For "the IRA had FF goals" people: Why is it FF to try and impose minority government on a majority that wants to be part of another country?
Don't act so cocky. The Irish nationalist party got the most seats in the assembly election for the first time ever just a few days ago, and in the last general elections the Nationalists and Unionists tied (before, it has always been a Unionist majority). The tide is definitely turning.
The nationalist vote went down in the recent Assembly election, and the unionist vote continues to be larger. SF only topped the poll because DUP shed votes to Alliance and TUV. The recent trend in polling has been declining support for a united Ireland.
The sad legacy of the Provisional IRA is that they helped wreck the society and economy of Northern Ireland and poisoned the idea of Irish unification for generations of people both in the north and south. And while I personally support a united Ireland, it is not a "good cause" to attempt to bomb people into a country they have expressed a wish not to be a part of.
Wrecked relative to what? The disaster it is today is still leagues better than the state sponsored discrimination of the first half century. Yes hurt the economy sure, but this seems to make the out to be more of a cause rather than the result of northern irish society and the crushing of the civil rights movement.
The objective of the Provisional IRA's armed campaign was to collapse the British state in Northern Ireland. It had nothing to do with civil rights: the PIRA were convinced, quite reasonably from their point of view, that rights for Catholics achieved within the UK would weaken physical force republicanism, therefore they deliberately worked to derail cross-community powersharing in the Sunningdale Agreement with bombings. I agree that Northern Ireland is a more equal society than it was in the 60s, and that is a significant achievement, but the IRA were a major obstacle to that for decades.
And yes, I also agree that unionist violence deserves the lion's share of the blame for the failure of the civil rights campaign and the first attempt at powersharing. Was keeping myself to the thread question.