SubscribeAnd let me tell you something: I've had enough of Irish Americans who haven't been back to their country in twenty or thirty years come up to me and talk about the resistance, the revolution back home; and the glory of the revolution, and the glory of dying for the revolution - fuck the revolution! They don't talk about the glory of killing for the revolution. What's the glory in taking a man from his bed and gunning him down in front of his wife and his children? Where's the glory in that? Where's the glory in bombing a Remembrance Day parade of old age pensioners, their medals taken out and polished up for the day? Where's the glory in that? To leave them dying, or crippled for life, or dead, under the rubble of the revolution that the majority of the people in my country don't want. No more! Sing no more!— Bono.
One of the bigger issues I have see with the Pro IRA Americans (have they ever been to Ireland? or read of its history? or are they just joining the bandwagon)I'll have to dig up the reference, but there was a book on Irish-American support of the IRA written sometime in the mid-90s that challenged the stereotype of Irish-American IRA supporters as nth generation Irish-Americans who were only distantly attached to Ireland. The book suggested that many active, as opposed to armchair, IRA supporters were relatively recent working-class Irish immigrants who used IRA support to act out their alienation both from both Irish and American society. Ireland hadn't offered them much other than a one-way ticket out of the country, and in America they were stuck in low-wage jobs with little status or prospect for advancement. (Remember, this was the era when there were tons of Irish illegal immigrants in the U.S.) The IRA's pseudo-Marxism, revolutionary rhetoric and solidarity with other oppressed people, including people of color in the U.S., appealed to people who saw themselves as members of an oppressed and marginalized underclass. And that sense of solidarity went both ways, which is why you see a Bobby Sands mural in a part of New York that's mostly Latino.
Why won't they let go of Ireland?Most people in Northern Ireland want to remain part of Britain. That's true because the British government drew the boundaries of Northern Ireland to ensure a permanent unionist majority, but that doesn't change the fact that the majority of people in Northern Ireland prefer the status quo. Democracy can be a pesky thing.
Other identity markers used to be the colour of the barns in the countryside, you could see at a glance whether you were driving through a loyalist or a republican landscape. Don't know if that is still the case.That's interesting. I didn't notice that, but I was pretty clueless. What you couldn't miss was that in towns and cities, the curbs by the side of the road in unionist neighborhoods were painted red, white and blue, the colors of the British flag. In nationalist neighborhoods, the curbs were painted the colors of the Irish flag. People seemed to put a lot of effort into marking out whose territory was whose.
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posted by soundofsuburbia at 2:08 AM on January 14, 2008