What happened to the I.R.A.?? ( Archived) (33)

Believe me the English were glad to get rid of the yoke of Ireland. We were quids in and the investors you speak of sved the Irish economy.

Northern Ireland stays in GB at their own request, the votes of the people.

As for the Irish terrorists, dunno, probably executed.

Richard Baer writes (journalist)

Spend Easter Sunday in Belfast and you have to wonder what happened to the IRA.

The first time I visited Belfast, in 1977, it was a city under siege. Stores were closed. British bunkers protected by anti-rocket meshing sat on most intersections. Police and military patrols were the only sign of life on the street. The Europa, which had to be the most bombed hotel in the world, was a sandbagged fortress.

On paper at least, the 1998 agreement between the IRA and the British government was what started to put an end to the violent conflict. But at the bottom of it the IRA lost the will to fight.

This year's IRA parade on Easter morning was one of the most anodyne, sentimentalized events I've ever seen, made up mostly of little boys and old men not even bothering to pose as veterans. A half a dozen marchers carried wooden rifles, but the Republican banners were furled — on orders from the IRA's leadership. Armored police Land Rovers were parked inconspicuously on side streets, but they were there to protect the marchers from Protestants rather than keep a watch on them.

Any lingering doubt I had that the conflict was truly over disappeared when I saw the Europa. There wasn't even a car bomb barrier out front. The place was full of families, many of them American, coming home for Easter. Ex-IRA foot soldiers out front offered driving tours of the old IRA battlefields. Who would ever have thought Northern Ireland would be turned into a theme park?

The sharp contrast of old and new Belfast raised one overriding question: Did Northern Ireland's Catholics get anything they wanted? Northern Ireland, after all, still belongs to the Queen. I asked a former IRA car bomber. "We got absolutely nothing," Marion said. "We were betrayed."

Marion joined the IRA when she was seventeen, showing up at an IRA "call house" every day after school. She was never sure what the night's mission would be, but often as not it involved delivering a car bomb. She was (and still is) beautiful, and easily passed through the British checkpoints. "You never forget the smell of sodium nitro benzene" — the improvised explosive used by the IRA in the early days. "It smelled like marzipan."

She eventually went to jail after being caught parking a car bomb in London, but was released under an amnesty. Did she ever think of going back to war? "No. It's finished." Marion was convinced the IRA rank and file were betrayed by its leadership, and it had all been a waste of lives. She now is married and working as a nurse.

I asked a former IRA soldier, a bomb maker, if Marion was right. "You can't know for sure," he said. "They wrongly called an end to the conflict in 1962." He agreed that no one was satisfied with the power-sharing agreement that technically gives the province's Catholics as much say in government as the Protestants. And one of the biggest problems for Northern Irish Catholics is unemployment; much of the lost generation only knows how to fight.

I've got Norton anti virus