Quote:
Originally Posted by nomadking
McGuinness was a senior member of the IRA. The Catholic population still supports the IRA and its aims. Just look at the violence that occurs when an IRA cache of arms is found, and that's post-GFA.
Are we really expected to believe that the IRA disappeared completely. They just changed their name. Same people involved. As a certain somebody once said, "They haven't gone away, you know".
People didn't only start voting for Sinn Fein after the GFA.
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Martin McGuinness was a senior commander - possibly the commander - of the IRA operation in (London)Derry. He was also, in his later years, a friend of Rev Ian Paisley. That’s a story of reconciliation that should talk volumes.
As for level of Sinn Fein support, well in the 1982 attempt to set up a Northern Ireland Assembly they managed 10%. At the Westminster election in 1997 they managed 16%. It is only in the last 15 years that its support has risen to, and steadied around, 25%. This week they have achieved 29%. All of this progress has occurred a good number of years after it disavowed violence and the IRA disbanded.
If you seriously are asking whether the Provisional IRA still exists then you’re either too young to remember the troubles at their worst or are being wilfully amnesiac. Absolutely nothing occurring in Northern Ireland today comes remotely close. Yes, of course the older members of the Continuity IRA and the Real IRA are the same people as were once Provisionals. But do they have the same command structures, supply lines, funding sources, numbers of personnel? Of course they don’t. The Provisional IRA has gone in every meaningful sense of the word. Which is why 3,500 people were killed up to 1998 and only 158 so-called “security related” deaths from 1998 until today.
If you have alternative facts to back up what actually just look like lazy assumptions and prejudice, by all means share them.