 So, I don't know how many of you follow the news about Northern Ireland, but you might have seen it recently about the recent legalisation of abortion in Northern Ireland, and the passage into law of equal marriage. Of course you can applaud that, but it's on a sour note, basically, that the Storm and Assembly has now been suspended for over a thousand days, so it's setting a world record at this point for being a region of a country with no functioning government, essentially. Understandably, a lot of people are very frustrated about this, and when it comes to the Storm and Assembly, there's a feeling amongst a lot of people, especially young people in Northern Ireland, that they've never really escaped trouble's politics, that the same old faces, the DUP, Sinn Féin and so on, who've caused these only to collapse, are kind of responsible for all of this, and it's in some sense that's very true, the sectarian divide in Northern Ireland is institutionalised in the Storm and Assembly, and people are kind of losing all faith in the system, especially after this suspension of the Assembly, and the only justification it kind of maintains is that there's peace now in Northern Ireland after decades of violence, which is, of course, what we're talking about tonight, so the troubles in Northern Ireland, I'm not sure who coined the term, it doesn't really encapsulate the scale of violence, of chaos and disorder that really happened in Northern Ireland at the time, or the significance of many of the events, but it's kind of just known familiarly, obviously, as the troubles, but in reality it was more like a civil war, really, in Northern Ireland. Anyway, but the starting point, what's often credited as the starting point of the troubles is when British troops were sent into Northern Ireland in 1969, so in August 1969 was the beginning of the longest military operation in British history, which was Operation Banner, which ran from 1969 until 2007, so it was only 2007, relatively recently, that the British military officially decided that the troubles were over, but into a bit of the background, essentially, so the day, the exact day, is often the troubles began, I suppose, is often credited as the 5th of October 1968, so what happened then? So on the 5th of October 1968, a civil rights march was planned through Derry, and was banned by the police, and the Civil Rights Association that was called the march, it officially cancelled it, but nonetheless, people turned up for it, so the Civil Rights Association and the Civil Rights Movement itself was a response, obviously, to the oppression and discrimination that many people, especially Catholics in Northern Ireland, felt, so it was based on campaigns against housing discrimination, so Catholics in Northern Ireland were not up allocated, social housing, they often lived in more kind of squalor conditions, in places like Derry and some places in Belfast and West Belfast, people lived in, you know, this is like the 1960s, and people lived in like pre-First World War conditions, with no indoor toilets, no drilling water, things like that, Civil Rights Association, it also was campaigning for like one man, one vote, so in Northern Ireland, the electoral system was still largely based on property qualifications, so again, like pre-First World War kind of conditions, so property owners and small business owners and so on would have like up to 30 votes at elections, whereas kind of ordinary citizens, usually poorer citizens, put up, you know, disproportionately Catholic, of course, would have no vote whatsoever, as well as campaigning against things like the Special Powers Act, which was a kind of ruthless, repressive kind of piece of legislation passed by the Northern Irish Parliament, which was envied around the world, in fact, by repressive colonial regimes, South Africa in particular, they said they envied the Special Powers Act. So the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, they were campaigning against us, but like I said, the 5th of October 1968, March was prohibited and somewhat cancelled, but yeah, people turned up for anyway, and it was basically under the leadership of the Derry Labour Party and the Derry Young Socialists that up to 500 people, they did turn up to have the demonstration anyway, and they were ruthlessly attacked by the RUC, Royal Ulster Constabulary, so the Northern Irish Police Force at the time, and the Auxiliary Force, the Infamous Bee Specialist, so an Auxiliary Force of the police that were recruited normally from Protestant backgrounds and were particularly kind of ruthless in dealing with strikes and demonstrations and things like that, but these bee specials and images of this attack was beamed upon television screens all around Ireland, people were understandably horrified and shocked that, you know, a peaceful demonstration of 500 large of the young people was being treated so callously and so violently and that there were sectarian taunts from the police and from the bee specials and so on, and this kind of ballooned the Northern Irish Civil Rights Association, which like I