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The British Army got away with heinous murders too. So did loyalist terrorist groups. At some point both sides need to move on if peace is to be obtained. I

by czstar 4y ago

The British Army got away with heinous murders too. So did loyalist terrorist groups. At some point both sides need to move on if peace is to be obtained. I like what Ghandi said: An eye for an eye makes the world blind.

olliej 4y ago
I don’t recall the British bombing school buses, or libraries, or pretty much any place where people congregated. The IRA were terrorists. Pretending that they’re not only really stopped in the US after 9/11, presumably because it became harder for supporters in the US to explain why targeting groups of civilians was an acceptable strategy.
- BrianHenryIE 4y ago
  > I don't recall The British army opened fire on a civil rights march, killing 14 people, all of whom were unarmed. It is the most significant day of the Troubles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Sunday_(1972) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Sunday_(1972)
  - KaiserPro 4y ago
    that sadly was the most obvious. It wasn't the worst.
- czstar 4y ago
  I didn’t use the word “terrorism” in regards to the British Army. I said the British Army got away with heinous murders too. So did loyalist terrorist groups. The British Army colluded with loyalist terrorist groups and innocents died as a result. I did not pretend the IRA were not terrorists. I said nothing in this regard. People fight using the means available to them. The IRA had no tanks, bombers, frigates, etc. They fought back the only way they could. To them it was justified. To you it wasn’t. But this is true in all wars. The Americans were considered uncivilized during the American Revolutionary War since we frequently targeted officers during battles. This was contrary to how European armies fought. EDIT: Deleted incorrect statements.
  - olliej 4y ago
    I apologize, I clearly responded emotionally to a perceived minimization of the acts of the IRA. Having re-read your original comment I can see clearly that's not something you said or were in anyway implying, so again I apologize unreservedly.
    - czstar 4y ago
      Thank you for your response. In my response to you I had to edit it to remove some incorrect statements. I had to do that because I read into what you wrote some implications that you clearly did not intend. It’s so easy to do that.
      - metiscus 4y ago
        As an aside, I am always happy to see this type of discourse, HN is such a rare place. A discussion about a topic with lots of division and when people disagree, they are friendly and reasonable about it. Kudos to both of you.
- VictorPath 4y ago
  Aside from things like Bloody Sunday where the British Army opened fire on Irish marching against internment of Irish in concentration camps without trial... The DaSilva report, Stevens inquiries etc. showed collusion between English military and intelligence and loyalist death squads, including furnishing of firearms. So the English armed their loyalist paramilitary death squads like the Shankhill butchers and then wash their hands of it all. Why are English soldiers in Ireland any how?
  - sgt101 4y ago
    >Why are English soldiers in Ireland any how? To prevent widespread sectarian murdering and ethnic cleansing of both Catholic and Protestant communities, and because there Irish state is incapable of doing this. No one in England wants anything to do with it anymore, is a mill stone round our neck.
    - mathieuh 4y ago
      Have you ever been to Northern Ireland? This comment is so misinformed. You say widespread, most people don’t care anymore. It is only in the incredibly deprived estates that this matters anymore, and even then it’s mostly loyalist drug dealers terrorising their own community. The Alliance party, the non-aligned neo-liberal party here, had a massive jump in votes in the recent election. The idea that if the British weren’t here people would instantly devolve into sectarian murders is completely laughable to me. In my entire life I have never interacted with anyone who was sectarian. You see the areas with union flags strung up everywhere but as I say, these communities are completely insular and run by drug dealers hiding behind the aegis of shared ethnicity. “A mill stone around our neck”, come off it, my eyes are rolling so hard in my head I fear they may roll under the sofa
      - eduction 4y ago
        Perhaps you can explain then how Lyra McKee (who worked for TechMeme) was murdered in plain view on a public street in Derry by the “New IRA” or why police say the murder weapon was used in four other paramilitary attacks. She was not an “insular” person (she had many contacts in Sillicon Valley) and is hardly an isolated case, nor was she “depraved,” or from a depraved estate, or someone who is not cared about. She was perfectly lovely. RIP
- lmm 4y ago
  > I don’t recall the British bombing school buses, or libraries, or pretty much any place where people congregated. The MRF's own ex-members describe it as a terror group; they carried out drive-by shootings of civilians, and UVF members have claimed that they took part in the bombing of McGurk's.
