[PotatoHeadMick]

Hey, who the f**k are the UDF? You seem obsessed about an organisation that none of the rest of us have ever heard of, perhaps you mean the UDA or the UVF or the LVF or the RHC or one of the other ghastly, grisly 'loyalist' terrorist gangs that sprung up in Northern Ireland as a result of the terrorist appeasing policies of successive UK governments.

Just for the record these 'loyalist' gangs should have been exterminated too, but whilst secret negotiations were held by successive British governments with the IRA it might have been a bit of bad form to whack the Prods.

So here's the deal, I believe in democracy and the rule of law the IRA, the INLA, the UVF, the UDA and all the rest of the alphabet soup of terrorist groups should have been wiped out and it ill behoves Americans today to claim that one terrorist gang was better or worse than the other.

[markedman]

"Hey, who the f**k are the UDF?"

One of the "alphabet soup": Ulster Defense Force

My grandparents were members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood before emigrating and who still has many kith and kin who didn't move to America. I was raised on this stuff.

Like many Americans of Irish extraction and emigres, I am also a US Veteran. Again like most, could never understand the sense/senselessness of taking action against civilians or blowing up pubs and stores. Its anathema to how we were trained and to what we believe. This is one of the reasons that the IRA has ceased to be, as their support greatly waned here during the Clinton presidency and all but disappeared after 9/11.

To those Americans who were raised on all of this dark history the EU and Peace Accords ended 'the long war'. In the past decade or so the IRA and offshoots like all of the Ulster Defense (Insert whatever here) have been nothing more than gangs engaged in organized crime and drug dealing.