Shane Costello said:
So much for the Catholic community wanting it's young men to go out to war, then.
Not in 1962, when the border campaign was abandoned. In 1968 conflict broke out that lasted for decades. On the face if it, that suggests that circumstances were different in 1968. There were people eager to promote conflict in both periods. In the earlier period they could not get an audience, in 1968 they could. There were grievances in 1962 but not sufficient to ignite a lasting insurrection. In 1968 the Catholic community was under assault, which in my opinion was the important difference. In 1962 the argument used was nationalism, an ethereal concept. In 1968 the argument was a very clear and present danger. At such times the young men of a community tend to see themselves as the righteous defenders of that community, and communities expect them to be. That's why young men are so prone to group violence and so easily persuaded of its righteousness. There's millions of years of natural selection behind it. Sadly inappropriate in the modern world, but modernity has evolved way quicker than the human psyche.
Ditto. BTW considering that Northern Catholics of the time were as pious as their Southern co-religionists, I doubt very many of thwoem would have perceived the availability of rubbers to be a sign of progress.
Given that the boomer generation which has transformed Ireland from a benighted theocracy to a modern state would have been of an age when contraceptive use is most on the mind, I'd have thought it would have been regarded as progressive in the South. In the North the issue would have been the removal of the right to choose contraception had a unified Ireland under Free State laws been achieved. I, for one, never sympathised with PIRA (have never sympathised with nationalism) or the idea of subjecting the people of the six counties to unification with the Free State. The sacrifice of freedom from superstition for the sake of some transcendent "Ireland United and Free" bollocks never struck me as a wholesome enterprise. It's the sort of thing that gets some young men's juices flowing, though, even if they have to tack a socialist revolution for the
whole of Ireland onto it to justify themselves against arguments such as mine. Ideology is another of those concepts that can get young men's juices flowing, as is religion. It has never been a difficult trick to persuade young men into righteous violence.
Do you write for An Phoblacht?
My style is far too stilted for journalism. That's not just my opinion, trust me.
The notion of the PIRA as some sort of Arthurian band of white knights doesn't bear up to serious scrutiny.
I never thought it did. Lots of young Catholic Irish men thought differently, but I have no great respect for popular opinion. I'm pretty much convinced that most people are biddable idiots.
One wonders why they devoted resources to murdering civilians in Britain when time and effort could have been devoted to protecting their own community from Loyalist attack.
The intention was to remove a crucial ally of the Loyalists from the fray. A perfectly sensible strategic objective. Dresden was bombed to further a sensible strategic objective. The Mongols exterminated populations that resisted them for sensible strategic reasons. That's people for you.
Crunching numbers also gives lie to the myth. The IRA murdered more Catholics than the Northern Security forces or British Army combined. Considerations of space limit us to the consideration of one case. With defenders like that.....
This was not unexpected. Polarisation is an immediate aim of people promoting conflict, for whatever reason. That means the first targets will be moderates on their own "side", leaving the field free for their extreme positions. Terms like "traitor", "apostate" and "counter-revolutionary" feature in the process.
As for the IRA being sensitive to public opinion, well words almost fail me. For one thing the IRA campaign was not an insurgency, lacking as it did the majority support of the Catholic community.
So what was it, an extended riot? Where do you get this 50% plus one requirement from? It's not in the dictionary definition as far as I can see. Clearly in some NI Catholic communities - in parts of Belfast, (London)Derry, Portadown and such - there was wide support, quite possibly a majority in some streets and estates.
As well as lacking a factual basis your peculiar notion suggests that Irish Catholics were unmoved by mass murder commited in their names. Anti-Irish bigots everywhere are nodding in agreement. Nor were the IRA passing bricks at the notion of Celtic mothers getting a bit pissed off. You must be as aware as I am that they murdered enough of them.
I intended to make no such suggestion when I specifically mentioned mainland public opinion. There was almost universal revulsion, of course, including in the most important constituency - the NI Catholic community. Had such policies been continued, that community would have rejected PIRA and got rid of them. PIRA was never entrenched enough to
force their insurgency on the Catholic population, which included its own members and potential recruits. To say nothing of the moral opinions of PIRA members themselves. The Crazies were out and the politicals were in.
More pie in the sky. The IRA wants to end British jurisdiction on the island of Ireland and create a 32-county socialist republic. If this isn't an attempt to bring down a current political structure and create a new one then I don't know what is. Neither do they consider the government or constitution of the Republic to have any legitimacy. I believe some of these fine upstanding individuals have been moved to comment that the real war will begin as soon as the Brits depart.
The
Official IRA adopted Marxism and rejected sectarianism, the
Provisional IRA and Sin Fein are not Marxist. They are quite open about their objective of a unified Ireland in which they could present a socialist manifesto to a unified electorate. PIRA coalesced around the old nationalist IRA men who never got into politics and were most definitely sectarian, and it had more pressing matters to deal with than the future economic structure of a unified Ireland.
Marxists have a long and detailed theory of how to create their desired political structure from existing structures. They've been at it for 150 years or more. They don't expect to bring society crashing down then make something out of what they find in the rubble. That's what anarchists do, and Marxists have no time for anarchists. Marxism rejects terrorism. The Islamists of today are intent on anarchy in the expectation of coming out on top by virtue of their own righteousness. They're more like the Red Brigades than PIRA.
It took Grizzly until 1983 to become president of Sinn Fein, almost a decade after the Birmingham atrocity.
The subject was PIRA, not Sinn Fein, and the "leadership" of neither is simply one man. Gerry Adams's membership of the IRA War Council (or whatever they're termed these days) since at least the 70's is not in much doubt.
I hope that people in Enniskillen and Warrington gain some comfort from the notion that their loved ones were vapourised by sensible, rational people, as opposed to the nutjobs who thought that bombing pubs in Birmingham and Guildford would make Catholics in Belfast sleep easier at night.
The fact that you can name these attacks from amongst the thousands that occurred (the Enniskillen attack being indiscriminate is contentious, but people can look that up for themselves) has to mean something. The vast majority of attacks were against military, economic and political targets, and were part of a political strategy. The slogan of the "Bullet And Ballot", the rise of Sinn Fein to eclipse PIRA and the negotiated end to violence are all evidence of that. Nothing similar is evident in Islamist extremism.
The nutjobs behind the Birmingham bombs weren't out to make Belfast Catholics sleep better at night, they were intent on getting the Brits to withdraw from NI because of the cost to themselves of staying. The sort of primitive thinking behind 9/11, the Amritsar massacre or Sharon's Palestinian Pacification Program.
