The "Troubles" Debate Thread

@wolfgang59 said
It isn't "either/or". Both.

@shavixmir said
Are you claiming the British government didn’t sanction or have first hand, early, knowledge of any Loyalist paramilitary attacks?


Don’t for a second think that the protestants, the army or the British government were innocent or not involved up to their teeth in the violence.

@blood-on-the-tracks said
I am not claiming that at all. Sorry if my post led you to that conclusion.

I was asking No1 if he believes they had knowledge of ALL (100% ), which would explain why he lumped both sets of figures together. If he does not believe there was 100% collaboration, then that 'lumping together' makes no sense.

Hope that clarifies my debating point.

As to the other quoted bit of your post, I don't.

@no1marauder

So, just to clarify, as you have evaded answering the question...

You ARE claiming that all civilian deaths perpetrated by the Loyalist Paramilitary were with the knowledge/aid of the British Armed Forces?

This time that IS a yes/no

@blood-on-the-tracks said
@no1marauder

So, just to clarify, as you have evaded answering the question...

You ARE claiming that all civilian deaths perpetrated by the Loyalist Paramilitary were with the knowledge/aid of the British Armed Forces?

This time that IS a yes/no

@no1marauder

Don't I? You mean you refuse to answer.

The relevance is that if you do not think that the British military were involved in 100% of the Loyalist killings, then your figures quoted are, well, irrelevant.

Basic 'math'

@no1marauder said
What definition of "terrorist" are you using?

@no1marauder said
The Loyalist paramilitaries were allies of the British. I "lumped them in" because it is true.

The figures show that most of the civilians killed in the Troubles were not killed by the IRA but their enemies and also show that even British security forces killed more civilians than combatants (unlike the IRA).

@wolfgang59 said
Irrelevant.

Let us suppose that the IRA killed one civilian in London.
And the Army killed a million Catholics.

Does that make the IRA killing not terrorism?

@blood-on-the-tracks said
@no1marauder

Don't I? You mean you refuse to answer.

The relevance is that if you do not think that the British military were involved in 100% of the Loyalist killings, then your figures quoted are, well, irrelevant.

Basic 'math'

Hey, I get to do a cut and paste from the Guardian:

"Irish parliamentary report says troops aided loyalist bombing

The conclusions are likely to fuel fresh demands for investigations into what is alleged to have been a pattern of collusion between British security forces and the Ulster Volunteer Force.

The study, by the Irish parliament's committee on justice, equality, defence and women's rights, focuses on what has become known as the Glennane gang, a loyalist paramilitary group operating from a farm near Glennane, County Armagh, in the mid-70s.

Earlier this month a panel of international lawyers concluded there was credible evidence that Royal Ulster Constabulary officers and Ulster Defence Regiment soldiers had cooperated with the gang.

Yesterday's report assessed the bombings at Dublin airport and Dundalk in 1975 and Castleblayney, Co Monaghan in 1976, as well as a series of atrocities in Northern Ireland including the Miami Showband massacre in 1975.

In its conclusions, the committee said it was "left in no doubt that collusion between the British security forces and terrorists was behind many if not all of the atrocities considered in this report."

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2006/nov/30/uk.northernireland

Tip of the iceberg.

Kev and BOTT should have a gander at this:

"The lawyer Pat Finucane was shot dead in front of his wife and children in Belfast in 1989 by a UDA hit squad which included British police and military agents. The most recent government-ordered review of the murder noted that 85% of the UDA’s intelligence originated in one arm or other of the British security agencies. It also stated that the UDA was “heavily reliant on the flow of [British] security force leads to enable them to identify republican targets” and that “many UDA attacks could be traced back to assistance initially provided by one of their [British] security force contacts”.

Research by Mark McGovern, a professor at Edge Hill University in England, has focused on the activities of loyalist murder squads in areas of Northern Ireland in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It found that weapons smuggled into Northern Ireland from apartheid South Africa — with the help of British intelligence — were used to kill dozens of Catholics between 1988 and 1994."

"By August 1973, the British army admitted in an internal assessment that between 5-15% of UDR [Ulster Defense Regiment - a Regular Army Unit - no1] members were active in paramilitary groups, although the actual figure is likely to have been far higher.

The same assessment noted that the UDR was also “the best single source of weapons (and the only significant source of modern weapons) for Protestant extremist groups”, and that “an element of collusion was present” in the theft of weapons. It also noted reports of UDR soldiers giving “weapons training” to extremist loyalist groups, including the UDA.

Moreover, the document also stated that “a number” of British UDR soldiers holding positions in the paramilitary UDA and other groups “have been involved in overt terrorist acts”.

