The NI/ROI Protocol

yin ewe

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
Co Antrim
Was it only "Gerry and his pals" who thought that?
What excuse did other excuses did the rest of the terrorists use?

Totally agree that legitimate killings carried out by on duty forces shouldn't be classed as murders, but I think they maybe were in the stats posted earlier.
Just something I wanted to make a point about.

Gerry and his pals were the only ones I ever heard talk about a war, most people called it a terrorist campaign.
 

BrianV

Member
Mixed Farmer
Location
Dartmoor
My daughter's English immersion trip, which would have been London , was to Dublin. Why? Because they only need their ID cards not Passports. Don't think London will be bothered with again as it's much less hassle for the staff to plan. Think of the value of that lost business, now and going forward, and replicate it across the EU education system.
Tourism has fallen as the UK is seen as the Covid cess pit of the world at the moment so you can't really blame tourists for staying away, if simply taking a passport is enough to put someone off coming here then they are probably too thick to come anyway!
 

The Agrarian

Member
Mixed Farmer
Location
Northern Ireland
You can sleep soundly in the knowledge that your “entrepreneurial” ancestors, transplanted themselves from mainland to Ulster, where the crown on an ethnic cleansing campaign, displaced vast swathes of the ethnic, catholic Irish from their lands (flight of the earls), to make way for the planters.
Yes, it’s convenient to block out your own country’s history from say around 1915, First World War era. You can create a pretty nice narrative around saving Europe and fighting the Jerries etc. But of course we all know there‘s more to know about.
The most recent part of history which you myopically and conveniently focus on, is a mere short chapter in the whole history of the two islands. Others conveniently of course for them, or inconveniently as the case may be for others, insist that the book be read from start to the present day.

Hang on. So you're comparing how the tail end of medieval kings behaved with 20th and 21st century democracies? Right, ok!😂

I don't hear you give off too much to the Danes or the French about how their ancestral invaders behaved. You don't mention how your own invading ancestors behaved either, that is if you are able to trace them. We think people have been here for at least 5 or 6k years. Are you absolutely sure your ancestry dates back to the very first to landing/cross the ice sheets?😁

The plantation was really just another step in a very long line of invasions of Scotia Major, as the Romans called the island. It came at the end of the completion of the forming of the counties of Ireland by the Normans (and subsequently the Anglo-French), with Londonderry being the last one to be formed. It reduced the administrative size of Tyrone, which of course had pre Norman roots. People were moved around during the plantation, certainly, but not expelled (apart from a handful of leaders who obviously couldn't stay), and there was a more communal system of farming, of grazing areas before that. It's not terribly useful to think of feudal land ownership in modern terms. The feudal system throughout Europe and Russia persisted for centuries after the plantation. It was how the known world was organised. It's not something many of us approve of today! We have new feudalism, or we call it capitalism. 😂 ROI doesn't participate in that of course.
 
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le bon paysan

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
Limousin, France
Tourism has fallen as the UK is seen as the Covid cess pit of the world at the moment so you can't really blame tourists for staying away, if simply taking a passport is enough to put someone off coming here then they are probably too thick to come anyway!
On school trips in Europe all the kids identity cards or passports are logged on a School passport held by the teacher in charge. Filed with the host country and pre checked. The UK will no longer accept this. The schools are going elsewhere . In the Shengen zone you don't need a passport, just your free identity card , to travel. Many people don't bother with a passport as they don't leave Europe.
 

Ashtree

Member
On school trips in Europe all the kids identity cards or passports are logged on a School passport held by the teacher in charge. Filed with the host country and pre checked. The UK will no longer accept this. The schools are going elsewhere . In the Shengen zone you don't need a passport, just your free identity card , to travel. Many people don't bother with a passport as they don't leave Europe.
Not to mention the misfortunate British kids, now excluded from Erasmus. But that’s ok, because the new Turing scheme, will get the rich dads kids away to somewhere, European ideals and culture won’t corrupt their true Britishness.
 

BrianV

Member
Mixed Farmer
Location
Dartmoor
Not to mention the misfortunate British kids, now excluded from Erasmus. But that’s ok, because the new Turing scheme, will get the rich dads kids away to somewhere, European ideals and culture won’t corrupt their true Britishness.
But this is once again down to the totally incompetent government we have been saddled with ever since Cameron came on the scene, we now can clearly see what we are saddled with & people need to man up & when the time comes give the buggers a good very clear kicking, come May will be the ideal time to make any dissatisfaction of the status quo very clear to even the thickest Tory!!
 

