IRA- heroes or villains?

Post Reply New Topic

No - I thought you were referring to the Provos. There were some border campaigns in the 1950s by the OIRA, but they weren't successful.

I would argue that blowing someone up for delivering political leaflets wasn't a justifiable action by the British army. Or rather to be more specific - a small group of soldiers presumably working vigilanty style without authorisation, seeking revenge. As I said before, nobody was totally clean in that bloody mess.

Whatever their reasons for forming, the IRA's approach wasn't very nice.
I don't know a lot about them apart from the fact that they were violent.

TallyMan - First of all, soldiers have wide knowledge base/intelligence and when they decide to blow someone up, they choose. I don't think they simply blow yust anybody, although it can happen.

And secondly - sure he wasn't in the IRA, nobody was. It was not something you would tell you sister/friends, anyone outside the cell...

I've googled that, and there isnt a single reference to that group which you quoted.

Besides which other than the IRA i cant think of any other group to become martyred through the same method.

Suicide bombings, Kamakaze attacks are painless deaths and non analogous. The hunger strikers endured months of agonising pain before they succumbed. That takes real bravery.

The British government were the IRA's best recruitment agents. If the British army hadn't shot dead 14 unarmed civillians in cold blood in 1972, the civil rights movement wouldnt have lost its pedestal and the IRA would have had no where near the appeal to new recruits they were able to acheive.

The IRA's adversaries should not get off lightly either. It is they who are responsible for provoking most of their violence.

I take it you're a Nationalist/Republican, yes?

You should probably bear in mind that the IRA were killing hundreds of people that year. So it wasn't simply an Army shooting dead people in a peaceful point in time.

Apart from Bloody Sunday and Ballymurphy though, there were very few open murders committed by the British Army in Northern Ireland. If there were, we'd be hearing about them all endlessly. Meanwhile, the PIRA were responsible for thousands of avoidable deaths - murderers - during that period. During the entire 30 year conflict in Ulster, the British Army, RUC, UDR, USC and the police in Great Britain were responsible for the same number of deaths as the American police are in a single year. It's worth noting though that the IRA were responsible for half of all the deaths in the Troubles. And they still failed in their goal. Northern Ireland is still part of the United Kingdom and will be for some time to come.

Or real fanaticism and insanity.

ruveyn

Try this:
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2 ... 030,444963

.[/quote]

I do wonder how bombing the Royal Marines barracks in my home town and killing 11 Royal Marine Bandsmen in an unprovoked attack could be considered "heroic".

No, I am a left leaning technocrat with Irish nationalist sympathies.

My sympathies arise from reading Irish history with intellectual sobriety rather than through the rubbish bin sized, orange tinted goggles that my immediate peers tend to.

What is unique, I formed my political opinions as a result of being raised in a Protestant Unionist background. Growing up in Belfast around the peak of the conflict, I had a front row seat to witness the bigotry and backwardness of Orange-ism and Ulster Loyalism first hand.


You need to keep it in context and remember the conditioning of the day. Between the 80's to mid 90's it was an ongoing series of tit for tat killings. Ulster Loyalists killed more, if not 2 or 3 times more than Irish Republicans did. Not only that there is irrefutable evidence that British security forces worked with loyalist paramilitaries for the purposes of state sanctioned violence. What seperates the 2 is that Loyalist murders were indiscriminate in that they killed paramilitaries and catholic non combatants alike; the IRA made a point of targeting only enemy combatants, informers and criminals.

As for the bloody sunday massacre, the hostilities were largely provoked by the army themselves. Before violence erupted British marksmen were pointing their guns into the crowd before any alledged gunfire started. Armed soldiers were clearly witnessed firing into fleeing, unarmed civillians.


While i largely empathised with the IRA's political objectives (less their methodology), I was never optimistic that the armed struggle would result in a United Ireland. Many from that time would argue, that it served its purpose in bringing about a situation where we have reduced British involvement and a power sharing executive (which Sinn Fein are arguing is a peaceful vehicle to a United Ireland).

My belief is that Scottish independence will be the demise of the Union, because without the Scottish cultural link to Ulster there is no cultural precendence for Northern Ireland to continue its participation within the UK.

[/quote]

I'm sorry you'll need to do an awful lot better than an obscure newspaper cutting from the end of the war. This is nowhere near analogous to the Irish republican hunger strikers.

If my history serves me right, thats around the time that the allies captured Italy and the Italians defected to the western side.

Most of those soldiers (presumably they were Waffen SS) had nothing to lose because they knew they were fighting a lost cause and had probably taken a vow to protect the fuhrer with their lives, knowing full well that as Nazi party members they'd be shot by their own side for cowardice or tried and hanged by a western court anyway.

The same logic could be applied to Royal Air Force bombing of Dresden which resulted in the deaths of many thousands of civillians.

Yet those bomber crews were still celebrated rightly or wrongly, as heroes. Whether or not the bombing against the Marine base was provoked, well I'll leave that up to the nationalist communities who were regularly subject to Loyalist collusion and harrassment by British security forces to decide.

While it might not conform to your idea of heroism, war is war.

A noble cause does not excuse ignoble actions.

As for the claim that,

this is nothing more than a lie.

Of just over 3.500 victims of violence during The Troubles, almost 60% of them were killed by Republican paramilitary forces. Loyalist paramilitary groups killed less than half that number. Even if we add in British forces and police to that number, the Republican's still out-killed the Loyalists 3:2.

Both sides had their fair share of scum. Doesn't mean the peons in the trenches were any less justified than the peons on the other side.

There is that side to it. I'm the last one to say the IRA were blameless but you need to keep it in context. However, unlike conventional Republican sympathisers I am qualified to criticise this side of the trenches because I grew up in it.