- dreen 4y ago
  > why targeting groups of civilians was an acceptable strategy Churchill allowed his Black and Tans to burn entire villages to the ground and terrorise people to subdue them with fear. Terrorism is not just blowing up buses.
  - circlefavshape 4y ago
    My grandfather was in the "old IRA" during the Irish war of independence. My dad tells a story about a conversation he had in his youth with an elderly pub-owner who said "At least when the Black and Tans set fire to my pub I'd get compensation from the Brits, when your father set fire to it I'd get nothing"
- KaiserPro 4y ago
  It was a civil war, mixed up with religion. The only "british" people were the army/RUC, the rest were people from ireland. NI is not part of great britian. NI is _not_ british. The IRA (well second/third gen by this point) had an army that was being funded partly by american's "fighting the fight of the old country". They bombs, shot, and tortured anyone they thought who were dodgy. On the other side, the Loyalist paramilitaries were kidnapping and shooting people in a similar way. One could make the call to say the reason why the loyalists wern't so keen on bombings (they did do them) was because you could argue that the RUC(the police in NI) and the army were acting on their side. For example the republicans rarely called the fire brigade/ambulance because more often than not, the army would be pretending to be them. There were "murder squads" of SAS/others who would go out and "stop" people based on informer intelligence. So yes, its brilliant that we(NI, ireland, UK) have managed to stop this. If that means that people have to live with the murder next door, so be it. Its far better than another generation of killings that has poisoned NI since the 1920s. on a side note, do you know how hard it is to forgive/live with the "other side" when you personally know a dad, uncle, relative that was murder by the state/paramilitary?
  - olliej 4y ago
    That's not true though. The majority of NI wanted to remain part of the UK. There was a large segment of the NI population that wanted to become part of Ireland, but that was still the minority. It is absolutely false to say that NI is not part of the UK - a statement the Irish government agrees with - or that the only British were the army/ruc if we're using a definition of British == wants NI to remain part of the UK. Maybe what is wanted by the majority in NO is different now - 20+ years is obviously a long time, and society can change so maybe they no longer wish the connection. The Good Friday agreement acknowledges that possibility and explicitly states that if the majority of NI wish to become part of Ireland then the UK is required to accept that choice. Now, to the awful things that happened: Do I think that members of the RUC who killed civilians should have ended up in jail? of course. But I think the same thing about members of the IRA. Finally: no I don't know what it is like to live with the "other side", but I am sure that there are many of the "other side" who lost friends and family, and also had to accept the Good Friday agreement despite their loss.
- chipsambos 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_and_Monaghan_bombings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_and_Monaghan_bombings
- GoodbyeMrChips 4y ago
  > The IRA were terrorists. Seconded. To see such a plainly factual statement being down voted on HN is deeply worrying....... I suspect the Americans doing the down voting have never been cought up in a terrorist attack and are happy being keyboard warriors about something they know so little. Thank fuck for the peace process and the hard work that has gone into it.
  - mhoad 4y ago
    I suspect it was the partisan and kind of BS nature of the claim. The IRA weren’t blowing up school buses full of children or libraries. They even had a very clear policy of trying to minimise civilian casualties in a way that loyalist groups absolutely did not, in fact they made a point to intentionally target civilians repeatedly. So to make the claim that the OP did like it was some black and white scenario where violence against civilians was only going in one direction is objectively wrong. Nobody is upset with the claim that the IRA were a terrorist group. They were. They did a lot of bad shit, including killing civilians but that was never any kind of policy and it never made sense for their objectives. It was correctly considered to be “bad for the cause” to piss off the support network that enabled them to operate at all. Agreed with about about thank fuck for the peace process though.
