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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 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 tried to ease the anti-Catholic discrimination problem but was forced from power.

Thirty years of death and hatred 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 IRA/Sinn Fein murderers! 

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