On 2010-03-10, at 9:16 PM, Chris Doss wrote:
> I know nothing about the history of the IRA, but I have never met an Irish person (I mean actual Irish people, not the descendents of people who left in 1850 and fantasize about Glorious Ireland) who thinks that the IRA have been anything more than a glorified Mafia within recent memory.
===============================
I suppose it depends which Irish persons you have met. Sinn Fein, long regarded as the political wing of the now disarmed IRA, is the more popular of the two parties representing Catholics in West Belfast and other parts of Northern Ireland, the other being the Social Democratic Labour Party. It's less easy to measure what popular support there was for the IRA during the Troubles, but the mass demonstrations they were able to muster and their ability to survive as a sizeable urban guerrilla force in a confined territory for so long would seem to indicate that the Provisionals were regarded as rather more than thugs by the mass of Irish Catholic nationalists, even as their decision to stand down was widely welcomed.