Southerners wrote songs about Warrington, formed peace movements because of IRA violence - but I can’t point to any mainstream effort to oppose/understand who the glenane gang, or Shankill butchers were, care about Loughinisland, state violence, &collusion.
V selective interest

They were and are revolted by SF glorifying murder but dont know or care about the deaths of catholics here. As I’ve seen the apathy to the life my parents lived, and the fear I grew up with, I always make it understood I’m Irish but from the north. Because it’s important
Showing absolutely no interest in the murder of the people in the areas SF are elected to represent is really selectively deciding whose lives you think are worth anything. I doubt anyone south of Louth Monaghan or Cavan could tell you or care about the Reavey brothers
There was and is no hand wringing about children being shot in the fields by soldiers in front of their parents or hunted down in their own house and killed in front of their families- where were the marches, the songs, the movements?
“But Sinn Fein said this”- is of zero comfort to victims of state or loyalist violence and you are actually framing their loved ones murders in such a way that you’re almost making them partially culpable for their own fate or excusing it somehow when it’s nothing to do with SF
I completely agree with hearing, platforming and engaging with ex prisoners - but the media reception that Billy Hutchinson got in the South was absolutely not what a republican prisoner would have been treated and we all know it
“God it must have been awful growing up around IRA”. No, that wasn’t what I was primarily afraid of going through 4 checkpoints in Newry/driving past giant military base in clohogue every day, when daddy was going out to work after loughinisland or going to GAA matches, no.
My wee sisters used to cry unless the army or police shone their red torches into their car seats when we were growing up they were that used to checkpoints. Some of them were lovely, to mummy when she asked them to do it, some were absolutely disgusting
And lastly if you’re wondering why TikTok generation republicans see it simplistically, maybe reflect on how your media has helped frame what happened here simply and not empathised with their community and the terror it too suffered. Why it ignores ballymurphy & collusion.
And because of that who else have these kids got to listen to that has ever given a damn about where they are from and what their families went through?
Last I’ll say on this - Derry Girls was a comedy yes, but to me and so many here, it was like watching a completely accurate Documentary.
Southern Twitter proving yet again that so many cannot look at people killed up here without saying “but the IRA” - news flash, it often wouldn’t have mattered if you were wearing an “i h8 the IRA” jumper, if you were in the wrong place or identified as a catholic, it was enough

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