Originally Posted by
Readthebigbreach
Northern Ireland is far from a bloody mess . It has the highest number of civil servants per capita than any part of the UK . There are more murders and violent crimes in many US cities than in NI including during the troubles. For many it is a very profitable and easy existence despite (or maybe in some cases because of ) the continuing sectarian dialogue trumpeted by a the usual sources.
Surely you are not correlating the "highest number of civil servants per capita" as any sort of measure of success for a population, are you? My experience suggests that the reverse should be true, a truly meritocracy should have the LOWEST number of civil servants per capita, as ultimately they are little more than a burden upon taxpayers.
I made no reference to murder, or violent crime, you appear to have plucked that from thin air. What I wrote is a matter of record above, and in case comprehension is not a key skill, allow me to repeat it:
The British media, in particular, rarely seemed to report on the massive amount of organised crime going on, most of it not specific to one sectarian group or another, just criminals taking advantage of the no-go areas and the general break down in law and order. By contrast, the criminal stuff, particularly associated with cross-border activities, was never out of the news when we were still living near the border.
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Most of that cross-border activity was associated with smuggling. In the case of fuel smuggling this was obvious to a visually impaired person. There were filling stations out in the wilds on the UK side of the border that made a handsome living from selling fuel to Irish drivers, often driving vehicles with enlarged fuel tanks, who would cross the border several times a day to fill up with cheap British fuel and flog it back home. Same went for pretty much any other commodity that was more expensive in the RoI.
Very little was ever done to address the vast amount of cross-border crime, and much of it (on some of the bigger roads across the border) was allowed to continue because it there were no resources to police it. There were hundreds of official crossing points on the border, and many hundreds more unofficial ones, like farm tracks. Heck, one farm near our place had fields both side of the border, so moving his cows through a gate was crossing the border!