Watched it last week and forgot to log it here for kudos… that good analysis.
As for the Irish state - On one hand you can understand a need to control tensions but still, point blank refusing to even discuss the murder of your own people wouldnt happen in too many Western countries. We have had a lick-spittle political class in this country since the inception of the state – lots of political dynasties carved out their little empires after the civil war and they have done everything to retain that… Ballymurphy + Bloody Sunday were probably the two biggest incidents to fuel the troubles, without them it may not have been half as bad… the fact it was the same regiment involved in both incidents is mind blowing … both events should be taught in English schools.
A lot of Ra stoolers on here blame the Hillsborough victims. You could not make it up.
people read a story in a newspaper and if it fits within their narrative believe it completely and if it doesn’t then dismiss it completely.
Truth is usually greyer. The IRA campaign may have started out with good intentions but quickly those guns and beatings were turned on their own people.
I said after watching it a couple of weeks back. People can say what they want about the likes of Slobodan Milosevic, Franjo Tudjman etc and some of it would be justified but they would never have stood idly by and let their people be subject to what Northern nationalists were in occupied territory.
I hold the Free State equally as culpable as the British State for the Northern conflict.
No-one’s denying that, but do you think that if the southern establishment had been more willing to engage with events like the Ballymurphy killings then the Nationalist community might have been more willing to engage with the southern establishment on things like punishment beatings, etc? There must have been a serious sense of abandonment for things like punishment beatings to seem acceptable in these communities.
What exactly did the southern establishment do for the Ballymurphy community or what did it offer them? Go back to the people who gunned down 10 of you in the street? In circumstances where the southern establishment wont even talk to Northern Nationalists about that event? How can the southern establishment criticise these communities?
The fact that this behaviour continues today in Derry in a country where Sinn Fein were in government and could be if a deal was reached suggests a certain element in power enjoy the feudal society they have created.
Once you invite self appointed guardians into your community you don’t get to undo that Faustian bargain.
Maybe that was what the Irish government decided at that time and did not want a full blown civil war on entire island.
Grand but stop acting like the southern establishment is some kind of moral beacon for deciding to cut a massive chunk of Irish society completely loose and basically never offering those communities any kind of alternative. What exactly was the Irish government’s alternative for the northerners? The SDLP? Just go get shot on the streets of Ballymurphy?
You can make these decisions if you want, but acting like they make you or our government a good person and the people who lost out were bad people is massive massive cognitive dissonance. Being afraid to talk then about the Ballymurphy killings is just pathetic. Look how insecure you are, one mention of the historical fact of the Ballymurphy killings and you’re jumping up pavlovian-style about punishment beatings. What do they have to do with each other? I think it would help you in fact to explain the connection yourself.
Anti-Northern racism and hatred of the abandoned northern communities was invented to provide a (false) moral justification for an economic decision.
Break it down for me. What do you think the Irish government (the authority of which was denied by the IRA) should have done in the early seventies or late sixties.
You cannot be racist against Northern Irish people as they are not a race.
You speak of abandonment. The systematic sexual abuse of children and Magdalene laundries suggests abandonment of its own citizens by the governments of the time.
Good government of NI was not a concern for any stakeholder. Republicans wanted Irish unity and Unionists to remain In UK. So NI’s economy became a basket case. Add in deep sectarian divides. Any criticism from Republican side could be batted away in that context.
Question remains what should and could Irish government have done at the time