The IRA

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Pages: 7

"Some of the worst things imaginable have been done with the best intentions" ( ). The History of Northern Ireland and the IRA is a history of oppression responded by terrorism, where there is no clear line between morally righteous actions, and violent atrocities. Both the Irish Republican Catholics and the British/Irish Loyalist Protestants had fought each other for generations before the troubles (Name given to this period) began, since the annexation of Ireland (Tools 94). When Ireland became an independent nation is when the Issue of the mostly British held Northern Ireland became to unravel. The IRA was a response of intimidation and mistreatment by the Protestant Northern Irish government, as a means of fighting back. The reality became …show more content…
The North Irish Government was a bigoted one, similar to the American South in the 1950s, and the Apartheid government in South Africa they the government let public policy be to condemn a certain group of people, in this case Catholic. As stated in the Book Making Sense of the Troubles the story of the conflict in Northern Ireland by David McKittrick and David Mcvea, “the Unionist establishment, which was to run the state on the basis of Protestant majority rule for the following half-century, actively discriminated against Catholics in the allocations of jobs and housing, over political rights and in other areas” (Mckittirck 4). Again this was similar to other nations at the time making the Irish minority another discriminated group in their own country. This all lead up to the 1960s where there was a civil rights campaign to combat the institutionalized decriminalized by the Protestant government, it was in fact influenced by Martin Luther King and the black civil rights movement in the United States (Mckittrick 39). Unlike the United States where for the most part helped the Black cause and civil rights, in Ireland it gave birth to the violence that would come, the peaceful protests would fail. In Londonderry 5 October 1968 a peaceful march was attacked, the local police overreacted and started …show more content…
The direct response of the IRA killings was the 1971 bombing of Befastpub which kill 15 people a popular catholic Pub (Northern Ireland). The following years were equally as violent, while there was no singular protestant group like the IRA there was as equal violent carnages repeated against each other over the years. At the largest point in the 1970s the UDA a large protestant paramilitary group held over 40,000 members ready to kill (Northern