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 ...
Tony (actually brief in view of the subject!)
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