This is my second attempt at a column this week and it is not funny.

I wrote a column about the weather – moaning, in what was hopefully a light-hearted manner, about our lack of a summer.

There is so much horror in today’s world that I was determined not to go there. I wasn’t going to mention Las Vegas or terrorism or Allepa or North Korea.

I nearly got away with it – and would have if I had not been listening to the car radio.

The International Red Cross is scaling back its operations in Afghanistan because the organisation feels its workers are not safe.

Seven have been killed this year alone. One of those who died was a physiotherapist shot by a patient!

Even more horrific is the fact that when I entered ‘Red Cross workers killed’ into Google I got a choice of places where they had been killed: Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Vietnam.

They are all shocking but the most shocking one is the Spanish physiotherapist Lorena Enebral Perez, a 38-year-old woman who went to Afghanistan to help.

A patient from the orthopedic ward, sitting in a wheelchair, drew a gun and shot her as she walked toward him. He had suffered from Polio and she was teaching him to walk. He knew her, she helped him and he shot her.

Why?

That probably seems like a dumb question but it is all I can think of to ask.

Why?

I’ve been watching Victoria, the story of Queen Victoria.

Last weekend’s episode dealt with the Irish potato famine.

It was absolutely shocking. While we have to understand that some might have been dramatised for TV, the attitude of the Protestant Church was appalling.

Some would offer Catholic families food only if they converted to the Protestant religion.

Dr Robert Traill, who began a soup kitchen for all denominations was reviled by the church. He died of Famine fever after feeding hundreds of his parishioners.

Watching this programme and seeing how people were treated because of their religion, you can see how the IRA came about.

There is probably a deep-seated reason why any terrorist organisation starts. Surely, at one time or another, they must have decided they have right on their side. If not, then they are even more monstrous than we think.

But there is a way to promote a cause and killing defenceless people is certainly not it.

When the IRA became a terrorist group was when they started bombing shopping centres and places where people who had nothing to do with their fight were gathered.

So-called ISIS is a whole new breed of terrorist. They don’t seem to care who they kill. And I will tell you this – it must take a huge heap of inhumanity to even have the guts to behead someone – and especially if that someone is innocent of any crime.

Killing those who want to help, though, is lower than inhumanity.

How twisted do you have to be?

I guess if you are bombing a shopping centre or driving into people you are not face-to-face with any individual. It is impersonal – inhuman but impersonal.

But to sit in your wheelchair and watch a young woman walking towards you – a woman who has helped you, who is helping the children of your country – and shoot her face-on. Well, I guess that takes a special kind of commitment. It’s a special brand of callous indifference to human life.

I wonder how the killer felt afterwards? I wonder if he sleeps at night? I wonder if he has any remorse at all?

I would love to talk about the weather. I would like to write about something cheerful, something that would make us smile.

But I can’t. All my rantings and ravings do absolutely nothing but I feel obliged to write these things. Someone has to remember Lorena Perez, Dr Robert Traill and all those others who lived and died for others.