said, was based itself, was kind of inspired in a large part by, for example, the civil rights struggle in the United States and also by what was going on in France at the time, so the kind of big demonstrations and so on, as well as the US kind of anti-war movement, and it was around this time that it really became like a mass movement, you know, there were local civil rights association kind of chapters and branches set up all across Northern Ireland and there was a huge kind of outpouring of public support for them. So on the 16th of November, so a few weeks later really, they planned another march through Derry, which was again attacked by the police with particular kind of brutality. It led to kind of massive riots in the areas of Derry where the march took place, you know, petrol bombs being rained on, police bricks and stones being thrown and even in some areas, particularly the bog side of Derry, which is a majority kind of Catholic area, a very, very poor area of Derry, sort of self-defense kind of groups began to emerge as well, such was the skill of the kind of violence, the attacks in these communities, and such was the violence and the kind of outpouring of public support for the civil rights demonstrators, that they managed to agree kind of a truce and the Northern Irish government at the time under O'Neill, Terence O'Neill, Captain Terence O'Neill, he probably called, because he used to be a British army captain. They kind of managed to, they were going to make some concessions, you know, and they're willing to kind of make these concessions at this time really, because although Northern Ireland, I mean the background to the Northern Irish state really, so Terence O'Neill, Northern Irish Prime Minister, so Northern had, it was still called the Parliament, the Assembly, they had a Prime Minister, and obviously Northern Ireland was formed in 1922 after the partition of Ireland, so the British colonial partition of Ireland, so after the Irish War of Independence, the Irish, Anglo-Irish War in 1920 to 2122, which ended in roughly sort of a military stalemate, but an offer from the British side to the Irish Republican Army, the Republican side at the time, to sort of call it a truce and sort of end it, or have a peace treaty, and to grant sort of limited concessions, so led to the formation of the Irish Free State, which is an independent state in the south forming the majority of Ireland, but also the partition of Ireland, so the six northeastern counties of Ireland would become the Northern Irish state, this was the majority of Protestant areas, and indeed it was deliberately kind of gerrymandered, so they would have a Protestant majority, so these kind of sort of six counties of Ireland, you know, they were the smallest kind of a polity that could be sort of pulled together, where there would be a Protestant majority there, and it was a state characterised by extreme discrimination of Catholics, and the kind of dominance of kind of Protestant half of the state. But by the 1960s, so although the reason I mean that this partition was kind of enforced on Ireland, obviously, was out of pure kind of British imperial interests, sectarianism had been used in Ireland for decades, for generations, hundreds of years, to sort of divide the working class and divide the struggle for Irish independence, but by the 1960s this sectarianism of the ruling class had kind of whipped up, was becoming a bit of a drag in the border, the economic interests that Britain had in the north of Ireland were starting to kind of subside to the economic interests they had in the south even. There was more kind of foreign investment in the south, there was more GDP and more profit being produced essentially by British companies, or companies operating in the south of Ireland, owned by British owners than Northern Ireland was, and Northern Ireland was becoming a drain on the purse strings of the British treasury and so on. So they knew towards this position of kind of war sort of concession. So like O'Neill was seen as kind of a liberal reformer almost, not quite by Catholics of course, but in his own kind of context. And so he kind of was going to offer these concessions to the Civil Rights Association, which he was kind of forced to renege on because obviously he was also facing opposition from the kind of the grassroots of extreme kind of protestant reaction, which was the kind of the sort of loyalist group, so people like Ian Paisley and so on. But anyway, this this truth didn't last very long, and a more kind of radical group within the Civil Rights Association, called People's Democracy, which is kind of formed by students at Queen's University. They planned a civil rights march from Belfast to Montenegro. Again, inspired by the civil rights marches in the United States, the Selma Montgomery March, where Black Civil Rights activists march from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama. And I was scheduled to arrive in in in Derry in early February 1969. And basically all along the route started with a very small group of people, eventually swelled to about 400 