Who was the target of the Omagh bomb?

Of course not, but it was regularly claimed McGuiness fired the first shorts that day.

I'd say the revulsion of the two British soldiers being drove away in a black taxi, stripped, beaten, then shot in the head, whilst a helicopter cameraman filmed the majority of it was enough for most people.... It had to end!

I appreciate that changing the focus of the debate to fit your hobby horses is your modus operandi, but even by your standards that's a stretch. I can only assume you have sympathy with the causes and methods McGuinness and his like espouse?

See, I can put words in your mouth much as you can put words in mine.

Causes?

Yes. Just as I would imagine any democrat and progressive would.

Methods?

No.

No more than I have any sympathy for the methods of, say, the British military in blowing the heads off Iraqi children or raping Kenyan women. Or, for that matter, shooting dead a bunch of civilians on Bloody Sunday because someone had a panic.

But to look at some of the earlier contributions on this thread – not yours alone, but certainly yours included – one could be forgiven for imagining that only one side was culpable in the 800-odd years of the 'Irish problem'.

Having said that, let's check, shall we?



Yup. Only one side mentioned. And with your comment about "terrorist sympathiser", the implication the entire issue about what constitutes 'terrorism'.

Now I really don't do 'sins of the fathers' and all that stuff, whether it's in a religious sense or in a sense of grovelling about history. But that does not mean that the history is not there – or that, as in this case, that only one side shoulder historic blame or guilt for atrocities.

You mean this one

The Omagh bombing was a car bomb attack carried out by the Real Irish Republican Army (RIRA), a splinter group of former Provisional Irish Republican Army members =#FF0000opposed to the Good Friday Agreement, on Saturday 15 August 1998.

A bomb planted by people whpo were trying to undermine the PEACE process being put forward by Martin McGuiness

Yes I do mean that one. You were suggesting in your post that for some reason people shouldn't criticise McGuiness or other Irishmen because the British have superior technology that has killed innocent civilians in wars.
So why not answer the question - who was the target of Omagh bomb?
Or if you prefer, who was the target of the pub bombings? Or the Manchester bomb? Or the Warrington bomb?

Don't waste your time Him.

Apparently the history of the British empire makes us all legitimate targets.

I reckon she should wait until McGuinness apologises for the cowardly murders of Tim Parry, Jonathan Ball, the wives and kids on the M62 bus and many others first.

I'm sorry but I couldn't help singing along:

"Oh the famous Wizeb's father went to Rome to see the Pope"

I see Liz wore green for the occasion, although there is a rumour that she was wearing orange drawers to appease the Unionists

A hefty fine, stitches in his head and a bad hangover I'm led to believe....Fooking eejit!

England [uis[/u, in general, pretty civilised, as is Ireland.
McGuinness isn't.
I don't blame the average Irishman for bombing England because I reckon most of them weren't in favour of killing and, by the same token, I don't blame the average Englishman (like, say, you or me) for bombing Iraq.

As for collateral damage, I do recall the IRA saying that the deaths of the children in Warrington were a regrettable cost of war (same weasel excuse as collateral damage) ... which was cynical bollox, who the hell did they expect to kill with a bomb outside a town centre McDonalds on a Saturday?

I dont know. why dont you ask the people who planted the bombs. I am sure they would have swapped them though, for a few tomohak cruise missiles or submarines and torpedoes.

to be honest it is Britains current actions which are making everyone in the UK a legitimate target.

happy to kill a million Iraqi civillians and now happy to fight and support proxy wars in Syria. Sod the poor syrians there all mussies anyway.

Quite happy to support British actions then you cannot complain when the chickens come home to roost.

without McGuiness there would have been NO good friday settlement. McG could deliver the vast majority of the IRA and Republican movement in a way Gerry Adams could not.

I do not really se much difference between McGuinness, Mandela and Begum. All terrorists who went down a different route

Do you model yourself on a character from Four Lions?

Cos that's exactly how you sound throughout this thread.

Rubber dinghy rapids, bro.

I'd agree with this.

But I would equally suggest that what was done in the name of all those people was often pretty dismal.

Are we really all saying that, in a comparable situation, we'd simply buckle under and, after it became clear that a political solution had been rejected, not think (at the least) about other means?

Fair enough, we're not talking in the same terms as apartheid, but we are talking about a state-sanctioned situation that had a direct, concrete – and negative – impact on the lives of a particular group of ordinary people.

If you have a quarrel with the actions of a state, then take aim at the machinery of the state by all means.

Slaughtering its defenceless civilians is never justifiable or defendable.

Agreed. Whether it was Harris blanket bombing Dresden. The 'shock and awe' of Iraq, or on a far tinier scale, innocents being blown to smithereens on the British mainland.

Mandela is a crusading hero, fighting against an oppressor.....McGuiness does the same thing and is seen as a villain....Only in Britain...



Personally, the only problem I had with the IRA was that their targets were very poorly chosen....Innocent civillians should never have been targeted, however, Mountbatten, the British government and British troops were all legitimate targets.

I really was made up about today, the Queen, McGuiness, and all involved in the peace process should be very proud of how far this whole thing has come, if only all those involved in the middle east could watch and learn.

Well to be fair they did give clear warning that a bomb had been planted 15 miles away from where it went off.

The Warrington bombing was a nasty, pointless attack. However, it was very much a 'revenge' attack brought on, unwittingly, by some of the Warrington public.

A couple of weeks earlier, they had failed to detonate a bomb at the gasworks on Winwick Road (about 400 yards from the HJ) - A few days later, I remember being sat in work reading the Warrington Guardian's letter page, where there were several letters openly mocking the seemingly incompetent bombers. A work colleague from Liverpool quite prophetically commented that the IRA wouldn't stand for being openly laughed at in an English paper...Sure enough, they returned.

I think that was half the problem with the IRA....Most of their attacks were simply flexing their muscles, with little point behind them....It was half the reason their campaign simply ran out of steam, in that even those they were supposedly fighting for, failed to see the point in all the bloodshed, when, most of the time, it was the blood of total innocents.

That's my view too.

The only problem with the IRA is they were murderers. The Protestant majority built a prosperous economy in NI, something the Irish themselves have always failed to do, except on the back of EU handouts and they blew that. Us British oppressors have hosted the Irish over here for generations. We have even let them collect in our pubs to fund their terrorism. To equate the British people with the IRA is frankly disgusting and shameful.