Depends when that assassination would happen. If it happpens just before invasion, Argentine military junta might decide that it would be dishonorable invade islands which nation is mourning their queen or at least thinking that it would look really bad for them. In other hand these guys weren't ever really rational on their actions. During invasin not so sure. Perhaps they can accept ceasefire but it is not certain.
WI: The IRA assassinateQueen Elizabeth II?
- Thread starter SlickerVyn
- Start date
Depends when that assassination would happen. If it happpens just before invasion, Argentine military junta might decide that it would be dishonorable invade islands which nation is mourning their queen or at least thinking that it would look really bad for them. In other hand these guys weren't ever really rational on their actions. During invasin not so sure. Perhaps they can accept ceasefire but it is not certain.
Exactamente
A particularly popular form with punk / alt rock bands in 70s and 80s
Ref was to the brick that fell and nearly hit the queen
We can expect some more massacres by some of the Protestant paramilitary groups in Ulster against Catholics. Apparently they were quite brutal and kept the Catholics in a bit of an apartheid state, though the Irish state did not want to annex areas while leaving British laws that were more permission with abortion, divorce, etc. Buuuut the Ulsterites would have been happier with more rights for themselves, or so says a book I read. Back to the actually relevant parts here.
Where is this happening? Are their other casualties? A nice woman gets gunned down as children gives her flowers, or gets blasted by shrapnel as a car in some local parade detonates, some IRA agents having come to some town in the Midlands to kill her off. How she dies will have an effect on things, if only on the rage felt by other people. Get some foreign dignitaries for some added anger from overseas. If the Irish government is not actively trying to throttle the IRA after this then the group will fall even further into the Leftist sphere, and I can see a lot of members trying to get to Libya where they would be welcomed as agents to be used against the British. One big issue though is what faction is doing this, as many groups claimed the Irish Republican Army as there name, though added extra words to It later on.
Where is this happening? Are their other casualties? A nice woman gets gunned down as children gives her flowers, or gets blasted by shrapnel as a car in some local parade detonates, some IRA agents having come to some town in the Midlands to kill her off. How she dies will have an effect on things, if only on the rage felt by other people. Get some foreign dignitaries for some added anger from overseas. If the Irish government is not actively trying to throttle the IRA after this then the group will fall even further into the Leftist sphere, and I can see a lot of members trying to get to Libya where they would be welcomed as agents to be used against the British. One big issue though is what faction is doing this, as many groups claimed the Irish Republican Army as there name, though added extra words to It later on.
It’s ultimately not going to matter which faction did it. The whole Republican community will be blamed for it.
True.
Elizabeth II was liked even by Irish Catholic Americans. She welcomed John Paul II to England in 1982. Their supporters also understood that the royals are figureheads.
It's Northern Ireland not Ulster. Ulster includes 3 counties in the Republic of Ireland. I'd never use the term "paramilitary". They're terrorists just like the IRA. Both utterly evil.
So, say the IRA assassinates the Queen in 1983 (no particular reaaon, I just decided after the falklands war) and as a few here sugested a vengful British government clamps down even harder on the IRA and there is no Good Friday Agreement. The troubles continue til today.
How does this affect Northern Ireland as a filming destination? Doe filmakers still shoot their movies and shows in the various castles etc with all the risks? or do they choose somewhere else? Did filmakers use it as much as today before the agreement?
How does this affect Northern Ireland as a filming destination? Doe filmakers still shoot their movies and shows in the various castles etc with all the risks? or do they choose somewhere else? Did filmakers use it as much as today before the agreement?
I didn't consider that bit. But honestly, I doubt it. I also doubt the Troubles would continue till today, but it certainly be extended. Even with it over, the situation may still be volatile from the old wounds that it's not particularly safe.
I too don't think it would be attractive security wise to film there
What lead to my thaought and later question, was thinking of thinking of that famous case of a car bomb in Belfast that ended up killing Australian tourists. Which then led me to think about tourism there in general.
The Law Must Take Its Course, but the European Court will have its say first and may quash that.
I am more interested in how this would affect British politics if it happened in Lithingow in 1970?
Would Edward Heath be able to hold on to PM position or would a more aggressive Anti-IRA wing of the Tories become inevitable and come to power?
I doubt that. Britain had already basically abolished death penalty almost every case. And would European Council even allow that?
Thing is that the British intelligence apparatus had a fairly good general knowledge of most of the significant players on both sides, but largely avoided crossing the lines that a totalitarian state would have done to suppress an opposition and subversive war. I think it would be as read, that if QEII was assassinated, the gloves would have come off and pretty much all of the Principal internal structure of both sides rounded up and detained by any means, illegal or not. . If
Everyone is commenting that the IRA would be “crushed extremely brutally” if such a thing happened. I do not think this is actually possible. Could the British state take extreme measures and inflict horrendous losses on the IRA through a sustained and aggressive crackdown? Absolutely. Could the British military do so without also creating the same conditions that turned the region completely upside down and bring it on the verge of a full scale civil war like in 1970 to 1972? I don’t think so.
