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August 12 - October 22, 2022
Another outcome of the famine which had a lasting impact was the formulation of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The IRB – or Fenian movement, as it became popularly known after the legendary Irish version of the Samurai – was founded in 1858 in Dublin, and the following year spread to New York, where the movement became known as Clann na Gael (Family of Gaels).
Bishop Moriarty of Kerry produced one of the more celebrated denunciations, saying of the Fenians that: ‘Eternity is not long enough nor hell hot enough to punish such miscreants.’9
impetus which it gave to a body of revolutionary ideas concerning republicanism, separatism, identity and a consciousness of being Irish
The British infiltrated the movement with informers, and a planned uprising in 1867 fizzled out with nothing much in the way of military activity beyond some dynamite explosions in London and other cities which were the precursors of the contemporary IRA bombing campaign.
He had managed to unite the three major streams of Irish self-assertion under his leadership: firstly the parliamentary party itself, which he had made into a formidable force through a strategy of giving or withdrawing his support to either the Liberals or the Conservatives according to the circumstances of the moment; secondly the Fenians, who agreed to put their energies at his disposal; and lastly the Irish Land League, founded by an ex-Fenian, Michael Davitt, with the objective of rectifying the crisis on the land.
‘killing Home Rule by kindness’
a series of reforming Acts facilitated the buying-out of the landlords and the creation of a peasant proprietorship.
It was the era of the so-called Celtic Dawn. An Irish literary renaissance, spearheaded by Protestant intellectuals like Yeats, Synge, and Lady Gregory, centred on the Abbey Theatre. Another Protestant, Douglas Hyde, founded the Gaelic League, which generated widespread enthusiasm for the idea of restoring the Irish language. The Gaelic Athletic Association, founded by a Catholic, Michael Cusack, attracted even more widespread support for the ancient Irish sport of hurling, and for a hybrid version of rugby and soccer, Gaelic football, which also gave rise to Australian Rules ‘footie’.
I cannot say otherwise when five sixths of the lawfully chosen representatives are of one mind on this matter… certainly I cannot allow it to be said that a Protestant minority in Ulster, or elsewhere, is to rule the question at large for Ireland.
However, he was about to be presented with a ‘constitutional doctrine’ which made nonsense of his efforts, and the efforts of many who came after him, to apply democratic principles to the Irish situation.
using the situation in northern Ireland for English electoral advancement.
From the time of the plantations by Scottish settlers, the province of Ulster as a whole had developed differently from the rest of Ireland, and particularly so during the nineteenth century.
Politically, the experiences of the Presbyterians – who, because they too were discriminated against by the Anglicans, though to a lesser extent than the Catholics, had thrown in their lot with the Catholics during the 1798 rebellion – had been so traumatic that Anglicans and Presbyterians now formed a united front on the Union against their Nationalist and Catholic neighbours on the Home Rule issue.
By the time of the First World War, Belfast had an only too well founded reputation for bigotry and sectarian strife. Catholics, attracted by the jobs, frequently came into conflict with Protestants. The Protestants got most of the jobs, certainly the more skilled, craft-worker positions, but there was sufficient work about for a thriving Catholic community to have established itself in and around the main west Belfast artery of the Falls Road, where it existed in resentful proximity to its Protestant counterpart, the Shankill Road.
To no avail: the near treasonous behaviour of the Conservatives overpowered all rational political argument on the issue.
The slow pace of reform on the land issue, ‘the carrot’, with its consequential widespread agrarian outrage was balanced by an equally widespread application of coercion.
which became a cause célèbre in 1887 after police had fired on a crowd of stone-throwing demonstrators, killing three of them and wounding many more.
An ‘ugly hatchet-faced man’, he had a type of mind not uncommonly met with at the bar: ‘Ruthless, defiant, with thinly veiled contempt for democracy’, he made no bones about his methodology, saying flatly that he ‘intended to break every law that is possible’.
Bonar Law made it clear that he was consciously lending his position to violent resistance to Home Rule.
by a man who was not only leader of the Conservative Party, but also a potential prime minister of England.
Before I occupied the position I now fill in the party I said that, in my belief, if an attempt were made to deprive these men of their birthright – as part of a corrupt political bargain – they would be justified in resisting such an attempt by all means in their power, including force.
Being convinced in our consciences that home rule would be disastrous to the material well-being of Ulster as well as the whole of Ireland, subversive of our civil and religious freedom, destructive of our citizenship, and perilous to the empire, we… loyal subjects of His Gracious Majesty King George V… do hereby pledge ourselves in solemn covenant… to stand by one another in defending for ourselves and our children our cherished position of equal citizenship in the United Kingdom, and in using all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a home rule
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Some 470, 000 people signed the Covenant and 100, 000 more were enrolled into an Ulster Volunteer Force.
