Our young are being fed diet of ‘greenwash’ about the IRA’s true actions during the Troubles

To argue, as Michelle O’Neill has done, that the PIRA’s bloody campaign was justifiable and unavoidable is not only a lie, it is yet another grotesque attempt by SF to rewrite history.

Unfortunately, that is a project that has brought them some reward.

Such is the ‘greenwashing’ of the period of ‘The Troubles’ that today, 25 years after they ended, a generation of young nationalists, which knew nothing of their terror, butchery, and ultimate futility, blithely chant pro IRA slogans as they play out their odious tribal rituals.

Michelle O’Neill and the SF machine knows exactly what they are doing when they glorify three decades of atrocities, sectarianism, and barbarity.

They are playing to their own gallery, consolidating the lowest denominator in their support base and, using very specifically tailored vocabularies, constructing a counterfeit history in which everyone else is to blame.

It is worth remembering that the Provos were no friends of the Civil Rights campaign. They opposed it, they attacked it, they condemned it.

They rejected the Sunningdale Agreement of 1973 only to, eventually, sign up to the Good Friday Agreement 25 years and three and a half-thousand deaths later.

The only inevitability about the IRA’s actions was that, like all forms of militant nationalism, British and Irish, they will always revert to the elitism of violence rather than join with others in a united approach to tackling the injustices of society.

There was no justification for what the IRA did over three decades. There’s no legitimacy in its glorification or attempts at justification today.

Hugh Scullion, Mid Ulster, Workers Party

(the party grew out of the Official IRA, which had largely disbanded by the mid-70s)

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