What on earth is wrong with Ian Rankin's memory?

[tree_and_leaf]

It was fascinating to research the 1980s. I was at university then and thought myself political, yet I had forgotten so much: protests against US missiles on British soil; Greenham Common; animal rights; acid rain; global cooling; Reagan's star wars technology; the threat of nuclear attack; unrest in Ireland;* unrest in Scotland …

Or was he living under a rock? I remember all of that, with minimal prompting (certainly not research), and I was at primary school.

Although I'll admit I don't remember any unrest in Scotland comparable to the Troubles...


* How the hell can you forget the Troubles?

Comments

[tree_and_leaf]

Although it's amazing how many Americans you run across who think the IRA were romantic freedom fighters... (But Rankin grew up in Fife, so has little excuse for having forgotten).

[kerravonsen]

Stan Rogers (a Canadian) wrote an excellent song ("The House of Orange") in which the protagonist emphatically refuses to give funding to IRA fundraisers... so I would deduce that the IRA got a lot of their funding from naïve North Americans.

[tree_and_leaf]

Yes, they did, although it's remembered in the UK (and resented) as primarily an Irish-American thing. The stereotype is of idiots in Boston and New York who had actually never been back to the Old Country and hadn't got a clue about modern Ireland and somehow managed to overlook the nastiness of kneecappings and blowing up toddlers.

[tree_and_leaf]

In an odd coda, they also got money from Libya and the PLO,* because they saw it as a way for punishing Britain for being allied to America. It's probably a good job that the IRA never organised meet and greets for its supporters...


* And possibly also from the Stasi, although that doesn't seem to be very well substantiated. The Russians, mostly stayed out of it, though they did give some weapons to the "Official IRA", who were a Marxist splinter group. After 1973, though, the only people they killed were members of the P-IRA (the Provos, usually who people mean if they say the IRA) and the INLA, another republican group. Then they ended up getting into organised crime, though they did take part in the decomissioning of weapons scheme.

[legionseagle]

Including Rep. Peter King, a member of Congress, who got himself flung out of a UK courtroom for being somewhat partisan on the side of the defendant.

The resentment is quite strong in some quarters towards the Noraid idiots.