I've only recently discovered the Mudcat site and was overwhelmed by the kindness and enthusiasm with which my beginner's questions were answered.

So what's Redeye doing polluting the site with his ranting about Bloody Sunday? I suggest he tries one of the UK tabloids if he really wants to air his views among like-minded people.

Just to drag him back on track with a folksong reference, the folksong which epitomised the Civil Rights movement in the late 1960s was "We shall overcome", not "A nation once again". The IRA at the time was a spent, irrelevant force, exemplified by the graffito "IRA = I ran away" when the Royal Ulster Constabulary brutally suppressed the CR marches. The CR movement on the other hand was a striking new, non-sectarian departure, based on what people had seen ont television of the black civil rights movement in the US.

As another contributor to this string points out, the British Army was welcomed with cups of tea as a saviour (from both Protestant mobs and out-of-control police auxiliaries) in Catholic areas of Belfast and Derry, and the Sinn Fein spokesmen who criticised this welcome at the time were widely derided.

Unfortunately, the subsequent behaviour of the British Army on Bloody Sunday, on the introduction of internment without trial and in its intimidatory practice of spurious "arms searches" of Catholic areas, was the best thing that ever happened to the IRA. It led to a rapid increase in recruitment and funding, and was a significant contributory cause of thirty years of death, grief and destruction.