Why I'll say no to a united ireland

Tbh, you're asking all the wrong questions and restricting the discourse to such a narrow area that it effectively becomes meaningless.

You are also very clearly and visibly ignoring all contributing factors and events that go against your personal, and preferred world view, and instead hyper focus on a highly select subset of events as if that produces a meaningful answer.

The way you phrased the question demonstrates you are not open to new information, or even any information, from discussion in the forum. You haven't internalized any of the last few dozen posts of contributing facts and events.

To disentangle decades of history and state, with full certainty, "the IRA accomplished this", would be to second guess all the events and assume they would not have occurred if the IRA didn't exist. This question is a disingenuous trap.

So, I'll take a gamble - I'd suggest a key accomplishment of the pIRA was the earlier dismantling of the sectarian state which treated Catholics as second class citizens. A key failure was that they did not produce a 32 county state. A key accomplishment is they they effectively disbanded after achieving the next best thing - a legally binding text which outlines a legally binding path to their preferred 32 county state.

Why are you telling me how many history books you read? The post wasn't addressed to you. Suspect.

I'm delighted you like cherry picking pieces of (unverified) info from history books, but you fail to account for how food was distributed to people, the rules blocking them from receiving it, and the rules in place that made it necessary for landlords to keep exporting food while mass starvation was occuring. You also give an account of one year, the horse had already bolted by that point.

Potatoes were a staple diet in many European countries (including Britain), and early intervention by governments in those countries who had the welfare of the populace in mind prevented from occurring there what happened in Ireland. Ireland was the outlier. I wonder why that was?

I agree with you and this is the reason why the famine period was not popular to discuss till the last couple of decades. There was a deal of guilt as many ordinary people both survived and profited from the famine, the haves and the have nots have always been with us. One of the practical consequences was the enlargement of land holdings with fewer people about. And a rural society remembered that hence a level of survivor guilt. But now all you frequently hear is 'genocide'.

That's not the question posed though and you cannot fathom a discussion past "IRA Bad= The troubles summarised". If you wish to limit the depth of the discussion, don't bemoan it going no where.

If you're not going to recognise the opposing side(s) contribution as well as the cause and effect, you point is entirely moot.

Yes win win

That isn't what I said if you read my posts, but clearly what I said does "wash", because that is exactly what happened in NI. It happens in countless other places that there is grave injustice against a portion of the populace. It is playing out in Israel now.

Terrified people were pushed into the hands of extremists because they were being severely mistreated by state sanctioned extremists who facilitated injustice and sectarianism. How is this hard to understand? How else would you explain it.

Refusing to admit the situation there highlights your extreme bias and doesn't give you an ounce of moral ground to preach against anyone.

‘Them’, says all we need to know francie. That’s almost the worst label of all.

Well, you shouldn’t have got one of your kings to invite them over then, and you would not have had a problem.

And even before that if you had curtailed the Irish slave trade and not brought them over as slaves, you could’ve avoided Christianity as well.

as you make your bed, you lie in it

They drove people in the north into enclaves, that many generations will not rectify, and they put any chance of a peaceful United Ireland, back generations as well

The community that brought us gerrymandering of constituencies, discrimination in housing and education and employment and not to mention power sharing on the basis of religion is complaining about people being driven into 'enclaves'? Seriously?

Which is what the poster stated....a legally binding way. Unlike the previous administrations ethos of sectarianism.

Do people like you not realise that the ultimate blame for this lies at your leadership and generations of the same for near on 100 years. Had they not selectively treated one section of the community with so much indifference (to say the least) and created a stable place to live, a United Ireland would never been tabled in such a meaningful way.

Same challenge for you as I gave downcow.

Post a link to a 'history' of NI since partition that doesn't outline the systemic sectarian discrimination in housing employment and education, by the one party statelet in it's first 50 years of existence.

Quite a challenge I would say, to find such a book, but someone so confident in their argument as you must be getting your unique view from somewhere or else you just make stuff up on the hoof.

Can you rise to the challenge?

Haha, says the man who must be sleeping out in the henhouse with the chickens so as to avoid the bed he made.

The percentage of Catholics in the UDR decreased when Republicans started murdering UDR men coming out of mass, when they were visiting their elderly parents, putting bombs under their family cars etc etc.

I would take the word of those Catholics and why they left the UDR far sooner than a supporter of the party whose leader may think there was "no alternative" to shooting them in the back when off duty etc.