Here is Rep. King writing about Northern ireland in today’s New York Post:

“And while there were murders, atrocities and human-rights violations on all sides, the security forces and the loyalist paramilitaries caused more civilian casualties than did the IRA.”

There are a couple of things to be said about this. The first is that it is probably not true. The best reference here is LOST LIVES, a careful tally of all the dead in the Northern Irish “Troubles” of 1966-99. The book has a long statistical appendix, breaking down the numbers of the dead in various ways. It does not address Rep. King’s point directly, mainly because of the difficulty of defining “civilian,” and of ambiguities in which “side” to award a killing to. (E.g. if a British soldier kills a loyalist terrorist — 10 UDA/UFF/UVF terrorists are listed as having been killed by the army.) Is a retired cop a “civilian”? The IRA did not think so, and targeted many. Is a prison officer a “civilian”? How about a clerical worker at a prison? Etc. etc.

The IRA’s definition of a “legitimate target” included people like census takers and building contractors doing UK govt work. In fact, as Sean O’Callaghan has testified, for a lot of IRA operatives, “legitimate target”

simply meant “Protestant.”

LOST LIVES lists 3,636 dead in the Troubles 1966-99, of which Table 2 — “Responsibility for deaths” awards 2,139 to republican terrorists, 1,050 to loyalist terrorists, 361 to the army and police, 86 to “other.” That doesn’t answer the question, since we don’t have a breakdown of civilian vs.

non-civilian in those numbers. If, for example, all 2,139 of the deaths attributable to republican terrorists were British soldiers, Rep. King might be telling the truth. Plainly this isn’t so, but to what degree is not clear from the stats presented.

Table 20 — “Deaths for which the IRA were responsible” shows 456 in the UK military (and one in the Republic of Ireland military), not counting the Ulster Defence Regiment and RIR (182 — part-time soldiers, many farmers in border areas who fell to the IRA’s “ethnic cleansing” program in these areas

– those are real nice farms out there…)

If you rank the categories in this table, for deaths for which the IRA was responsible you get: Civilians (636), UK military (456), police (NI, British, and 6 Irish Gardai — 284), UDR/RIR (182), republican terrorists (i.e. their own “comrades”! — 161), loyalist terrorists (28), prison service (23).

The second thing to be said is the nature of the IRA terror, its deliberate and savage frightfulness, by comparison with the amateurish butcherings of occasional lone loyalist psychopaths and operational blunders by the British Army and NI police. The Enniskillen massacre was a characteristic IRA operation, to which no military, police, or loyalist-terrorist actions even come close. It was almost certainly planned and carried out with Gerry Adams’s approval. Why does Rep. King admire this man?