Operation Banner’s initial phases included mass raids and house searches, indiscriminate internment of all suspected IRA men, cases of torture like with the Hooded Men, and an ambivalence to growing offensives by loyalist paramilitaries. This did damage to the IRA but paradoxically served to massively increase one of the main impulses for young Irish Catholics to become involved in physical force republicanism: community defense. The more the community seemed to be on the back foot, the more volunteers and support paramilitaries got from their constituent communities. While the murder of the Queen would be a PR blow for republicans short term, I do believe a brutal British crackdown would engender much more international outcry and pressure long term. Hell, Mountbatten was a pretty senior royal and that didn’t so much as make them stumble. Obviously the Queen is different, but not incredibly so. But essentially, a massive British offensive would create conditions similar to the early 1970s again and that would create untenable conditions again that the British state historically found far less preferable to the smaller scale violence of mid 70s onward. Without being committed to a campaign of full on ethnic cleansing, I don’t believe a ‘more brutal’ Operation Banner is going to manage to destroy the Republican paramilitaries.
Operation Banner’s initial phases included mass raids and house searches, indiscriminate internment of all suspected IRA men, cases of torture like with the Hooded Men, and an ambivalence to growing offensives by loyalist paramilitaries. This did damage to the IRA but paradoxically served to massively increase one of the main impulses for young Irish Catholics to become involved in physical force republicanism: community defense. The more the community seemed to be on the back foot, the more volunteers and support paramilitaries got from their constituent communities. While the murder of the Queen would be a PR blow for republicans short term, I do believe a brutal British crackdown would engender much more international outcry and pressure long term. Hell, Mountbatten was a pretty senior royal and that didn’t so much as make them stumble. Obviously the Queen is different, but not incredibly so. But essentially, a massive British offensive would create conditions similar to the early 1970s again and that would create untenable conditions again that the British state historically found far less preferable to the smaller scale violence of mid 70s onward. Without being committed to a campaign of full on ethnic cleansing, I don’t believe a ‘more brutal’ Operation Banner is going to manage to destroy the Republican paramilitaries.
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Thing is, done comprehensively and with due disregard for the law, it would probably take a generation for the operational base needed to act as a terrorist organization to recover, and who knows how that new generation will adapt. The second thing is that both sides of the conflict would be remarkably keen to rat out everything they know about the opposition. Every bit of supposition and history becomes fair game, passive support networks, safe houses, caches etc., not just the foot soldiers, to suppress it. Given the impetus and if there is a degree of ruthless pragmatism and intent to completely eradicate both sides as effective organizations by the UK, then with that background they could pretty much gut the structures comprehensively of both sides at the same time.
Part of the problem though is that there was a fairly direct institutional bias in the leadership of Operation Banner towards the violence committed by the UDA/UVF/loyalist paramilitaries. Especially early on in the conflict. Their actions were seen as a purely defensive reaction to the alleged inauguration of violence in the six counties by violent Republican ideologues. On the ground, the Ulster Defense Regiment played a support role to the army and it has been pretty well proven now that soldiers of that regiment were active simultaneously in loyalist paramilitaries. There’s fairly well documented though disputed evidence of British army and intelligence collusion with armed loyalism as well - generally considered to be part and parcel of Frank Kitson’s counterinsurgency strategy.
With a Provo attack on the Queen, I think these institutional flaws are going to be exacerbated rather than minimized. A British army going outside the law to fully crush Republican paramilitaries is going to almost necessarily need to use loyalist paramilitaries to supplement their efforts… Lists of prominent PIRA/Sinn Fein targets ‘go missing’ when the Army can’t conveniently justify their detention or death. This then, of course, triggers a sectarian Catholic counterreaction as they see the supposedly neutral army acting no better than the hated B-Specials and the return of army occupations of the Bogside, Ballymurphy, etc are going to trigger another mass counter reaction like they did in the early 70s which heightens the untenability of normal governance and once again puts the British on the back foot in terms of the international spotlight (I’m also going to assume that putting scared young men with guns in the middle of rioting hostile communities again is going to lead to at least another massacre).
I think it’s also worth mentioning that the point about destroying the leadership is well taken, but it also must be acknowledged that a significant cohort of Republican leadership came pretty directly out of involvement in the early 1970s. Men like Gerry Adams or Bobby Sands were created by the conflict rather than being some trained reserve coming in from before the Troubles began. I do believe that it would take less than you might think for another Army fiasco in West Belfast to produce another ad-hoc generation of leaders and junior officers in the Republican paramilitaries unless you reintroduce some far more sweeping internment which produces another *massive can of worms*. Groups like the UDA pretty much produced their entire structure through grassroots leaders and though it did produce a lot of structural issues in their organization, they could keep in the fight and I think the same applies to republican paramilitaries
A multi-pronged approach against all paramilitaries could potentially be a good solution, but historically that wasn’t how those institutions were thinking and working in this time frame and now we are giving those same people more of a reason to be harsh and brutal rather than precise and exact. I’m thinking, at best, this offensive goes down in another costly stalemate or, at worst, is a pyrrhic victory for republicanism.
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