This was the post that drew such a seething reaction. I don’t see what’s remotely controversial about it. It is 100% true. The British Army were welcomed as peacekeepers, did keep the peace and Provos were formed to wage war - to destroy that peace. The Provos were utter vultures and the likes of Sean Mac Stiofan, Ruairi O’Bradaigh, Daithi O’Conaill and Seamus Twomey should be remembered as the nihilist scumbags they were. Not just enemies of the people of Ireland but enemies of all decent society.
What I posted was 100% true.
Well, duh, to protect them from Loyalist mobs. Where have I claimed otherwise?
Where did I claim things were going great for Catholics? You do realise that it shows how weak your argument is when you have to flagrantly lie that other people have said things they never said? I mean you came on here complaining about supposed trolling (I’m not remotely trolling, I’m giving you the truth), and then you end up resorting to demonstrably trolling nonsense. Reality is clearly too complicated for your understanding of history, which is framed exclusively through slogans and crude reductionism.
The fact is the Catholic population did welcome the British Army. You should ask @glenshane why his family welcomed the British.
Yeah, the Provos formed and decided to hurl Northern Ireland into three decades of hell.
Again, you’re making up stuff and claiming I said things I never said. Again, that’s outright trolling to mask a complete inability to debate honestly because the facts aren’t on your side.
The Troubles obviously didn’t happen in a vacuum but the PIRA were formed with the specific intention of waging war. It’s barstool blather and ahistorical nonsense to claim the PIRA didn’t want what the Troubles became. What happened over the next three decades was exactly what they wanted - mass violence, wanton murder, the destruction of a society.
Take this post as the clamping it is and fuck off back to your barstool and sing a few Wolfe Tones songs to yourself.
The British army were sent to NI at the request of the Unionists as the brave men and women of Derry were routing the RUC on the streets in 1969. It was a colossal mistake by the British, and against all the advise given to the government at the time. Instead of addressing the sectarian genocide going on, the British set the 30 year conflict in motion and are 100% responsible for all that happened afterwards.
Harold Wilson 1969 " If it became necessary for troops to intervene, they would be thought to be doing so in order to maintain the orange faction in power. The constitutional consequences might be very grave, and once we were involved it would be very difficult to withdraw."
The bastards knew the outcome, but still did it, to defend fascism.
You know less about Irish history than you know about American history, and you know nothing about American history.
The Provos were formed to wage war. The likes of you are all about personal responsibility until your heroes are asked to take some.
The Provos ruined the lives of Catholics and Protestants in the North, in Britain and further afield, and many families down here too, and destroyed any chance of a united Ireland in our lifetimes. The likes of you and the other lads here who object to basic historical facts are the main continuing obstacle to a united Ireland.
The victims of the Provos, and indeed the victims of the Loyalists and the British Army, are now mere punchlines for the the likes of you who never gave a fuck about any victims and have no interest in understanding anything through anything other than the lens of a rabid football supporter mindset.
Yis are basically Provo footixes drunk on a barstool.
The barstool you were on and singing the loudest from up until a couple of years ago is it
It’s some journey you’ve been on from Up the ra a few years ago to the Rangers supporting Jamie Bryson character you are pretending to be today. Wherever you get your kicks from Sid, have at it.
Because they thought they would protect them?? The IRA was two men and a dog in 68/69.
Instead the British army watched on in many instances where Loyalists attacked catholic houses or paraded through Catholic neighbours.
They formed and armed the UDR and spent far more time harassing nationalists and nationalist areas than protestants. All in the first year.
It was their actions during the this year ( where you claimed they were peace keeping) that lost the nationalist community. Not anything the provos did.
The first British soldier to lose his life was nearly 2 years after they first arrived… Because the PIRA was largely defensive for the first few years.
You’re argument hinges on catholics welcoming British soldiers… Something no one has ever denied. You seem to think this means they had an amicable relationship with each other for a year based on this … And that the Tans were worthy peacekeepers.
It’s very poor wumming or a severe case of ignorance.
On the contrary, the seethe at my stating of a basic historical fact threw you and the rest of the Provo footixes into a flaming rage of denial.
If there was no denial, none of the posts after my original post would exist.
The Provos were a failure and a disaster on every level. They oppressed their own community, killed their own community, and left a trail of destruction everywhere they went.
And at the end, as Brendan Hughes rightly said, they GFA - Got Fuck All.
You strike me as the sort that collected 12 crisp packets to get a history degree.
Ted Heath Jan 1972 “As to Londonderry, a military operation to reimpose law and order would be a major operation necesarily involving numerous civilian casualties”.
General Robert Ford Jan 1972 “I am coming to the conclusion that the minimum force necessary is to shoot selected ringleaders among the Derry young hooligans after clear warnings have been given”.
