eakout of discrimination towards Catholics arose. Laws were designed to allow the police to beat and arrest almost any Catholic in sight. These actions caused the IRA to take action. They started to “protect the people,” grounded in the tradition of the underground societies that protected Irish Catholics in the mid-1780s. In practice, however, the IRA, “forces people to go protest, breaking children’s knee caps if they were caught breaking laws, and forcing people to do their will.” Effectively, they were a brute squad.The Protestant-Catholic strife continued until the infamous day of Sunday, January 30, 1972; perfectly memorialized as Bloody Sunday. On this day, British airships gunned down 13 civilians. At that moment, chaos came to Ireland. British took complete and total control over the entire country. Absent from the British control of Ireland were the ideas of due process, jury trials, and tolerance for religion. There was total discrimination against Catholics. The police were now allowed to arrest and hold people without even charging them with a crime, as well as enter any home at anytime and search for whatever they want. During the time of occupation, the police entered 170,000 Catholic homes, enough to have entered every Catholic home twice. Random vehicle checkpoints were also placed along roads to check anyone they thought were suspicious. In the words of Michael McDonald: “My dad used to carpool to work, it was him and two Catholic guys. When they would hit random checkpoints and my dad was driving the police would just look at the license and see his name, McDonald, and they knew it was a big Protestant name. But when one of the Catholic guys would drive and arrive at a checkpoint the police would see his name, O’Malley, and they knew he was Catholic. They would make him get out of the car and basically do everything but stripe search him. They made him take...
