A incoherent statement trying to deflect from the sins of the father. And it is straight from the Provos playbook, cynical and self serving.
O toole is a disingenuous bigoted hack who had no interest in getting it right, he was called out. Brolly isnât ashamed of where heâs from and isnât afraid to express an opinionâŚor tribalism as youâd call it.
The fact is brolly has plenty of unionist and protestant friends- genuine ones who know where hes coming from, can fight their own corner and respect a man for being honest- fellow travellers in a post conflict society. He could be a liar and a lackey, that might make him suitable for your company and approval but it wouldnât make him much of a man.
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Heâs talking shite to say people in the Republic of Ireland somehow blamed nationalists because there was disgust at the IRA blowing up children.
John Hume clearly articulated in 1977 that there was no justification for violence. It ultimately achieved nothing and was done as Hume predicted to gain power for its perpetrators and not for any ideal of unity.
Also remember the IRA stated aim was to overthrow the democratically elected government of Republic of Ireland and instal a socialist (unelected) government
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Thatâs excellent. And he was right to defend the loyalist.
He never said that
And yet you havenât been able to argue with a single one of his points.
He did say it.
In the clip above he says it. Says orthodoxy developed in South that nationalists were to blame.
Thatâs just not true. What is true is that IRA campaign was condemned and thatâs rightly so.
Whether there was justification for it or not is irrelevant once it becomes inevitable. Get your head round that.
Thatâs gobbledygook
Itâs not inevitable. As the ceasefire eventually proved.
Called out by Brolly doing a bit of gaslighting about southerners?
Is this like you saying the south should have protested to international organisations but not having a clue that they did exactly that?
There are many criticisms of Tin Tinâs work in general but his rebuttal was absolutely pathetic.
The article in question goes across the full breadth of PIRASF atrocities. Are you suggesting someone in the south âdoesnât get the Northâ when FOT called them out for murdering Irish policemen and soldiers? Did we have to live through Bloody Sunday to have an opinion on that?
Brollyâs argument is the Provo one. Mention an PIRASF atrocity and volley back with civil rights. But that wasnât the point of their campaign and the 30+ year campaign they conducted. It is a cynical attempt at gaslighting the public and it has worked on plenty.
Nobody has an issue with Northern Catholics, plenty still do with pondlife Provos from the south, the north, England and even the US though.
Catholics in NI lived like kings and queens compared to the blacks in the US or the blacks in apartheid South Africa.
In neither of those cases was there anything remotely resembling a three decades long campaign of murder and terror.
No alternative my hoop.
Which is of course ârevisionismâ by them.
It has been going on for 25 years in order to justify the campaign.
I made the point on the âlivedâ experience of Catholics at that time who overwhelmingly rejected violence at the ballot box. At the conclusion of the Troubles polls showed they rejected the violence and any justification for it.
That has swung in the last 25 years as SF have worked hard to plant various seeds in the media.
According to the likes of Halfpipe this is because they are better informed than this âlivedâ experience. They read the inquiry reports and just are better informed. Theyâre the same kids who donât care about the Troubles though, donât forget. 
It is amazing they get away with it. They pretend like southerners werenât aware of Bloody Sunday. The same ones who burnt down the British Embassy in Dublin, had a general strike, a national day of mourning etc. It is the Neo Republican of today who is better informed.
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You donât get it. Violence has its own logic and energy. Thereâs little point in trying to rationalise it, measure or predict it. Anger, power, outrage, fear etc canât be divvied up and moralised over in any useful fashion, except maybe in the minds of fools. Dont dismiss it it as âgobbledygookâ. Take a few days to think about it.
The ceasefires happened for all sorts of reasons. A military victory wasnât possible by any of the sides involved, people were sick of it, there was fair employment legislation, the eyes of the world were on the behaviour of the protagonists, the eleven plus had the unforeseen consequences, nationalists had a strong cultural identity due to oppression, thatchers post industrial britain wiped out a protestant working class supremacy, and the demographic was changing catastrophically etc etc etc
But you lads boil it down to good vs bad. You embarrassingly pig ignorant clueless frightened ditch hurlers. You are genuinely pathetic
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I donât agree with all of this - most specifically the bit about the British supposedly âlearning a lessonâ from Bloody Sunday - I donât think thatâs true at all - but I do agree with the key point - that the Troubles were created above all by the Provos and their leadership.
