Sorry for the delay in replying - I've been having a new stove fitted so that I can boil Irish Catholics - eating them raw is too much for my deformed British teeth these days.
The key to understanding Ireland is that the two sides are utterly opposed and have an extremist, fundamentalist mentality that means they are convinced that they are in the right. It therefore follows that anyone who is not 100% behind them is utterly wrong, and probably evil, twisted, tyrannical and so on. Your contention that "the British army quickly waded into "the troubles" on the side of the unionists" is typical of this kind of mindset. Some individual soldiers probably did (mostly through contacts with the heavily protestant local militia regiment, the UDR). In fact the British army was first deployed to PROTECT the nationalists from unionist agression. Catholics were handing them cups of tea in the streets. And then, naturally enough, when they started violence of their own against Unionists, the army moved to stop them too, and this was interpreted as "turning against them".
And I dont believe my assertion was that Catholics in the Republic only treated protestants with decency because they were a minority. My contention is that very small minorities are not seen as a threat, and therefore are ignored. Kind of like Mexicans in sw USA fifty years back. Or Muslims in Europe twenty years back. I never said anything about "decency".
You are either willfully ignorant or deliberately obtuse. Supposedly the British Army was brought in to protect the Catholics from the protestant paramilitaries, yet they immediately sided with the unionists and provided them with military weapons and intelligence services. The whole British military sided with the unionists thugs and that was the plan from the beginning.
And I dont believe my assertion was that Catholics in the Republic only treated protestants with decency because they were a minority. My contention is that very small minorities are not seen as a threat, and therefore are ignored.
Your justification is pointless. The protestants in the Republic were treated with decency while the Catholics in the north have always been treated poorly by the British and that is because of how they viewed each other.
The British have always had a superiority complex. Funny coming from a country that practically invented flamboyant homosexuality so much so that it is referred to as the English Disease.