Martin McGuinness dead

Jules Galen said:
We got anti-discrimination legislation in the USA preceeding that which reference, and yet...black people in the USA are thrown in prison at an extraordinary rate. So all that legislation sounds fine in theory...but how does it work in practice?

The USA calls itself "...the Land of the Free"...and yet has more imprisoned than Russia and China combined. And if you consider that the combined population of China and Russia 4x+ greater than the USA, then it is staggering the rate with which the USA imprisons people. Hey...people say one thing, and do another. That's life.
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There is a very real problem that governments may be a able to legislate about what people do but not how they think. Merely legislating for equality does not remove bigotry, discrimination and prejudice. What often fails is the follow through of affirmative action. Legislation can be well meaning but ultimately ineffective.

There may be sex discrimination legislation but women still have difficulties with rights over their own bodies in Ireland North and South.

Trump is a good example of how religious bias persists, but at least pending a decision from the supreme court it does appears that the US courts are restricting his application of his bias.
 
Planigale said:
There is a very real problem that governments may be a able to legislate about what people do but not how they think. Merely legislating for equality does not remove bigotry, discrimination and prejudice. What often fails is the follow through of affirmative action. Legislation can be well meaning but ultimately ineffective.

There may be sex discrimination legislation but women still have difficulties with rights over their own bodies in Ireland North and South.

Trump is a good example of how religious bias persists, but at least pending a decision from the supreme court it does appears that the US courts are restricting his application of his bias.
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Actually, I used to think it was religious too, until Trump was elected. And Trump is no friend of religion and the religious people who elected him know it.

As I suspected for awhile, and this seems to be the case as the religious have voted Trump, there is a mean core of people in the USA that just get infuriated if they suspect someone, somewhere of being happy or content.

Yeah...it sounds like a very simplistic answer, but I don't know how else to explain the election of guys Trump...or even Ronald Reagan (who was really no friend of religion either - certainly not compared to Jimmy Carter he wasn't). So, from here on out, I look at the "Religious Right" as just being "Hateful Mob" who vote for Beezlebub F.Satan if it would insure other Americans would be made miserable.

These people worship Force and gloat in the misery of others. And I don't think I'm only one who feels this way...I think the people at California Berkeley recently got fed up with it and decided to "communicate" with this Hateful Mob in the only way they'll understand.

But...there it is: America is chocked full of unreasoning hatred and Force Worship.
 
Re not killing civilians, which group of heros was responsible for the Omagh bombing?
 
Cleon said:
SWP, not SNP. ;)
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Sorry, need to clean my glasses.

If you scratch the SNP hard enough I suspect you'll find a fairly strong vein of support for a united Ireland. But nobody wants to get involved in that messy business.
 
Jules Galen said:
Yeah...it sounds like a very simplistic answer, but I don't know how else to explain the election of guys Trump...or even Ronald Reagan (who was really no friend of religion either - certainly not compared to Jimmy Carter he wasn't). So, from here on out, I look at the "Religious Right" as just being "Hateful Mob" who vote for Beezlebub F.Satan if it would insure other Americans would be made miserable.

These people worship Force and gloat in the misery of others. And I don't think I'm only one who feels this way...I think the people at California Berkeley recently got fed up with it and decided to "communicate" with this Hateful Mob in the only way they'll understand.

But...there it is: America is chocked full of unreasoning hatred and Force Worship.
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Okay, for awhile you had me going with your supposed superior understanding of the Northern Ireland question.

Fortunately your analysis of the USA is so facile and wrong-headed that I feel more comfortable with what I have posted here.
 
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Brainster said:
Okay, for awhile you had me going with your supposed superior understanding of the Northern Ireland question.

Fortunately your analysis of the USA is so facile and wrong-headed that I feel more comfortable with what I have posted here.
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And...I presented what I said as an opinion. Meanwhile YOU have got got a problem with the facts and a couple of posts on this topic demonstrate that very well.

Seriously....YOUR PROBLEMS are not mine.
 
I have no love for McGuinness, and I have no idea whether his switch from the gun to the ballot box was motivated by seeing the light or, as Norman Tebbit suggested, because the IRA had been penetrated and their time was up, or some other reason, but without him the situation in Northern Ireland would probably not be as peaceful as it is now. In the same way that only Nixon could visit China, it would have been more difficult for someone who was not a hard-liner to accomplish what he did.
 
