without McGuiness there would have been NO good friday settlement. McG could deliver the vast majority of the IRA and Republican movement in a way Gerry Adams could not.

I do not really se much difference between McGuinness, Mandela and Begum. All terrorists who went down a different route

Do you model yourself on a character from Four Lions?

Cos that's exactly how you sound throughout this thread.

Rubber dinghy rapids, bro.

I'd agree with this.

But I would equally suggest that what was done in the name of all those people was often pretty dismal.

Are we really all saying that, in a comparable situation, we'd simply buckle under and, after it became clear that a political solution had been rejected, not think (at the least) about other means?

Fair enough, we're not talking in the same terms as apartheid, but we are talking about a state-sanctioned situation that had a direct, concrete – and negative – impact on the lives of a particular group of ordinary people.

If you have a quarrel with the actions of a state, then take aim at the machinery of the state by all means.

Slaughtering its defenceless civilians is never justifiable or defendable.

Agreed. Whether it was Harris blanket bombing Dresden. The 'shock and awe' of Iraq, or on a far tinier scale, innocents being blown to smithereens on the British mainland.

Mandela is a crusading hero, fighting against an oppressor.....McGuiness does the same thing and is seen as a villain....Only in Britain...

Personally, the only problem I had with the IRA was that their targets were very poorly chosen....Innocent civillians should never have been targeted, however, Mountbatten, the British government and British troops were all legitimate targets.

I really was made up about today, the Queen, McGuiness, and all involved in the peace process should be very proud of how far this whole thing has come, if only all those involved in the middle east could watch and learn.

Well to be fair they did give clear warning that a bomb had been planted 15 miles away from where it went off.

The Warrington bombing was a nasty, pointless attack. However, it was very much a 'revenge' attack brought on, unwittingly, by some of the Warrington public.

A couple of weeks earlier, they had failed to detonate a bomb at the gasworks on Winwick Road (about 400 yards from the HJ) - A few days later, I remember being sat in work reading the Warrington Guardian's letter page, where there were several letters openly mocking the seemingly incompetent bombers. A work colleague from Liverpool quite prophetically commented that the IRA wouldn't stand for being openly laughed at in an English paper...Sure enough, they returned.

I think that was half the problem with the IRA....Most of their attacks were simply flexing their muscles, with little point behind them....It was half the reason their campaign simply ran out of steam, in that even those they were supposedly fighting for, failed to see the point in all the bloodshed, when, most of the time, it was the blood of total innocents.

That's my view too.

The only problem with the IRA is they were murderers. The Protestant majority built a prosperous economy in NI, something the Irish themselves have always failed to do, except on the back of EU handouts and they blew that. Us British oppressors have hosted the Irish over here for generations. We have even let them collect in our pubs to fund their terrorism. To equate the British people with the IRA is frankly disgusting and shameful.