Bloody Sunday!

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most violent conflicts are caused by people who divide people into them and us and lack the common sense of applying their morals equally which always results in the belief that violence is justified as long as someone else has been violent too. its pretty sad to watch.

Pretty much this ^^^

Agreed. It must be galling to see Americans who have no idea what's going on, cheerleading from the other side of the pond and longing for a return to the violence because they think it's exciting and romantic and they don't have to live in the middle of it.

I would love to live in the middel of it I'd be much happier in Irleand or Germany then in America.

Where would you go, Joker? A Catholic area, or a Protestant one? I suspect you'd find sectarianism less romantic in practice than it seems from thousands of miles away.

The Protestant part of Ireland.

And how many IRA sympathisers do you expect to find when you get there?

None really the only IRA sympathisers I know are Irish Americans. But I wana live their some day

Fair enough. Do your homework first though - its a beautiful place, but its less fun to live there, it can be very socially conservative and at the moment the economy is seriously screwed. Northern Ireland has very high unemployment and is still divided along sectarian lines - ask tequila for more info, he's just got back from the real province. I'm not trying to put you off - there's nowt wrong with seeking a connection to your heritage, I'm part Irish myself. But there's a reason so many young Irish folk move to England or elsewhere, a visit might be a good first step.

Yeah the unemployement is really bad over their. And North Carolina is pretty socially conservative. But I would love to go their again. Or Germany never been their.

As someone who stays the hell out of this debate, can I please just have one, brief rant?


No Oppression Olympics in PPR, please! There's enough of that in the autism/disabled community already.

Yes mam I will stop bringing it up.

This is true. Northern Ireland is still a very divided society - people generally keep to their own areas in many places and (apart from in mixed areas) keep to themselves - due to Northern Ireland being such a small and closed place, politics is not often discussed openly in a cross-community sense (due to fear of upsetting people) and, as I say, it's divided so, for example, they might not feel especially comfortable going to the nearest town centre five miles away so will go ten or twenty miles away instead. In fact, in many ways, many people keep their opinions close to their chest and, especially in places like pubs and with outsiders, are somewhat guarded. The public sector is massively bloated there and while it's a great place to visit, it looks like less fun living there - put it this way, the regional assembly is not a democracy at all as it's impossible to have an opposition.

Life goes on as in much of the UK and Ireland but it still has its problems - in fact, the biggest problems for ordinary Irish people in NI in the modern day are caused by exactly the sort of extremists you support, Joker. Most people in NI have had enough of that kind of thing (yes, even the people in nationalist and unionist organisations) and just want get on with their lives. Most people, even in the marching band/GAA organisations, just want to do what they do without violence. That's why the IRA ended their campaign - they were getting nowhere, and Loyalist terrorists were murdering more people than the IRA was murdering in an effort to get the IRA to stop murdering. It's about murder, and pain, and terror.

That's all it comes down to in the end - evil bastards from sink estates being given leeway to be evil bastards. Half the debate in Northern Ireland is about people thinking whether "our" evil bastards were every bit as bad as "their" evil bastards, and what counts as an evil bastard, and in what case from 35 years ago, and about cases were the police were found to be evil bastards in such-and-such a village. Can you understand how tiresome it must be as a youngster growing up in today's NI to have to listen to this every day? Most of the news stories are about what happened in 1972, or 1985, or 1975 or whenever.

The Republic is not as socially conservative as you would expect, especially with the fall of the Catholic Church. In fact, places like Dublin are much more like English culture - i.e. socially liberal, and comfortable with themselves - than, say, Northern Ireland is.

Last edited by Tequila on 09 Jun 2012, 10:09 pm, edited 4 times in total.

The same could apply to the entire British Isles - I have some breathtakingly beautiful countryside within ten miles of me, as I'm sure you have in Yorkshire.

In North Carolina the prettiest place to live is mount arry

The other point is that IRA sympathisers (and UFF/UVF sympathisers, and all the rest of it) are not the sort of people that you want to spend time with. They're just criminals and the detritus of society. Would you want to associate with members of Bloods or Crips? They're similar people. Trust me.