Have always been interested in the story of Ireland - another example of the arrogance of the British government. Decided to watch this after you mentioned it and am struck by the similarities to the Palestinian situation.
Watching the peaceful Catholic Civil Rights marches against deep-rooted, state-sanctioned inequality being met with Protestant police brutality, then the British army on Irish soil, kids throwing stones at the British army and their armoured cars, the justification for armed struggle, the British Army ransacking Catholic homes, the IRA terrorist attacks followed by mass internment of Catholics, the British army shooting people in the back as they were running away. As the former army soldier who got blown up by the IRA says - one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist.
It may be that this will end up needing moved if it becomes just about the similarities or not of Northern Ireland and Palestine rather than the TV programme.
I'm reminded of the first line of Anna Karenina:
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
I think it's easy to see similarities in such situations but that it's tempting to see too much. The main motivation for a lot of British govts in Northern Ireland was indifference, sometimes feigned, in the hope that the problem would just go away. The redrawing of the province of Ulster was a desperate attempt to deal with a problem that there was no easy solution to.
The split in the community was one centuries in the making, and it's worth remembering that the Ulster Protestants had been transplanted in many cases because they were seen as problematic in Scotland. The British govt after Northern Ireland left it alone as much as possible hoping that some sort of miraculous coming together would happen. It didn't.
When the protests produced violence from the Protestant side, it was the Catholic representatives that asked the British Govt to intervene. Hence, in the programme you get the member of the Army you mentioned talking about the difference between his first and second tours.
I don't think there was any action the British govts could have taken over the first few years of the Troubles, and what a marvellously inappropriate euphemism that is, that would have changed the situation much for the better. That's not to say that there weren't bad decisions made but that it was inevitable that some would be.
As with so much war, I listen to the voices on the programme and like the Big Endian and Little Endians in Gulliver's Travels, it is the tragedy of small differences that I hear.
