Anyone willing to admit that they supported the IRA at any point?

_Kaiser_

_Kaiser_ wrote: »

Nope, never supported it or their campaign. Both sides were as bad as each other really.

Bull****.

The Backwards Man

Cowardly murderous bastards.

RobertKK

No, two wrongs doesn't make something right.

Donald Trump

dd972 wrote: »

They had the means and organisational capacity to wipe out the likes of Johnny Adair and his state backed cronies

Those Protestants. Up to no good as usual


:P

Wheeliebin30

Didn’t they kill the most Catholics out of all the terrorist groups?????

Some defending of the catholic community alright.

umop episdn

Wheeliebin30 wrote: »

Didn’t they kill the most Catholics out of all the terrorist groups?????

Some defending of the catholic community alright.

It's only a matter of time before someone comes along and tells you that Jean McConville got what she deserved :rolleyes:

Donald Trump

Wheeliebin30 wrote: »

Didn’t they kill the most Catholics out of all the terrorist groups?????

Some defending of the catholic community alright.

Depending on how you categorize the various "sides" then you can say that yes they were. But only if you categorize the stats in a particular manner



See bottom of here

Taytoland

Wheeliebin30 wrote: »

Didn’t they kill the most Catholics out of all the terrorist groups?????

Some defending of the catholic community alright.

Here is how much they loved Catholics. They took a Catholic and put him on a milk float, put explosives on it and told him to drive into a barracks and murdered him. So much for defending Catholics.

Donald Trump

Taytoland wrote: »

Here is how much they loved Catholics. They took a Catholic and put him on a milk float, put explosives on it and told him to drive into a barracks and murdered him. So much for defending Catholics.

Pat Mustard was an awful bollix

thebull85

They had my support up until about 15 years ago when they decided to stop shooting heroin dealers in my area.

Wheeliebin30

Taytoland wrote: »

Here is how much they loved Catholics. They took a Catholic and put him on a milk float, put explosives on it and told him to drive into a barracks and murdered him. So much for defending Catholics.

Proxy bomb.

Utter cowards yet some laud them as heroes.

Atoms for Peace

Taytoland wrote: »

Here is how much they loved Catholics. They took a Catholic and put him on a milk float, put explosives on it and told him to drive into a barracks and murdered him. So much for defending Catholics.

I saw a documentary about that on channel 4 once. Wasn't it a moustached and disgruntled former milkman with grudge against the Catholic Church that placed the bomb on the milk float?

Donald Trump

ShooterSF

My great grandfather fought for the IRA, even got a military funeral. Obviously I didn't exist at the time but I'd probably have supported them then I'd like to think.

Donald Trump

ShooterSF wrote: »

My great grandfather fought for the IRA, even got a military funeral. Obviously I didn't exist at the time but I'd probably have supported them then I'd like to think.

apt username is apt :pac:

Yer Da sells Avon

'Support' is a strong word, but I wouldn't regard them as being worse than the British Army or the RUC. I mean, I can understand why people joined up. Unlike Gerry Adams, had I grown up in West Belfast during or before the Troubles, maybe I would have joined. I don't know.

Silent Running

Someone had to do something to defend the Catholic minority in NI.

The B Specials were running riot and even supporting youth gangs (tartan scumbags) picking Catholics off the streets and bringing them to "romper rooms" where they were savagely beaten, for no reason other that they answered the "Protestant or Catholic" question the wrong way.

When the British Army were deployed in NI, they were widely welcomed by the Catholic community, because they thought they were there to protect them from the evil that was the RUC and particularly the B Specials. When the Army turned out to be as bad, and even worse, who were the minority to turn to but their own homegrown Army? No-one else showed any willingness to stop the persecution. Not the British Government, not the Irish Government, not the international community. At least the IRA brought the international spotlight on Northern Ireland. What it illuminated was not pretty, and the world was shocked into action.

The IRA lost their way when criminals took over the higher ranking positions. From then on it was all about the money. All credibility was lost at that stage.

steddyeddy

Taytoland wrote: »

A well established lie from Republicans.

