There was a family up the road from us who had one of theirs join the RUC. This would have been back before my time in the 70s, nice family from a Stoop background but he wanted to join the guards but couldn’t get it in as he didn’t have Irish. Anyway he took up with the Peelers, the family were a bit embarrassed but it kind of came to a head when there were the Provos tried to take him out at his home up the road not long after Patsy Kelly’s disappearance.
They failed but he was transferred to Coleraine or somewhere round there after, it kind of soured things locally but those were the times. I’d know some of the nieces and nephews well and they would still hold grudges about it which I suppose is understandable but that would also transcend the other side too, there’s definitely a stigma about it.
That’s very different to over here. Loads of retired around the place, would be at least half a dozen in the local pub on a weekend night. Not something they boast about but most would know anyway, it’s the main GAA pub here but nobody passes any remarks. Very decent sorts regardless of what you think of how they earned their living.
There’d be a lot of rancour over the past still to this day in that generation. The RUC would have directly been involved in a lot of sinister events on the nationalist community. Generally each community would stick to their own bars etc.
A lot of those places on the Down/Armagh borders always seemed to be quite integrated. I remember the Poyntzpass murders and how it was pointed how the two communities had generally got on quite well in that area.
I’m only going from my experiences and that fuckwit speaking above is the exact type of wankstain I’ve encountered around our neck of the woods and where RUC/UDR officers were involved in your numerous attacks on random Catholics and where neigbours and family members were regularly harassed. Everyone locally encountered these guys in their professional capacity and they were scum.
UDR checkpoints with the red lasers pointing at you were par the course on the dark, even I can remember them as a cub and the sheer panic that would happen when they’d stop you. Maybe that’s a legacy of growing up in the murder triangle but peelers will always be trusted with contempt by the nationalist community locally because we knew what they were involved in and up to.
Might be time for you to mature a bit though. You remind me of the time I was in a pub in Glasgow where a Sinn Fein Councillor started abusing a local lad because he had a paras tattoo. The lad wasnt long out of nappies when the ceasefire took place, and one of his main reasons he joined the paras was he lived with his mother and she used to bring a different ‘uncle’ home most weeks for him to meet, he was just desperate to get out and the military was his chance. Didn’t stop the SF clown though from telling him what a disgrace he was for being a para and having the tattoo.
I saw a bit of coverage this week of the time the IRA went into the children’s hospital in Belfast when Dodds child was there and fired shots. Would you associate all IRA men you know with that incident?
You can’t do anything with loyalism and unionism. Times are changing and you can bring a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.
I’d be ashamed if I was a Para. Maybe if you grew up or experienced the terrors of the Paras you might feel a little different. Maybe if you were subjected to unionists rubbing your face in it every summer with Para flags up and down any big town in the O6 it might rankle with you.
But if you haven’t had those life experiences then maybe you probably don’t get it and probably never will.
Things were messed up but if you’re falling into the both sides as bad at each other narrative then you deserve to put your head in a bucket of ice cold water for a bit.
Because going around saying things like this is no way to live your life
We used to have the Para flags here as well, they are now almost completely a thing of the past because generally people in this part of Ulster don’t view the opposite community as ‘inhumane’. To say a lad from Glasgow should be ashamed to be a Para because of events here years before he was born is complete nonsense.
If a United Ireland ever happens the vast majority of Unionists will get on with things and build the best life they can for themselves and their family. I see a recent poll taken in the south which said in a UI Unionist politicians shouldn’t be allowed serve in government, that type of stuff is embarrassing to read for anyone who would have friends from that community.
They’re no longer a minority and their actions will dictate a lot. I stand over that comment by the way, this isn’t a both sides as bad as each other and debasing it to such shows a huge lack of understanding and respect to what happened. Only when unionists change their mindset will that take place. Read that article from the Indo there and that’s the type we are all used to. If unionists were progressive they would not consistently vote for the sectarian dinosaurs they do in the UUP/TUV/DUP/PUP.