marchers. All along the routes, they were attacked by the REC, by police, by peace specials, as well as by kind of loyalist and kind of reactionary sort of gangs, essentially, you would obviously pelting the stones and so on, taunt them with sectarian chanting and things like that. And also this product a kind of a reaction from a lot of communities in Derry. So by the time that they did arrive, there was almost a kind of insurrectionary mood being sort of prepared in Derry. And it was when they did arrive that there was the, again, like I said, kind of the local kind of groups would sort of take over the areas that was establishing these kind of no-go areas in parts of Derry, you know, where the police couldn't go into because riders so taking over, taking control from the police, where it wasn't safe enough for them to go in. And yeah, that's the PBDA in Dogside. But over 1969, this peaceful kind of civil rights march, there's a series of kind of riots and so on all throughout the kind of country. Every time they try march, the REC have quite a deliberate tactic, because the Civil Rights Association, originally, it wasn't just a purely kind of Catholic organization, it had cross community appeal and was kind of intended to kind of appeal to kind of both Catholic and Protestant working class communities. Because, you know, although the Protestant sort of half of the population were dominant over the other half, they nonetheless had, there was extreme kind of poverty amongst Catholics, or amongst Protestants, sorry, particularly in places of Belfast, again, like along the Schenkel Road and places like that, people lived in sort of squalid conditions, really. But towards throughout 1969, the REC would force these kind of demonstrations whenever they gathered through here, when they would always constantly be kind of attacked by the police, and they would be sort of forced into Catholic areas, the only places that the march could go for self defense, where they could be defended essentially by rioters and so on. And that was the, and so there's this kind of changing perception of the Civil Rights Association throughout 1969, which is kind of very important. And then the movement kind of knew that this violence and these kind of riots, they were culminated in August of 1969. So when on the 12th of August, the Derry Apprentice Boys, which is kind of a loyalist, you know, Christian brotherhood, they would call themselves, would march through Derry, these kind of orange marches, obviously were very sort of triumphalist, you know, they sang songs about kind of historic kind of massacres of Catholics in Ireland, and the kind of oppression of kind of of Ireland. And they they were going to march through Derry. And they knew this would provoke the police and everyone knew this would provoke a reaction from the local community and that there would be kind of riots and so on. But the skill at which it happens again was kind of unprecedented at the time. So from the 12th of August was the infamous Battle of the Bauxite. So rioters kind of took over the Bauxite area. The Gable wall was painted with the kind of famous free Derry slogan. So this is kind of declared a kind of almost like an autonomous kind of space where the REC and so on were not welcome. And it was true, they really couldn't go into these areas. But there were riots all across Northern Ireland at this time in August of 1969. As well as kind of what became kind of world famous atrocities as well. Bombay Street in Belfast, a whole row of houses where Catholics lived was burned out and people were forced to live in the school gymnasiums and so on. And many people even just kind of felt they needed to flee the city completely. There was there was this feeling amongst the Catholic community that there was going to be an unprecedented level of sectarian violence against them and a pogrom essentially, a massacre of people. And indeed they never very nearly got to that point. Under this kind of pressure, the the Labour government at the time sent dispatched soldiers to Northern Ireland. So this is the beginning of as I mentioned of Operation Banner. So soldiers were sent to Northern Ireland with the supposed kind of remit of protecting these Catholic communities from these kind of PZI gangs and this threatened kind of pogrom, this threatened motivated kind of attack. And initially the troops, they were they were welcomed really by the by the majority of the population. They were seen as that they had beaten the REC, that they had beaten the PZI and by the kind of loyalist gangs. And the troops kind of were genuinely there to protect them. It was a sign that they were kind of winning. Even some elements of the IRA, so the IRA went through very important kind of period at this time, which I'll talk about a little bit. But even some elements of the IRA were saying this said, you know, the Britain sending troops in is proof that we've beaten the Northern Irish state that O'Neill and the Ulster Unionists and so on, they're basically about ready to give up and collapse. And Britain will will have to enter some sort of