The suspect bomb in London.... but this comment really annoyed me. It feels vaguely racist and yet I am not sure it is..

[BreeVanDerCamp]

All options, including the Irish, are open at this stage," said the source.

Hi DominiConnor

I'm not sure I can accept the premise of your opening question

Is anyone here really claiming the Irish were that picky about which shop they bombed ?

As an Irish girl who grew up in London in the 70's neither I nor anyone I knew wanted anyone bombed.

I think you mean .... claiming the terrorists were that picky.....

DC - We can always talk about personal experience and no one can ever deny our memories and the things that ultimately shaped our points of views, our hard held beliefs.

You speak of one side of a very big coin, from your perspective, and the flip side to that of course exsists also, in very real terms for others.

We all have to forgive and move on with a real desire to overcome a lot of injustices and wrongs done in the name of something, which really, has nothing to do with the true underlying issues at all.

I'm not sure a discussion of pedantic use of words will bring anyone to my point of view, but here goes.
When we refer to a group, what do we mean by "this group does X" ?

I think it is legitimate for me to say "English men like football". Not all do, but the majority support a team, and will cheer when the national side wins a match. Football is I recall the most popular participation sport in Britain.
Some hate football, I was brought up in England and (like me) never liked it.
But, although if someone made the assertion on MN, I might, like pagwatch say that I was a dissident to this.

But I would not say that they were wrong in that generalisation.

The OP felt that mentioning the Irish in the context of terrorism was racist. However, if one mentioned the English in the context of some soccer, I don't think this would be felt.

My position is to use the same prinicples whether it is something people want to be reminded of or not.
Yes, I have a personal grudge against the people of NI, that was of their making, not mine. Given that I was only 5, I'm not sure I even knew of their existence as a type of person until they tried to kill me.

Later, (at British taxpers expense) I became aware of Irish tactics in a bit more detail, and learned that they didn't want to kill me.
The idea was to scare people.

But under most legal systems, if you kill someone in an act that was intended merely to scare them, you are guilty of murder, and the IRA has made many such screw ups.
They apologise for this.
Yes, really, they send letters to the families.

Why do you insist in grouping a whole race together with terrorists who are both British and Irish? that is a factual error, is it not? I await your apology.

StGeorge - I think DC is just a troll on a wind up mission. His latest posts seem to confirm that.

We've been feeding him...

TnOgu, I have moved on, though the memory is permanent.
But there is a difference between "moving on" and not learning from experience.

I would regard it as dishonourable to treat someone differently because of their race or faith. But that does not extend to pandering to people who like the OP and some others who publicly state their "offence" when the misdeeds of their group are mentioned.

Sinn Fein has a large electoral mandate in NI, and Martin McGuinness is deputy first minister. I don't know what to make of that in terms of the feelings of the people of NI towards terrorism. I am not trying to tar an entire electorate with the terrorism brush, but I'm not sure what to make of it.

Cramenere, not sure what you mean ?
Some were indeed British citizens, but like my father regarded themselves as Irish, and the ability to get a British passport as an insult, not an identity.
Some of the "Irish" terrorists held American or other passports, but regarded themselves as Irish.
For not making that clear, I apologise, it was sloppy of me.
But I have a nagging feeling that you mean something else I got wrong.

If you mean that the British did bad things, I will agree. I was competent at history, and I suspect I can list more atrocities than the average person. Internment was not the most brutal of British actions, but was stupid on a quite impressive scale.

Britain was quite scrupulous in teaching kids at my sink comprehensive a long list of people that England/Britain had shafted. Indeed, it was pretty much devoid of any notion that the Brits were the good guys. Be it murderous Tudors, or the British invention of the concentration camp.

Only read the OP and the first post from Expat and am p'd off!

Not that I object to your point per se Expat but:

Irish
Scottish
Welsh
Indian
Pakistani

and now
Black

Do you see the problem there?

Nationality versus Adjective

Black could be (and in the past has been) deemed an offensive term (but is currently acceptable).

