Some fairly crude reductionism there apart from the dig at the crudely reductionist Harris, who you can be as crudely reductionist as you like about.
The post was very popular with other posters too.
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Would you disagree with his post or would you just like to be reduced to a smart comment?
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There were over three and a half thousand people killed in Troubles. Few people know the details of many of them, and that goes for people living in the North too.
I really don’t get this construct that people in the Republic supposedly don’t know what happened Catholics in the North in a general sense. Like, you’d have to be living on a metaphorical Mars to be a southern Catholic who wasn’t broadly aware of the hardships Northern Catholics faced and still do face to an extent.
But I’m quite suspicious of it as a construct because I believe it more often than not is used to in some way justify IRA atrocities.
I also find it funny that the person that brought up that construct is from Cork.
In one sense the North can’t ever move on as long as it forgets such atrocities.
But in another way, it would be much for the better if people who didn’t live through them, live their lives as though those atrocities never happened.
That has the to be the aim. Because otherwise we’re condemned to endlessly repeat the past.
I said a large number buy into it, not everyone. I know plenty of people who would think along these lines… Anything north = IRA…
I think it’s quite a legitimate position to be able to bear in mind atrocities like Ballymurphy and Bloody Sunday and still condemn the actions of the IRA and INLA.
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I don’t think a majority of people in the Republic thought like that at all. I think a considerable, nay overwhelming majority did not. Not least because the notion that “anything north = IRA” was so demonstrably not true, given that the SDLP were the most popular party by a considerable distance among Catholics in the North during the Troubles.
I’d be in exact same boat as yourself
I disagree with most of it, yes.
I also do not understand why other posters have even brought the concept of justification of support for the IRA into this discussion given that the dead of Ballymurphy were nothing to do with the IRA and were entirely innocent of any wrongdoing whatsoever. Bringing the IRA into the discussion is cheap and an insult to those dead.
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You don’t think incidents like Ballymurphy had a direct link to IRA enlistment of young Catholics in the North? You think the youth just volunteered for the sake of it?
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You don’t know what you’re talking about. You can sit aloof and pontificate all you want but for young nationalists in the North, BA\RUC\Loyalist killings of members of their community had almost everything to do with it. The minority population in the North wasn’t Republican. The fact that the SDLP were dominant politically shows where they were at even taking into account that SF didn’t concentrate on winning elections till the hunger strikes and then after the GFA. It was the treatment of their community which radicalised young nationalists. So those murdered in Ballymurphy and later Derry in fact had everything to do with the IRA and its emergence.
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Because the number of people volunteering to join the IRA multiplied hugely after Ballymurphy Nd bloody Sunday? It’s a fairly direct link.
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Julie Livingstone
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Id safely say Hamas will see a rise in new membership in the coming weeks after the Israeli air strikes in Gaza.
Fuuuuuuuck. That’s horrendous
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Change of time
This could go on
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I’d say if you asked 90% of FF FG TDs who Majella O’Hare was they wouldn’t have a clue.
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Brilliant post.
Sid displays a complete ignorance of the situation northern nationalists found themselves in.
Many SDLP voters back then would have supported the IRA but SF always took a back seat to the military campaign until the late 80s and once SF began to establish themselves as a political party rather than s mouthpiece for the IRA, northern nationalists showed little compunction about transferring their vote from the SDLP to SF.
The reason the IRA were supported by quite a sizable amount of their communities because they had nobody else to look out for nationalists and their interest. Hume is rightly regarded for his role in the peace process but what did he have the SDLP achieve for the nationalist community up until then? Nothing.
It was the Provos who brought the British to the negotiating table and that is why SF have been the political party of nationalists and republicans post GFA. The people who lived in those communities recognised the role and sacrifices of the PIRA in standing up to the British.
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What were the IRA to do with the Ballymurphy dead? Why did you bring the IRA into it? Because by doing so, you’re tacitly associating the Ballymurphy dead with the IRA. And providing the sort of bogus discussion framework through which British atrocities have been attempted to be justified again and again.
The Ballymurphy dead were nothing to do with the IRA. Not a single one of them. They were innocent civilians murdered by the Brits.