Well established but not a lie.

Unionists seem to forget that attempts had been made as early as 1973 to implement power sharing in the form of the Sunningdale agreement. Unionists seem to forget that they opposed the ballot via the bullet:

On 10 December, the day after the agreement was announced, loyalist paramilitaries formed the Ulster Army Council – a coalition of loyalist paramilitary groups, including the Ulster Defence Association and the Ulster Volunteer Force, which would oppose the agreement.

It's hard to see that democracy would have worked in Northern Ireland without the troubles since loyalist paramilitaries seemed so keen to prevent it ever happening.

Yer Da sells Avon

_Kaiser_ wrote: »

You see it here anytime a SF/IRA or "British" thread pops up.

Hey, the DUP circa 1998 just called. They want their political slur back.

Junkyard Tom

Taytoland wrote: »

A well established lie from Republicans.

Go to CAIN and check out the thousands of gun battles the Provos had with the British Army and their scumbag proxy unionist terroists. Here's a good example of one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_at_Springmartin

Now tell the people reading the thread that they're a bunch of morons if they don't believe you.

Go on.

FTA69

I became attracted to politics when I was 13 and a month before my 15th birthday I ended up joining the Republican Movement. Obviously my politics weren't very developed at the time but you think you know everything at that age. I jacked in everything when I was 19 as I thought SF were moving to the electoral right and I couldn't stomach accepting and endorsing the PSNI.

So yeah, I did support the IRA and I think they were right. They also did some awful, terrible things that Republicans have to accept responsibility for as a collective. That having been said, violence didn't come about in Ireland because the Provisional IRA popped into existence in 1969; it happened because the British government decided to tolerate a violent, sectarian and discriminatory statelet because it suited their interests and they met the challenge to that status quo with harsh military measures. In many ways, the IRA was an inevitable response to that.

Long term though I think the organisation should probably have packed it in around 1990, militarily they failed in their objectives but managed to Republicans managed to establish themselves as one of the major political forces in Ireland so perhaps that's something.

If I had my time back I probably wouldn't have bothered too much with Republican politics but there you go.

Kermit.de.frog

Assetbacked wrote: »

I’m 30; too young to know (or particularly care) about them other than from history books.

Murdering psychopaths and criminal thugs. Same with UVF etc.


That's all you need to know.

FTA69

Kermit.de.frog wrote: »

Murdering psychopaths and criminal thugs. Same with UVF etc.


That's all you need to know.

Yeah they weren't though. This blanket characterisation of all IRA Volunteers as being xyz is just dopey propaganda to be honest. Like it or not, they had a support base in the north (and south to a lesser extent) and that couldn't have been maintained had they been a bunch of self-interested scumbags. In the main, the IRA were normal people who found themselves in an abnormal conflict situation and had they been in any other country they'd have never been involved in anything like that.

Obviously there were bad people within it, and also some criminally minded people as well but unfortunately that small element has existed in Republicanism going back to the 1800s.

Strazdas

FTA69 wrote: »

Yeah they weren't though. This blanket characterisation of all IRA Volunteers as being xyz is just dopey propaganda to be honest. Like it or not, they had a support base in the north (and south to a lesser extent) and that couldn't have been maintained had they been a bunch of self-interested scumbags. In the main, the IRA were normal people who found themselves in an abnormal conflict situation and had they been in any other country they'd have never been involved in anything like that.

Obviously there were bad people within it, and also some criminally minded people as well but unfortunately that small element has existed in Republicanism going back to the 1800s.

I think that's a bit simplistic. It takes a particular type of person who chooses to arm themselves with a weapon and open fire on people in the name of a political cause or to plant a bomb. They might have been normal on the surface but were still sufficiently different from the other ordinary people in NI who weren't participating in these activities.

FTA69

Strazdas wrote: »

I think that's a bit simplistic. It takes a particular type of person who chooses to arm themselves with a weapon and open fire on people in the name of a political cause or to plant a bomb. They might have been normal on the surface but were still sufficiently different from the other ordinary people in NI who weren't participating in these activities.

