Allan, I should think that the sheer blandness of Keith's dismissive remark "And all swept away by a couple of years of peaceful protest by Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association" was calculated to be offensive. Certainly it was founded on ignorance as I would have thought Emma's post made clear, and it underlines my suspicion that most of what Keith knows has been learnt in his armchair and, perhaps, one or two Teribus-like characters he has met in pubs.

Keith may be right that the PIRA campaign was ultimately counter-productive. It's a hard one to call. Unquestionably PIRA was caught flat-footed early in the troubles in the perception of many catholics, and may have over-reacted in consequence. But it would be surprising if a scratch formation of headstrong volunteers, reacting to discriminatory governance in the absence of credible democratic processes or even a credible police force, got everything right.

Keith would do well to consider some of the mistakes made in the name of law and order, which are surely harder to excuse. There is already widespread agreement among historians that two such in particular were hugely significant in entrenching divisions and prolonging the strife: the introduction of imprisonment without trial (internment) in August 1971 and the British response when members of its Army shot dead unarmed demonstrators in Derry in January 1972. (That response was the infamous Widgery report, soon to be formally discredited when the long-awaited Saville Report at last reaches the public domain.)

I am still waiting for Keith to explain who he was talking about when he said "They started from a much worse position than you..."

Keith took me to task earlier for suggesting shooting was less indiscriminatory than bombing. Rather pathetically he invoked a reference to splattered brains, as though I didn't know what happens when someone is shot. (Again his crude illustation is easily matched, and indeed exceeded by reference to the atrocities - I won't go into the details - of (say) Lenny Murphy and his brothers, or Johnny Adair and his fascist-loyalist gang.)

As is often the case, Keith missed my point, which was that catholics were much less likely to finish up as collateral damage when PIRA used guns rather than bombs. (Before Keith picks me up on that, even face-to-face murder was not 100 per cent reliable: for the loyalist thug Lenny Murphy it was enough that the people he tortured and shot had been picked up in "catholic" streets - as a result of which some of his victims turned out to be protestants.)

To support his argument that the death rate in the troubles was high, Keith says that if it had been replicated in the UK, total fatalities would have exceeded 100,000. That's quite a lot fewer than actually died in road accidents in the same 30-year period. If the rate of fatalities in the breakup of Yugoslavia had been replicated in the UK, the total would have exceeded 500,000 in just three years.