negotiations to return Northern Ireland to the majority of Northern Ireland and there'll be a United Ireland. Just, I think, clearly incorrect. But there were warnings given by the left, particularly by militant, obviously, which is the the predecessor of our own organization. So in the the Barrakeid's bulletin, which was produced by militant supporters in Derry, they warned that, you know, these kind of this welcoming of British troops would turn to to vinegar in the mouth of these people who were celebrating it. And indeed it did, you know, people like people like Bernard Develyn, who was a kind of leader of the People's Democracy, this kind of more left wing, younger part of the Civil Rights Association. She was originally one of these people who is kind of calling for like troops to be sent, you know, before it was ever kind of even targeted by the British by the British state. And very quickly, she she sort of changed her position. And once she realized that the sending of these soldiers, they were not here to protect them. But they were, as the militant said, here to impose a solution on the on the crisis in the interests of British capitalism. And indeed, that's what they were there to do. So the ruling class at the time. So obviously, this is the late kind of 1960s, we're entering the period of the 70s and 80s, these big class struggles around Europe and around the world, but particularly in Britain. And the last thing is was the ruling class wanted was a kind of civil war, essentially breaking out on their doorstep. They knew they couldn't end the violence completely. So the the official policy and the official remit of Operation Banner was to to contain the violence to acceptable levels, which I can reassume would mean like pre 1960, 68 kind of levels of violence and into community kind of violence. As I mentioned, the this is a very important period for the for the IRA. So I'll talk about them for a little bit. But so in 1969, obviously, like I said, there were this this these unprecedented sort of sectarian attacks on on Catholic nationalist kind of communities. And the IRA was kind of really underprepared to deal with this. They were sort of stunned by what they should do. In from 1956 to 62, what remained of kind of the IRA. So the sort of small kind of groups of hangars on that had, I guess, continued since the days of the Irish War of Independence and so on. They launched what they called the border campaign or Operation Harvest, which was a completely kind of doomed attempt to, you know, basically kill some police officers along the border of Northern Ireland, you know, seize some arms and so on. And this would, you know, provoke an uprising amongst people amongst, you know, Irish Patriots, I guess, in the north of Ireland, who would then you're going to over through the Northern Irish state. And again, bring about this United Ireland that they that they were seeking. It was a military failure. They had something like 200, you know, members and volunteers of the IRA to do this. They got away with killing some people, but mostly people were kind of stunned at the violence and they didn't lead to any kind of uprisings. After this period, the IRA were kind of left questioning this military defeat about what they should do to sort of build support. And there was a section of the IRA leadership that wanted to make a turn towards politics essentially. So to put down the gun, you know, transform the organization from just a kind of secretive army and terrorist organization, essentially, and take control of the political wing. You use more the political wing of the IRA, which is the Sinn Féin party to sort of build support for United Ireland and so on. However, when these kind of the the riots, the Del Fasse riots and the Battle of the Bogside happened in August 1960 or 1969, rather, they were left wondering, there was this demand that the IRA are people with guns, why aren't they here to defend us essentially? And from a lot of the IRA rank and file, that was the question that was coming up. You know, why are we not defending our people from these attacks? And these questions, along with the political question that's again very sort of central to the Republican movement of abstentionism, whether they should recognize the institutions of partitioned Ireland as legitimate, i.e. the parliament in Dublin and the parliament in Del Fasse, and whether they should stand candidates and so on. Over this question, over the question of whether the IRA should be taking up arms to defend Catholic communities, the IRA splits into its two wings. So the militarists, as they were kind of called at the time, and the self-defense people in favour of defending Catholic communities were the provisional IRA. So they were the ones who went on to be the kind of, I guess, the more famous IRA. They had more support over the years. And in the other half became the officials, the official IRA, who today are incarnated as the Workers' Party. So they made a kind of turn towards Stalinism, essentially. And in this quest to find a political roots, to building support among the