Considerations of the indivisibility of empire, or affection for Irish Unionists, were not uppermost in these gentlemen’s minds, convulsing their dinner parties, and those of society London generally, with heated controversy over the ‘Ulster crisis’.
But in their public support for the Unionists Conservative apologists concentrated their fire not on party advantage but on large questions of empire and of religious freedom,
the Unionists also formed a provisional government ready to take over the province should Home Rule be applied.
What this assurance meant in practice was spelled out a month later, on 24 April, when police and customs officials stood idly by as 300 tons of rifles and ammunition were landed illegally from Germany for the UVF
Whoever was going to enforce Home Rule, it would not be the British Army.
contained sizeable Catholic minorities.
Instead he sought a system of option whereby counties could opt for or against Home Rule depending on their religious coloration.
because the increased Catholic representation from the remaining three Ulster counties, Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan, would be a force for the eventual coming-together of the two parts of the island!
The Unionists could huff and puff all they liked, but the ineluctable fact appeared to be that the majority in favour of Home Rule in the House of Commons was over 100 votes.
After Murphy dismissed workers who refused to resign from the IT&GWU, Larkin declared a general strike of his members. Murphy and the other employers responded by declaring a general lock-out.
In November of 1913 a citizens’ army was founded to protect the workers from police brutality.
and indeed a fact overlooked in the welter of controversy was that the financial provisions of the Bill were so limited that Ireland would have had less independence than Britain’s other colonies
Eoin MacNeill, a respected scholar, was persuaded by colleagues in the Gaelic League, who unknown to him were members of the IRB, to write an article in the League’s newspaper, An Claideamh Soluis (The Sword of Light), proposing that the Green tradition should have a corps to match that of the Orange in order to withstand any effort to frustrate the introduction of Home Rule by force.
The government, which of course had made no response to the formation of the UVF, reacted by issuing an order banning the importation of arms into Ireland.
In fact, in view of this background it was a major blunder on the part of the framers of the first Home Rule proposals not to have incorporated in the Bill safeguards for those of the Protestant tradition. Failure to do so gave a patina of reality to the ‘Home Rule is Rome rule’ argument which became embedded in the Unionists’ resistance. Nevertheless it was not the genuineness of the Unionists’ resistance which gave it its strength. That came from Conservative backing in press, parliament, and security forces.
In contrast to the proceedings at Bangor, Donaghdee and Larne, which had been overseen by British officers, the army made a bungled attempt to seize the Howth weaponry. As a result a riot developed at Bachelors’ Walk and frightened soldiers fired on a stone-throwing mob, killing four people and wounding dozens more. ‘Remember Bachelors’ Walk’ joined Mitchelstown in the litany of Ireland’s Stations of the Cross.
As a result tens of thousands of young Irish Nationalists went to their deaths wearing British uniforms, believing that they were fighting for the freedom of small nations. A tradition, built up over centuries, of ‘listing for the Crown’ and ‘taking the King’s shilling’ was not easily eradicated.
Through manipulation of the Irish Volunteers the IRB now stood on the threshold of the greatest alterations in the relationship between Ireland and England since the coming of the Normans in 1169.
Though no German aid reached the rebels, and MacNeill destroyed whatever slim prospect they had of success when he did hear of the plot, by countermanding it, so that only some six hundred Volunteers, backed by the tiny Citizens’ Army, actually went out to fight, chiefly in Dublin, Ireland, in the words of Yeats, was ‘changed utterly’ by the rising of Easter Week, April 1916.
The people of Dublin at first execrated the rebels:
Apart from creating martyrs, the British compounded their error by a nationwide round-up of suspects. So many innocent people were arrested and incarcerated in England that not only was wrath swiftly converted to sympathy, but the IRB’s infectious doctrines, inculcated in camp and prison, were later carried to the four corners of the land on their release.
Realising their mistake, the government ordered the prisoners released within months. It was too late: they returned home, metamorphosed in the public imagination from murderous vandals into revolutionary heroes, to be cheered back on to the streets they had been booed off from.
‘Remember John Redmond’ joined the litany. This particular incantation, carrying with it damaging implications of contempt for moderation in politics, and for parliamentary methods generally, bedevilled Irish political life for decades afterwards, and still affects Northern Ireland.
Following the election Sinn Fein withdrew from Westminster, set up its own parliament, known as the Dail, in Dublin, and, in reiteration of the demand made in the proclamation of 1916, declared an all-Ireland republic. From then on the Volunteers became known generally as the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Spearheaded by the genius at the head of the IRB, Michael Collins, regarded as the father of modern urban guerrilla warfare for his work in building up an underground intelligence network which defeated the British secret service, the IRA ultimately brought the British to the conference table.
These last were so christened in order to give the impression that this was a ‘police war’ aimed only at putting down a handful of unrepresentative criminals.
particularly American public opinion,
the Unionists were given a parliament in Belfast to rule over their portion,
