And the Queen is the head of a nation that has a whiter-than-white record, yes?

Or are atrocities acceptable – if committed by and in the name of a state?

I don't think he'd have been very impressed about my opinions on the Anglo-Irish troubles.

Well, I'm the daughter of a fundamentalist, Conservative, conservative non-comformist preacher. It's all bleedin' bonkers, but the hatred of other sections of the same faith for some matter of theological interpretation is insane.

I detest the Vatican etc – as should be perfectly clear to anyone who has been here for any length of time – but right-wing, fundamentalist, born-again Protestants are little better.

And in terms of the island of Ireland, it's actually rather a good thing to try to remove yourself from thinking of it in terms of religion and religious tribalism – or at least from the perspective of being in one of those tribes.

What has happened in the last 20 years is one thing I think John Major deserves praise for. Where we are now is infinitely better than where we were before Good Friday etc. It was a brave thing to go down that path.

And the likes of McGuinness and Adams showed bravery too – they'd have been dead themselves if it had failed.

Over the centuries, both sides committed atrocities. Although I'd suggest that, if you want to have some sort of competition on that score, then the British state would win hands down. Perhaps we shouldn't forget that.

And while I'm no ardent monarchist, today's events are part of a process that has seen genuine progress.

The UK has been guilty of dreadful things but that doesn't make McGuiness or his organisation any less odious.
Just as small example, let's consider what we think about an organisation who would place a bomb in a litter bin, bearing in mind it was Saturday when there would be mainly families around, also bearing in mind that it was outside McDonalds on the the day before Mothers day, the day when the number of children around would be pretty high.

I'm not saying McGuiness did that personally but he was part of the group that did.
Odious is pretty mild actually.

Agreed.
Unpalateable though it is to accept it, it's necessary to move on.

Indeed....'Before the Dawn'.

If only the bog trotters had some nice new shiny, precision targeted tomohawk missiles. With a good PR machine they could even have avoided all this guff about innocent civillians and just talked aboput collateral damage.

Thank God England is so civilised.

Who was the target of the Omagh bomb?

Of course not, but it was regularly claimed McGuiness fired the first shorts that day.

I'd say the revulsion of the two British soldiers being drove away in a black taxi, stripped, beaten, then shot in the head, whilst a helicopter cameraman filmed the majority of it was enough for most people.... It had to end!

I appreciate that changing the focus of the debate to fit your hobby horses is your modus operandi, but even by your standards that's a stretch. I can only assume you have sympathy with the causes and methods McGuinness and his like espouse?

See, I can put words in your mouth much as you can put words in mine.

Causes?

Yes. Just as I would imagine any democrat and progressive would.

Methods?

No.

No more than I have any sympathy for the methods of, say, the British military in blowing the heads off Iraqi children or raping Kenyan women. Or, for that matter, shooting dead a bunch of civilians on Bloody Sunday because someone had a panic.

But to look at some of the earlier contributions on this thread – not yours alone, but certainly yours included – one could be forgiven for imagining that only one side was culpable in the 800-odd years of the 'Irish problem'.

Having said that, let's check, shall we?



Yup. Only one side mentioned. And with your comment about "terrorist sympathiser", the implication the entire issue about what constitutes 'terrorism'.

Now I really don't do 'sins of the fathers' and all that stuff, whether it's in a religious sense or in a sense of grovelling about history. But that does not mean that the history is not there – or that, as in this case, that only one side shoulder historic blame or guilt for atrocities.