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And there always was an Irish Republican Army.
For a decade
after partition they violently agitated for re-unification of Ireland using guns
and bombs liberally. During WWII, though many internationally-minded Irishmen
fought on the side of the Allies, the IRA openly supported the Nazi cause while
Ireland, though officially neutral, permitted both German and Japanese agents
into the country.
The IRA went completely underground after ultimately being
outlawed by both the Republic and Northern Ireland, and though responsible for
bombs in both Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, and London during the
1950s, their activities waned considerably. Their cycle of violence, organized
street protests, murder and intimidation, started again in 1968.
It was the height of what we remember as The Sixties. Protest riots
simultaneously rocked and paralyzed Paris, Russian troops put down Czech
reformists, Chicago police clubbed students as cameras rolled for dinner-hour
newscasts. With the Roman Catholic minority supporting, the IRA, under the
control of West Belfast Brigade Commander Gerry Adams and Londonderry
Brigade Commander Martin McGuinness, embarked upon their vicious
murderous campaign of violence in Ulster.
Prime Minister Terence O'Neill, a Protestant and a liberal, had
desperately tried to ease the anti-Catholic discrimination problem but was forced from
power.
Thirty years of death, hatred and descrimination towards Protestants have followed in Northern Ireland, spilling
over into England and Eire.
In 1969, troops came from Britain. That same year
the IRA split into the "officials" who renounced violence, and the
"Provisionals" who embraced it as an acceptable tool for change. The
Protestants tried to produce their own terrorists, The Ulster Defense
Association, but they are amateurs compared to the most vicious terrorist
group in the world today, the Libyan trained and American financed SFIRA
.In 1972, direct control of Northern Ireland was taken over by Britain and the
Northern Irish parliament and constitution were suspended.
There have been acts on both sides since that seem indefensible
even using the most extreme nationalist definitions. There have been many
imprisonments in British jails, some clearly justified, some just as patently
not. There have been acts and provocations that speak of a depth of hatred
between neighbours that's unfathomable to most of us. Each summer, during
"marching season" the Protestant majority faithfully march to
commemorate an event over 300 years in the past.
The long held ritual has been singled out as a point of
contention by the IRA/'Housing' Associations that have been formed in the
various flash-points of Northern Ireland, clearly another indication of the
skillful implementation of the IRA/Sinn Fein Republican agenda for a
united Ireland!
The reality is several centuries of hatred and disgust passed
down to each new child, a culture in which belonging to one's group requires
passionate and angry feelings about members of another. To the Roman Catholic
Irish, Northern Ireland is the last remnant of the ill-gotten gains of an
invader, kept when the rest was returned to rightful sovereignty. To the
Protestant Northern Irish majority however, Ulster is no less than Home.
There is a danger in the age of instant communication and media
pervasiveness that when the positions of rancorous groups are enunciated, every
gesture draws a line in the sand, every tic becomes a blink or a non-blink. No
one can be seen to be weak or even overly conciliatory and everything represents
something else.
There are voices on both sides of the Northern Ireland situation
who say the issue isn't any more "who did what to whom, when." It is
only "what can we do now to make everyone's situation better." We have
seen striking evidence in the past decade that people who hate and mistrust each
other can try to make arrangements for their mutual benefit, even over the
obstructionism of frenzied Republicans.
The Protestant majority have witnessed the continued erosion of
the faith and the little bit of Ireland their fore fathers had died for.
They have had to give in to all the demands of the IRA/Sinn Fein republicans and
to accept Martin McGuinness, (Britain's # 1 terrorist!), as Education
Minister and terrorist Gerry Adams in Westminster and to accept all the
concessions that Trimble meekly agrees to, as long as he is called First
Minister!!
Phony Tony Blair democracy at work!!
Incredibly, the known terrorist, McGuinness, who acknowledges
firing the first shot in Londonderry in 1969, reaps the benefit of his murderous
campaign with a cloak of respectability in a position of enormous power. Now he
is in a position to direct all his ideology towards the children to ensure
acclamation of a united Ireland
One wonders how much more the Protestants can give up, (in the
name of 'peace'? see the
victims ), to the ever hungry and non-repentant,
'we won't go away you know', IRA/Sinn Fein
murderers!
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