“Non so cosa stia facendo”: McDonald è “sbalordito” dai commenti di Martin sui Troubles

He saw Simon’s PR mistake and decided it was his turn.

I heard she was caught on a live mic while going to the toilet singing Uh Ah Up The RA after the PrimeTime show on Thursday. I don’t hear anybody talking about that !

This is a phenomenon I’ve been talking about for years and years. To preface, I’ll always condemn the IRA for choosing to intentionally target civilians rather than restricting their campaign to targeting only state forces in NI. It’s impossible to justify blowing up a pub full of random people enjoying a night out and with no connection whatsoever to NI, and call it “justified” – its evil and barbaric, end of story.

Having said that. There is a large, large demographic of primarily middle aged, middle class establishment voters particularly from Dublin (the quintessential “West Brit” essentially) who genuinely and earnestly believe that the IRA’s actions were morally orders of magnitude worse than those of the Crown Forces; who refuse to acknowledge that the entire conflict started specifically because the Crown Forces tried to use extreme violence to suppress a peaceful civil rights march, and that in a conflict which ultimately boils down to one side demanding equality before the law and the other side demanding to maintain their codified, formally established supremacy, you absolutely can say that one side is 100% in the wrong and that while both sides did evil things, one side was categorically motivated by a desire for the continuation of a hierarchy which saw them dominating and subjugating the other side. A thirst for power and an unwillingness to give up that power.

That you can make a very simple moral distinction – regardless of the means employed which we can all agree were utterly sadistic, barbaric and unjustified – that fighting for freedom is morally right and fighting to maintain power over people who don’t consent to it is fundamentally unjustifiable and morally repugnant.

There is a large segment of Irish society which refuses to see this, and legitimately believes the IRA to have been automatically worse than the RUC, British Army etc because the latter were “officially recognised” and the former were not. Essentially a very odd form of “even if the established authority is brutal and oppressive, they are automatically morally superior to unofficial citizens’ uprisings employing the same tactics, because the latter are *breaking the rules*.”

It’s a form of bootlicking to be sure and it’s very bizarre, but it’s *extrenely* prevalent in Ireland and this is an example of someone accidentally saying the quiet part out loud. As far as they’re concerned, because the crown forces wore an official uniform and are an organisation recognised by a state, while the IRA were a grassroots insurgency led by regular citizens against the aforementioned established authority, the IRA is automatically the bigger villain because “*their* terrorism, unlike the Crown Forces’, is *illegal*. They’re being violent *without permission*.

It’s a bizarre and in my view disturbing and sickening ideology, but it’s far more widespread than most of us would be comfortable admitting. People who could see a man in a Garda uniform stab somebody ten times in the chest in a fit of uncontrolled rage, and someone in a tracksuit doing exactly the same thing, and – probably without ever even rationalising it to themselves – just conclude, on instinct, that the latter attacker is *automatically* a bigger scumbag than the guy who was wearing a uniform at the time he did the stabbing.