Had the Provos not existed, there would have been no Troubles as they played out for three decades.
That terror is Liam Kennedyâs core concern. The question posed by the title of his bookââWho was responsible for the Troubles?ââis intentionally provocative. Some nationalists would no doubt consider it scandalous. How could one side carry the blame for thirty years of killings when IRA and loyalist paramilitaries routinely avenged each otherâs acts? At some point it seemed impossible to say just who was responsible; the death spiral became self-perpetuating. Catholics had mobilized for equality, but Protestants claimed this mobilization was itself aggressive. By the early 1970s the volunteers streaming into paramilitaries on both sides believed they were protecting their communities.
Kennedy has been listening to the rival justifications since arriving at Queenâs to teach economic history in 1977. He asks readers to get outside their echo chambers and consider what party may have been primarily responsible for perpetuating the conflict. Violence, he argues, does not happen by âinertia.â The people who blew up crowded pubs or gunned down magistrates at breakfast with their children were not automatons. They thought what they were doing was not only necessary but right.
Kennedy gets to a âprimeâ culprit by a process of elimination. The police and army were indeed often partisan, but their basic job was containing violence, and if not for the introduction of British troops in 1969, the region might have descended into a full-blown civil war. In any case, these âcrown forcesâ did not drive the violence. âHad there been permanent paramilitary ceasefires at any point from say 1972 onwards,â writes Kennedy, âthe British army would have been recalled to barracks.â
What of the denial to Catholics of basic rights from the moment Northern Ireland was founded? Kennedy argues that systemic injustices were being dealt with via reformist policies pursued by British officials from the late 1960s: âMany of the key reforms in housing, local government and voting had been conceded by the time the Provisional IRA went on the offensive.â What of Protestants as agents of violence? According to Kennedy, the unionist side was primarily responsive.
By âProvisional IRA,â Kennedy means the main IRA faction that remained after a split in 1969 (the other faction is called âOfficialâ). After decades of dormancy, the Officials had arisen once more in the late 1960s, setting bombs and killing British soldiers. But in May 1972, after their volunteers murdered Ranger William Best, a nineteen-year-old Catholic on leave in Derry from his unit in Germany, the Officials declared a unilateral cease-fire, worried that the violence would spiral out of control. For Kennedy this proves that continued armed struggle for âIrish rightsâ was unnecessary: had other republican groups emulated the Official IRA in its radical rethinking of armed struggle, loyalist violence toward the nationalist community would have fizzled out.
Yet rather than retreat, the Provisional IRA (also PIRA or âProvosâ) scaled up its campaign of bombings and assassinations. Kennedy thus assigns primary responsibility for the Troubles to a tight-knit Provos leadership group that pressed forward with targeted terrorism into the 1990s, killing more people than all other sources of violence combined.
Critics will ask whether the search for culprits can stop at the PIRA leadership. After all, they did not create themselves, but grew out of generations of official contempt and hypocrisy capped by human-rights abuses during the early 1970s. Anyone who watches documentaries on the TroublesâArthur MacCaigâs The Patriot Game, for example, or the BBCâs eight-part series Spotlight on the Troubles: A Secret Historyâwill conclude that arrogant officials from Britain, abetted by security forces displaying a colonial mindset, made the emergence of a radical faction in the IRA inevitable. Photojournalists recorded police kicking down doors, violating the elderly, roughing up and arbitrarily arresting young men, and clubbing everyone in sight when entering Catholic areas. After being dragged, sometimes by their hair, into paddy wagons, the arrested were held without trial and subject to abuses condemned as torture by the European Court of Human Rights in 1976.
