MB Civic

By James Carroll | Monday, May 21, 2007 | The Boston Globe

“…The road to this peace has been twisted and long, stretching back through centuries of Irish resentment of British colonizers, Europe’s longest-lasting wars of the Reformation, and deep hatreds bred of 20th-century violence that flared in 1916 and again in 1969. When 14 unarmed Irish Catholics were massacred in Derry by British soldiers in 1972, and when the soldiers were then exonerated by London, the contemporary conflagration was ignited. It was then that IRA recruitment took off in Ireland, IRA fund-raising took off in America (Noraid), and people on both sides began to treat the conflict as intractable. But it was not.”…BS

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/05/21/how_peace_arrived_in_northern_ireland?mode=PF