Word: iras
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...wake of the horrific terrorist attacks on America, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) is now encountering a more resolute, determined opposition. This past Saturday, Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) leader David Trimble delivered an ultimatum to Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political wing. Trimble announced that unless the paramilitary group began “a credible process of decommissioning” its weapons in accordance with the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the UUP would withdraw its three ministers from the executive and abandon Northern Ireland’s unstable alliance government...
Images of Loyalist hatred and violence being directed at innocent Catholic four-year-olds in Belfast are far more powerful than any weapons the IRA has stashed away. Indeed, those images actually shift the Northern Ireland spotlight away from the IRA's refusal to begin destroying its weapons and onto the hate-filled extremists in the Protestant community. Four policemen were injured in the Ardoyne section of Belfast, Wednesday, by a blast from a bomb thrown at a group of Catholic children trying to reach the Holy Cross Girls' Primary School. It was the third day of trauma...
...blame game over the stalled Northern Ireland peace process, the Ardoyne incident couldn't have come at a better time for the Sinn Fein. The most recent collapse of the institutions of Northern Ireland's self-government were widely blamed on the refusal of the IRA to begin decommissioning its weapons, and the recent capture by Colombian authorities of three alleged IRA men accused of training that country's leftist guerrillas had done little to improve the image of the Republican cause. The Ardoyne standoff, however, is a reminder of the communal hatreds that helped spawn today's IRA...
...Ardoyne has been a disaster for the Unionist politicians seeking international sympathy for their reluctance to press forward with the peace agreement while the IRA remains fully armed. And despite their limited scope, attacks on young children there threaten to plunge Northern Ireland back into a far deeper crisis as images of unmitigated hatred threaten to provoke inter-communal clashes at other flashpoints. And it's a crisis that will ultimately hurt the Loyalist cause. Indeed, there are signs of increasing impatience, or even distaste in Britain over the Loyalist's desire to keep Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom...
...longer an insurgent's career, the more difficult it becomes to contemplate disarming - and that's precisely the problem with the IRA and ETA. Ireland and Spain today are two of the fastest growing economies of Europe, and young people reared in the increasingly prosperous EU culture are increasingly disdainful of separatist struggles, much less those pursued by arms. The hard men of the IRA and ETA are relics of a past era, but it's not hard to see why they cling to that past. When a nationalist movement moves from insurgency towards politics, the power tends to shift...