Who was Responsible for the Troubles?: The Northern Ireland Conflict By Liam Kennedy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This is a troubling book about the Northern Ireland Troubles. Nor has the troubling legacy of those Troubles gone away, to coin the infamous phrase of Gerry Adams. Liam Kennedy, a fine historian and long-time observer, commentator, and peace activist since his arrival as an academic at Queen’s University in 1976, is more qualified than most to write about it. At a time when Queen’s academics and students were targeted by Protestant and Catholic paramilitary terrorists, he was a courageous figure, publicly speaking out against them, where many more were intimidated into silence. So the reader will have to forgive him for this very disturbing analysis and conclusion that the paramilitaries and Sinn Féin, the party which is now the largest in Northern Ireland—and possibly, soon, in the whole of Ireland—have learnt nothing from the Troubles. Taking the question set out in the book title, ‘who was responsible’ for the obscenities of the Troubles, Kennedy takes us through the various actors and institutions, including the oft-repeated republican claim that the Unionist state was unreformable. He shows that the real power lay with London, not Stormont, and that reforms were coming through. Many of the demands of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights movement had been granted before the Provisional IRA went on the offensive and the violence only served to delay further reform. So what was the violence all about? Communal defence? Hardly; the IRA’s record defending Catholics against Protestant paramilitaries was not good, and it was responsible for killing and maiming more Catholic civilians than Protestant paramilitaries and the security forces put together. What, he asks, has the IRA to show for its decades of violence? Every major gain was achieved by the constitutional parties. What the IRA succeeded in doing, he argues, was ‘diverting the course of Irish history’ and the possibility of ‘the road not taken … it is hard to visualise an outcome that would have been more dystopian than the society produced by thirty years if terror.’
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".