Ashtree

Member
But this is once again down to the totally incompetent government we have been saddled with ever since Cameron came on the scene, we now can clearly see what we are saddled with & people need to man up & when the time comes give the buggers a good very clear kicking, come May will be the ideal time to make any dissatisfaction of the status quo very clear to even the thickest Tory!!
The folks you are saddled with now, are the very folks who wanted you out of EU, and when they were charging out the door, they thrashed your access to the single market and customs union. To avoid parliamentary scrutiny, they then prorogue the thing. 🤨
 

caveman

Member
Location
East Sussex.
The folks you are saddled with now, are the very folks who wanted you out of EU, and when they were charging out the door, they thrashed your access to the single market and customs union. To avoid parliamentary scrutiny, they then prorogue the thing. 🤨
Ballocks.
They jumped on the Brexit bandwagon, half of them.
 
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If the UK Government "couldn't care less" why do they bother with various inquests and inquiries?
A variety of sources suggest only 4 serving soldiers were convicted for murder while on duty in NI.
I meant they couldn't care less about NI or its past, they all want to be distanced from the stigma.
But the inquests you speak of are a result of public pressure, not the caring nature of the government. Otherwise I'm guessing they'd happen a lot quicker.
I thought that was obvious.

I'm glad you have clarified there were only 4 cases of murder by the forces, your post suggested that 15% (the remainder of the 85%) of murders were carried out by non terrorists, which would be misleadingly negative towards those who served during the troubles.

I'm also glad you went back and edited your original post. 👍
 
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pgk

Member
In reality I don't think the British establishment couldn't care less, as they generally class themselves as having nothing to do with NI or it's past.
It generally suits a loyalist agenda to only talk about the murders carried out by republicans (and vice verse), but it's usually human nature to shift blame where possible.

That wasn't really my point though, I was just interested to know if the killings carried out by the likes of the army were classed as murders, or if those listed in @nivilla1982's post were all proven murders.
I'd assumed that terrorists killed by the army wouldn't be classed as murder.
I am not sure that is the case, 11% of fatalities in the troubles were attributed to the army and the establishment did all they could to prevent investigation into those deaths. Between 1970 and 73 the army and RUC had an illegal agreement in which the RUC did not interview soldiers involved in killing civilians. Despite a finding by HM Inspector of Constabulary and judgements in the ECJ that the RUC could not delegate the investigations to RMP, later enquiries found collusion at the highest levels of the government in which successive Attorney Generals conspired with the MOD to obstruct investigations into deaths at the hands of serving soldiers and where overwhelming evidence of criminal acts were found, to block prosecutions. It took tens of years for independent enquiries into eg Bloody Sunday etc. to take place due to the obstruction. IMV these illegal acts were one of the major recruiting sergeants for the terrorists.
 

The Agrarian

Member
Mixed Farmer
Location
Northern Ireland
We can only speculate what the motives were behind those decisions, as we don't now have a 1970's field of view. It may have been that the government calculated that to expose unlawful killings would have been to increase hostility and tension in an already dangerous environment. We can debate whether the suppression of investigation increased terrorist recruitment, or whether media coverage of the trials would have increased the recruitment, but we won't know the answer to that. My own view is that trials and convictions wouldn't have caused any more terrorism than did occur, and the smear on the reputation of the government and security forces would have been lesser had it been dealt with sooner. It's rarely a good idea to let rogue members of forces go unpunished/unhindered, as the USA found also found out in Nam. The terrorists clearly bore the blame for most of the deaths, tens of thousands of horrific injuries, incalculable grief and economic destruction of so much of the region - so it was, with hindsight, I think a poor calculation to veer off the moral high ground. It invariably is. And it let down the vast majority of serving security personnel in the RUC and army, who served justly and with dedication to preserving the peace and safety of civilians.
 

The Agrarian

Member
Mixed Farmer
Location
Northern Ireland
Yeah I know, I was being sarcastic.
My point was what reason did the rest of the terrorists use if they didn't class it as a war?

Well, loyalist terrorists, I'm assuming you mean, mostly (but not always) acted in a tit for tat way. Victims tended to be more random e.g. machine-gunning down everybody in a pub, regardless of their religion or identity.

The other non-PIRA ones perhaps you aren't recalling might be official IRA, continuity IRA, INLA etc
 

Nenuphar

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
Ireland
We can only speculate what the motives were behind those decisions, as we don't now have a 1970's field of view. It may have been that the government calculated that to expose unlawful killings would have been to increase hostility and tension in an already dangerous environment. We can debate whether the suppression of investigation increased terrorist recruitment, or whether media coverage of the trials would have increased the recruitment, but we won't know the answer to that. My own view is that trials and convictions wouldn't have caused any more terrorism than did occur, and the smear on the reputation of the government and security forces would have been lesser had it been dealt with sooner. It's rarely a good idea to let rogue members of forces go unpunished/unhindered, as the USA found also found out in Nam. The terrorists clearly bore the blame for most of the deaths, tens of thousands of horrific injuries, incalculable grief and economic destruction of so much of the region - so it was, with hindsight, I think a poor calculation to veer off the moral high ground. It invariably is. And it let down the vast majority of serving security personnel in the RUC and army, who served justly and with dedication to preserving the peace and safety of civilians.
"Rogue"
 
Well, loyalist terrorists, I'm assuming you mean, mostly (but not always) acted in a tit for tat way. Victims tended to be more random e.g. machine-gunning down everybody in a pub, regardless of their religion or identity.

