The idea that the IRA were jolly people who were just going to leave alone anyone who identified as British and wished to remain in the United Kingdom is laughable.

I've seen "Brits out" and I know what it means. I've known innocent businessmen have their livelihoods ruined and their lives taken, all by the hands of various republican factions, just for being "collaborators".

I'll never forget Enniskillen, Omagh, Bloody Friday, the attempt at Tullyhommon, or the various other atrocities and the party in Stormount that lauds them.

Look up Barry McElduff and his shameless mocking of the Kingsmill atrocity. This happened as recently as 2018 and he is already back in Sinn Fein. Not something anyone does in the spirit of reconciliation.

I'm glad someone at least had the nerve to defend us from clear intimidation and death wishes.

>Why are English soldiers in Ireland any how?

To prevent widespread sectarian murdering and ethnic cleansing of both Catholic and Protestant communities, and because there Irish state is incapable of doing this.

No one in England wants anything to do with it anymore, is a mill stone round our neck.

> and because there Irish state is incapable of doing this.

The Irish state isn't responsible for NI.

At one point the Irish government actually considered militarily intervening in NI, but the British would have seen that as an honest to God act of war.

When? This sounds like an interesting story!

> To prevent widespread sectarian murdering and ethnic cleansing of both Catholic and Protestant communities, and because there Irish state is incapable of doing this.

If that were the reason then they wouldn't have been deployed in places like Armagh where there was no community division.

The army were sent in for the same reason that the border was drawn where it was: to serve British financial interests.

> No one in England wants anything to do with it anymore, is a mill stone round our neck.

The IRA succeeded in making it more expensive than it was worth (although the collapse of the shipbuilding industry was probably the biggest single factor).

Which British financial interests were served by deploying the army to Armagh? It's not known as a hotbed of industry.

> No one in England wants anything to do with it anymore, is a mill stone round our neck.

Cutting and running when it gets hard in the colonies is more difficult when the colony is next door.

Said as someone in a former colony, with the country having all the expected post-colonial problems.

Have you ever been to Northern Ireland? This comment is so misinformed. You say widespread, most people don’t care anymore. It is only in the incredibly deprived estates that this matters anymore, and even then it’s mostly loyalist drug dealers terrorising their own community.

The Alliance party, the non-aligned neo-liberal party here, had a massive jump in votes in the recent election.

The idea that if the British weren’t here people would instantly devolve into sectarian murders is completely laughable to me.

In my entire life I have never interacted with anyone who was sectarian. You see the areas with union flags strung up everywhere but as I say, these communities are completely insular and run by drug dealers hiding behind the aegis of shared ethnicity.

“A mill stone around our neck”, come off it, my eyes are rolling so hard in my head I fear they may roll under the sofa

Perhaps you can explain then how Lyra McKee (who worked for TechMeme) was murdered in plain view on a public street in Derry by the “New IRA” or why police say the murder weapon was used in four other paramilitary attacks. She was not an “insular” person (she had many contacts in Sillicon Valley) and is hardly an isolated case, nor was she “depraved,” or from a depraved estate, or someone who is not cared about. She was perfectly lovely. RIP

I presume you are aware of how she actually died right? She’s a good friend of a good friend of mine so while I won’t claim to have known her personally I do think about how her on a semi regular basis and how unnecessary and pointless her death was.

But she wasn’t just straight up murdered like you claimed. She wasn’t even targeted, it was just a wrong place, wrong time situation.

I don’t say it to excuse what happened but the way you seem to be telling that story is just not what happened.

If you intentionally kill the wrong person, is that not still murder?

Sure, but it drastically weakens the case for "Northern Ireland would devolve into sectarian murders".

If a person has taken the side of a terrorist group, they've decided any victims deserved what they got, so providing evidence that such belief is clearly nonsense is going to be ignored in favor of whatever twisted worldview they've taken up.

Where do you get the idea I am on the side of a terrorist group? I mentioned loyalist terrorists because although I don't consider myself as belonging to either side, my grandmother was staunchly British and therefore I know more about the loyalist terrorists. I don't know what the republican terrorists are up to because I've never lived near one of their areas.

I believe violence is only ever justified defensively and even then only as a last resort. The sooner that generation of parasitic drug barons either kill each other or die naturally the better for everyone.

Not to support terrorism in any way, but I'm not convinced they have to have decided that the victims deserve it. There's plenty of other justifications, such as it being a necessary but unfortunate evil on the way to a greater good.

> The Alliance party, the non-aligned neo-liberal party here, had a massive jump in votes in the recent election.

I think this is more a splintering of the unionist community as the DUP has taken a hardline and self-harming pro-Brexit, anti-protocol, no compromise approach. For the US readers, the DUP's social views would make many of the US republicans look liberal. Their last leader was ousted for merely abstaining on, rather than opposing, a ban on gay conversion therapy. Now the DUP is holding the entire NI political system to ransom unless they get their way.

There are many unionists who are done with that shit but are still pro-UK, and this is the group that flocked to alliance in large numbers last election.