It was a chilly night in Philadelphia, back in the early ’80s when it still looked like it does in the first “Rocky” movies. The crowd, some holding signs, marched in its circle, chanting the name Bobby Sands. Across the ocean, in the infamous H-Block prison in Northern Ireland, Sands, a member of the Irish Republican Army, lay dying of his hunger strike. It is a very early memory of mine, and one that underscores a basic fact about growing up in my Irish Catholic family. We supported the IRA.
Like most American supporters of the IRA, we did not celebrate the death of innocents, we did not hate Protestants, and we did not provide any material support. We did, however, believe that the United Kingdom was an occupying force in Northern Ireland, which the Irish people had a right to fight. Since a standard military engagement was out of the question, that left only acts of terror.
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