Yeah, the Brits were very neutral in the Northern Ireland conflict. Seriously, what would they want with Northern Ireland, anyway? It's got basically no natural resources or any economic sectors of interest. They let far more profitable colonies leave their empire many years before the Troubles began.
The claims about the Loyalists being British proxy forces is a whole bunch of, um, "bollocks". If the UDA and UVF were really being armed, trained, and supplied with intelligence by MI-5, then why were they so incompetent? If you look at the list of Loyalist victims (on web sites like CAIN), you'll see they killed relatively few IRA members, which shows that they weren't able to find them (and British intelligence on IRA members was extremely good). Not only that, but they weren't even very good at identifying Catholics from Protestants; they shot literally hundreds of Protestants simply because they were in Catholic areas and therefore assumed to be Catholic.
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