Keith, I was making the point here years ago, in the interminable debates we had about Ireland, that decent-minded non-catholics were fully justified in viewing with horror the prospect of being absorbed into such a repressed society.

But that, of course, did not in any sense justify the monstrous excesses of Northern Ireland's self-proclaimed "protestant parliament for a protestant people." The difference between you and me was that I had much sympathy for the PIRA insurgence, given the scale of protestant support (both active and passive) for Stormont's abuses, whereas your sympathies seemed to lie largely with the British Army. (I became less enamoured of the PIRA campaign as increasingly robust, non-gerrymandered, deomcratic processes were established.)

Incidentally your reference to IEDs "often killing ordinary folk" is over-stretching it a bit. Many thousands of bombs were detonated, 1,000 of them in just one twelve-month period (1972-73) in Belfast alone. Yet in the 30 years of the troubles the number of fatalities on all sides, many of them resulting from gunshot wounds, totalled significantly fewer than 4,000. So in reality the bombings achieved their aim of widespread commercial damage and infrastructure disruption at the expense of relatively little loss of life. (There were a number of notable exceptions such as Claudy, mentioned above, Le Mons, etc.)