It's trendy these days to be anti colonialism, but as soon as you mention ireland all the support fizzles out. Fucks up with that? Most young people hate tories, hate british empire, etc etc, but then you say IRA and everyone gets scared. It's not even like my generation has an emotional attachment to it either - it's before our time
https://www.spin.com/featured/inside-the-ira-spins-1994-feature/ this is a really good, unbiased article that goes into the late IRA's response to calls for peace as well as how their structure worked as a whole. This is specifically about the war in NI though, and not the bombings in England, though it talks about why they went to such a strict recruiting process.