[mhoad]

I suspect it was the partisan and kind of BS nature of the claim. The IRA weren’t blowing up school buses full of children or libraries.

They even had a very clear policy of trying to minimise civilian casualties in a way that loyalist groups absolutely did not, in fact they made a point to intentionally target civilians repeatedly.

So to make the claim that the OP did like it was some black and white scenario where violence against civilians was only going in one direction is objectively wrong.

Nobody is upset with the claim that the IRA were a terrorist group. They were. They did a lot of bad shit, including killing civilians but that was never any kind of policy and it never made sense for their objectives. It was correctly considered to be “bad for the cause” to piss off the support network that enabled them to operate at all.

Agreed with about about thank fuck for the peace process though.

[olliej]

What? They absolutely did bomb a school bus, with kids (protestant and catholic) on it at the time: https://apnews.com/article/49117d7cbfe3b351f61290b53ad3e34f

I'm sorry I screwed up, it was a polytechnic I was thinking of rather than a library: http://bufvc.ac.uk/tvandradio/lbc/index.php/segment/00168003...

I'm also unsure how they were minimizing civilian casualties when the blew up multiple pubs and apartment stores in the UK.

That said I'll cop to being unreasonable and biased in my first comment, I did disregard the violence committed by the RUC. I was reflexively responding to what came across as a minimization of the IRA and ended up doing what I was accusing the person I was replying to of doing.

I'll update the original comment if HN still allows it.

[mhoad]

I tried writing a reply to this but its kind of hard to talk about the nuance here around intent etc when at the end of the day dead kids are dead kids. I don’t think anyone rightly gives a damn about if that was the intent or not and I’m certainly not here to try and justify it. The entire thing is completely unacceptable in every sense of the word.

Regarding that second link though, I thought that was INLA which were a totally different group?

[HeckFeck]

https://www.newsletter.co.uk/news/politics/ira-tried-massacr...

They tried to bomb a bus load of Protestant children on a church trip before fleeing across the border. On the same day as the Enniskillen bomb with a device nearly four times the one used for that atrocity.

Thank heavens it failed, but the intention was there.

[mhoad]

Just want to throw my hand up and say in all honesty I’d never heard of this story before hence my original comment.

It’s quite hard to find information on this one and I have to say the Wikipedia article [1] tells a much more plausible version of the story than an unsourced version written by someone who’s brother was killed by the IRA.

“the IRA called a radio station and said it had abandoned a 150-pound (68 kg) bomb in Tullyhommon, 20 miles (32 km) away, after it failed to detonate. That morning, a Remembrance Sunday parade (which included many members of the Boys' and Girls' Brigades) had unwittingly gathered near the Tullyhommon bomb. Soldiers and RUC officers had also been there, and the IRA said it attempted to trigger the bomb when soldiers were standing beside it. It was defused by security forces and was found to have a command wire leading to a firing point across the border.”

Nobody in this story was setting out to actively target civilians let alone children.

There is also this section in the article which may or may not be relevant but this particular theme came up on multiple occasions and I believe was proven to have happened at least once but I have to double check the sourcing on this.

“Under the thirty-year rule, a letter sent after the bombing was released by the Irish Government. The author was anonymous but claimed to be working for MI5, and the letter was sent to then Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs, Brian Lenihan. Without providing any evidence, it claimed that MI5 had advance knowledge of the Remembrance Day bombing but allowed it to go ahead, so that the public could turn against the Provisional IRA and new security measures could be justified.”

At the same time, I’d say this entire story is actually a great example of why trying to wage a Guerilla campaign amongst a civilian population is an actively terrible idea. These things are going to end up happening regardless of if you meant for it to happen or not unfortunately.

So that’s all to say, none of this is in anyway justified but again, nobody was trying to actively target a bus full of children here because again, it’s hard to think of ANYTHING that could be more counter productive to their aims as you can see from the rest of the article.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_Day_bombing