What an excellent question. What, I wonder, made Bush, Clinton, Reagan, Nixon, and Kennedy travel to Ireland? Why did Carter "internationalise" the Troubles by issuing a policy statement on Northern Ireland, when the situation in Northern Ireland was a UK domestic affair? I don't know, but maybe it's because many Americans have close links with Ireland, even if they have a misguided understanding of the problems there.

To suggest that nobody can make any valid contribution to this problem by discussing it is the language of the gunman or the bomber. I know you're ex-army, but you don't want to get trapped down that particular road. The only outcome will be more deaths and deeper hatred (if that's possible); but if Martin Sheen is, by any chance, reading this thread, maybe he'll see there was never any glory in what the IRA did, and reconsider his earlier comments about his uncle.

As for original input, aren't you expecting a lot? However, judging by the reaction from several posters here when I said the nub of the Irish problem is that the Irish themselves, not the British, have always been oppressors of their own people, I expressed an idea not previously encountered by them.