Somebody wrote:
> > Now, would you like to explain exactly how your suggestion would result
> > in a successful resolution of the Irish problem? If you can convince us,
> > then I suggest you will not find the Prime Minister and the Taioseach
> > uninterested. (They -- and their predecessors -- have been looking for a
> > solution for the past three decades, at great personal risk.) If you
> > can't suggest a solution, may I submit that the smart thing to do would
> > be in future to do your research _before_ you open your mouth in public?
> >
> The unfortunate problem, Charlie, is that the northern group looks upon
> itself as 'english', not 'irish', so the solution is to get ALL of the
> 'english' out of Ireland.
>
> To paraphrase Longshanks:"The problem with Ireland is that its full of
> Englishmen."
Heh. I had to laugh when I read this. But, nice guy that I am, instead of
slagging off your ignorance, I'm going to let you know what the real
situation is.
To cut a long story short, long ago the northern area of Eire was colonised
by the British military. Obviously the natives were not impressed. Since
then "Northern Ireland" has existed as a state in it's own right. In the
meantime, the populace of NI have gone two ways. One group, "republicans",
want control of Northern Ireland for themselves (naturally - everyone wants
to rule, right?), and their method of achieving this is by bombing innocent
members of the public in NI and the rest of the UK (this has included many
children). THERE IS NO GROUP THAT WANTS NI TO JOIN EIRE, this will never
happen, it is not the issue. It's a juvenile flag-grab, that's all. On top
of all the bombings is a regime of "kneecapping" (blasting the unfortunate
victims kneecaps off from the back of the knee - crippling for life), which
is the standard punishment for anti-republican activities. The other group
are the "loyalists". They are strangely apprehensive of removing the current
British government and replacing it with a bunch of bomb crazy kneecapping
arbitrarily power hungry lunatics (emotive yes, but undeniably true).
THIS is the crux of the problem. The fact that the populace of NI are split.
The British government wants nothing more than to wash it's hands of NI
forever after all the troubles, but they can't just hand the country over to
the terrorists, leaving the other half of the populace under the control of
nutters against their will. They all are, after all British citizens, and
the government absolutely cannot condemn it's citizens to such a fate just
because some juvenile megalomanic vermin threaten to blow some people up.
There is no "Irish" problem in NI, and there is no "English" problem in NI,
it's entirely an NI problem. The leaders of the republicans see an
opportunity to rule, and the followers are either blindly following a
movement for the opportunities for violence, or they're so idiotic that
changing the colour of a flag is deemed more important than thousands upon
thousands of innocent peoples' lives.
It really doesn't help the situation to have the damned Americans funding
the bastard IRA under the delusion that they represent a native struggle
against British oppression, which is exactly what the republicans want us
all to believe. Simply not true. I live in England, and I can tell you that
the government are if anything, a bit wet - certainly anything but an
oppressive regime. The loyalists know that their current government is
vastly superior to any terrorist organisation, and you can see this in the
fact that loyalists - protestants and republicans - catholics no longer
correlate as they once did. Everyone is sick to the back teeth of this IRA
shit, and a great many including myself would have liked to have seen wider
use of the 80's "shoot to kill" policy of the SAS.
Err.....rant over.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:09:51 MDT