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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ManyMoose who wrote (103270)	5/6/2005 3:52:37 PM
From: Grainne	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

I have been reading about the Troubles in Northern Ireland since I met my husband in 1980. There are a lot of books available about the history of the conflict, as well as biographies of the major players. I have also followed all the press reports for twenty-five years now. One thing that most people don't realize, because they just see articles in the paper or brief news stories on television, is that it is not exactly a religious conflict. While the IRA is Catholic, the UDF and the other paramilitaries on the other side are Protestant, seeing it this way doesn't really reflect what is going on. It is in many ways a struggle between the Catholic working class and the Protestant working class in cities where the housing projects are jammed up against each other. There are a lot of social problems in these groups, and they compete for scarce jobs. A lot of the youth are violent; this is where most of the combatants on both sides come from. In the rest of Northern Ireland there are Protestant towns and Catholic towns. For example, my husband's sister married a wealthy Protestant farmer and lives totally surrounded by other wealthy Protestant farming families in County Down. In the cities and at the universities, the educated middle classes live in nice neighborhoods that are mixed. And there are some experiments with schools where both Catholic and Protestant children attend. Certainly the conflict presents some problems for the populace in general, but most Northern Irelanders don't live anywhere near places that have been bombed. They just go about their day-to-day lives. And hopefully the IRA will decommission itself and disappear, and there will be a power-sharing government before too long. Ireland itself is really beautiful, but houses are so expensive there now that many young families cannot afford them. People are going more and more into credit card debt, and Dublin is so bustling with traffic james that getting around is difficult. And you might of read that story I printed here recently from an Irish newspaper about how Tara and Newgrange, ancient historical sites, are getting a new freeway whizzing just past them! It is becoming a little too much like L.A. there, with a lot of people commuting several hours to work in Dublin, and tacky housing developments and suburban sprawl. The west of Ireland is less spoiled, and the whole place is very green and fun to visit, though, especially along the coasts.