Opinion of the IRA

[Cashew]

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.

[Cashew]

That's largely to the credit of a very different set of Nationalist political activists and not to the (P)IRA, who were a major obstacle to it for the bulk of the civil war - along, of course, with a majority of Unionist politicians, we shouldn't forget that part.

My contention is with the term wrecked, call it a quibble if you like, but it can be read the wrong way by somebody not having the appropriate context, and overestimates the impact of their political violence on a society that already experience plenty of unionist violence.