    - olliej 4y ago
      What? They absolutely did bomb a school bus, with kids (protestant and catholic) on it at the time: https://apnews.com/article/49117d7cbfe3b351f61290b53ad3e34f https://apnews.com/article/49117d7cbfe3b351f61290b53ad3e34f I'm sorry I screwed up, it was a polytechnic I was thinking of rather than a library: http://bufvc.ac.uk/tvandradio/lbc/index.php/segment/0016800322009 http://bufvc.ac.uk/tvandradio/lbc/index.php/segment/00168003... I'm also unsure how they were minimizing civilian casualties when the blew up multiple pubs and apartment stores in the UK. That said I'll cop to being unreasonable and biased in my first comment, I did disregard the violence committed by the RUC. I was reflexively responding to what came across as a minimization of the IRA and ended up doing what I was accusing the person I was replying to of doing. I'll update the original comment if HN still allows it.
- raffraffraff 4y ago
  Before the IRA were engaged in armed conflict, Catholics in Northern Ireland were treated like shit by the British government, police and local authorities. They were denied jobs and housing, the latter basically denying them a vote (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_man,_one_vote https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_man,_one_vote). After a civil rights movement emerged, the UVF were formed in 1966 by an ex British soldier (Gusty Spencer) and it's ranks were full of soldiers and police. They petrol bombed Catholic homes, schools and businesses. They shot Catholic civilians dead in the streets. Peaceful protests by Catholics were attacked by gangs which included off-duty police. After one march in Derry the police went on a rampage, attacking Catholic homes. Police beat Catholics to death (Samuel Devenny (42) and two of his daughters were beaten in their homes - he died from his injuries. Frances McCloskey (67) was beaten by police during a protest and died of his injuries). In response, the Bogside area went into lock-down, declaring themselves a no-go area for police. Police and loyalists attacked the residents with CS gas, water cannon and armoured vehicles. The Irish government called for a UN peacekeeping force to intervene. What actually happened was that the British army went in. Initially welcomed by the Catholics, they turned out to be even worse than the police: in a single event 745 People were injured (154 with gunshot wounds) and a 9 year old was killed. Hundreds of homes were demolished or badly damaged. The Irish government set up refugee camps South of the border. All of this before the IRA had started their bombing campaigns. I don't agree with what the IRA did. Never have. But come on. "I don't recall the British bombing blah blah blah". Selective memory.
  - notabothonest 4y ago
    > They were denied jobs and housing, the latter basically denying them a vote (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_man,_one_vote https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_man,_one_vote). They were not "denied the vote". Read your own link. "However, unlike the situation in Great Britain, non-ratepayers did not have a vote in local government elections." - if you did not pay rates, you couldn't vote in local elections, but could still vote for Parliament. Furthermore, from your link: > the Parliament of Northern Ireland voted to update the voting rules for elections to the Northern Ireland House of Commons, which were implemented for the 1969 Northern Ireland general election, and for local government elections, which was done by the Electoral Law Act (Northern Ireland) 1969, passed on 25 November 1969. So, the IRA campaign began after the voting situation was equalised, for rate payers and non rate payers alike, in 1969. And when the Stormont Parliament was abolished in 1972, the MPs for NI were elected using UK wide rules, which again, did not "basically deny them the vote". Thus, the IRA campaign was not about civil rights. It was about forcibly pushing NI into the Republic of Ireland, against the wishes of the majority of the population. > in a single event 745 People were injured (154 with gunshot wounds) and a 9 year old was killed. And which "event" was this, because given the nonsense in the rest of your post, I'm betting that this didn't happen.
- sentinalien 4y ago
  Well you clearly know fuck all about the topic then. The British military are guilty of several massacres and civilian murders in Ireland both before and after 1969 and either directly or indirectly through collusion with loyalist paramilitaries.
- wikfwikf 4y ago
  Do you include the UVF, the LVF and the UDA when you refer to 'the British'?