working class in North of Ireland and in South, the officials as the Workers' Party, they adopted kind of Stalinist politics. Whereas the provisionalists were an explicitly nationalist organisation. They rejected class struggle. And very often they would have members who were explicitly kind of sectarians, who wanted to drive all Protestants out of Ireland and so on. But after this period, after this kind of failure, the Civil Rights Association and the kind of protestants that existed, they had huge potential really. Like I said, they initially had this kind of class appeal, much more than a sectarian appeal. And in very many situations, they were kind of challenging state power. They'd taken control of small areas where they'd set up, they would control essentially law and order there. However, the Civil Rights Association, as an organisation, it was devoid of class ideas, despite this potential. So they were an organisation that had, again, a kind of Stalinist sort of political line, in any way. So a big sort of influential part of the Civil Rights Association, this kind of alliance, was the Communist Party of Ireland and some sort of Republicans as well, through the Republican clubs, these more left-wing Republicans. And they eventually just had this position, which was expressed by a guy called Dr. Johnson that the Civil Rights Association and the task of Irish revolutionaries was just to gain equal democratic rights for Catholics in Northern Ireland. And once that was sorted out, then they would move on to the next stage, which would be to unite Ireland, so on a capitalist basis, to unite the North and South. And only after, you know, these two stages of the kind of, you know, of choosing democratic rights and a kind of democratic revolution in Ireland, only after that would socialism be posed as a real kind of concrete question. Obviously this is something that we disagree with. And it led to the Civil Rights Association essentially kind of fizzling out and becoming irrelevant. And being unable to cut across the rising kind of sectarian division that happened after 1969. Because after this period really, the kind of, apart from isolated kind of incidents, the sort of political trajectory and the political kind of atmosphere was, became dominated just by kind of paramilitarism, by paramilitary attacks. Large movements of people and so on, they kind of withdrew and they became sort of less important. So this sort of began really in kind of 1970. And like I said, the Civil Rights Association became just politically frozen in this period, frozen in kind of pre-1968 kind of policies of, you know, you can't talk about socialism from the platform, you just have to talk about, you know, these kind of equal rights and so on. And even some elements of it, they would argue for, you know, equal rights to what, like, people have in Britain, you know, they would frame it in those kind of terms that, you know, it was like full British rights, full British standards, was their kind of, was their slogan, which obviously doesn't really appeal to people who think that the British are there, obviously, to rule over them. So despite the troops being sent in and some sort of concessions, so the Royal Archdiocese was disarmed, the bee specials were abolished and so on. The feeling amongst, you know, the majority of people who were on these barricades and so on, these bogside rioters, and the kind of Catholic community was that nothing was really changing, that the Northern Irish state was kind of still left in tact, O'Neill was still Prime Minister and so on. And this gradually became obvious, as the army became much more kind of less viewed as a kind of neutral organisation there to protect them, but as a hostile, occupying force, and indeed they gradually came to behave like that as well. So a standard kind of event from early 1970s and the 31st of March 1970, when again an orange parade is planned through the town of Bally Murphy, which is kind of just around Belfast really, and actually provokes Catholic residents and the British army, they respond, they're in this kind of policing rules part of Operation Banner, they try to contain the crowds, contain the rioters, and it leads to clashes between them and people being shot at by the British army of course. And or in this time the provisionals have kind of emerged as a group and they start to plan their kind of campaign against the British army in Ireland. So it's kind of the ending of what was kind of thought of as this kind of truce between Catholic communities in the army, this idea that they'll just kind of treat each other with a certain amount of kind of cool to respect, but yeah, where are we? I don't know, I was going to talk about it there. Anyway, so yeah, in 1970s, so there was also a growth in this time. So around this time the kind of the rabid kind of reactionary kind of like loyalist kind of supremist kind of groups around Ian Paisley, you know, were calling for a campaign against the IRA, a big campaign for like a people's militia and so on. And again, to further prove to like a lot of Catholic kind of