eli5: What is the cause of the IRA? Are they still active, and what do the people of Ireland think of their cause?

Question

eli5: What is the cause of the IRA? Are they still active, and what do the people of Ireland think of their cause?

In: 8

Answer 1

basically, Ireland wanted to be independent of the UK. the IRA, the Irish Republican Army, was the militant wing of that indepenance movement. After WW1, when the modern country of Ireland was spilt off form the UK, each county voted to either stay in the UK or join the new republic of Ireland. The counties in the north voted to remain in the UK and formed modern Northern Ireland.

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these counties were dominated by a protestant, pro-Union culture (the results of deliberate colonisation in centuries past), but had significant minority populations of Catholics, many of whom wanted to join the Republic (theirs a LOT of bad blood between the two groups stretching back literal centuries, far too much to detail here) . The IRA continued its efforts to unify the whole island of Ireland under the banner of the Republic.

Officially, *THE* IRA stopped its efforts many, many decades ago, but various splinter groups budded off form it and kept up the “good fight” (the real IRA, the provisional IRA, etc). The violence *mostly* ended with the Good Friday agreement in 1998, but their still occasional flare ups, the odd car bomb found, etc. to this day.

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Basically, the IRA and its successors are going to simmer on until northern Ireland joins the Republic. The majority of the population of the North doesnt want this, so the situation will likely carry of for a while, unless the fallout form brexit drives the north to unify.

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Irish peoples opinion on the matter tends to follow sectarian lines. Generally, the catholics feel the IRA was noble freedom fighters who sought to protect the oppressed catholic minority (the protestant government was rather heavy handed in its suppression attempts, and thier was pro-union paramilitaries that were just as vicious as the IRA). the protestants thought they were terrorists (indeed, they were the preferred stereotype of “generic terrorist” before 9/11 pushed Muslim extremism into that role)..