Irish Rebellion against the British-was it justified?

Irish Rebellion against the British-was it justified?
Asking in terms of the whole island, but especially interested in how justified the Troubles in the North were, specifically on whether action was necessary to stop any oppression the Irish people in Ulster were under.

Probably.

NICRA had tried peacefully moving for change, and had been met with paramilitary violence.

After the first clashes, the British security forces interned thousands of Catholics and precisely zero Protestants, despite the fact that the IRA had only stepped in because Catholic civilians were unable to defend themselves.

Be warned, this topic brings out angry Britbongs. It's like talking about the Donbass conflict around Russians.

>NICRA had tried peacefully moving for change, and had been met with paramilitary violence

Really? By the same groups that fought in the Troubles, like the UVF/UDA?

>angry britbongs
My experience in trying to gather information on this from britbongs or unionists is "IRA are terrorists who all deserved to die, unionists good guys irish are bad" so I tend to prefer outside resources or irish people for information.

I've heardthat the IRA in the troubles lost the "we're protecting irish people" idea and went a bad gang-tier toward the middle or end. Any truth to that?
I feel like there's that many splinters that it must be hard to tell.

>By the same groups that fought in the Troubles, like the UVF/UDA?

You've got to think of the Protestant paramilitaries as like the KKK in the old south. The Royal Ulster Constabulary had next to no Catholics in it and operated as an apartheid police force, in concert with the paramilitaries.

Later on, it would be revealed that the police and military of Northern Ireland shared information with the paramilitaries, and in some cases off duty cops and soldiers carried out the killings themselves under the auspices of the RUC.

>I've heardthat the IRA in the troubles lost the "we're protecting irish people" idea and went a bad gang-tier toward the middle or end. Any truth to that?

This is mostly true after the Good Friday Agreement, where most of the members of the IRA that were there for political reasons agreed to the ceasefires.

Any IRA activities you hear about going on today are the work of RIRA, who are a glorified mob family.

The actual PIRA engaged in things like smuggling, protection rackets, and forced disappearances, but they did manage to kill less civilians proportionally than the actual security forces did.

>under the auspices of the paramilitaries

derp

So, to put it in laymans terms:

>Irish people in Ulster treated like shit
>NICRA met with often violent opposition
>Current police force massively biased against Irish people and in cahoots with protestant paramilitaries
>IRA step in
>Troubles.gif
>Good Friday Agreement
>All actual "freedom fighters" or those fighting for irish rights stop activity, people there for violence keep going under different name

Interesting. Weren't the NICRA in some sort of collaboration with the IRA at some point?

NICRA was bookended by the activities of the IRA.

Northern Ireland, since the time it was created, had always been a security state, because it was obvious from the beginning that the Catholics would want physical security.

There had been two bombing campaigns by the IRA before the Troubles, during WW2 and during the late 50s early 60s, but nobody really cared about those.

NICRA attempted to remedy the disparities in housing, public services, and justice, but the RUC was having none of that.

The sad part is that when British troops were first deployed to Northern Ireland, they were welcomed by both sides as a neutral party that could end the violence. Unfortunately, there were strong loyalist elements in the British security forces at that time, and the British Army ended up becoming a tool of the Protestants rather than a neutral peacekeeping force.

>Catholics would want to be part of regular Ireland

I have a test coming up, and it's really fucking with my nerves.

100% Justified after how poorly they were treated over the years.

>inb4 angry britbongs

Man, the more I hear the more I guess I sympathise.

Do Unionists in NI just refuse to differentiate between the IRA fighting politically in the Troubles and all the other groups?
I feel like anyone who knows all this simply cannot just say "nope, unionists are the good guys, IRA are irish ISIS"

Guess it makes sense now. Thank you, informative user.

The sad thing is, that the Protestants themselves were acting out of fear.

They feared that if Northern Ireland integrated into the Republic of Ireland they'd be ethnically cleansed or treated as second class citizens. To prevent this, they put in place restrictions on the political representation and civil rights of the Catholics, to keep them suppressed.

The Catholics reacted to this with rallies, which scared the Protestants enough to crack down.