residents that the British army and the kind of the orange sort of state, as it was called, was not really on their side and was not going to act as a neutral body. In 1970 the UDR was once, and I think this is off what overlooked as a significant kind of thing. So a large kind of Protestant, loyalist, paramilitary group existed at the time called the UDA, so the Ulster Defense Association. So it doesn't take much thinking to see the connection between the Ulster Defense Association and the section of the British army, the Ulster Defense Regiment, which became one of, which historically is one of the largest regiments of the British army ever formed. Originally basically was this kind of people's militia. It was a part-time organization, people were allowed to participate with their own arms and so on. And many Protestants obviously joined it as this idea that we need to defend themselves against the IRA and also to join this campaign to destroy the IRA. And yes, in June 1970, which is when the, it's when the provisionals kind of make their first big appearance as these kind of defenders of kind of the Catholic community. So it's called the Battle of St. Matthews. So it happened in Belfast in the short-strand area, which is not far from where I grew up. Where again there was a kind of an orange march very close to this kind of Catholic area led to sort of clashes and riots and there was groups of kind of armed loyalists turned up and it was the provisionals they were engaged in the gun battle with them and with the elements of the police in the army as well to defend this kind of small area from again what they thought was going to be an ensuing kind of pogrom and sort of sectarian slaughter of people there. And this leads essentially to one of the big provocative actions that would really turn the population against the army which was the Falls Road curfew. So again a kind of famous event in the history of the Troubles. So it was an enforced curfew, so people were out after this time, they were arrested and there were very many house searchers, then there were basically house searches. So it was portrayed as like an anti-IRA operation, so trying to seize arms, trying to find members of the IRA hiding in areas of the Falls Road. And a particularly brutal method for employing people's houses were completely turned over. You know, windows smashed in, doors kicked in, furniture just completely ripped apart, floorboards ripped up, people's houses were completely turned over really. And this obviously turned people towards the IRA. So it you know there was a leader of the Belfast Brigade of the IRA at the time said you know they could barely contain the amount of people that were ready to join. They said they could fill the Falls Road Park with volunteers, which is like a kind of, I don't know like a kilometer square of people you know. And as around this time as well the IRA campaign, they make this turn towards individual sort of terroristic methods. So they abduct, they famously abduct two off duty soldiers and kind of murder them in the hills above Belfast. And in response to the kind of this this campaign from the from the original IRA. In 1971 Operation Demetrius was planned, which is an operation by the British Army to supposedly capture suspected IRA members and to intern them. So to imprison them without trials. This is the beginning of internment, which again became a big massive kind of a grievance in Northern Ireland. It was unprecedented. Internment had been used before in both the south and the north of Ireland. This was unprecedented because it was a unilateral action by the British government to launch this internment. Originally the operation was planned to be started on August 10th, but just to give you an example of the kind of the atmosphere at the time. It was brought a day forward because there was unrest in Belfast due to the the army killing a man called Harry Thornton, who was a completely innocent man. He was driving a delivery van through Belfast which backfired a local nearby kind of group of British Army soldiers immediately turned on the van and shot it up. Thornton, as I said, was killed and his his passenger was shocked and was dragged out of the vehicle and was taken to a local RAC station where he was beaten and tortured. So again in the 1970s, so after this kind of failure of this kind of a civil rights kind of movement, it's in the 1970s and days when the real kind of darkest periods of the troubles begin. This descent into sectarian violence and into particularly brutal methods of oppression. So as I said in Operation Demetrius 342 people were taken to makeshift internment camps. Most of them the intelligence was rubbish, most of them were not IRA members and even many of them who were were like 17, 18 year old, like young kids and stuff like that who had said they joined the IRA or something like that and maybe they had, but they weren't trained in the use of weapons, they weren't going planting bombs and stuff like that. They were just joining this organization which they thought was going to help them defend their neighborhood