Virgil said:
I don't know what to say...in the NE USA I heard people sing the praises of the IRA. from what I've seen they look like a terrorist/ crimial org. with link to all sorts of bad people.
I don't know firsthand because I don't live there. I also have a hard time seeing why there is so much violence. the differences between north and south are surely minor compared to other countries in the world. English rule vs. Irish rule...both are democratic in nature. etc
It is a very tough issue and I feel for you all.
Virgil
No offence, but your first statement is almost criminally naive.
To finance their activities the IRA fleeced and continue to fleece albeit to a lesser extent unsuspecting Americans who thought and think that they represesnt some sort of oppressed freedom fighter movement.
They don't, they represent themeselves and always have done. They represent murder, savagery and brutatlity and the absolute opposite of everything the USA and democracy is supposed to stand for.
It may interest you to know that to supplement their transatlantic shell game, the IRA engage in drug running, drug dealing on both an indivisual and wholesale level, protection rackets, assasination, armed robbery of banks and security transports, armed robbery of stately homes, kidnapping (of people and animals, interestinly enough), murder, murder, murder, oh and murder.
This may help you understand why the Irish (or some of us anyway) find the US spouting about Europe appeasing and supporting terrorism to be, well, slightly ironic, to say the least.
Your last paragraph is equally naive, btw. There is no conflict between Irish rule and British rule, nor has there been for nearly a hundred years now (slight exagggeration).
No one wants Northern Ireland - neither the British nor the Irish, for the most part. It's a s***hole full of of ignorant, psychotic bigots with massive unemployment and no viable industries of any kind. If it sank into the sea tomorrow no one would miss it.
The differences between north and south are nothing except to those who make a living from them, be that the IRA, the INLA, the UDA, the Peoples Liberations Front of Judea or the Judean Peoples Liberation Front.
To those people the differences are everything because those differences are what makes them rich and powerful (on their own limited scale of things anyway). Look at it htis way - you can be an unemployed, uneducated, useless peace of human faeces
or you can be a heroic freedom fighter living off the proceeds of the drug trade and the "cost" of "protecting" "your people" - which do you choose?
The IRA are and have been since the formation of the free state, criminal scum. It should be one of the enduring shames of the US that they armed and funded them for so long.
Thanks to Bill Clinton, however, we forgive you. Smile, conservative terror fighters
Graham
