I'm reading this, Tempe, but I have to stop and object: I claim the violence is mostly, not exclusively but mostly, one-sided, Catholic against Protestant, and in any case always initiated by the Catholics, with which you agreed
Tempe may have agreed, but I can assure you with no reservations that this is nonsense. The first violence of the Troubles was Protestant. The IRA's campaign of violence ended in 1962. The terrorist bombing campaign of the Loyalist Protestant UVF began in 1966. The IRA at the time was following a policy of peaceful class struggle, and it was only in 1969 that frustrated members broke away to form the Provisional IRA and returned to sectarian violence.
From what the pastor said in the sermon I linked the vast majority of these, possibly all of them, would have been Protestants
Then what the pastor said was a lie. According to the data gathered by Malcolm Sutton (which you can see
here), gathered from newspaper reports, coroner's records and other sources, the breakdown of all those who died in the Troubles between 1969 and 2001 is as follows:
Northern-Irish Catholic: 1,522
Northern-Irish Protestant: 1,288
Not Northern Irish: 722
and the breakdown of the organisations responsible:
Republican paramilitaries: 2,058
Loyalist paramilitaries: 1,027
British security services: 363
Irish security services: 5
Unknown: 79
Edited by caffeine, : No reason given.
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