This didn’t seem to get much press in the US. It is a wonderful landmark that the violence in Northern Ireland has subsided enough for the UK to remove the bulk of its deployment. I only wish my ethnically Irish grandmother lived to see it; she was born in America along with her parents. Contrary to her feelings and Gerry Adams’ (the public face of Sinn Fein), the UK’s army was there to keep the Catholics and Protestants from openly killing each other. One of my freshman teachers at Marquette was an Irish graduate student named Aidan. He hailed from Belfast which he charmingly called the Beirut of Europe and he set people straight about what life was like there in his classes. It couldn’t be helped, we were all curious and most students attending a Jesuit school in the Midwest are part Irish so their sympathies were with the Catholic factions (the IRA, Sinn Fein). Many were taken aback, including Grandma, when Aidan stated that the British army kept the Catholics from being wiped out. He wasn’t keen on what the UK had done in the past neither. However, it didn’t matter anymore. The fighting had been going on for almost 20 years by then and most people were tired of it. Unemployment in both parts of Ireland was high and the educated citizens were leaving in droves; the Troubles made it much worse.
Love them or hate them, Clinton and Blair finally got what may be a lasting peace happening. Personally, I think the British majority grew sick of Ian Paisley and the other UDF extremists giving their nation a black eye. The UDF proved to be as thuggish as the IRA with their random murders. Grandma always had a chip on her shoulder with the English but after finally meeting some Brits over the years, I learned they weren’t proud of the situation. They found the conflict stupid because the rest of the UK is a functioning society, government and infrastructure with Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims and Hindus working together.
Hopefully, the end of Operation Banner signifies that Northern Ireland will finally move forward as a functioning democracy where denomination isn’t important; both factions are Christian so they’re not different religions, people and the media get this frequently wrong.