The other non-PIRA ones perhaps you aren't recalling might be official IRA, continuity IRA, INLA etc
I didn't mean mostly anyone!

I know what they did, I just wondered what their reason for killing was if they didn't attempt to justify it as war.

Not that I class that as a justification.
 

The Agrarian

Member
Mixed Farmer
Location
Northern Ireland
I didn't mean mostly anyone!

I know what they did, I just wondered what their reason for killing was if they didn't attempt to justify it as war.

Not that I class that as a justification.

I think I told you in the post. Tit for tat means retaliation. You may recall on TV many many times hearing relatives of victims of republican terrorism appealing for 'no retaliation'. Twas a common thing back in the second half of the troubles.
 
I think I told you in the post. Tit for tat means retaliation. You may recall on TV many many times hearing relatives of victims of republican terrorism appealing for 'no retaliation'. Twas a common thing back in the second half of the troubles.
Like now, I didn't watch much TV back then, particularly news.

Shame those victims families weren't listened to better.
 

Farm buy

Member
Livestock Farmer
Do I believe the IRA were out to exterminate? Um. Yes. I did live through more than half of the troubles. That kind of thing is etched in the memory for life.




They gave eddie the push though, and he died in exile.


I found this bit of History by DAVID ROOS very informative

UPDATED:NOV 12, 2021ORIGINAL:NOV 12, 2021
How the Troubles Began in Northern Ireland
After mounting tensions between Catholic nationalists and Protestant loyalists, particularly in Belfast and Derry, violence broke out in the late 1960s.
DAVE ROOS
Battle of the Bogside in Derry, Northern Ireland, August 12, 1969. Credit: Peter Ferraz/Getty Images

For 30 years, Northern Ireland was scarred by a period of deadly sectarian violence known as “the Troubles.” This explosive era was fraught with car bombings, riots and revenge killings that ran from the late 1960s through the late 1990s. The Troubles were seeded by centuries of conflict between predominantly Catholic Ireland and predominantly Protestant England. Tensions flared into violence in the late 1960s, leaving some 3,600 people dead and more than 30,000 injured.




The origins of the Troubles date back to centuries of warfare in which the predominantly Catholic people of Ireland attempted to break free of British (overwhelmingly Protestant) rule. In 1921, the Irish successfully fought for independence and Ireland was partitioned into two countries: the Irish Free State, which was almost entirely Catholic, and the smaller Northern Ireland, which was mostly Protestant with a Catholic minority.

While Ireland was fully independent, Northern Ireland remained under British rule, and the Catholic communities in cities like Belfast and Derry (legally called Londonderry) complained of discrimination and unfair treatment by the Protestant-controlled government and police forces. In time, two opposing forces coalesced in Northern Ireland largely along sectarian lines: the Catholic “nationalists” versus the Protestant “loyalists.”


READ MORE: How Northern Ireland Became Part of the United Kingdom

A 1960s Civil Rights Movement Modeled on the US
In the 1960s, a new generation of politically and socially conscious young Catholic nationalists in Northern Ireland started looking to the civil rights movement in America as a model for ending what they saw as brazen anti-Catholic discrimination in their home country.

“There was systematic discrimination in housing and jobs,” says James Smyth, an emeritus history professor at the University of Notre Dame who grew up in Belfast. “The biggest employer in Belfast was the shipyard, but it had a 95 percent Protestant workforce. In the city of Derry, which had a two-thirds Catholic majority, the voting districts had been gerrymandered so badly that it was controlled politically by [Protestant] loyalists for 50 years.”

Young nationalist leaders like John Hume, Austin Currie and Bernadette Devlin refused to accept the status quo. They saw what was happening in the United States and how peaceful mass protests had drawn attention to the plight of Black Americans living under segregation and Jim Crow.

“They modeled themselves on the American civil rights movement to the extent that one of the songs sung in Northern Ireland was ‘We Shall Overcome,’” says Smyth, who edited a 2017 book titled Remembering the Troubles: Contesting the Recent Past in Northern Ireland.


On October 5, 1968, a protest march was planned along Duke Street in Derry. The nationalist activists wanted to draw attention to discriminatory housing policies that resulted in de facto segregation along sectarian and religious lines.

