Reformed Covenanter
Cancelled Commissioner
I have started reading a book on a terrorist organisation known as the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), and the author makes a rather shocking observation concerning the number of people killed in the Northern Ireland "Troubles":
The UVF has cast a long, dark shadow over life in Northern Ireland. During the troubles it killed 564 people, mostly Catholic civilians, and injured thousands more Protestants and Catholics between its first killing in 1966 and its most recent in 2010. Its violence – like that perpetrated by the IRA and its nearest rivals in the loyalist Ulster Defence Association (UDA) – has left behind a bloody legacy of almost 4,000 deaths and ten times as many injuries in a relatively small region of only 1.8 million people. Yet the physical and psychological scars on Northern Irish society are apparent to anyone who has taken the trouble to look. Had the same violence been unleashed on the population of Great Britain, the proportional numbers killed would have stood at 100,000, and, if it happened in the United States, the losses would have peaked somewhere in the region of the astronomically high figure of 1 million.
Aaron Edwards, UVF: Behind the Mask (Dublin: Merrion Press, Kindle Edition, 2017), preface (emphasis added).
The UVF has cast a long, dark shadow over life in Northern Ireland. During the troubles it killed 564 people, mostly Catholic civilians, and injured thousands more Protestants and Catholics between its first killing in 1966 and its most recent in 2010. Its violence – like that perpetrated by the IRA and its nearest rivals in the loyalist Ulster Defence Association (UDA) – has left behind a bloody legacy of almost 4,000 deaths and ten times as many injuries in a relatively small region of only 1.8 million people. Yet the physical and psychological scars on Northern Irish society are apparent to anyone who has taken the trouble to look. Had the same violence been unleashed on the population of Great Britain, the proportional numbers killed would have stood at 100,000, and, if it happened in the United States, the losses would have peaked somewhere in the region of the astronomically high figure of 1 million.
Aaron Edwards, UVF: Behind the Mask (Dublin: Merrion Press, Kindle Edition, 2017), preface (emphasis added).
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