> To what extent were/are the Irish being oppressed?
> Discriminated against? Unbearably taxed? These
> aren't rhetorical questions, I really am ignorant
Ireland, as we all know, was "the world's first colony." Many of us could presumably go through the litany of oppression and resistance that has characterized Irish history for hundreds of years (perhaps not really 800 years as the nationalist mythology goes -- at least not in the same way -- but at least several hundred years), with all the land struggles, the British and Orange tyrants and all the Irish rebels from Wolfe Tone's United Irishmen through the Fenians through Sinn Fein in its early-20th-century and contemporary incarnations. I'm not sure how useful that would be, however.
In this context, though, it's important to note that yes, the republican (read: historically Catholic) population of Northern Ireland has suffered discrimination for a long time, with severe consequences in terms of housing, jobs, living conditions, etc. A civil rights movement -- implicitly and sometimes explicitly modeled on the US civil rights movement, including use of anthems like "We Shall Overcome" -- arose there in the late 1960s, in turn provoking a violent Protestant reaction akin to US Southern "massive resistance" against desegregation. The British sent troops in at this point, and for a short time the troops were even welcomed by Catholics as protection against Orange mobs and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), though that was short-lived, and by the early 1970s the British were shooting down civil rights demonstrators in the streets of Derry ("Bloody Sunday"). Also at this time, the IRA in its current incarnation (the original IRA had driven the British from the Twenty-Six Counties under the leadership of Michael Collins in the immediate aftermath of World War I) was born in response to Protestant vigilante violence and death squads.
There's a complex political history that follows, and I am no expert in it. The IRA is often described as the "military wing" of Sinn Fein; there were also splits within the IRA and within Sinn Fein. The IRA defended republican communities against loyalist death squads and in some really volatile areas (South Armagh, for example) became a more-or-less universally-recognized bulwark of the community and an unofficial police force. At various points they went on the offensive not only against the Protestant death squads (Ulster Volunteers, etc.) but against the British occupiers and the RUC, with bombing campaigns against both "hard" and "soft" targets. There were lots of fights around political prisoners, Bobby Sands and the hunger strikers of the early 1980s, etc.
Right now, there's been an IRA ceasefire for some time as the leadership pursues another, more strictly political strategy, with a Northern Irish parliament that came out of the "Good Friday Agreement," with relations with the parliament in the Twenty-Six Counties that Sinn Fein views as a step toward a united Ireland. It should be noted that the attempts at communal reconciliation in the North have been supported more heavily in the Catholic community than the Protestant; if you look at the votes on the Good Friday Agreement, it was way over 90% for Catholics, but a good deal lower for Protestants, due to the violent and bigoted provocations of people like Ian Paisley. The dishonest position of both the British government and the Ulster loyalists throughout all this has been that "decommissioning" must be a precondition for further steps in the peace process -- i.e., that the IRA needs to give up its weapons before everyone else.
Lately, the more militant parties in each camp have become the majority parties -- with Sinn Fein outstripping the Social Democratic Labor Party (SDLP) among Catholics and the violently reactionary Paisleyites of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) overtaking the more "moderate" loyalists among Protestants. From afar, certainly -- and probably even moreso up close -- this does not look good.
In any case, while the loyalists and the British like to talk about how things have gotten so much better for Northern Irish Catholics (just as whites in the US like to talk about how much better things are for blacks) -- and there's probably more than a grain of truth to it -- you could still look at a list of statistics across the board, for the quality of housing, jobs, income, wealth, etc., and Catholics will consistently show up worse off than Protestants in Northern Ireland.
I hope I didn't just drone on too long, but there you have it. People who know more about the situation can fill in -- or correct -- details.
- - - - - John Lacny
People of the US, unite and defeat the Bush regime and all its running dogs!