In the first night of internment in NI only catholics were interned, and even afterwards the vast majority were catholics, in this case internment was used against the catholics of the area by the security forces. it was supposedly used to frighten nationalists but instead as you have said bolstered their numbers and support more than anything that they could have done themselves. it is the unlearned experience of all governments everywhere that treat sections of their communities as alien that these actions will always have a detrimental effect in the medium and long term. all it does is segregate society further and force younger generations into polarised views of their place in society and create the self Perpetuating cycle of trouble that we now have in NI and other areas.
Cheers
~M


>In the UK a lot of "enemy aliens" where also interned. Quite a few got shipped to Australia. I believe some of them got killed by being torpedoed. A lot of those deported had originally come to the UK as refugees from the Nazis, some where Jewish.
>During the first Gulf War a lot of Arabs got interned on the basis of lists supplied by the security services. Those lists where later found to be completely out of date and inaccurate.
>
>Wholesale internment has almost always turned out to be a bad idea. In Northern Ireland internment is believed to have been a substantial boost to the IRA and loyalist terrorist organisations in terms of recruitment publicity and in the actual camps training.
>
>Nick Mason