Helmholtz Watson said:
Never claimed that everybody that doesn't like the IRA are Ultser loyalist, just that I'm as sympathetic to their cause as I am to southern states in the US that wanted to form the Confederacy.
Are you talking about Loyalist Paramilitaries here or just people who live in Northern Ireland who want to remain part of the UK?
Matthew94 said:
Like I said, the IRA were terrorists who committed horrible acts that the majority did not even agree with.
Also, peaceful means worked much better than fighting. If you look at NI now, much more progress has been made when they sat down and talked.
On that note:
These kind of arguments take me back to uni in 97 (in Manchester, a year after the bombing no less). There was a guy in my flat who had a friend from Belfast, not an active catholic but of catholic extraction and one day after the pub we'd got back and a foreign student (I'll let you guess where he was from, although in his defence he was young and drunk) decided to start spouting off to this guy about how great the IRA were for fighting for blah, blah blah, and dear god did the room turn blue. Complete silence in the flat for a good couple of minutes while he berated the ever loving shit out of him (Well, mainly the IRA and paramilitaries in general).
And while I do feel very bad about the fact that this Irish guy had had his entire childhood and young adult life marred by sectarian violence and fear of both the people who were claiming to be fighting for him as well as the Loyalist paramilitaries who were actually less likely to give him a beating if only by virtue of finding it harder to get to Unionist areas and the security services and government who, at best, weren't particularly friendly, it gave me great pleasure (even if I do feel a bit ashamed about it for the aboce reasons) to see him verbally tear this ignorant little twat a new arsehole and give him a lesson in not vomiting out garbage about shit he knows nothing about.
