I'm sure we all have huge sympathy for the innocent victims of this appalling and unwarranted attack - and here in UK we can be glad that our own London marathon went off without incident yesterday.
But a letter in today's Daily Telegraph describes how, not all that many years ago, the writer was in Boston and saw zealots collecting bucketfuls of dollars for the IRA and their terrorist campaign in Northern Ireland. And at about the same time there were reputedly signs being displayed which said "give $10, it'll buy you the life of a British soldier - the best bargain you'll ever have!" I was outraged at the time since I was putting my life on the line - and more importantly my soldiers lives - in an attempt to just keep the peace in the Province.
However, the Telegraph letter-writer suggests that maybe this will perhaps "educate" Americans as to just what terrorism is all about (as if they didn't know after 9/11). I disagree. They do know. But I do sincerely wish that once a year we could dispense with the misty-eyed fairytale folklore that seems to so strongly - and wrongly - colour the views of the Irish-American community in places like Boston and New York.
Tony (nothing anti-American intended. And can you imagine burying your 8 year old whose life has been snuffed out by some misguided lunatic for no logical reason).
I think people in Ireland understand there are people of Irish decent in America that like to act out that they are more Irish than St Patrick himself. They like to pretend they are in the IRA and such because they feel romantic. There are a lot of real Irish here and they never even talk about those things. "Empty drum bangs the loudest" as they say. Wouldn't be surprised if the "donations" were spent at the pub.
there are people of Irish decent in America that like to act out that they are more Irish than St Patrick himself.
That wouldn't be hard, he was from Britain. :P
Anyway, I agree with both of you. Irish-Americans have a very warped view of Ireland and Irish culture, especially when it comes to the subject of the IRA. Yes, there are still people here in Ireland who sympathise with the 'Ra, but for the most part we consider them to be, at best, gangsters. Ireland is a very different place than it was in the 1910s and 1920s, and indeed Northern Ireland is a very different place than it was in the '60s and '70s and even the '90s. The glamour and romance of the republican struggle wore off for most people many, many years ago, but for some reason, it persisted for a long time (and still does to a lesser extent) among Irish Americans, many of whom seemed to think that Ireland is still suffering under the yoke of "The Hated English" as they call them, and didn't seem to realise that IRA activity isn't glorious, song-worthy battle against the oppressors, so much as bank robbery, protection rackets and, occasionally, car bombs. Which isn't quite so romantic.
As for IRA donations being spent at the pub, no doubt a lot of them were, but some of them did find their way to Ireland.
About 2 months ago I was over a friends house while guys were working on pouring a new cement floor. One of the 60+ year old masons was US Irish and he would go in and out of a brogue while he spoke (which I thought was whacked). He told me about a trip he once took to Ireland, and about a male singer he saw in a pub. He said to me:
"I heard a man singing and he had the voice of an angel - an angel! But his face was hard - he was a hard hard man I could just tell! He says to me 'You know - all the good men left - all the good men left'"
From that I could tell he thought he was more Irish than the Irish. He was the "real" Irishman going back to see the the people who didn't quite have the right stuff. I got to the point where I stayed away from any local pubs when they had their Irish nights/days because there would be a lot of these guys.
But there are still a lot of real Irish around here. One of my fav nights out I started talking to a pretty blond waitress about movies and was surprised how much she knew. I don't mean she knew titles and dates of films etc. She knew all about screenwriting and cameras, editing - the whole production side. It turned out she was Jim Sheridan's (In the Name of the Father, The Field, The Boxer etc.) daughter. A few years latter I saw her at the Academy awards nominated with her father for a film they made called "In America"
This thread was really intended to sympathise with those who suffered in the Boston bombings. But it is good to see, Brain Fever, someone from the Republic condemning the IRA for the thugs and gangsters which they were (and indeed which some still regrettably are). They didn't hesitate to murder any of their own if they thought they were less than loyal to the cause and they were responsible for the great majority of the appalling number of deaths which occured during the "Troubles".
That said, the Unionist extremists were hardly better - illegal clubs abounded in the Protestant areas of Belfast and their idea of a punishment knee-capping was not the pistol shot favoured by the IRA but a slow drilling with an electric drill to inflict the maximum agony. What sort of people can do that to a fellow human being unless they themselves are so sick as to be less than human.