Cause and effect. British troops were never acceptable on Irish soil, the scum British government knew this and still went ahead with the inevitable outcome of Bloody Sunday and Ballymurphy.
The Claudy bombing occurred on 31 July 1972, when three car bombs exploded mid-morning, two on Main Street and one on Church Street in Claudy in County Londonderry, Northern Ireland. The attack killed nine civilians, injured thirty and became known as “Bloody Monday”.[1] Those who planted the bombs had attempted to send a warning before the explosions took place. The warning was delayed, however, because the telephones were out of order due to an earlier bomb attack.[2] The Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) issued an immediate denial of responsibility,[2][3] and later stated that “an internal court of inquiry” had found that its local unit did not carry out the attack.[4] On the thirtieth anniversary of the bombing, there was a review of the case and in December 2002 it was revealed that the IRA had been responsible for the bomb explosions.[5][6][7]
Wow. According to @Tierneevin1979, the British Government were responsible for the Enniskillen massacre, and every other massacre committed by the PIRA.
This is how genocides happen, folks. People with views like this.
Nearly all deaths in such a conflict are awful and tragic in the fullest sense. But here are a few facts:
1 The PIRA were on ceasefire when the Kingsmill attack took place. Everyone accepted, then and ongoingly, PIRA members were centrally involved in said attack.
2 The attack, a desperate and awful act, was both an immediate response to the fatal UVF attack the night before on the Reaveys and the O’Dowds and also aimed at the so called Glenanne Gang’s murderous activities in Mid Ulster, activities facilitated and aided by state collusion.
3 The Kingsmill attack, within its own awful calculus, achieved its aim. The UVF agreed shortly afterwards to end its sectarian assassination campaign. A sobering recognition but an important recognition nonetheless.
There is little worthwhile in trying to score moral points, nearly 50 years later, in discussion of one incident, however terrible, in isolation.
Firstly there was no justification whatsoever for a massacre like Kingsmills. None at all, whatever way anybody slices and dices it. The appropriate response to the murder of the Reaveys could never be the murder of 10 Protestant civilians.
This whole discussion started because people objected to the notion the British Army entered Catholic areas as peacekeepers. They did. This is a fact, and they were welcomed as such by Catholics. You do not have to be a fan of the British Army, and by christ I’m not, to recognise historical fact. The Provos formed because to them the British Army acting as protectors was a humiliation and could not continue. The Provos also formed because they were fanatics who wanted war.
At least two posters in this discussion have done their done their damnedest over the last year to introduce mendacious, lying, fake “nuance” to Russia’s genocidal war against Ukraine, which could not be more black and white in terms of blame and innocence, directly analogous as it is to Germany invading Poland. These posters have decided to act as propagandists for a genocidal regime for the “bantz”.
These two posters entirely reject nuance when it comes to the Troubles, preferring an infantile goodies v baddies narrative. This all comes to to the fact that too many people want to understand the Troubles as goodies v baddies. It was far, far more nuanced and complex than that. Some British soldiers did terrible things, and the British Army and state did terrible things. That happens when war starts. Not all British soldiers were monsters. The majority were not. Most were frightened young fellas in a place they did not understand.
Loyalists did unspeakable things. And so did the Provos. And the Provos wanted the war. Once that war started, and the British Army knew the Provos were the enemy, unspeakable things done by the British started happening. So it was understandable why young lads would then join the Provos. But this was the situation the Provos wanted. Massacres like Ballymuprhy were what they wanted, because they served as effective recruiting events.
Some things are not complex however. It is not complex to understand that fifty years of sectarian bigotry is bad. It is not complex to understand that a Protestant state for a Protestant people is bad.
It is not complex to understand that deliberately provoking a nihilistic conflict which lasted three decades and ravaged an entire society – which let’s be clear – the Provos did - is bad.
The oppression suffered by Catholic people in Northern Ireland was an abomination. The oppression suffered by black people in the US and in apartheid South Africa was far worse. And yet in both of those situations, violence did not win out, peaceful resistance did. It could have done in the North too, if it wasn’t for the Provos. The Provos killed that chance.
Recently we’ve seen polls that demonstrate that knowledge of the Troubles among younger generations is not what it should be.
In some senses, society, both north and south, has to forget that what happened happened in order to move on.
But in another sense, it’s utterly essential that people know what happened, and how it happened, who died, who killed them or murdered them, and how and why, in order to stop it happening again.
That’s why the rewriting of history by Sinn Fein and the DUP is so toxic. Real history requires brutal honesty and a willingness to face up to reality. People’s standpoints are people’s standpoints, but history is history. What Sinn Fein and the DUP do Disneyfies history. And that Disneyfied history is not real history, it’s rabble rousing bullshit.
