Word: iras
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...division of sympathies is complicated because each group has reason to fear the other. In the foreign press and the propaganda of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the conflict in Ulster is often portrayed only as a struggle of a Catholic minority against an oppressive Protestant majority backed by the British government. In reality the struggle is that of a "double minority." It is both the Catholic attempt to secure long-withheld civil rights; in Ulster, and the Protestant desire to insure British identity in the face of the Catholic majority to the south...
...exclusively takes place in the working class. In the larger cities, particularly Belfast and Londonderry, where the violence predominates and where Protestants and Catholics live in tense proximity, the population is heavily working class. Virtually all the major violence occurs in working class neighborhoods. The main para-militaries--the IRA, and the Ulster Defense Association (UDA) and the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), both Protestant groups--are all manned by residents of these communities. Even the British army, manned by recruits from the back streets of Leeds or the gorboels of Glascow, is a working-class force...
...Catholic communities, the IRA, though highly visible, is difficult to describe. The two branches of the organization, the Official IRA and the Provisional IRA, are hostile to British sovereignty for different reasons. The Officials, who claim to be the intellectual successors to the old IRA of the Irish Civil War or the '10s. have adopted a Marxist ideology, "forsworn" violence (though they have kept their guns), and oppose the British as part of a greater opposition to sectarianism and imperialism. The Provisionals have grown out of the present troubles, and their credo is the visceral hate of the British army...
Most Catholics will tell you they have relations or friends in the IRA. Whether these are actually IRA members, or a part of the shifting number who sympathize with or aid the few who are actively engaged, is never clear. Whoever they are (and it is not the kind of thing people are eager to know), they are effectively in control of the Catholic communities. The British army patrols these areas as if it was an occupation force; the police, called the Royal Ulster Constabulatory, never enter...
Although Catholic communities are often accused of fully supporting the IRA, they probably give it less true support than the Protestants do their paramilitaries. In private, many Catholics, especially older people will express their dislike or even hatred of the IRA. But very few would actively oppose it to the extent of siding with the police or army, and the reason is not merely fear of retaliation...