Fortunately events in Boston don't seem to indicate anything seriously sectarian (unless you count Jihadism against the West as a whole - a subject in itself). But people have died or been horribly injured, and our thoughts should go out to them.
Fortunately events in Boston don't seem to indicate anything seriously sectarian (unless you count Jihadism against the West as a whole - a subject in itself).
Oh yes they do - the bombers are liked to Iran's QUDS. They are in Chechnya and work with recruits. Iran wanted people to think bombing was just work of Al Qaeda because that would take focus off Iran's nukes and put it back on Saudi Arabia - who Iran doesn't like.
The other day an Al Qaeda plot to derail a Canadian train was exposed. Canadian officials said plotters had ties to Iran
"Canadian officials said an attack had been planned with support from al-Qaeda elements in Iran, although there was no evidence of state sponsorship. "
A defector from Iran Revolutionary Guards and ex CIA has said Al Qaeda has plans for attacks over next six in US and Europe.
When Osama bin Laden was raided they found documents describing future attacks "A previously secret document found at Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan sets out a detailed al Qaeda strategy for attacking targets in Europe and the United States.
"The document -- a letter written to bin Laden in March 2010 by a senior operational figure -- reveals that tunnels, bridges, dams, undersea pipelines and internet cables were among the targets....He said targets should include tunnels, airports and even "Love Parades" -- gay and lesbian events held every summer in Germany. He said recruits should infiltrate university courses in the West in key subjects useful to the group including physics and chemistry, so that they could later be re-activated and help the group, according to Die Zeit."
The reason I mentioned Republicanism at all was to refer to the letter I had read in the Telegraph earlier in the day in which the writer described having seen collections for the IRA taking place in Boston in the past. He suggested that the bombing would show those Americans who had contributed just what terrorism was all about. I disagreed in my post. If you now say "then why raise it at all", I did so because I was - and still am - greatly upset by the support which sections of a supposedly civilised nation offered to a bunch of thugs who were trying to impose their minority view by force on a legitimate part of the United Kingdom.
I'm glad to learn that there was/is so little support for the IRA in the Republic - I'd holidayed there before the Troubles, but never dreamed of discussing politics with the people I met. But having served three times in the Province between 1972-74 I can assure you that there was very widespread active and passive support for the IRA among the Catholic/Republican population there. Apart from the bombings and shootings aimed at us, we were frequently faced with crowds throwing petrol bombs, bricks and other missiles, with the local population making no attempt to quieten things down. Although we were there to try to save lives and keep the peace (at considerable risk to ourselves) we had no acknowledgement of this at all in the pro-Republican areas - rather the contrary.
By Union extremists I did of course mean primarily the UVF and UDA (they were after all both Unionists and extremists). I make no excuse for them, but at least they were not trying to kill us while we were doing our peacekeeping thing. They were often brutal but overall they killed a lot fewer people than did the IRA (not offered as any sort of excuse for them).
As to the background to what went on in the minds of those responsible for the bombings in Boston, it is of course way too early to draw any firm conclusions. All I meant in my comment was that there didn't appear to be any major split in the allegiances of different sections of the population (as per Sunni vs Shia as an extreme example) which might account for the event. No doubt more will come out in due course.
I'm glad to learn that there was/is so little support for the IRA in the Republic - I'd holidayed there before the Troubles, but never dreamed of discussing politics with the people I met. But having served three times in the Province between 1972-74 I can assure you that there was very widespread active and passive support for the IRA among the Catholic/Republican population there. Apart from the bombings and shootings aimed at us, we were frequently faced with crowds throwing petrol bombs, bricks and other missiles, with the local population making no attempt to quieten things down. Although we were there to try to save lives and keep the peace (at considerable risk to ourselves) we had no acknowledgement of this at all in the pro-Republican areas - rather the contrary.
I'm sorry to hear that you and your fellow soldiers suffered that from civilians just for doing your job, but I would like to reiterate and emphasise something I said earlier: Ireland, both the Republic and the North, is a very different place than it was in the 1910s/1920s and in the 1960s-1990s, respectively. While IRA sympathisers are indeed a slim minority of Irish people, it must be admitted that pro-IRA sentiments were more widespread in the North during the Troubles than they are now, and the same goes for the Republic during the War of Independence and (to a lesser extent) the Civil War and the period afterwards, up until the Republic of Ireland Act in 1948. As far as I'm aware, IRA support in the Republic steadily declined from then on.