  - MomoXenosaga 4y ago
    The British armed and trained them. We will never know the truth about the black ops that the English security agencies were involved in. Some things are never declassified. There are even theories that they deliberately allowed some of the IRA attacks to go through in order to sway the English public opinion. They had their informants all over the place.

by czstar 4y ago

olliej 4y ago

I don’t recall the British bombing school buses, or libraries, or pretty much any place where people congregated. The IRA were terrorists. Pretending that they’re not only really stopped in the US after 9/11, presumably because it became harder for supporters in the US to explain why targeting groups of civilians was an acceptable strategy.

BrianHenryIE 4y ago
> I don't recall The British army opened fire on a civil rights march, killing 14 people, all of whom were unarmed. It is the most significant day of the Troubles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Sunday_(1972) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Sunday_(1972)
- KaiserPro 4y ago
  that sadly was the most obvious. It wasn't the worst.
czstar 4y ago
I didn’t use the word “terrorism” in regards to the British Army. I said the British Army got away with heinous murders too. So did loyalist terrorist groups. The British Army colluded with loyalist terrorist groups and innocents died as a result. I did not pretend the IRA were not terrorists. I said nothing in this regard. People fight using the means available to them. The IRA had no tanks, bombers, frigates, etc. They fought back the only way they could. To them it was justified. To you it wasn’t. But this is true in all wars. The Americans were considered uncivilized during the American Revolutionary War since we frequently targeted officers during battles. This was contrary to how European armies fought. EDIT: Deleted incorrect statements.
- olliej 4y ago
  I apologize, I clearly responded emotionally to a perceived minimization of the acts of the IRA. Having re-read your original comment I can see clearly that's not something you said or were in anyway implying, so again I apologize unreservedly.
  - czstar 4y ago
    Thank you for your response. In my response to you I had to edit it to remove some incorrect statements. I had to do that because I read into what you wrote some implications that you clearly did not intend. It’s so easy to do that.
    - metiscus 4y ago
      As an aside, I am always happy to see this type of discourse, HN is such a rare place. A discussion about a topic with lots of division and when people disagree, they are friendly and reasonable about it. Kudos to both of you.
VictorPath 4y ago
Aside from things like Bloody Sunday where the British Army opened fire on Irish marching against internment of Irish in concentration camps without trial... The DaSilva report, Stevens inquiries etc. showed collusion between English military and intelligence and loyalist death squads, including furnishing of firearms. So the English armed their loyalist paramilitary death squads like the Shankhill butchers and then wash their hands of it all. Why are English soldiers in Ireland any how?
- sgt101 4y ago
  >Why are English soldiers in Ireland any how? To prevent widespread sectarian murdering and ethnic cleansing of both Catholic and Protestant communities, and because there Irish state is incapable of doing this. No one in England wants anything to do with it anymore, is a mill stone round our neck.
  - mathieuh 4y ago
    Have you ever been to Northern Ireland? This comment is so misinformed. You say widespread, most people don’t care anymore. It is only in the incredibly deprived estates that this matters anymore, and even then it’s mostly loyalist drug dealers terrorising their own community. The Alliance party, the non-aligned neo-liberal party here, had a massive jump in votes in the recent election. The idea that if the British weren’t here people would instantly devolve into sectarian murders is completely laughable to me. In my entire life I have never interacted with anyone who was sectarian. You see the areas with union flags strung up everywhere but as I say, these communities are completely insular and run by drug dealers hiding behind the aegis of shared ethnicity. “A mill stone around our neck”, come off it, my eyes are rolling so hard in my head I fear they may roll under the sofa
    - eduction 4y ago
      Perhaps you can explain then how Lyra McKee (who worked for TechMeme) was murdered in plain view on a public street in Derry by the “New IRA” or why police say the murder weapon was used in four other paramilitary attacks. She was not an “insular” person (she had many contacts in Sillicon Valley) and is hardly an isolated case, nor was she “depraved,” or from a depraved estate, or someone who is not cared about. She was perfectly lovely. RIP
lmm 4y ago
> I don’t recall the British bombing school buses, or libraries, or pretty much any place where people congregated. The MRF's own ex-members describe it as a terror group; they carried out drive-by shootings of civilians, and UVF members have claimed that they took part in the bombing of McGurk's.
dreen 4y ago
> why targeting groups of civilians was an acceptable strategy Churchill allowed his Black and Tans to burn entire villages to the ground and terrorise people to subdue them with fear. Terrorism is not just blowing up buses.
