At the risk of major thread drift, I'd just like to point out to Guest JB that the real problem was that the British Army wasn't really trained for peacekeeping duties, and once it deployed in Northern Ireland in 1969, its concept of operations was largely based on an internal security doctrine developed in decolonisation wars like Kenya, Malaya etc. Ask anyone in South Armagh.

I read the standard BA manual at the time - author the then Brigadier Frank Kitson - and saw how the operation was condemned to go off the rails as the army initially relied on the local police for intelligence, and natives were identified as friendly or hostile and treated accordingly. When it followed the book and introduced internment and carried out "arms searches" (selective trashing of people's homes), it moved from being a perceived peacekeeper to being a perceived oppressor.

Regarding the IRA apology, it depends which end of the telescope you look through: from a militant-nationalist perspective it was a giant leap, whereas from a loyalist perspective it was a meaningless gesture. But in my book, anything like it, which helps to keep the politics show on the road and signals, however faintly, a renunciation of violence is to be welcomed. The whole logic of the peace process was not surrender by either side, but recognition of a military stalemate and an agreement to create political structures which would gradually render violence redundant.

I just wish that David Trimble was more of a statesman and did more to support the process which he signed up to, rather than continue to gloat, to belittle his opponents and thus to undermine the primacy of politics over violence as a means of resolving conflict. Mind you, with George Bush rattling his sabre at Iraq, and Spain and Morocco facing off like a pair of nineteenth-century empires over a worthless, uninhabitable rock, maybe Trimble is more in keeping with the Zeitgeist than I realised.