Living in Britain during the mid-1990s gave me the opportunity to consider both the bloody history and current tactics of the Irish Republican Army. This extreme activist wing of the Roman Catholic minority in Northern Ireland used terrorism to try to force the British government to yield to its perverse will. From that time, the Trumpet has followed developments in Ireland closely.

We observed, analyzed and wrote on the period known as “The Troubles” that ended with an ira/Sinn Fein declared ceasefire in 1997. We followed ira progress through the 1998 Good Friday Peace Agreement, the questionable path of the ira disarmament process, the experimenting with local administration in Northern Ireland, on up to the hiatus that Prime Minister Blair declared in 2002, when he suspended local government in Northern Ireland over Irish Republican Army espionage activities. And we have kept a watchful eye on events in Northern Ireland since.

The inevitable end of this process instigated by the anti-British Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland, for which we have watched over the past two decades, now appears imminent.

The tactics of terror are about to triumph in Northern Ireland.

Given the absolute inerrancy of biblical prophecy on the future of the British peoples, we are not surprised at this outcome.

Terror was a reality in Britain decades before it hit the American continent. Over 3,600 souls have died in the blood shed by terrorist groups in Ireland over the past four decades, more than were slaughtered by Islamic extremist terrorists in the United States on 9/11.

In fact, the Irish Republican Army is perhaps the longest-standing terror group of modern times, being the mentor of many terrorist cells that have evolved from the time of the Indian rebellions during the British Raj, to the Islamic extremist terror that has swept the globe since the fall of Suez.

Yet for all its mentoring of other multiple terrorist groups around the world, the ira has been slow in gaining a much-cherished goal accomplished by so many of its international apprentices, often with much less effort over shorter spans of time. That goal, pursued tenaciously by too many who launched their initial power grabs by terror, is to become a legitimate political force in the mainstream, gaining acceptance by established governments, the international community, and the public within their home states, and thus to win the power by political means which they started out to gain by the tactics of terror.

From Jomo Kenyatta’s Kenyan Mau Mau to Nelson Mandela’s South African anc/Communist terror cells, Africa has been the post-colonial exemplar of the trend to forge publicly acceptable political imagery out of terrorist beginnings.

In the Middle East, the Palestinian terrorist enterprise, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, having morphed into the politically acceptable Palestinian National Authority, is a current example of this trend.

Terror groups in Latin America have also been part of the movement to gain political acceptability by timely changes from perpetrating murder and mayhem on governments, political opponents and the general public to winning—or even buying—political support in the mainstream. The degree to which the ira was involved in the drug- and gun-running circles that feed many of these terrorist enterprises is a matter of clearly documented fact.

The Taliban in Afghanistan are another case in point.

In achieving their ultimate goal of political power, much has to do with the evolution of the language employed in the description of terrorists, who, by their very nature, are intent on seizing power at any cost.

They all start out their dubious political careers as terrorists, fitting the classic description embodied in that term, plain and simple. At some point, “enlightened” members of the terror group garner the support of the most easily influenced members of society, the politically naive within the liberal, socialist left. Often these will be young, impressionable students and youth intent on rebelling against the traditions of the society within which they live. In the West, terrorism is aided and abetted by the politically correct police dictating word usage within the press, mass media and the intelligentsia.

Thus we have the influences that have enhanced the image of many a terror group in the public eye, gaining the sympathy of the masses by changing their description to “separatists,” “resistance movement,” and, in what is the ultimately appealing title among free democracies, “freedom fighters.”

The process by which terror groups increasingly achieve their political goals has become familiar. Kill and maim until you reach a point when sufficient terror has worn down opposition by force. Wear out resistance by unerring application of tactics that consider all—men, women, children, and even some of your own terrorist group’s members—as fair game to be sacrificed in pursuit of the terrorists’ perverse political goals. Eventually you will reach the breaking point—the point at which the press, the public, and mainstream politicians yield, brainwashed through mass mind-conditioning into viewing the agents of terror as the oppressed of society that really deserve a break, especially from the “tyranny” of America, Britain and the Jews!

Three classic photographs sum up the effectiveness of this process—and its inevitable results: the May 4, 1990, handshake of Nelson Mandela and President De Klerk of South Africa that started this once-great nation down the path toward the inevitable status of Robert Mugabe’s neighboring Zimbabwe; the handshake between petty terrorist Yasser Arafat and Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn on Sept. 13, 1993, that started the embattled nation of Israel on the road to the ultimate partitioning of its homeland; and now, the most recent infamous photograph to yet hit the front pages in Britain this century, the photographic portrayal, minus handshake, between Ian Paisley and ira/Sinn Fein terrorist head Gerry Adams, on March 27, that will end with a Catholic takeover of Northern Ireland once Paisley fades from the scene.

Though it has been slow in coming—as it followed the terrorists’ bloody and tortuous path to its ultimate objective—the ira, via its publicly acceptable political wing, Sinn Fein, appears to be on the verge of finally gaining legitimacy in Northern Ireland.

On March 27, the day following the event, newspapers in Britain carried front-page photographs of Ireland’s Democratic Unionist leader, the conservative, anti-Catholic Ian Paisley, sitting at a diamond-shaped conference table with Gerry Adams, being interviewed by the media. The occasion was the first-ever meeting between Paisley and Adams following decades of acrimony between the two and their respective parties. Paisley and Adams met on this historic occasion and agreed to form a joint administration for the province of Northern Ireland, hotbed of hatred between Protestant and Catholic.

If this deal does eventually come off, and a joint administration between Northern Ireland’s largest political party, the protestant Democratic Unionists, and its most militaristic—Catholic Sinn Fein—does eventuate, it will be a clear victory for ira/Sinn Fein.

That’s tantamount to another victory for terror! And the Vatican!

Despite the fact that Paisley will be the likely first minister of the Northern Ireland administration, with Adams’ underling, Martin McGuiness, as deputy, in reality this will reflect a huge backdown by the Democratic Unionist leader. There has to be a reason why Adams was grinning like a Cheshire cat in those photographs, and his political opponent not even managing a twitch at the corners of his mouth.

Ian Paisley, long the rabidly anti-Vatican voice for a non-Catholic province of Northern Ireland, is now at risk of yielding to a compromise that once was thought an impossibility: not only doing a deal with a terrorist leader, but also creating the avenue for the political and religious entrenchment of the very process against which he has for so long fought, the inevitable catholicization of Northern Ireland.

With May 8 set as the date for the commencement of the new joint administration, if indeed it does proceed, Paisley may well have aided the process that the current archbishop of Canterbury seems so inclined to hasten: the yielding to Rome of the British Isles in matters of both religion and politics, and the resultant subsuming of the British royal crown by the very popery Paisley has spent his whole political and religious career resisting.

Since Britain fled the clutch of Rome under King Henry viii, the sceptered isle, long known in Roman Catholic tradition as “Mary’s Dowry,” has been lusted over by a Vatican that has intrigued through the centuries for its return to the Catholic fold.

Unfolding events in Northern Ireland may signal that Mary’s Dowry may soon be handed back to the vicar of Rome.