You are used to nobody, you don’t interact with people like that at all. A journalist isn’t going to seek out the ex-RUC men drinking in the local pub here with their nationalist neighbours and going out golfing together, that’s not the story they want to tell from up here.
It’s not a case of both sides being as bad as each other, but I know plenty of people here who would have their dad check under the car every morning for ‘cats’ before being dropped to school just in case someone had strapped a bomb to it. If they described nationalists as ‘inhumane’ I’d think of them as needing to mature a bit as well.
Maybe you should tell that to the families who were terrorised by the RUC and had RUC deliberately botching investigations into the killings and intimidation of their loved ones.
As any northern nationalist will, there’s little more gauling than a free stater telling them to forget about the past. If you weren’t subjected to it and didn’t live through it, then maybe you should relax on the dishing out of lectures.
I may have been too young to properly experience the worst of it but I do have early childhood memories of RUC/UDR/British Army intimidation and harassment that the whole local community was subjected to.
We still have the RUC/PSNI still covering up the past to this day, still striving to ensure justice is never so maybe with the morality lectures when you don’t seem to understand the past the severity the actions of the RUC hit nationalist communities with.
A grand post of whatabboutery. All the hallmarks there in that response of the ‘2 pint republican’. If you are happy to go on calling Unionists inhumane then feel free, but them type views mean you have more in common with lunatics like Jim Allister than the growing majority up here.
No those views are accurate and not some fucking blow in who never experienced any level of the Troubles would have an iota of understanding on.
Why is that Free Staters always feel so fucking morally superior that they lecture northern nationalists. Maybe you should have some decency and respect and not comment on things you haven’t the slightest clue about.
It wasn’t your family and neighbours who were getting bundled into the back of van and taken for a beating, had their houses smashed in, had guns pointed in their faces and veiled threats made against them as they tried to go to and from work. They might be decent people in your eyes but maybe ask the Sean Graham shooting victims if they think RUC men are good and decent.
It’s clear you have little understanding but like most free staters feel like you deserve to be the authoritative voice of something you neither understand or experienced.
You have no idea what or who you are talking about. But I assure you if McGuinness was alive he’d be embarrassed by a fella with views like yours. Living your whole life wanting to be considered a victim isn’t healthy for you, it’s time to mature.
I have you imbecile. I was born there in the 80s, I experienced some of The Troubles.
I experienced a UDR checkpoint. Did you?
I experienced a RUC intimidation and harassment? Did you?
I experienced being referred to in sectarian terms by RUC officers? Did you?
You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t the history, you don’t have experience but yet you feel the need to get up on your haughty little soap box and tell us all that we are as bad as each other.
I don’t consider myself a victim. Only northern nationalists and those on the border communities will have an understanding what those years were like and I’ll never as long as the day I die, ever take a lecture from a pompous free state twat on who suffered and who didn’t suffer in something they don’t have the first iota about.
I was thinking about what that actually meant. What does it mean for a southerner to “accept” or “not accept” a government? Ireland has arguably the strongest democratic culture in Europe. No-one is going to be burning down the law or breaking the law. I think what people understood by that question was “If Fianna Fail said that they would go into a government with a Unionist party after the election, would you still vote for them?” In the same way most voters would have said 10 years ago that they wouldn’t accept SF in government but if push came to shove and such a coalition was elected no-one would have questioned the legitimacy of such a government.
Iv no interest in playing top trumps with you to decide which of us can claim the right to describe Unionists as inhumane. I am happy for you to claim that prize yourself. If you really want to get competitive at the victim game though give Jamie Bryson a shout, ye would be very well matched in ability and he is every bit as keen to be seen as one as you are.
I’m off this evening to have a couple of Christmas pints and laugh at those locked out south of the border, if any of the RUC men drinking with me refer to me in sectarian terms il be sure to log it.