Gerry Adams says Thatcher caused "great suffering" in Ireland

[FunkyLeprechaun]

100. My dad is Protestant and my mom is Catholic

Yet my dad is the redheaded one! My mom's side of the family is Black Irish. My mom and dad got married in the early 70s but couldn't do so in Ireland at all due to their religions so they got married abroad.

A lot of my relatives can be traced to Scotland, especially my Protestant relatives, on both sides (MacLamont, Coulter, to name a few). My Catholic granddad said there's a lore that his side of the family is descended from people who were involved in the Spanish Armada due to the dark hair, green eyes, and olive complexion that side of the family had (I didn't inherit that! I inherited my dad's looks, fair hair and freckles).

When my mom and dad got married, they lost a lot of friends because of their mixed marriage (it's nothing new, my mom's father was Catholic and her mother was Protestant, his entire family shunned her). Nowadays, as they've moved back to NI, people couldn't give a toss. I often go to Catholic friendly areas, near where the Mourne Seafood Bar is and Falls Road in Belfast. The Protestants, especially on Shankill Road, seem very bitter and stuck in the past but that's slowly dissipating, as seen in this year's St Paddy's day parade in Downpatrick.

It's a beautiful country and people are working to shake the past off them, including shunning the IRA. Gerry Adams left Northern Ireland politics to pursue politics in the Republic but he's not as popular as he thought he would be in the Republic. Sinn Fein has completely denounced the IRA (McGuinness used to be IRA and he now doesn't like the IRA). My mom and I were agape when we saw the picture of the Queen shaking McGuinness's hand. My grandfather, the Catholic one, knew the Queen's cousin Lord Mountbatten, who was assassinated by the IRA (and Mountbatten LOVED Ireland and everyone, including the Catholics who lived near him, loved him too).

I've had relatives who were killed by both the British Army/Orange Order and the IRA. The IRA's bombs were indiscriminate, they killed people, regardless of what religion they were (they even murdered Ronan Kerr, a Catholic policeman, for working alongside Protestants). My mom and dad's university friends were murdered (the IRA regularly targeted Queen's at the end of the year), my dad was a doctor at the Royal Victoria Hospital and often saw the result of IRA bombs, my mom survived the Bloody Friday attack (she was in Donegal Quay). I felt terrified after Omagh happened (I was shopping in Bangor when it happened and we evacuated the area because we didn't know whether the IRA was targeting just the one town or multiple towns).

I'm really shocked and appalled to see posters on here embracing the IRA ideology and assuming a whole lot about Ireland/Northern Ireland which isn't true.