Jude Webber writes (Report, February 3) of Northern Ireland’s “three decades-long conflict involving republican paramilitaries fighting British forces to reunite Ireland”.
That’s a highly tendentious way of putting it. The IRA were terrorists, bent on changing the democratic status quo by violence. They murdered the vast majority of the 1,012 members of the security forces killed, and, according to Professor Liam Kennedy’s book Who Was Responsible for the Troubles (2020), the IRA killed 198 Catholic civilians up to 1999.
We’ve surely had more than enough experience of terrorism in recent decades not to euphemise it.
Andrew Anderson
Edinburgh, UK