Strawberry said:
Yes, they outlawed it in 1976 - after the PIRA started their armed campaign. What was stopping them from responding to the peaceful campaign by NICRA years earlier?
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I suppose one answer (although one that will not suffice for you) is that Westminster only took over responsibility in 1972 so that was four years that it took Westminster, rather less if you include the time to draft and introduce laws. Until that time NI was self governing, so it would be the responsibility of the Irish people in the NI government. I can see that it is perhaps comforting if you are Irish to blame the British for the behaviour of Irish people towards other Irish people. That is not to defend sectarianism, nor to say that it was not a failure of Westminster that might have forced the NI government to pass some form of anti-discrination legislation. In fact the concept was relatively new; racial discrimination was only outlawed in Britain in 1965 and women had to wait until 1970 for equal pay act. So NI was not that far behind. So you can argue there was a ten year difference in anti-discrimination legislation in Britain and NI certainly not the thirty years you claimed.

One can see even now the sensitivity of the devolved administrations to Westminster stepping on their toes.

I also wonder about your use of the term apartheid. By this one would assume you meant that there were laws forbidding e.g. mixed marriage, mixed education, requiring separate entrances on public buildings or separate accommodation on public transport such as happened in South Africa or even parts of the US. I can find no records of such laws in Northern Ireland so when you claimed there was a "apartheid regime" I think you were false or to put a gloss on it that you were exaggerating. The catholic church did and still seems to insist on separate education and is not keen on mixed marriages. You perhaps meant that the NI government or society was sectarian or discriminatory.

Overall I think your posts were rather inflammatory and posting on a skeptic site you should expect to be fact checked.

1) It is untrue that no Britain ever protested.
2) It is not true there was an apartheid regime
3) The claim about doing nothing for thirty years seems dubious but you did not specify the start of your timeline.
 
Actually, the 30 year claim is wrong - it was 54 years. From 1922 to 1976, the British government did nothing about the existence of religious apartheid in a part of the UK. And they only acted then in response to IRA violence.

Your defense that it was Irish people vs Irish people is a non starter. Unionists don't identify as Irish for the most part, and it was the UK government that pushed devolution onto them back in the 1920s anyway. Britain could very well have imposed direct rule straight away and ensured that Catholics in NI were treated the same as Catholics in England, Scotland and Wales.

NI was systematically gerrymandered so that even areas with a nationalist majority were unionist controlled. So there may have been no laws which openly banned Catholics from living or working in certain places, but when councils, the civil service, the police and the trade unions were all unionist dominated they were able to regulate and segregate Catholics all the same.
 
Jules Galen said:
Actually, I used to think it was religious too, until Trump was elected. And Trump is no friend of religion and the religious people who elected him know it.

As I suspected for awhile, and this seems to be the case as the religious have voted Trump, there is a mean core of people in the USA that just get infuriated if they suspect someone, somewhere of being happy or content.

Yeah...it sounds like a very simplistic answer, but I don't know how else to explain the election of guys Trump...or even Ronald Reagan (who was really no friend of religion either - certainly not compared to Jimmy Carter he wasn't). So, from here on out, I look at the "Religious Right" as just being "Hateful Mob" who vote for Beezlebub F.Satan if it would insure other Americans would be made miserable.

These people worship Force and gloat in the misery of others. And I don't think I'm only one who feels this way...I think the people at California Berkeley recently got fed up with it and decided to "communicate" with this Hateful Mob in the only way they'll understand.

But...there it is: America is chocked full of unreasoning hatred and Force Worship.
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Well and truly said - about a load of the religious - certainly not all, but a big load of them!!!!!!! I remember fondly the days when most of the religious went to church, socialized and lived actual life most of the rest of the time.
 
Strawberry said:
You should know better then. Ask your friend in Ardoyne and he/she will tell you the same as me - the Troubles would have been there with or without Martin McGuinness, the peace process maybe not.
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As far as I'm aware, the peace process only really took hold after 9/11 convinced the primary sponsors of the IRA to stop sponsoring them and the actual giving up of weapons bit happened. I don't think it would have mattered who dealt with that at the time, it would have happened anyway.
 
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