On a related point, I just thought I'd point out simply as a matter of interest that most Irish people do draw a distinction between the IRA of the War of Independence era and the Provisional IRA (and all the other versions of the IRA who have sprung up over the years). Generally speaking, we do consider the PIRA, CIRA, RIRA etc. as thugs and gangsters and terrorists. But the IRB/IRA of the 1910s/'20s are generally considered freedom fighters and are lauded as heroes. Having an ancestor who fought against the British during the Easter Rising is a major point of pride for many families, including my own - so much so that the number of men and women who claimed to have fought in 1916 is many, many times the number who actually did. Sadly I have no way of knowing for sure whether or not my great-grandfather did actually fight, but he certainly claimed to and it's a claim my family holds with pride to this very day.
Well, Epic, I'm sorry I didn't express lengthier sympathy for the victims of the Boston bombings, but my feelings were genuine nevertheless (wow, someone's actually counting the number of words I use!)
And it was of course my fault for allowing the Northern Ireland situation to come into the equation - a problem which Westminster had been trying to solve since before WW1 (read Roy Jenkins' biography of Churchill who had been trying to come to terms with it when he was Home Secretary in 1912 or 1913). And, let's face it, it's still not entirely solved.
You say that the majority of the wider Nationalist population don't support the IRA. This was certainly not the case in the Province in the 1970s in my experience, when by whatever means the IRA had the support of the majority of the Catholic population. Catholic areas (or call them them Republican or Nationalist, or what you will) were almost totally lawless. People didn't pay their rent or rates - though they drew their benefits - they didn't tax or insure their cars. None of these basics were enforced because the RUC was afraid to go into those areas without a hefty Army presence as back-up. This was as near to total anarchy as anything we've seen in UK in very many years and it showed just how fragile our system is when faced with mass disobedience.
We in the Army had somehow to try to steer an unbiased course through a sea of ordure. You try walking alone into a shop where a suspect device, which may be a bomb, has been reported. The ammo technicians won't come near it unless something positive is there for them to deal with. You can hardly ask your junior soldier to go in there, you do it yourself since it may well be a "come-on" in which case you stand to be blown to bits, as was a friend of mine. You try standing your ground while a crowd of yobs hurl bricks and petrol bombs at you and while your officers say "no rubber bullets", because foreign journalists were actually paying said yobs to try to provoke us into using them so that they would have footage of the brutal British Army forcing the poor innocent people into submission at gunpoint to show to their audiences at home. You try coping with an all-night exchange of fire with Republican gunmen - started needless to say by them - only to see your Commanding Officer allowed on the BBC news a bare 20 seconds to explain events while a so-called spokesman for the IRA was allowed a full 3 minutes to expound his claim that the Regiment had been provoking the population for weeks.
And, for the record, to show the other side, I once challenged the general who commanded the Army in Northern Ireland about having to stand holding back Catholic crowds in Belfast while the Protestant marchers went past waving two fingers and shouting "f*ck the Pope. Such marches are in my view a disgrace and should have been banned years ago
I could go on but, meanwhile my further sympathy to the victims in Boston and, for those of you who don't know what anarchy is, just hope that you never have to experience it ...
Thanks, Epic, for your further points. I think we have probably now flogged this subject to death and should let it rest.
However, one last point concerning nationalist support for the IRA in the Province. The IRA actually used children in the Catholic areas to watch Army patrols and help them build up a pattern of those patrols which they could then exploit. On one occasion I remember the last man of a four-man patrol being shot in the back from behind the curtains of an upstairs window just as he was turning the corner. The house had been taken over by gunmen just a few minutes beforehand - fear undoubtedly playing its part. But within seconds of the murder the weapon was being spirited away underneath a baby in a pram, pushed by a young woman who surely knew what she was doing. And the children who spent hours involved in the recce-ing could equally have been warned off that sort of thing by their parents - unless those parents at the very least sympathised with PIRA.
So, even at a distance of 40 years I'm left convinced that the IRA thrived at that time to a great extent because of the active or tacit support of the Nationalist population. Thank God it's now largely over.