from attacks. And particularly infamously, 14 were selected for what was then called deep interrogation, which obviously bears resemblance to what we now call enhanced interrogation techniques. So these were the, this is just again a particular aside and kind of method or a side in this kind of story here, but these methods of torture and interrogation which were developed by the British army they're called the five, the five techniques, so hooding, sensory deprivation, stress positions, things like that. These were used in these 14 men who were left permanently damaged from this experience. And just an example of the kind of colonial methods and innovations that the British and army were doing at this time and were making at this time, which essentially gave birth to modern torture. In fact the British government was sued by the European Court of Human Rights in the 1970s over these of these methods, which they successfully defended in court as being defined as not being torture. So there's European Union to the rescue again. So obviously the internment leads to mass opposition and real kind of mass opposition. The masses do take part again this time. So there are strikes, there are boycotts, there's rent strikes, there's non-payment of taxes and the state is basically unable to cope with these kind of things. Unfortunately trade union and kind of like labour movement leaders are basically slanted over the whole thing. They see Operation Demetrius and internment as just like a policing action against Republicans against the IRA. They take a face value and it means that the movement just further descends into sectarian violence and more members joining the provisional IRA. Even the official IRA, which formally didn't condone the terroristic methods of the provisional, they began to, they had the eventually felt need to kind of ip the provisional and plant bombs and kill soldiers and so on because they could steal their support kind of draining away because they were seen as they kind of do nothing half of the IRA. So from then onward really, in the Lyre kind of 1970s is when and in the kind of 19s it's when this campaign of bombings and shootings and so on really comes into its own and the provisional IRA become extremely proficient at it. They become funded from abroad, they get weapons sent to them by by Libya and so on and they become absolutely kind of committed to this military strategy of we'll just basically bring the British army to its knees and then they'll they'll withdraw and then Northern Ireland we return to the rest of Ireland and which ultimately does not succeed. But in this period like the 70s and 80s, like I said, some of the darkest kind of moments and the ugliest kind of results of this individual terroristic kind of strategy. So, you know, just shootings are kind of innocent people, individual soldiers and policemen. Most secondly, I think, is this is the kind of the beginning of the of the pub bombings. So I don't know if you can imagine a more obvious direct attack on just ordinary working people and to place a bomb in a pub and this happens several times, you know, with loyalists and Republican kind of paramilitaries. In the 1980s with the election of Margaret Thatcher, the British army's kind of policy moves from containment to more aggressive militaristic policy of trying to militarily defeat the IRA and aggressive policies which lead to, for example, the hunger strikes, which is a big significant element or moment in the development of Sinn Fein and of the provisional IRA. Because to this point, you know, Jerry Adams has just become kind of leader of Sinn Fein and the IRA around this time. He sees from the hunger strikes, which were essentially a recategorization of Republican prisoners from kind of political prisoners and kind of prisoners of war, essentially, to being categorized as just mere criminals, just, you know, you know, their bombings and so on and their kind of gun running and stuff, they were just treated as criminals. So they wanted a hunger strike against this and demanded they were treated as prisoners of war, the British army, the British government recognized the support and the legitimacy that the provisional IRA had and they were engaged in a war with them. But this led to a kind of mass campaign of public support. You know, people like Bobby Sands, one of the most famous hunger strike groups, he became elected as an MP when he was on hunger strike and who eventually died on hunger strike. You know, they became world famous kind of figures, essentially, you know, they were they were no more in the world and people sympathized with kind of the plight and the suffering of these people. And of course, the callousness and the cruelty with which Margaret Thatcher let them sort of start to death. And this kind of mass movement, you know, Jerry Adams and the kind of Sinn Fein leadership of the time, Martin Mages and so on, they began to see that they can take political advantage of this. They kind of make this almost this turn to the kind of political path is what they would refer to as, you know. At the time in the 