A measured look at a difficult situation

There is nothing along those lines anywhere in the Bible that I know of.

Faith writes: Except the "Proddy" violence was all in the form of military retaliation, not wholesale murder of unarmed people by herding them out to die in the snow, or bombs blowing them up.

Really?

Wiki writes: 21st of May, 1966 A loyalist group calling itself the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) issued a statement declaring war on the Irish Republican Army (IRA). The group claimed to be composed of "heavily armed Protestants dedicated to this cause".[7] At the time, the IRA was not engaged in armed action, but Irish nationalists/republicans were marking the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising. Some unionists and loyalists warned "that a revival of the IRA was imminent".

And then between May and June of the same year:

Wiki writes: The UVF carried out three attacks on Irish Catholics in Belfast. In the first, a Protestant civilian died when UVF members firebombed the Catholic-owned pub beside her house. In the second, a Catholic civilian was shot dead as he walked home. In the third, the UVF opened-fire on three Catholic civilians as they left a pub, killing one and wounding the others.

How about we move forward a couple of years to 1968.

Wiki writes: A civil rights march was to take place in Derry. When the loyalist Apprentice Boys announced its intention to hold a march at the same place and time, the Government banned the civil rights march. When civil rights activists defied the ban, RUC officers surrounded the marchers and beat them indiscriminately and without provocation.[9] Over 100 people were injured, including a number of MPs.

Then, we move into 1969 with more violence erupting.

wiki writes: January 4th, 1969 A People's Democracy march between Belfast and Derry was repeatedly attacked by loyalists. At Burntollet it was ambushed by 200 loyalists and off-duty police (RUC) officers armed with iron bars, bricks and bottles. The marchers claimed that police did little to protect them. When the march arrived in Derry it was broken up by the RUC, which sparked serious rioting between Irish nationalists and the RUC.[10] That night, RUC officers went on a rampage in the Bogside area of Derry; attacking Catholic homes, attacking and threatening residents, and hurling sectarian abuse.

The Protestant forces even planted bombs and tried to pin them on the IRA, but it was actually the UVF and UPV that planted the bombs, not the IRA. So, they weren't bombing people? Could you correct this statement?

wiki writes: Loyalists—members of the UVF and UPV—bombed water and electricity installations in Northern Ireland, blaming them on the dormant IRA and on elements of the civil rights movement. The loyalists intended to bring down the Unionist Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Terence O'Neill, who had promised some concessions to the civil rights movement. There were six bombings and all were widely blamed on the IRA. As a response, British soldiers were sent to guard installations. Unionist support for O'Neill waned, and on 28 April he resigned as Prime Minister.

So, we have now shown that they actually were participating in bombing people and risking civilian casualties and that they were the first to take action against the IRA during civil rights marches.

Source: Timeline of the Northern Ireland Troubles

So, how about herding them out to die....Did that ever happen (with the exception of the Famine, since you agree that forcing the Irish to starve was terrible treatment, I don't think we need to rehash that). Yes, you just don't see the forcing them out of their homes and confiscating their lands as driving them out into the cold and forcing the risk of death upon them. However, the English used laws to take away property and force them into poverty during a period of extreme cold within the continent. I'm pretty sure they were forced to deal with the cold as well and I doubt all the civilians that lost their homes were armed.

Finally, Faith, I would like you to look into how many Irish lost their lives during the rebellion. If you can justify Cromwell because it was a war, this rebellion was just as much of a war. The Irish wanted freedom and they did not only face unarmed Protestants. Yes, civilians were killed and that is terrible, but that does not mean that the English had no defenders there. This was battle and the Irish showed no quarter and when they retook towns, they expelled those who had originally stolen their lands from them.

Understood, if there was not an actual victory then I will definitely stop using the war of 1812 as any sort of comparison. As for the great Britain thing, this is a fault of my terminology. I've never been comfortable with which descriptor to use for certain time periods in that area, so i tend to choose Great Britain simply for consistency of location. I will try to fix that error in the future.

