Actually, you are comparing them to the wrong period of US History. The right comparison would be the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s if the democrats got their way.
“The Troubles” began when the local Catholics wanted equal treatment under the law. And they followed in the non-violent tradition of MLK and Ghandi and the Protestants responded by slaughtering Catholic Women and Children. Now apparetnly, most freepers seem willing to let the government kill their wives and children, Irish Catholics on the other hand thought that these deeds shouldn’t go unpunished. And like men, fought back.
The Catholics never wanted this fight, the Protestants kept the bloodshed going on for 30 years. And the evidence is the voting for the Good Friday accords, 95% of the Catholics in the Republic voted for it, 90% of the Catholics in the north voted for it. Yet in Northern Ireland, less than 50% of the Protestants voted for peace.
Nope. The most appropriate comparison would indeed be '60s, but it would be the 1860's.
The Union denied the validity of southern secession since they asserted that the relevant "people" who had the right to determine their government by majority vote was the "people of the United States," not the people of each State individually. Since the people of the United States had not agreed to secession, it was invalid, and the desires of the people of each State were just irrelevant.
Similarly, the IRA since its beginning has considered the relevant "people" to be the people of all Ireland, not those who happen to reside in the North. Since presumably the people of united Ireland are against a separate Northern Ireland, what a majority of those who live in the North want is just as irrelevant as what those in South Carolina wanted in 1860.
Except of course that in 1860 SC a majority of the population were chattel, which adds an additional layer of illegitimacy to the vote for secession.
From a purely logical standpoint, it would be just as reasonable to assert that the relevant "people" are the residents of the British Isles, of whom the Irish are a distinct minority.
I am the first generation of Irish children to grow up without the shadow of republican terrorism over us. I regard the IRA as nothing more than a group of murdering thugs who hijacked Irish history for their own selfish ends. They were not concerned about the Civil Rights of Jean McConvill, a widowed mother of ten who was ‘tried and convicted’ by a so-called IRA court. They murdered her and hid her body so her family were even robbed of the dignity of a funeral. Gerry Adams would be, in my opinion, no better than Osama Bin Laden. He is the leader of an organisation that propagated murder and terror and my generation will NEVER forgive his band of brothers for what they did to us.