As per usual, I should not be allowed to word vomit all of this, however, no one can stop me, therefore this will be happening. Sorry to whoever's reading this five years later because I decided to get a security clearance.
Basically, though Dreamwidth may/is-almost-definitely the better platform for this, it's fun, therefore it'll be staying on here.
Anyway, back on topic. What's interesting is really the difference and contrast between the American Civil Rights movement and the Northern Irish one. Obviously, in the 1960s, they're both active. You have the difference between the non-violent one (NAACP, SNCC, NICRA) and the more violent one (Black Panther Party, Nation of Islam, IRA), and that the non-violent one is really in power, it's ascendant.
What you see that happens differently is that the American government gives in. The Civil Rights Act is signed into law in 1964. As for Northern Ireland, they don't. They're marching, and then 1969, they're attacked.
Meanwhile, you also see this questioning of what political tactics work. So you have Malcolm X's famous speech, "The Ballot or the Bullet", and you also have this strategy that the IRA goes for, "The Armalite and the Ballot Box." Which is also related to voting, of course. The "one man, one vote" principle was in effect in America, the issue was lack of enforcement against discrimination at it. But in Northern Ireland, you don't have this system - you have one which looks like colonial-era America. Landholders - taxpayers - can vote, women can't, and rich people can, making these two groups have different goals.
The American Civil Rights movement then was fighting for enforcment of de jure laws about voting, which is why the threat is that if things don't get resolved the legal way - through voting, through protesting - the more violent branch of the movement will show up.
And this is in clear contrast to how the threat is there in Northern Ireland, it's a threat of violence so they can even get the ballot box. This evolves, of course, and by the time groups like Sinn Féin have political power, they act much more like the Black Panthers and mainstream civil rights groups do in relation to each other.
In America, the civil rights movement started off peaceful, and they threatened a movement to violent. But in Ireland, there was a long history of violence in futherance of their goals, "physical-force republicanism", and it was this that was most popular, most common, and most believed in. So the movement there was away from violence and towards the ballot box, towards voting and constitutionalism.