The march was banned by the Northern Ireland government, but protestors defied the order and gathered on October 5 with signs reading “One man, one vote!” and “Smash sectarianism!”

The crowd started to move, but was barricaded by a line of police from the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) brandishing batons. The police charged the protestors and simultaneously cut off their retreat. TV cameras captured disturbing footage of RUC officers beating marchers with batons and chaos in the streets.

“October 5, 1968 was when the Troubles began,” argues Smyth, “and those TV images are etched in the people’s memory.”

1969: Violence at Burntollet Bridge
The police crackdown on October 5, 1968 ratcheted up tensions between Catholic nationalists and Protestant loyalists and set the stage for more violent clashes.

On New Year's Day, 1969, nationalist activists took a page from Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic March on Selma and organized a march from Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, to Derry, “the capital of injustice,” as Bernadette Devlin called it. The route took them through known loyalist strongholds, where the threat of violence was palpable.

The RUC provided a police escort for the nationalist protestors throughout the multi-day march until they reached Burntollet Bridge outside of Derry. At that point, protestors recall, the police put on their helmets and shields as if expecting trouble. That’s when a loyalist mob started raining rocks down on the protestors
The attackers, estimated at 300 loyalists, swarmed the bridge wielding clubs and iron bars. Some of them wore the white armbands of the B-Specials, an auxiliary police unit of the RUC. While bloodied protestors fled into the freezing river for protection, the RUC officers stood aside and did nothing to protect them, says Smyth.

The ambush at Burntollet Bridge was eerily similar to the events of March 7, 1965, when peaceful Selma marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge and were violently beaten back by a line of white-helmeted Alabama state troopers armed with tear gas, night sticks and whips.



Some historians peg the real beginning of the Troubles to the events of August 1969, when a loyalist parade in Derry sparked three days of rioting and violent reprisals.

Across Northern Ireland, says Smyth, loyalists groups regularly organized parades to commemorate Protestant military victories dating back to the 17th century. In Derry, the local chapter was known as the Apprentice Boys and they planned a patriotic loyalist parade on August 12 that ran directly past a predominantly Catholic part of town called the Bogside.

The Bogsiders saw the Apprentice Boys parade as a direct provocation and prepared for a violent confrontation, barricading streets and readying Molotov cocktails. As expected, nationalist Bogsiders clashed with the parading Apprentice Boys and RUC officers rushed in to quell the rioting. They were met with violent resistance by the Bogsiders, who hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails.

The “Battle of the Bogside,” as it’s known, raged for three days, but some of the worst damage was inflicted in Belfast, where loyalist mobs aided by the B-Specials swarmed Catholic neighborhoods and burned 1,500 homes to the ground.

On August 14, the overwhelmed prime minister of Northern Ireland called on the British government to send in troops to restore order. It was the beginning of a decades-long deployment in Northern Ireland by the British military.

“Basically the entire Northern Ireland state collapsed over a period of three or four days,” says Smyth. “They couldn’t maintain order, so the British had to come in.”


The British troops were initially welcomed by the Catholic nationalists as potential protectors, but the military soon instituted a controversial policy of “internment without trial,” after which hundreds of suspected IRA members were rounded up and imprisoned without due process.

On January 30, 1972, Catholic nationalists in Derry organized a march to protest the British internment policy, but the military was called in to shut it down. When protestors didn’t disperse, the troops opened fire with rubber bullets and then live rounds. Thirteen protestors were killed and 17 wounded in a tragedy known as “Bloody Sunday.”

“It’s amazing that more people weren’t killed,” says Smyth, who was among the protestors that day in Derry.

During the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, Northern Ireland suffered dozens of car bombings and sectarian attacks perpetrated by paramilitary groups on both sides like the Provisional IRA and the Ulster Volunteer Force. Hundreds of civilians were among the dead.


The Troubles came to an end, at least officially, with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, which created a framework for political power-sharing and an end to decades of violence.

HISTORY Vault
BY DAVE RO
 

Ashtree

Member
And there you have it. I have yet to see a unionist poster on here, acknowledged in any shape, the contribution made to the troubles, by the sectarianism of the unionist state of NI, right from its foundation, to the days when John Hume et al, said enough is enough.
No self respecting human being, should have been expected to put up with the sheer sectarian and unjust rule by the unionist majority. No self respecting central government in London should have put up with such carry on either.
Then Terrence O’Neill came along as unionist leader. He tried manfully to change the unionist culture, and build bridges with catholics and ROI. Ian Paisley however brought that process to a halt, and brought down O’Neill. Brought down on the specific policy of having introduced a one man one vote policy in NI in 1969. Imagine that. It’s 1969, and catholics in NI didn’t have equal voting rights with their Protestant neighbours.
 

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quote: “Red Tractor has confirmed it is dropping plans to launch its green farming assurance standard in April“

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