"Catholicism, the religion of peace...."

"those damn dark-skinned bearded muslim terrorists posing as white-skinned cleanshaven catholic feckle-faced irishmen...."

When Catholic clergy starts advocating this behavior and when the people planting the bombs start giving religious justifications for their actions, you'll have a legitimate comparision.

As it stands, you are only demonstrating an inability to differentiate between violence justified by religion and violence justified by nationalism. Or maybe its more a willful ignorance to acknowledge a fairly obvious distincition. Either way, you sound very stupid.

And of course, anyone who knows a little bit about this situation would know that the governmen's inexplicable failure to disarm the Ulster militias along with the IRA is a big reason for the continued violence.

"Yeah. Bombs in Belfast have nothing to do with religion. Sure."

I love when people think they are being sarcastic but are saying something that is 100% true.

The bombs in fact have nothing to do with religion. If you think the Republicans and the Ulsters are fighting over the role of clergy in Christianity or something similar, you're a complete idiot.

It is a conflict based on nationalism and always has been. The ignorance on display here is astounding.

"would be shocked if they aren't

not the church... but rogue clergy.."

There are undoubtedly priests who have helped the IRA. But they aren't preaching about blowing up Ulsters during mass. There are no "Death to (fill in blank)" chants going on during services. Nobody is being told at mass that it is their duty to harm anyone. There is a huge difference between a member of the clergy taking part in violence on his own time knowing full well he's sinning and a member of the clergy preaching to his congregation that violence is a religious duty, not a sin.

"thats basically what al qaeda's mullahs are... rogue clergy."

To you, they are. But there's a huge number of these mullahs with millions of followers in dozens of countries. They're pretty much their own sect at this point.

"The basis of the Irish troubles was Catholic/Protestant hatred."

They hate each other because the Protestants, who were brought in from Scottland, supported the British Crown, who shit on Ireland for hundreds of years. Originally, people didn't like being moved off their land and treated like 2nd class citizens in their own country. Then over the years they just kept hating each other because they were already fighting for so long. Nothing to do with actual religious ideology.

It was really a classic British Empire move. They turn one local population against another to make it easier to control both. If there aren't two populations to turn on one another, they import one. They invited all the Jews into what is now Israel to make the Palestine easier to control back in the day too.

"As for nationalism, there is a Catholic run Ireland. (Personally, I think the RAF should have turned its sites on nazi-supporting Dublin after WW2, but what you gonna do). "

I can only imagine what you're referring to but based on the rest of your post, I'm sure its some biased nonsense. I'm sure some Irish saw the Nazis as an opportunity to get rid of a long standing enemy but the country was neutral in the war and plenty of Irish fought for the Allies - many in the British army in fact. I've never heard of any Irish joining the Axis forces.

And there would have been no RAF or Britain after WWII if it wasn't for the large number of Irish-American GIs who save their asses, BTW. If the Brits would have attacked Dublin after the Americans bailed their asses out, we would have crushed those fuckers and deservedly so.

"The idea of the "liberation" of NI from an "oppressive" invader by a bunch of murdering criminals is no different that that of the Iraq jihadists and taliban."

Nowadays this is true. Its been put to a vote and the Republicans lost. It is also true that Ulster militias are currently more active and more violent than the IRA.