- circlefavshape 4y ago
  My grandfather was in the "old IRA" during the Irish war of independence. My dad tells a story about a conversation he had in his youth with an elderly pub-owner who said "At least when the Black and Tans set fire to my pub I'd get compensation from the Brits, when your father set fire to it I'd get nothing"
KaiserPro 4y ago
It was a civil war, mixed up with religion. The only "british" people were the army/RUC, the rest were people from ireland. NI is not part of great britian. NI is _not_ british. The IRA (well second/third gen by this point) had an army that was being funded partly by american's "fighting the fight of the old country". They bombs, shot, and tortured anyone they thought who were dodgy. On the other side, the Loyalist paramilitaries were kidnapping and shooting people in a similar way. One could make the call to say the reason why the loyalists wern't so keen on bombings (they did do them) was because you could argue that the RUC(the police in NI) and the army were acting on their side. For example the republicans rarely called the fire brigade/ambulance because more often than not, the army would be pretending to be them. There were "murder squads" of SAS/others who would go out and "stop" people based on informer intelligence. So yes, its brilliant that we(NI, ireland, UK) have managed to stop this. If that means that people have to live with the murder next door, so be it. Its far better than another generation of killings that has poisoned NI since the 1920s. on a side note, do you know how hard it is to forgive/live with the "other side" when you personally know a dad, uncle, relative that was murder by the state/paramilitary?
- olliej 4y ago
  That's not true though. The majority of NI wanted to remain part of the UK. There was a large segment of the NI population that wanted to become part of Ireland, but that was still the minority. It is absolutely false to say that NI is not part of the UK - a statement the Irish government agrees with - or that the only British were the army/ruc if we're using a definition of British == wants NI to remain part of the UK. Maybe what is wanted by the majority in NO is different now - 20+ years is obviously a long time, and society can change so maybe they no longer wish the connection. The Good Friday agreement acknowledges that possibility and explicitly states that if the majority of NI wish to become part of Ireland then the UK is required to accept that choice. Now, to the awful things that happened: Do I think that members of the RUC who killed civilians should have ended up in jail? of course. But I think the same thing about members of the IRA. Finally: no I don't know what it is like to live with the "other side", but I am sure that there are many of the "other side" who lost friends and family, and also had to accept the Good Friday agreement despite their loss.
chipsambos 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_and_Monaghan_bombings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_and_Monaghan_bombings
GoodbyeMrChips 4y ago
> The IRA were terrorists. Seconded. To see such a plainly factual statement being down voted on HN is deeply worrying....... I suspect the Americans doing the down voting have never been cought up in a terrorist attack and are happy being keyboard warriors about something they know so little. Thank fuck for the peace process and the hard work that has gone into it.
- mhoad 4y ago
  I suspect it was the partisan and kind of BS nature of the claim. The IRA weren’t blowing up school buses full of children or libraries. They even had a very clear policy of trying to minimise civilian casualties in a way that loyalist groups absolutely did not, in fact they made a point to intentionally target civilians repeatedly. So to make the claim that the OP did like it was some black and white scenario where violence against civilians was only going in one direction is objectively wrong. Nobody is upset with the claim that the IRA were a terrorist group. They were. They did a lot of bad shit, including killing civilians but that was never any kind of policy and it never made sense for their objectives. It was correctly considered to be “bad for the cause” to piss off the support network that enabled them to operate at all. Agreed with about about thank fuck for the peace process though.