Despite this knowledge on the part of the British army, there is no evidence it made serious efforts either to root out those responsible or end such actions.

In fact, other files show that by the late 1970s, British UDR units were financing and supporting another paramilitary group, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) in Belfast, with at least 70 soldiers on one UDR base linked to the group.

British army chiefs have been exposed as covering up evidence of this collusion, which also involved a UDR soldier being involved in the UVF’s notorious Shankill Butchers gang. This group was effectively a death squad, undertaking a sectarian murder campaign in Belfast which abducted, tortured and killed at least 10 Catholics.

Another British declassified document from 1975 reveals concerns from senior British army officers — which were communicated to then prime minister Harold Wilson — that the UDR was “heavily infiltrated” by loyalist paramilitaries and could not be relied upon to follow orders. The response from the British government was not to disband the UDR but to mobilise it along the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland, and increase its numbers and its intelligence-gathering role."

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2020-01-15-explainer-british-collusion-in-northern-irelands-dirty-war/#gsc.tab=0

There's plenty more in that article, but plenty more from other sources as well.

Here's a continuation of the story. Admittedly, it's from a pro-Nationalist viewpoint, but those you claim its facts are incorrect in any way can post whatever material they think refutes them:

"The Unionist government requested the British Home Secretary for troops to be sent to Derry to maintain “order”. The Wilson government agreed. On 14 August they were deployed, too late to stop Protestant mobs burning out Catholic streets in West Belfast and the RUC murderously using heavy machine guns fired from armoured cars on the Catholic population. "

"In that same meeting [of the UK Cabinet in April 1969] Callaghan states:

"There was a good deal of corroboration for the view that the Catholics had acted largely in self-defence, and there was little evidence to support the view of the Northern Ireland government that the I[Irish] R [Republican] A [Army] were mainly responsible.

Home Office officials openly stated that the Unionist government had restricted local government votes to “their” People, had gerrymandered electoral boundaries and blocked Catholics from getting council homes."

"The then Defence Minister Denis Healey, warned prophetically that

"troops were likely to be required in Northern Ireland for a considerable time; little confidence would be placed in the local forces by Catholics until they were seen to be working efficiently and fairly."

In 2000 he recalled:

"All the violence was coming from the Protestants at the time."

"Over the years we were told Britain aimed to remove the gun from Irish politics. Yet in 1969 the only guns were in the hands of the RUC, and they used them readily. The IRA was tiny and sidelined and split in 1969. But British actions would create the Provisional IRA and ensure it had popular support in the Catholic population.

In July 1970 the British imposed an illegal curfew on the Lower Falls Catholic area of Belfast. They sealed the area off, saturated it with riot gas and shot four unarmed civilians dead. Unionist MPs were toured round the streets in army Land Rovers. It wasn’t until February 1971 that the IRA killed its first British soldier.

On 9 August 1971 the army swooped into Catholic areas at dawn dragging off 346 men to be interned without trial, often for years. Few were IRA activists. No Loyalists were taken. Nine civilians were shot dead as rioting spread in response. By now the IRA was recruiting widely."

And then, of course, Bloody Sunday:

"Repression peaked with the Bloody Sunday killings of 30 January 1972 in Derry. A month before, General Harry Tuzo, the army commander in Northern Ireland, told the then Tory government that,

"A choice had to be made between accepting that Creggan and Bogside were areas where the army was not able to go, or to mount a major operation which would involve, at some stage, shooting at unarmed civilians."

The government raised no objections.

On 7 January 1972 General Robert Ford declared in a memo to Tuzo,

“I am coming to the conclusion that the minimum force necessary is to shoot selected ringleaders among the Derry young hooligans after clear warnings have been issued.

I am convinced that our duty to restore law and order requires us to consider this step.”

At Downing Street four days later prime minister Ted Heath told his cabinet,

“As to Londonderry [Derry], a military operation to reimpose law and order would be a major operation necessarily involving numerous civilian casualties.”

Accordingly, the paratroop regiment was sent to the city on the eve of a protest march against internment. The paratroops were sent into the Bogside following a minor riot. They shot 14 unarmed protesters dead."

https://www.counterfire.org/articles/history/20489-defending-the-indefensible-the-british-army-in-northern-ireland-1969

@kevcvs57 said
Links surely you have links proving that British soldiers attacked targets in the Republic of Ireland.
Why is it relevant whether or how the British military killed members of Republican terror groups. How does that make PIRA not a terrorist group?
No ones claiming sainthood for British military / security machine they would have been operating covert ops inside loyalist and Republican terror groups.

@wolfgang59 said
Irrelevant.

Let us suppose that the IRA killed one civilian in London.
And the Army killed a million Catholics.

Does that make the IRA killing not terrorism?