70s, it was this policy of which was expressed in a Sinn Fein conference speech, which is, you know, the armor lights, which is a rifle in one hand and the ballot in the other. And this is how we're going to like win Irish freedom, you know, which is kind of sounds very like a very strange thing. But, you know, as Marxists, when we kind of study and how we understand, you know, the methods of individual terrorism and obviously of kind of parliamentary and electoral like reformism, you know, superficially, they seem very, very distant, very, very far apart. But we see in the example of Sinn Fein, provisional Sinn Fein in the IRA that often they can be very closely married together, really. And indeed they were. So there was this campaign, a continued campaign of bombings, which is eventually extended to England even in the 1970s. And as well as this strategy of electoral kind of of trying to stand in elections and win elections on mainly kind of sort of left reformist kind of platforms, you know. And I don't have time to talk about these little bits and pieces, but essentially it comes to an end. What does it as they as as the provisional leadership and Jerry Adamson, they begin to realize that people are exhausted of these bombing campaigns. They're tired of it. Jerry Adams, you know, as you know, he appears like a reasonable man. But he he's responsible for or is thought to be responsible for some particularly gruesome things. But he has always kind of maintained, I suppose, that, you know, the the IRA only fights when people wanted to fight. And like I said, of these these pub bombings, these kind of attacks and ordinary working people and so on, we see people are disgusted by this and they can see and they can feel that it seems it seems to happen to almost anyone and there's no kind of safety for it. So this kind of declining support really for the provisional. And so they they begin to by the late in the 1980s. So in 1986, 1988, Jerry Adams and the provisional leadership they propose, they start to propose peace talks. Again, Thatcher wants to exclude them. There's protests from kind of loyalists and so on to exclude Sinn Féin and you know, smash and then exclude them from peace talks and so on. And through the 1990s, there's a series of kind of ceasefires and so on from the provisional IRA where they agree to put down arms as long as peace talks go on. And this obviously ultimately results in the Good Friday Agreement. So a kind of rerun. Essentially, the the British were in class for all further troubles and been trying to get some kind of compromise going whether it be some sort of power sharing government. So I the ending of kind of the Unionist kind of domination of the North and trying to channel kind of the Catholic and the nationalist anger into kind of safe channels and that's kind of essentially. So there's the Sunday of the agreement in the 1970s, there's the Anglo-Irish agreement, things like that. And in 1997 with the Good Friday Agreement is the ultimate kind of supposedly successful attempt at doing this which obviously sets up with Northern Irish Assembly, the executive power sharing between political parties representing the nationalist and the Unionist half sort of of the population. And that essentially leads to Northern Ireland now but though Good Friday was in 1997, you know, the saga of kind of sectarian division and it doesn't end there, it really continues, you know. Like I said, it wasn't until 2007 that Operation Banner was officially over. And in 2006, you know, the assembly collapsed again and since then it's been a series of kind of collapses and kind of restarts of the assembly and the executive. It's never really, it never really worked. And it's because, you know, it doesn't really represent the solution to the problem. It just represents trying to kind of sort of put a sticking plaster on what is a kind of deep, deeply kind of reactionary and divided situation in which with a lack of kind of a kind of class conscious and sort of principled and revolutionary left, all kinds of dark and horrible forces will flow into kind of the vacuum left behind, created by people's kind of anger at how they're treated and by new feelings of kind of powerlessness and so on. So I guess to conclude then, obviously I have to say, that I think that's what we have to build in Northern Ireland, you know. Although when you look back in the Troubles, it can be easy to become very, very cynical I think and to think that it's a place dominated by violence, it's still very, very haunted by the kind of past people who trust each other and so on. But as Marxists we do have, you know, faith in the working class as a class that, you know, ultimately does recognise its own interests, that this kind of sectarian killing is something used by the ruling class to lower it over the working class. And it's through creating a kind of a revolutionary and Marxist organisation that can lead the working class in Ireland's north and south, that we can offer a way out of this impasse and a real kind of future to the lost generations that exist in Northern Ireland.