Re: After 35 years of bombs and blood a quiet voice ends the IRA's war
The "logjam" was caused by Unionists continually finding excuses to stall the peace process & not have to share power with the Republicans. They stated they wanted the IRA to start destroying their weapons before they would even sit down at the same table. The IRA did so. Then they changed the goalposts saying the IRA had to give up armed conflict altogether. They have now done that. Already the Unionists are saying it isn't good enough.
The Good Friday Agreement has been a catalogue of concessions being wrung from Republicans while they bend over backward to appease each ridiculous demand
Let's see the Unionists and their Loyalist paramilitaries decomission some weapons or declare an end to hostilities. It begs the question why they haven't been asked to do the same things that they demand the Republicans do before even talking with them. One set of rules for them, another set for everyone else. It's all delay tactics to hold up an end to the years of injustice and tyranny they have subjected countless people to.
They want to cling onto as much power as they can for as long as possible.
But they can only delay the inevitable. Our day shall come 
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The traditions of the Irish people are the oldest of any race in Europe north and west of the Alps, and they themselves are the longest settled on their own soil
- Edmund Curtis (A History of Ireland: From Earliest Times to 1922)
The Irish are one of the most ancient nations that I know of at this end of the world, and are from as mighty a race as the world ever brought forth.
For it is certain that Ireland hath had the use of letters very anciently and long before England; that they had letters anciently is nothing doubtful, for the Saxons of England are said to have their letters and learning, and learned men, from the Irish.
- Edmund Spenser (writer, and British Government Official in Ireland, AD 1596).
The renaissance began in Ireland seven hundred years before it was known in Italy. And Armagh, the ecclesiastical capital of Ireland, was at one time the metropolis of civilisation.
- Arsene Darmesteter, Professor of Old French and Literature
Ireland can indeed lay claim to a great past; she can not only boast of having been the birthplace and abode of high culture in the fifth and sixth centuries . . . but also of having made strenous efforts in the seventh and up to the tenth century to spread her learning among the German and Romance peoples, thus forming the actual fountain of our present continental civilisation.
- Heinrich Zimmer, Professor of Celtic and Sanskrit, Member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences
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