In no way can it be compared to Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Indian, Pakistani... ...
these are not and are unlikely to ever be offensive words.

Your point is bollocks even though I vaguely see where you're trying to come from. What is offensive about the weather girl is that she suggested that it was ok so long as the bad weather bogged off somewhere else. It is possible it could have been anywhere.
There is a scottish/ english rivalry that's been many centuries in the creation but it is nowhere near as close 'in terms of time and level of persecution' that the Irish have suffered with the english.

If you don't believe me try standing in Londonderry/ Derry late at night and swearing allegance to the Pope/Queen. It's a whole world of bad that you'll never be in whatever you say in Scotland.

The muppet presenter on Sky News Sunrise on Friday KEPT asking if there was an Irish connection. And the experts kept telling him no, that was HIGHLY unlikely and he KEPT asking. Gagh! Wasn't offended, just thought he sounded like an idiot.

The coverage I saw was BBC, and they quite rightly dropped the idea of an Irish link quite quickly.
Sky news is indeed rather more populated by muppets.

Domini - Whether I agree or disagree with you on this subject or any other, has no real bearing on anything at all.

However, you impress me with your skills of communication and intelligence, and I recogonize that you have been deeply scarred by your past.

I sympathize with you, for the memories you carry.

I truly, truly do.

Don't see myself as scarred. Having seen appalling actions by people otherwise identical to myself, I gained a strong dislike of religion and nationalism.
In later years, one side of NIers changed their label from "Catholic" to "Nationalist", which kids of gave the game away.
As someone who has read some of the propganda of the IRA, I saw that most of their political propagandas was socoalist in nature, and they did call for a socialist united Ireland.

As someone educated in Britain, I observe that it's hard to mix the words "socialist" and "nationalist" whilst avoiding a German word with highly negative connotations.

If I could be offended by labels, then I would be offended by the "racist" one used against me.

Certianly I do not approve of the actions of the majority of the people into whose ethnic group I was born into.
Having mixed with NIers, I observed a higher degree of racism than in any group I've encountered. That wasn't just the messy problem they faced in hating people that were genetically nearly identical, but a genuine hatred of coloured folk in an intense way.

Thus I reject racism, because I've seen it's consequences at first hand.
But the reason my position is so easily mistaken for racism, is that my own race has behaved so badly. Not all of them, but even now the majority vote for known murderers and torturers of children.
I see that as bad.

My thought is that Sky emphasised an irish connection for fear of being accused of persecution of islamic extremists by immediately pointing the finger at them. It was clumsy but I believe they wished to be seen to be putting forward all the options and not going with the obvious and seemingly correct one at this stage.

Most of us have not behaved badly.
FWIW Sinn Fein have difficulty getting seats in the Dail, they are a small minority party here in the South.
And in the North, they only achieved a sizeable majority of the Nationalist vote after the IRA gave up their arms. Before that the SDLP got the majority of catholic/nationalist votes in NI. The vast majority of people on this island do not support violence.
What happened to you was abhorrent, Dominic.
I have called you a racist in the past on MN and I apologise for that because I don't truly believe that you would discriminate against someone based on race, from what I have since seen of your posts.
But please don't think the IRA represent the whole nation or even a sizeable portion of the nation. They don't.

Most members of the IRA never killed anyone.
Doesn't make them good people.

OK, explain to me in simple terms why NIers vote for people they know for a fact are terrorists.

Also, why you are at it, who exactly were in the riots ? Considering what a small place NI is, it's like every single person in London taking up Paki bashing.
I have never seen a "only" a million Brits attacking people. NIers get a vastly higher % of themselves into mob attacks on each other at a whim.

DC - what is your take on Bloody Sunday?

I'm not going to post again, I resisted yesterday, and I will again, but I'm curious.

I don't know the truth, though there seem to be facts which kind of explain what happened.

