When the IRA was killing innocent people with their guns and bombs in Northern Ireland and England throughout the 1970’s, 80’s and 90’s, there was always the hope that it would end through negotiation.

There was a political channel from Westminster to the Army Council via Sinn Fein. It took nearly thirty years and much bloodshed, but eventually a solution was found. Their aim? Brits out. It didn’t happen but depending on what side you were on, a win had been secured by way of the so called “peace process”.

So likening the Isis suicide bombing in Manchester last week with the indiscriminate IRA campaign is somewhat trite. At least the IRA was eventually willing to talk. Their aim, as unrealistic as it was (to think that the British would be bombed out of the North), was at least tangible by other means. With this abomination known as Isis, we have no clue what they really want or how they are to be negotiated with.

In a similar way the debate about the Provisional IRA can be brought back eight hundred years if we want. On one hand, trying to find the trigger to the emergence of Isis can be traced to the failed 2010 Arab Spring or the 2003 invasion of Iraq on the other. Or we can then go back centuries if we want to find the source.

WARPED IDEOLOGY

I don’t see Isis as an army but more as a belief that will be hard to exterminate even if Putin and Trump worked together to do so. To me there are more than enough people willing to carry on its warped ideology. An ideology that has stretched to beyond getting the West out of Middle Eastern affairs. Solving the problem has certainly not been helped by trying to impose a Western type democracy to a culture that is obviously adverse to it.

It is in its more fundamentalist form a warped desire to make us subservient to their ways which are diametrically opposed to Western culture including pop music. In the meantime, the young brainwashed jihadis continue to believe in fantasy. In a world of 7 billion people, there are lunatics of all faiths and races with no respect for human life even their own.

Being able to latch onto a campaign like that of Islamic fundamentalism gives such chilling minds a bit of a kick what with their “virgins in heaven” and Isis is lapping it up. In America, the young white male equivalent buys a gun and heads for the local high school.

In Northern Ireland, there was always the hope that peace would prevail through negotiation. In this instance, who exactly are we to negotiate with and about what specifically? CL.