  - olliej 4y ago
    What? They absolutely did bomb a school bus, with kids (protestant and catholic) on it at the time: https://apnews.com/article/49117d7cbfe3b351f61290b53ad3e34f https://apnews.com/article/49117d7cbfe3b351f61290b53ad3e34f I'm sorry I screwed up, it was a polytechnic I was thinking of rather than a library: http://bufvc.ac.uk/tvandradio/lbc/index.php/segment/0016800322009 http://bufvc.ac.uk/tvandradio/lbc/index.php/segment/00168003... I'm also unsure how they were minimizing civilian casualties when the blew up multiple pubs and apartment stores in the UK. That said I'll cop to being unreasonable and biased in my first comment, I did disregard the violence committed by the RUC. I was reflexively responding to what came across as a minimization of the IRA and ended up doing what I was accusing the person I was replying to of doing. I'll update the original comment if HN still allows it.
raffraffraff 4y ago
Before the IRA were engaged in armed conflict, Catholics in Northern Ireland were treated like shit by the British government, police and local authorities. They were denied jobs and housing, the latter basically denying them a vote (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_man,_one_vote https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_man,_one_vote). After a civil rights movement emerged, the UVF were formed in 1966 by an ex British soldier (Gusty Spencer) and it's ranks were full of soldiers and police. They petrol bombed Catholic homes, schools and businesses. They shot Catholic civilians dead in the streets. Peaceful protests by Catholics were attacked by gangs which included off-duty police. After one march in Derry the police went on a rampage, attacking Catholic homes. Police beat Catholics to death (Samuel Devenny (42) and two of his daughters were beaten in their homes - he died from his injuries. Frances McCloskey (67) was beaten by police during a protest and died of his injuries). In response, the Bogside area went into lock-down, declaring themselves a no-go area for police. Police and loyalists attacked the residents with CS gas, water cannon and armoured vehicles. The Irish government called for a UN peacekeeping force to intervene. What actually happened was that the British army went in. Initially welcomed by the Catholics, they turned out to be even worse than the police: in a single event 745 People were injured (154 with gunshot wounds) and a 9 year old was killed. Hundreds of homes were demolished or badly damaged. The Irish government set up refugee camps South of the border. All of this before the IRA had started their bombing campaigns. I don't agree with what the IRA did. Never have. But come on. "I don't recall the British bombing blah blah blah". Selective memory.
- notabothonest 4y ago
  > They were denied jobs and housing, the latter basically denying them a vote (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_man,_one_vote https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_man,_one_vote). They were not "denied the vote". Read your own link. "However, unlike the situation in Great Britain, non-ratepayers did not have a vote in local government elections." - if you did not pay rates, you couldn't vote in local elections, but could still vote for Parliament. Furthermore, from your link: > the Parliament of Northern Ireland voted to update the voting rules for elections to the Northern Ireland House of Commons, which were implemented for the 1969 Northern Ireland general election, and for local government elections, which was done by the Electoral Law Act (Northern Ireland) 1969, passed on 25 November 1969. So, the IRA campaign began after the voting situation was equalised, for rate payers and non rate payers alike, in 1969. And when the Stormont Parliament was abolished in 1972, the MPs for NI were elected using UK wide rules, which again, did not "basically deny them the vote". Thus, the IRA campaign was not about civil rights. It was about forcibly pushing NI into the Republic of Ireland, against the wishes of the majority of the population. > in a single event 745 People were injured (154 with gunshot wounds) and a 9 year old was killed. And which "event" was this, because given the nonsense in the rest of your post, I'm betting that this didn't happen.
sentinalien 4y ago
Well you clearly know fuck all about the topic then. The British military are guilty of several massacres and civilian murders in Ireland both before and after 1969 and either directly or indirectly through collusion with loyalist paramilitaries.
wikfwikf 4y ago
Do you include the UVF, the LVF and the UDA when you refer to 'the British'?
- MomoXenosaga 4y ago
  The British armed and trained them. We will never know the truth about the black ops that the English security agencies were involved in. Some things are never declassified. There are even theories that they deliberately allowed some of the IRA attacks to go through in order to sway the English public opinion. They had their informants all over the place.