Once the actual shooting started, the average Protestant figured that they were fighting for their lives against a ruthless enemy.

You'll find this in a lot of conflicts, especially ethnic conflicts, that people don't trust each other, and the measures they take to assuage their fears eventually escalate the situation into violence.

It may have been justified, but the manner in which they used armed "resistance" was fucking moronic.

Elaborate. Where the IRA just ineffective or straight up bad at fighting?

Nigga don't knee cap a nigga just cap that nigga foo

Kneecaps? Wasn't that more of a punishment for civilians who gave information to the Brits?

I'd say killing them sends a much worse message than "he was hurt for betraying the cause"

Their targeting process was fucking stupid, and little different than any given Jihadi Muslim that thinks killing civilians actually accomplishes anything.

All they did was get a lot of their peers killed, jailed, and waste the lives of a lot of innocent civilians.

Initially yes.

It was justified at the start imo but once they started bombing shopping malls and kidnapping children they lost their credibility.

all truth

The IRA were justified and I say that as a Englishman.

The RIRA are just a bunch of angry faggots who want a fight for the sake of fighting. They claim to be nationalists and fighting for the people without realizing that the people want them to just fuck off so there can be peace.

Irish Republican from the North here, with family who served as volunteers. Just last week I went to a wake of my fathers former commander.

There are a lot of misconceptions and poor grasp of history in this thread. For Irish Nationalists who lived under the worst practices of sectarian British government, it was absolutely justified and we wouldn't expect others to understand that.

Scum English man, 5th columnist faggot

NICRA protests were justified but the IRA was not.
It's up to the people of NI to decide not a minority with guns. The south has no claim to the north unless if the majority of the populace want to join the south.

Source: Unionist ( but willing to accept the will of the people ) who hates the UDA etc.
The good news is that a lot of Catholics now couldn't care about a "united" Ireland.

Justification is subjective. In the minds of the people who rebel, they have an iron-clad reason for doing it. For the people who quash a rebellion, they have an iron-clad reason for not allowing it to continue. It is quite strange and revisionist to declare one of them right and one of them wrong; if you were in the position of either man, you would would reach the same conclusion the position allows you to reach.

Bombing of English civilians that weren't political or military targets was not justified.

Yes.

Christopher Hitchens summed it up best:

>What has been achieved by this cynical sit-down? An agreement to divide the spoils of Ireland's six northeastern counties and to refrain from flagrant homicide while doing so. Well, all that and more was on offer four decades ago. In fact, a better idea—that of a nonsectarian politics that shed no blood—was on offer as well. It was inscribed on the noble banners of the civil rights movement that marched in Derry in October 1968, and it was fought for in the parliaments of London and Dublin. The main force that opposed it initially was led by Ian Paisley, a brutish Calvinist street thug with covert sympathizers in the police force. The main force that opposed it eventually was the Provisional IRA, which gladly accepted the sectarian challenge and which preached the insane idea that Irish Protestants could be bombed into some deranged concept of a Fenian republic. The British laws of libel forbid me to tell what I heard when I was a young reporter in the pubs and back streets of Belfast, but I'll put it like this: Both Paisley and Adams know very well of things that happened that should never have happened. And both of them, in order to arrive at that smug power-sharing press conference, have had to arrange to seem adequately uninformed about such horrid past events. Both have been photographed carrying coffins at political funerals—funerals that were at one time the main cultural activity in each of their "communities." One day, their private role in filling those coffins will be fully exposed. In the meantime, they are the recognized and designated peacemakers. If you can bring yourself to applaud this, you are a masochist clapping a well-matched pair of sadists.

The initial "rebellion" was justified. A bunch of scum refusing to accept a popular referendum on remaining part of the UK blowing up a pub in the middle of a small village in the English home counties is not justified in any way. The British honestly should have been far harsher than they actually were, instead of the Ulster Constabulary's occasional dark shit being the exception it should have been the rule.

>norniron
>english
>white

Yes, free Ireland.

Brits from the mainland overwhelming don't give a shit about NI desu