Paisley Dead

[Feicarsinn]

It is extremely interesting to here the views of current Unionists. They claim Paisley betrayed them and is a sell out to go into power sharing with the Shinners.

It's not that black and white really. The unionist community in the north is a pretty broad spectrum. There are lots of people who identify themselves as Northern Irish primarily now and find figures like Paisley to be a bit of an embarrassment. Just looking for a quiet life really. Then you have the hardliners of course rally around the 'never, never, never' attitude. Hopefully their like become politically irrelevant as soon as possible for the sake of us all.

 

[Peat]

My condolences to his family but any prayers would have to be that the likes of him become less and less relevant.

 

[Chikwa]

The only useful thing he ever did was inspire Liam Neeson to become an actor.

Lol!

 

[McTallshort]

To be fair, and this is in no way a slight or meant to sound condescending, but the standard of knowledge int the UK about the recent history of Northern Ireland (say 1945-98) is very low. This is pretty understandable given that in school you have a whole empire's history to cover, but it does mean that the situation can often be misunderstood by those on the other side of the channel. That's not to say that there isn't a level of bias in our interpretation of things of course.

I think it's often forgotten that the troubles were born out of a Catholic civil rights campaign in the mid 60's. Simple stuff like introducing one man one vote, putting a stop to gerrymandering, reforming the very questionable housing and economic policies of the north would have gone an awful long way to ensuring that the scale of violence we saw never happened. It was the Paisleyites and their kind that tried to sabotage that at every turn though.

That said, anyone who turned the conflict onto civilians is scum, be they IRA, UVF, British army, whoever.

It is a bit...most people in the rest of the UK knew there was an almost apartheid system in NI that was out of control thats why the army was deployed in the first place. After the hunger strikes sympathy for the position of Republicans was very high among many in England who viewed the armys handling of the situation as almost criminal and had no love for Maggie Thatcher but the Guildford, Birmingham and Warrington pub bombings ( on the order of Adams ) ended all that and in the end it took a sustained campaign from MI5 to convince PIRA that it needed to talk

Oh and just to add the only empires we covered at school were the ones from Rome and Normandy as our ex hippie anti establishment guardian reading teachers had no problems at all leaving out that part of our history.