is a question constantly levelled at the former Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams and others who support a 32 County Irish Republic.
I ask myself the same question, as do most Irish people. I personally hope that if I was in Derry or Belfast at that time, that I would have had the guts and balls to also have joined the IRA.
Given gerrymandering, given the corruption of the NI statelet, given the deliberate impoverishment of nationalist communities, it was, frankly, the only moral choice to take at that time for the working class people of the failed statelet who were trying to protect their communities from extreme loyalist violence, discrimination and mass murder - most if not all of it facilitated by British establishment collusion.