Kennedy writes that the British learned a lesson from Bloody Sunday: it âwas not repeated.â Yes, technically Bloody Sunday was an event of one day, but the images of that event never disappeared from journals and televisions, becoming a perennial call to arms for young men and womenâdespite desperate efforts of peacemaking clergy and socialist politicians on the nationalist side.
Thus, if Kennedy is right that the violence was propelled by a monstrous coterie of ideological extremists, that monsterâs life was made possible by officials located in London, men with impeccable manners and an unquestioned belief in their right to govern supposed inferiors. They took for granted that, for example, the massive internment of Catholics without trial from 1971 to 1975, a âpainful decisionâ arrived at after âdue consideration,â would quench the resistance. The effect was the opposite: an unquenchable rage.
By 1972 the Provos seemed to many Catholics the only force speaking a language adequate to their desperation, a fact well documented in Patrick Radden Keefeâs Say Nothing, which tells the story of Dolours Price, an idealistic civil-rights activist from a republican family who was radicalized by direct witness to the persecution of Catholics. After swearing an oath of loyalty to the PIRA, she helped plant car bombs in London in March 1973, wounding some two hundred people. She and her accomplices were apprehended while attempting to board a flight back to Ireland. Decades later it emerged that Price had also belonged to a unit that kidnapped, shot, and buried Jean McConville, a West Belfast Catholic mother of ten who was suspected of treason. McConvilleâs remains were not located until 2003 in a bog south of the border.
Yet as easy as it is to understand the rage that drove young men and women to the Provos, in retrospect we see that no goal justified their bombings, targeted assassinations, and maimings. Kennedy takes special aim at a central myth promoted by Price and her comrades: that they were protecting Catholics. Only three Catholics had died at loyalist hands between 1966 and 1969, while in the succeeding decades hundreds lost their lives. The Provos proved âhopelessâ against their purported enemies: âLess than 2 percent of IRA killings,â Kennedy tells us, âor 28 to be precise were of loyalist paramilitaries.â Moreover, the IRA itself killed Catholics, including its own people. And contrary to the powerful images of Derry in January 1972, only a small minority of the Catholics who died were killed by security forces.
In fact, the Provosâ goals did not lie in immediate self-defense. According to their doctrines, Catholics suffering persecution by the police or unequal treatment were surface problems: peace, justice, and popular welfare were unattainable as long as Ireland remained divided. Thus, the Provosâ operations aimed to drive âBritish imperialismâ from the island. An early leader, London-born John Stephenson (later called SeĂĄn Mac StĂofĂĄin), wrote in his memoir, âwe believe that only by force of arms can Ireland achieve her complete freedom.â As in any war there would be casualties on both sides, justified by the cause; what the Provos did was exploit mass rage for their own program of national unity. Protestants would either accept united Ireland or get out.
Oh the irony from the poster who was doing exactly that last week.
Read a book. What you know about your home place could be written on the back of a stamp.
You keep on about this reading a book business. Iâll happily accept that youâre extremely well read and very clever.
There.
Violence is carried out by men. It isnât a force of nature.
Hume called it out in 1977. He was right. The freedom fighters wanted power. That was their goal. That is their goal. They killed more of their own community than the British.
I love when the veil slips.
The Provos should have done simple maths in January 1970. Catholics were outnumbered 65%-35% or more, or whatever it was.
You canât win by terror in that situation.
Perhaps the blame for the Troubles lies in the teaching of maths in NI schools, or more to the point Republic of Ireland schools, given that a majority of those who founded the Provos were from down here.
It doesnât matter. Logic didnât come into it. There was still too much bloodlust, revenge, idealism etcâŚeven thirst for power as you put it. Hume was just one part of itâŚbut unfortunately you can only see one part of it. Your problem, as most of us are moving on.
You find yourself in a bunker ⌠with sid, tim and an empty bookshelf . Best of luck.
You clearly arenât. Blaming the âsouthâ still. The veil slipped and youâve shown you are bitter as fuck about it.
I had three great days in Belfast this week. Heard lots of debate and views on how we got to here and how to move forward. Luckily enough nobody blamed the Republic of Ireland like you want to do.