Agreed, there were atrocities on both sides during the early 20th Century - both by the IRA and by the British soldiers there.
I'm not as familiar with IRA brutality in the early 20th century. From all my readings on it, it appears that they mostly targeted the RIC and British magistrates, while typically avoiding civilian casualties, mostly using a guerilla campaign.
Admittedly, my studies on this subject have pretty much come from Irish sources, so I'm not denying that IRA attrocities occured, I'm just not very familiar with them.
Do you have any links or sources I could see describing the IRA attrocities in the early part of the 20th century?
BBC News | History | 1968-69: The troops are sent in
Yes, I've watched some of the "truth and reconciliation" hearings which Archbishop Desmond Tutu chaired. What you have to recognise is the IRA and that includes Sinn Fein had to apologise to legitimise their quest for parliamentary power. I'm glad they did - they had a bad history involving brutality within the catholic community - they controlled the drugs trade etc.
The IRA-drug stuff is pretty damned complicated. They had the Direct Action Against Drugs front that went around killing drug dealers and scared people away form dealing drugs. Some studies have claimed that the pIRA was a primary deterrent for drug use in
Northern Ireland, and that their decreased activities after the ceasefire have been a contributing factor in Ireland's overall increase in drug use.
Groups like INLA were well known drug smugglers etc.
At the same time, it is well know that IRA operatives like Thomas "slab" Murphy were engaged in illegal smuggling and money Laundering operations.
However, you will find very few ex servicemen (myself included) who will talk of their call of service in Northern Ireland - we are still targets even though the IRA is no more involved in an up front campaign.
If you did a stint up in NI, my hat is off to you.
That's a rose tinted review of history I'm afraid. Of course the political leadership and others of nearly every terrorist group is kept away from the frontline atrocities and plans - that's the job of splinter cells and the way modern terror groups are organised.
I'm not saying that the pIRA was not a terrorist group overall. Any leaders that were involved with sanctioning terrorist acts would still be terrorists. The fact is that not every individual who was on the ground was engaging in terrorism.
I was talking about individuals who may have engaged in violence without ever targetting civilians.
I'm guessing your point is the British Army in Northern Ireland?
If you are guessing that I' saying that teh British Army was "the worst terrorist organization in Northern Ireland", I must say of course not. They are pretty much the only combatant group that
didn't engage in terrorism as a tactic.
The British forces hold the very best civilian to combatant ratio of all the combatant groups in NI. Far better than the IRA. In this case, I was actually thinking of the UVF and the various Loyalist paramilitary groups as the "worst" of all the terrorist organizations in NI.(
1019 total killings, 712 classified as civilians)
Now if you are guessing that I am calling the British army "combatants" and not civilians, I would say that yes they were. But I wasn't just calling the British Army the "combatants". The RUC and various paramilitary orginazations are all combatants as well.
Finally, I'm not saying that the pIRA was
not a terrorist
group as a whole. There is far too much evidence of civilian targeting to even try to play that game.
What I've been saying is that an individual's membership in the IRA alone is not enough to label that individual as a "terroist". It is true that
some individual who were IRA members and did engage in violence, do not qualify as terrorists themselves because they would not target civilians.
One thing I'm not doing is trying to glorify the pIRA as a group of "freedom fighters". There were some members who actually were "freedom fighters" that did not engage in terroism, but the over-all group as a whole was still a terrorist organization because it did engage in terrorism.
The only "organization" that was involved in the whole thing that I would not lable as a terrorist group would be the British Army.