He has no sympathy for the likes of Bobby Sands and thinks Thatcher was too soft.

No, at the time I thought she should have declared war on the IRA, but in retrospect I see that she showed restraint.

As I mentioned before they ordered the Paras (Parachute Regiment) to gun down peaceful civilian protestors in Derry (1972).

I am not sure that all the protestors were so peaceful. Marches were banned at the time, and a group of youths had attacked an army barricade throwing stones.

However I would agree that the British army overreacted and that some soldiers panicked and shot and killed a number of people who were unarmed and no threat. These events were in the context of a number of soldiers having earlier been killed by nail bombs and snipers, and there is no doubt that they were very jittery (or scared).

I think this is a much more likely explanation than that the British command ordered soldiers to open fire on unarmed protestors.

Anyhow, the long awaited Saville report is due later this year and may be the last word on the matter.

Regarding Thatcher and the miners, the problem now that we can put it into perspective was that coal mining in the UK was a dying industry because the coal was very deep, in narrow seams, and therefore dangerous and economically inefficient to recover and unable to compete with cheaper imported coal from Poland.

In the end, although Arthur Scargill fought a courageous campaign, he was on the wrong side of history and the mining communities which had provided a way of life for generations of miners and their families (notably Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock--son of a disabled miner) were doomed.

Mrs. Thatcher's description of the miners as "the enemy within" was completely over the top and unacceptable in view of the fact that the miners represented a struggling, dying community that had sacrificed a great deal to make an industrial economy possible.

Like the IRA, the two miners who protested by killing a taxi driver bringing a scab worker to a mine by dropping a concrete post from a bridge onto the car were convicted of the civilian crime of murder, and sent to prison for a long time.

Reading list:

The Road to Wigan Pier: George Orwell

Lady Chatterley's Lover: DH Lawrence

Germinal: Emile Zola

Billy Eliot: a movie.

Postscript: I only lived in the UK for the first 13 months of Thatcher's rule, but kept in contact with people who were there at the time. In spite of the momentous events going on--Ireland, miner's strike, Falklands War-- for most people in Britain daily life was as it ever was and these events were just the routine fare of the BBC News.

No, I'm just providing some background for those who may have forgotten the emotions that were running at the time.

Actually at the time I deeply opposed Thatcher's approach and often said that she OUGHT TO declare war on the IRA Bush-style and smoke them out wherever they were.

Certainly at the time, although there might have been the occasional cross border operation, it was practically unknown for British troops to make cross border incursions in hot pursuit, as they might have done if the IRA had been regarded as a military foe. It was well known that weapons were smuggled across the border from the Republic, and of course British forces did try to suppress this trade, but that is to be expected. Any covert operations were, of course, covert at the time.

Mrs Thatcher only came into office in 1979 and I believe it was that same year that the IRA murdered her friend Airey Neave, a cabinet minister and a survivor of the infamous Colditz prisoner of war camp in World War II, as well as Lord Mountbatten, a close relative of the Queen. One can hardly underestimate the effect this may have had personally on Thatcher.

Anyhow, as I said, I was a strong opponent of Thatcher and her party at the time, but I still had no sympathy at all for the likes of Bobby Sands, and very few people lost any sleep over the hunger strikers at the time.