Yeah I get your point like, it does take a certain type of opinionated, ballsy type to join a volunteer army but that doesn't make one abnormal per se. In Vietnam the vast majority of the population didn't pick up a gun but millions of young people did - and they did so not because the Vietnamese were all headers but because of the political, economic and military conditions in which they existed.

The IRA in places like West Belfast or South Armagh were barmen, mechanics or farmers etc. They were sons and brothers and sisters of the local people, they played soccer and Gaelic football and drank in the same pubs, and in these areas they were generally supported by the civilian population. They were very much ordinary people, albeit people willing to take risks.

Beasty

I've supported my Individual Retirement Account ever since I started paying into it

Taytoland

steddyeddy wrote: »

Taytoland wrote: »

A well established lie from Republicans.

Well established but not a lie.

Unionists seem to forget that attempts had been made as early as 1973 to implement power sharing in the form of the Sunningdale agreement. Unionists seem to forget that they opposed the ballot via the bullet:

On 10 December, the day after the agreement was announced, loyalist paramilitaries formed the Ulster Army Council – a coalition of loyalist paramilitary groups, including the Ulster Defence Association and the Ulster Volunteer Force, which would oppose the agreement.

It's hard to see that democracy would have worked in Northern Ireland without the troubles since loyalist paramilitaries seemed so keen to prevent it ever happening.

You had Nationalists voting and electing politicians even before the ill-fated sunningdale agreement. And even after that agreement you had Nationalists voting in elections during the very darkest of times in Ulster. So what I said was just factually true. Nationalists did have a vote in that timeline and voted SDLP. 

Junkyard Tom wrote: »

Taytoland wrote: »

A well established lie from Republicans.

Go to CAIN and check out the thousands of gun battles the Provos had with the British Army and their scumbag proxy unionist terroists. Here's a good example of one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_at_Springmartin

Now tell the people reading the thread that they're a bunch of morons if they don't believe you.

Go on.

Hilarious how you make a point which had absolutely nothing to do with my point which was pointing out a Republican myth about Nationalists not being allowed near the ballot in the mid 70s. You call Unionist terrorists scumbags almost as if the IRA weren't scumbags, they were just angels who didn't turn children into mince meat, who didn't murder Garda officers, women with children, working class people, you name it, they murdered it. They even killed a beloved horse, such was the psychotic mentality of them. But carry on trying to rewrite it.

Donald Trump

Taytoland wrote: »

They even killed a beloved horse,

As the proud Irishman Dr. Ian might have sang if he were to perform a rendition of The Wild Rover

Imaginary Dr. Ian wrote:

No! Neigh! Never! No neigh never no more

timthumbni

The only thing I liked about the IRA were their Funerals. Absolute and utter lowlifes from start to finish, and ditto with their loyalist opposites.

Attempting to bomb and shoot your way to intimidate unionists into a so called “United” Ireland was never going to work now was it... but republicans are generally as thick as champ anyway so no surprise when their murder terrorist campaign failed miserably.

Strazdas

FTA69 wrote: »

Yeah I get your point like, it does take a certain type of opinionated, ballsy type to join a volunteer army but that doesn't make one abnormal per se. In Vietnam the vast majority of the population didn't pick up a gun but millions of young people did - and they did so not because the Vietnamese were all headers but because of the political, economic and military conditions in which they existed.

The IRA in places like West Belfast or South Armagh were barmen, mechanics or farmers etc. They were sons and brothers and sisters of the local people, they played soccer and Gaelic football and drank in the same pubs, and in these areas they were generally supported by the civilian population. They were very much ordinary people, albeit people willing to take risks.

One reason I said what I said is that I've watched TV interviews with former volunteers over the years and they seemed surprisingly angry and bitter in general and also fairly unrepentant about their past activities. Which does make me wonder about the idea of them being ordinary, decent men who somehow got sucked into violence.

It's rare that you'll hear them say they are full of regrets about the Troubles. Frequently they will try and justify the armed struggle all the way in a "I did what I had to do" type of way.