Bloody Sunday!

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Out of 3,529 deaths during The Troubles, the IRA - and this is just the IRA alone, ignoring any other republican groups - were responsible for 1,711 of them (48.5%), most of them murders. The combined British forces - and that's all of them: British Army; the police in Great Britain; the RAF; the RUC and the UDR were responsible for 362 (10.25%) deaths.

So who were the aggressors of this conflict here? Almost all the main violence (apart from the Drumcree dispute) stopped when the IRA called their ceasefire.

Not necessarily.

Did you see what happened in Greece the other day? Dark, dark clouds are over the horizon.

I bet the eurozone, and probably the EU, won't last a great deal longer. Not without enormous changes.

Well, hopefully you'll get over that. Over on this side of the pond, we got over our little Civil War, and disunion is now moot.

I don't disagree.

My meaning was that an affirmative vote for reunification would be impossible before repudiation--not that repudiation would necessarily result in majority support for reunification.

Sorry to have been ambiguous. "My bad," as the youngsters say.

Despite the OP's persecution complex, British troops didn't go to Northern Ireland until 1969, (yes, look it up) and it went in because of the sectarian violence.

Northern Ireland only exists because Ireland was on the brink of a civil war 100 years ago, and it was agreed by all that partitioning the country of Ireland was the best way to prevent a civil war and keep both the catholics & the protestants happy.

Far from being some greedy evil empire desperate for territory, Britain has spent most of the last century attempting to prevent the Irish from killing each other, having let go of India, Canada, Australia etc etc do you really think the British Empire gave a s**t about keeping hold of Ireland? A country with no natural resources and an arsey population that couldn't even grow potatoes properly?

Even now today, the British government spends more than double per captia in government spending in NI when compared to England and no, than doesn't mean the money is being spent on nasty soldiers to oppress the poor downtrodden Irish, it is being spent building a leisure centre for protestants and then an identical leisure centre 500 metres down the road for catholics because the two refuse to share...

That is some weird form of oppression where the oppressor spends twice as much looking after the welfare of the oppressed as it does looking after the welfare of it's own people.

Jayzus, Mary and Joseph! It it were raining soup from Heaven the Irish would come running with their knives and forks.

The Catholics and the Protestants are the Keltic version of the Palestinians and the Jews in Israel.

ruveyn

Are the Irish the last Europeans who give a hang about Christianity?

If so, so much the worse for them. Christianity has not been a great bargain for the human race.

ruveyn

You do no the British started it right?

Neither has the Jewish or Muslim faith either.

Complete with Palestinian flags in Republican areas and Israeli flags in Loyalist areas.

Does almost every state have its own national language? Do you all have very different economies? Do you all have vastly different histories from state to state?

The U.S. and the EU really have very little in common. The US was a federation of states without a long history of their own. The EU is a (mainly forced, by the politicians) merger of countries with hundreds or thousands of years of history. Many people within these countries do not like what is happening and are angry, and are turning their votes to independence parties.

They went in to protect Catholics who were suffering loyalist violence.

Glad to see that this was unlocked, right call IMHO.

Anyway, the IRA is an interesting personal litmus test, as one of the few high profile European (read: white) terrorist groups with goals that seem sympathetic to some Westerners, that causes some people to trot out the "freedom fighter" distinction to try and separate them from "real" terrorists. It's actually kind of interesting to watch, people will use some really twisted "logic" to justify IRA sympathies while still denouncing Middle Eastern organizations, I don't think it's racism per se, but rather a form of cognitive dissonance. I've never quite understood the unfortunate tendency of some Irish Americans to internalize a conflict that they neither experienced nor understand, to the extent that they talk as if they've personally felt the British boot on their necks; I'm of British and Irish (among many others) descent myself, so that curious ideology was never really an option for me. I should add that I personally don't understand 3rd party grudges either; I don't particularly care who's ancestors did what to whom, I'm very present focused.

OK, so what are "the British" (who didn't even exist when Ireland was being planted) meant to do? Whatever the British did in Ireland (and it's worth putting on record that this was in no way always a colonial relationship - look at the record of Ireland's men assisting the British Empire), they fade almost into insignificance compared to what American settlers did to the Native Indians. So, before lecturing British people who were born hundreds of years after the Plantation of Ulster and the Battle of the Boyne, look at your own history first.

If it was on the other boot, the Irish would have done the exact same thing to us. It was the way of the world back then. As you can see, the Irish were no different to the British in their colonial instincts, we were just much larger than them.

Here's a bit of history you probably aren't aware of: in early 1938, a senior Irish Free State civil servant in then Anglo-Egyptian Sudan strongly urged the Taoiseach of the time, Éamon de Valera, to set up an Irish colony in Africa! So in only a few short years of throwing off the hated British oppression a senior member of the country's civil service advocated inflicting genuine colonialism on another people! Quite astonishingly hypocritical, wouldn't you say Joker?

In any case, the people of the Republic are as integrated with Britain culturally than many in Northern Ireland. We all watch similar soaps, read the same newspapers, drink similar beer and so on.



It probably had quite a bit to do with the Stormont regime before that, though, in which Catholics were discriminated against. Remember that before 1972, Northern Ireland was essentially a one-party state.



And defending the rights of the Falkland Islanders to remain British and looking after the - again, proudly British - Gibraltarians. The UK of the last thirty years is a very different one to that of, say, 300 years ago.



A slight nitpick, but most of Ireland was independent by 1922, the UK government keeping only the six north-eastern counties of Ireland, all of them in the province of Ulster. As part of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, the British kept hold of some Treaty Ports in the newly independent IFS but these were all handed back by 1938.



Northern Ireland is by far the most heavily subsidised part of the UK. It makes it a good place to go on holiday, because there's so much stuff to do as a tourist and it's easy to get there but damn it's expensive for the UK taxpayer. The public sector is massively bloated in regards to other parts of the UK - something like (it used to be anyway) 70% of Northern Ireland's working population worked in the public sector.



Indeed - Northern Ireland's people aren't oppressed. The biggest whinge Nationalists seem to have these days (apart from the one about "British rule") seems to be that they can't elect people of a foreign parliament.



Catch yourself on - the Northern Ireland conflict was political/national, not religious.

Okay ill drop the issue.