You'd never guess it from my name, but I'm 1/4 Scots and 1/4 Irish, from my mother's side. Indeed, my very nom de blog, "gnotalex," is a slight reworking of her maiden name, "O'Gnotalex," the famous Irish clan, or tribe, or swarm, or whatever it is that they call themselves. So with a rich heritage as that, I felt it was my right -- no, my duty -- to comment on the situation in Northern Ireland during the seventies and eighties, culminating with the hunger-strike death of IRA "soldier" thug (I'm also nominally Catholic, so I can name the IRA for what they were --- murderous Marxist creeps.) Bobby Sands in The Maze, a prison for paramilitary-linked criminals outside Belfast.
Certainly I had more claim to the topic than, say, Paul McCartney, who wrote what might have been his worst-ever song, "Give Ireland Back To The Irish" (link opens a terrible YouTube video of his band Wings rehearsing it.); or The Police, who turned out the better, but forgettable (I can't remember a note of it) "Invisible Sun"; or John Lennon, who confusedly offered to play benefit concerts for both the IRA and its Protestant foes.
Gratuitous literary reference: I stole the first line "Is there a family/Free from sorrow/These days?" from Tolstoy's War And Peace (second line at link). I figured the old buzzard owed me at least that much for the hundreds of hours I spent reading the bloody thing.