The British sent elite front line combat troops in to do peacekeeping. This was always going to end badly. Such people can be relied upon to function in certain combat environments, but not the constant stress of the type seen in NI.
Shooting at threats that don't exist is consistent with that kind of people under those conditions.
In some ways it resembled the performance of US troops in Vietnam.
Was this a blunder by the British authorities, something more sinister ? I don't know.
I strongly doubt that an explicit order was given to kill the marchers, simply because not enough were killed for that to seem plausible.

The IRA was well up for using civilians as a shield for attacks on the British. Did they actually fire the first shot ? I don't know.

British law contains the doctrine of joint and several liability. This seems to apply here.
The IRA caused a situation where dangerous troops were deployed. Even if they did not fire at all they caused it as surely as killing the marchers themselves.
The British were at the very least criminally negligent, and more probably various bigotries amongst decision makers made some sort of atrocity inevitable.
No one comes out of NI looking good. Not the Irish, not the British, and certainly not the Americans.

DominiConnor
I am not the smartest of people but I had a pretty smart dad. I have a sneaking suspicion that you and my pa would have got on pretty well. He loved to argue, in the proiper sense, he loved passionate debate and blimey did he feel strongly about Ireland.
He left Ireland to create a life for his wife and child because he wanted to look forward and move on and make a life for the future. He regarded Ireland as too dominated at that time by religion and cant and history. He had little truck with those who left Ireland and moved here only (like so many Americans) to adopt a quick quid dropped in a collection box at the pub for "the boys at home" as some mark of their Irishness. He loathed with a passion the religious leader of both sides who consistently failed to renounce the actions of bullies and terrorists who did their deeds in the name of religion. He LOVED history but only for what it taught us not for what was so often done in its name. He would listen to my grandfather telling the tale of his first memory - travelling in a cart with his adoptive mother only to be stopped by the black and tans who beat and degraded her in front of him.
My dad used to always observe 'yes but that was those men on that day at that time in that place and if it affects how we see everyman around us then we are no better than they were'
Peoples and nations can be brutalised and adopt hate and bigotry - it has happened in my time in Africa and Europe and will happen again.
I understand the points you are making but surely they represent rather a grim view of the people involved rather than a hope that as time moves on and people allow history to abate we will all become more accepting.
I honestly bow to your greater education and you far superior turn of phrase but to be honest I would rather be hopeful and stupid. I had pretend bombs put in my desk at school when I was 11 years old. I have always assumed that those kids were just reacting to their enviroment and time has shown that I rarely get a negative reaction to being Irish now. Don't we all move on ultimately?
FWIW I also hate football and if Englishness is associated with football then I am pleased with my Irish links. God what a choice - a terrorist or a footie supporter

Tradition, probably? Politics are a relatively new way of dealing with things in NI. The IRA was born not out of hatred of protestants as such, it was created because of lack of civil rights for catholics in NI. If you take a large minority of people and deny them the vote, how can they make themselves heard? Peaceful protest? That was how Bloody Sunday started, it ended in brutal violence. And then generation after generation is brought up in violence and they don't know any different.

TnaNog, cross posts, I am slow tonight!

One odd thing...
I have a very Irish name, and my general look is of that race.
Never, not once has any British person blamed me for what the Irish have done to them.

However, my accent is very English, and thus whilst in NI they have blamed me for things that not only am I not responsible for, but happened when my ancestors were the people being done to.

I'm posting again, AAAAArrghhhhhh

It also started way back in 1798.

Then there was the Black and Tans.

Then there was the Easter Uprising,

Partition.

Then there was much lies and gerrymandering and, so on, and so on.

Man's inhumanity toward his fellow man.

We could encapsulate all that's wrong with the world on this very thread, but I am going to choose the peaceful route, the one that makes me embrace my enemy and hope that somehow something changes.

pagwatch. I mean absolutely no disrespect to your Dad when I say this but IMO part of the trouble with Ireland is that a lot of the people who disagreed with the Church influence over the State did emigrate to the UK and the US and left the Holy Joes behind. It would have done us far more good if those people had stayed and attempted to change things.

I think a lot of people left to look for work.

The economic climate, upto recently has not been good.