Government has good reason to beware years ending with a nine

WATCHING this week’s RTÉ programme on the beginning of the Troubles in 1969, I was struck by the similarity of what happened then and what has been happening in the past year.

Are we on the brink of more strife? For most people the trouble started in October 1968 when a civil rights march was attacked by the RUC. The genie was out of the bottle and things got steadily worse. By August 1969 Taoiseach Jack Lynch was proclaiming we could not “stand by”. But in reality he had no intention of getting involved.

It would have been crazy to try to intervene in the North militarily. If the Irish army had invaded the North, it would have been wiped out. To fight one needs either the vitality of hate, or a least the sense of defending one’s home. Our army would not have been defending their homes and they would not have had the vitality of hate.