I don't think you're the only one who gets confused about what to call things during the 17th century. It was a very complicated time politically.

I will freely admit I do not know much about them and that is another reason I wanted to start this thread. The main reason was to show Faith that her simple Catholics versus Protestants did not properly encompass all that was really happening during the struggles in Ireland. Plus, that one cannot make a judgement or use as examples of Catholic evilness the Irish conflicts, which had multiple combined causes that led to the events that unfolded and were not simply a religious war. Also, I realized that while I knew some of the history of the region, in my education process the history of Ireland was glossed over very quickly and I knew there would be some incorrect information I would have received. Even right off the bat, those with knowledge were able to show me it was not as religiously based as what we are taught here.

I was mostly just using your post as a springboard to point out the complexities of the political situation at the time that, rather than criticising you, so sorry if it came off that way. I didn't mean to say that religion wasn't important either - religion was one of the big causes of the civil wars, but there was a lot more too it than Catholics vs. Protestants.

So, how about herding them out to die....Did that ever happen (with the exception of the Famine, since you agree that forcing the Irish to starve was terrible treatment, I don't think we need to rehash that). Yes, you just don't see the forcing them out of their homes and confiscating their lands as driving them out into the cold and forcing the risk of death upon them. However, the English used laws to take away property and force them into poverty during a period of extreme cold within the continent. I'm pretty sure they were forced to deal with the cold as well and I doubt all the civilians that lost their homes were armed.

On the 'herding them out to die' front, I believe Faith is thinking of the Portadown massacre in 1641, when about 100 Protestant settlers in Ulster were forced at gunpoint to strip out of their clothes and march into the River Bann in freezing November weather. Such things happened more than once, though this is by far the most infamous from it's use in Protestant propaganda.

I do agree that it did occur from the Nationalist/Royalist side of the fights, such as the one that you mentioned at Portadown. I was more asking her if the loyalist side was ever guilty of driving people into the cold. I cannot find an explicit example that I would consider identical to those actions taken at Portadown by the N/R. However, I do see forcefully driving people into poverty during the little ice age as having some equivalency and could perhaps be seen as the motivation for driving settlers from their homes, since several peasants would have died from cold and starvation after lands were confiscated.

Except the "Proddy" violence was all in the form of military retaliation, not wholesale murder of unarmed people by herding them out to die in the snow, or bombs blowing them up.

I haven't read through this whole thread, or the previous one, but I'm frankly speechless if you can be at more than 200 messages and believe that Protestant violence in Ireland didn't bombs blowing people up. The single largest loss of life in one day during the whole of the Troubles occured on 17th May, 1974, when four car bombs exploded in busy streets in Dublin and Monaghan, killing 34 people. The bombs were planted by the Ulster Volunteer Force, a Loyalist Protestant organisation who spent much of the 1970s setting off bombs in pubs. Over the course of 1973 they set off more than 200 bombs in total.

The UVF weren't the only Protestant bombers of the Troubles, but they were the most prolific.

Thank you, that is finally genuine information that makes your case after a lot of irrelevant stuff.

Thank you, that is finally genuine information that makes your case after a lot of irrelevant stuff.

I thought you did not trust wiki as a source?

That's the sort of information you should have posted long ago. I was clear what I was saying but all the answers were not to the point. I'm not interested in Irish politics as such.

Shame you didn't think that when I posted it back in message 17

Edited by Heathen, : No reason given.

Maybe it had something to do with your tone, attitude etc. I don't read much of posts that say things like Ian Paisley was the leader of the sectarian bigots. I'm a fan of Paisley's so of course I'm going to ignore you. Too bad.

and again, that is why you will remain ignorant.
you refuse to even read anything that disagrees with your preconceptions..

I refuse to read snark and rudeness. Sometimes.

Faith writes: I refuse to read snark and rudeness.

quote:

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Matthew 7:12 Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.

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Luckily, most people around here are more christian than you, or nobody would read yours.

Gosh, reading snark and rudeness is now commanded by the Bible? Golly gee heck, the way you interpret the Bible is Something Else. But nobody has to read mine either.