Martin McGuinness commander of Óglaigh na hÉireann

Manic Moran wrote: »

I don't know, but the 'duplicate' matching software is ringing alarm bells right now. We shall look into the details.

Judging by the abusive pm I received from Spiderman123 yesterday, you might want to check that one as well.

gatecrash wrote: »

There's more that went on behind the scenes than we know about. I don't know if it was here or somewhere else that i saw it, but apparently Blair had words with the unionist parties pretty much telling them that the time had come to sit down and chat.

Myself and Morlar (and you too i think) argued the point earlier on in the thread that there was a public backlash after the Warrington bombings in particular, and that Ahern and Blair latched onto and used to force both sides to sit down. Here we are, nearly 20 years later with Sinn Fein being accepted as a mainstream party once again.

I think they would have been better served to wait out this election, and maybe put forward a candidate in the NEXT presidential election. there will have been at least one more general election in the intervening period, and the Sinn Fein party could well be in a stronger position.

Unfortunately this presidential election strikes me as not electing the best candidate, because none of them stand out, but electing the least worst.

And i think that the anti Sinn Fein backlash of the last few days after McGuinness catching Gallagher out is misplaced too. If FG or Labour had pulled the same trick then people would be saying what a master-stroke it was.

That is an understatement to say the least and I don't mean that in a derogetory way to your post. "Behind the scenes" defined the northern conflict from start to finish and why it got so horrendously bloody. The full role of spooks hasn't come even close to the surface yet and when it does we will be probably well gone from this earth and people of the day will think what a deranged way of handling a war. You only have to look at the current refusals by the British government to give the family of Pat Finucane a full inquiry into his death as evidence for wanting things to remain hidden...because that case more than many others has the capability to reveal for all to see the cosy-as-lice relationship forged between the British security services and the loyalist death squads who did their dirty work for them.

On the winding down of the conflict regarding the Provos. That went waaaay back before Blair. All the work was done at that stage, himself and Berti just needed to draw up the wording and claim the credit. I think as early as 1986 Adams had shown a willingness through his contact with Fr. Alec Reid that he wanted to move the organisation down the political route. Now whether Adams was, but there were definitely other senior Provos, working for British intelligence but the IRA suffered a number of major setbacks from the late 80's onwards such as Loughgall, the capture of the Eksund, Enniskillen (later Warrington as you say) and the upsurge in Loyalist/British killings of Catholics. In fact Loyalist killings surpassed that of the IRA in the late 80's early 90's leading to the UDA FINALLY being made an illegal organisation in 1993. This all culminated in putting pressure on the military only heads within the Provos and allowed Adams to bring the organisation down the political route. The 94 ceasefire was what really ended the Troubles, the organisation was broken as a capable guerrila army after that with many of the ranks being led along and been promised great things by Adams and McGuinness. McGuninness was the key because Adams wasn't trusted by rank and file whereas McGuinness was. After 94 it was just a matter of when not if the Provos would call a permanent halt to the long war.

OS119 wrote: »

i disagree absolutely - i think the 'spookyness' of the war - and i mean on all sides - is one of the reasons that, for a 30 year civil war, NI was remarkably bloodless.

civil wars are, by and large, the most bloody, the most savage of all wars - Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Lebanon, Congo etc.. all have vast vast body counts - the Balkan Wars for instance killed 130,000 people minimum in 7 years out of a population of 23 (ish) million (0.565% of the population). if the same, ish, death rate were to be applied to NI, 10,000 people would have been killed in that 7 years.

now, you can easily argure that an NI after 10,000 deaths would be all 'fought out', and that the war would have ended after those 7 years, but if we extrapolate the casualties for the whole Balklan War to the 30 years of the most recent troubles, we find an NI with 35,000 fatalities.

i have my own views on why the conflict panned out as it did, but i cannot possibly imagine that the 'behind the scenes' nature of an awful lot of the important parts of the conflict did not have a significant impact on the doctrines, and therefore consequences, of all the partires involved.

The northern conflict wasn't like the Balkans. It wasn't primarily a civil war. The republican movement was fighting the British state for the majority of the conflict. The very early days in the late 60's early 70's were bordering on civil war alright where you had loyalist-republican battles but as the Provos emerged that changed. You may argue that because they targetted RUC/B Specials/UDR that it was internal but those organisations were part of the British security aparatus, British security manned by Irishmen but British security nonetheless. Otherwise the Tan War could be classified in the same way as RIC men were the main targets and were mainly made up of Irishmen working for the Crown, likewise some members of the Auxies.
It was a British security decision to purposely push the northern security forces to the fore in the conflict. The army was a diaster and from a wider view point gave recognition to the IRA campaign that it was indeed fighting the British state. But the British establishment was cute. Those boys didn't rule half the world for no reason. As they realised from past experience and in the face of an embarrasing conflict on their doorstep in western Europe (this wasn't Oman or Kenya where they could get away with anything!) the best way if possible is to get the natives to police themselves...and that's exactly why they gave lead role to RUC/UDR, had the SAS in the background and let MI5 pull the strings hidden from view.
British security had two main objectives...to crush Irish republicanism and to draw a line under the disputed legitimacy of British sovereignty infringing on that of another nations. They achieved both. The Provos not only were forced into a military defeat, the reasons for which I mentioned in my above post, but more critically they forced them into an ideological defeat...that of recognising the Crown as legitimate sovereign over north east Ireland and acceptance of the unionist veto over Irish re-unification. The 26 County state was also forced to recognise British sovereignty over part of its national territory and that full Irish independence was illegitimate.

OS119 wrote: »

i would argue that the Irish, and then NI conflicts have been civil wars (in the widest, cultural/societal definitions), but that unlike in other civil wars, they have manifested themselves in small group vs state conflicts, rather than the mass conflagrations that have been seen elsewhere.

what i'm suugesting is that the actual parties to the conflict - government, PIRA, Loyalists etc.. have been proxies for the societal conflict, rather than the real protagonists (though, obviously they are protagonists, and could be argued to have a vanguard position within the societies from which they come).

Are you saying the conflict for independence is really just a civil war between the people's of the islands of Britain and Ireland? I'd have to say since the rise of republicanism in the 18th century it has been a battle against British imperialism. I know there is a section of revisionists who prefer to ignore that Ireland was a colony, the only one of its kind in western Europe in fact. It was the first nonidividualist, noncapitalist society to suffer European individualist capitalist colonization. That is why up until the 60's Ireland (or at least the 26 County's) shared the same characteristics as many post independence colonies from Africa and Asia. Ireland since the first feudal Norman invasions and more especially from the time of the rise of mercantile capitalism has gone through a period of, not underdevelopment, but undevelopment which is something all former colonies have in common. Basically that more people bacame worse off than they were before colonisation. Although not looked upon as a third world country from the 60's onwards, Ireland didn't actually stop the process of undevelopment until the 90's.