I didn't say that hunger strikes were an exclusively Irish tactic. Gandhi reportedly went on hunger strike 17 times, and women's suffragists in both Britain and the US employed hunger strikes. And I certainly made no remark that could be construed as claiming that only Catholics can be Irish.

You're quite right that under ancient "Brehon law," a person could fast as a means of shaming someone who had injured him, and that person could be held liable for the faster's death. That had no religious component and may well date to the pre-Christian period in Ireland.

But in the 20th century, and especially in the '80s, hunger strikes in Ireland were strongly identified with the Irish republican movement, which was intertwined with Irish Catholic identity. (I'm not necessarily saying that was a good thing.)

There is absolutely no question that the deaths of the 10 hunger strikers, in the popular Irish imagination, became part of the Catholic tradition of saintly martyrdom. As historian Roy Foster wrote in 1990: "The hunger strikers and their supporters were steeped in the language and the imagery of Roman Catholicism, as well as being passionate adherents of its outward observances." Some of the wall murals painted of Sands and other hunger strikers look remarkably like religious shrines to Jesus, Mary and the saints. I can't remember whether I've ever come across evidence that the IRA leadership consciously intended this connection, but it comes up in the film, in the conversation between Sands and the priest. So I'm guessing they did.

I'll take Foster over JP2 as an analyst of the Troubles, I think, even if Foster tends to overcorrect, at least a little, with his anti-Republican bias. In that review I quoted (it's from the NYT, easily Googlable), he mentions that the pope opposed the hunger strikes and the Irish bishops equivocated, and then goes on to make the quoted statement. Of course it's a tribal conflict, but that doesn't mean that religious differences play no role whatever.

BTW equating the Scots Calvinists who became the Ulster Protestants with the New England Puritans, as you seem to do, isn't quite right. The Puritans were English in origin (mostly) and not quite members of the same church. Plenty of Scots or Scots-Irish Calvinists came to North America, of course, mainly settling in the Appalachian belt, from Pennsylvania down into north Georgia and Alabama. To this day, the culture, music, religion, speech and beverage-making propensities of that region reflect at least some of that heritage.

from English_roG and Amerigo, to the effect of: Why did the IRA believe that Maggie Thatcher of all people would negotiate with them?

Um, possibly because she did.

I'm not here to defend IRA tactics or strategy. And if you want to argue that the IRA's continuing military campaign delayed the eventual compromise that lead to peace, that's a reasonable position. Not sure whether it's true or not, but it's possible.

But before, during and after the hunger strikes, under Callaghan and Thatcher and Major and any other British PM of the period, there was frequent, intermittent contact between British authorities and the IRA. Thatcher liked to say she would never negotiate with "terrorists," but it was happening the whole time. As McQueen's movie makes clear, prison authorities eventually agreed to nearly all the hunger strikers' major goals.

(I believe you guys that there was little sympathy for the hunger strikers in the UK, but there wasn't much more support for the loyalist movement or for keeping British troops in NI. A lot of people on the British mainland would have been happy to get the hell out and let the Irish kill each other till they got sick of it.)

As much as you may want to find some clear lesson about the inefficacy of "terrorism" in the case of the IRA, it simply isn't there. It's pretty well true that they "bombed their way to the negotiating table," as the old phrase puts it. Clearly, the IRA had to abandon its most significant political goal along the road to a peace deal (that being forcing a total British withdrawal), but as with the FMLN in El Salvador or the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the tradeoff came in the form of mainstream political power. Sinn Fein has clearly replaced the SDLP as the dominant party in the NI nationalist/Catholic community, and although it remains a minor political force in the South it's more important there than it was in earlier decades.

I am NOT suggesting that the IRA was justified in murdering civilians or that they "defeated the Brits" or any other such thing. Just that the endgame of all this remains complicated and ambiguous and bereft of clear moral or political lessons.

But I haven't seen the former since I was a kid, and I think the latter requires grading on a curve, i.e., it's intensely sentimental and reflects the cinematic and social values of a different time.

Personally, I can't stand "Field of Dreams." I realize your results may vary.

I am totally willing to stand corrected on my usage of "the Dominican," although it doesn't strike me as inherently offensive or belittling. I'm pretty sure I heard Algenis Perez Soto, the star of the film, use it while speaking English. (He also says "the D.R.")