I've only just seen this Jammill, my apologies, but as I was the one who started the "slamming" I thought I'd best put my 2c in.
Firstly, I'm not a uber political soul, which is a good thing over here, because it's utterly exhausting to be so. I was born (at the height of the troubles, in Belfast, ironically) and have lived in NI all my life.
I think, regardless of how small the NI troubles were in terms of time scale and numbers dead, they are in peoples' memories, still. I worked in Belfast at the tail end of them and have fairly common memories of having to evacuate in case there was a bomb. I have a lot of friends who have lost family members in them, as have most people over here. I was on the phone after Omagh to check some close friends were okay etc etc.
I personally wouldn't be offended, in the least, but I know others who would be.
My point was that using NI which is still moving towards peace, we have a way to go yet, where memories are so close and offence is very easy to take, you risked any corporation looking at it and saying this could go up in our face and leave us with a very dodgy
PR situation. Therefore you were putting a barrier in place to sell it in the UK at this time. That's all.
Edit, just to say that this comment :
few hundred people killed in what is basically a small scale revolutionary conflict
would cause an awful lot of offence. It's not the number of people, it's that it happened at all.