Ireland’s struggle for independence is a complex story of seven centuries of relations with neighbouring Great Britain, a story that has shaped Irish political, social and cultural life and left its greatest mark on the collective national consciousness.
“Irish men and women: in the name of God and of the past generations from whom she received the ancient tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, calls her children to her flag and fights for her freedom. /…/ We proclaim the inalienable and sovereign right of the Irish people to ownership of Ireland and to unrestricted control of their own destiny. /…/ Every generation of Irish people has demanded the right to national freedom and independence; six times in the last three hundred years by armed means. Standing up for this fundamental right, which we are once again demanding at the point of a gun in front of the whole world, we proclaim the Republic of Ireland as a sovereign independent state. We pledge our lives and the lives of our comrades in arms to its freedom, welfare, and exaltation among the nations.”
So excited was the poet and teacher Patrick Pearse when he read the Irish Declaration of Independence on the steps outside Dublin’s main post office on Easter Monday 1916. The leader of a handful of radical revolutionaries, it marked the beginning of a short-lived Easter Rising against the British masters, but one that had historic significance for Ireland. As so many times before, the Irish rebellion was swiftly, cruelly and in cold blood crushed by the British, but this time, after centuries, the cards were finally turned in Ireland’s favour.
Within six years of the Easter Rising, followed by a war of independence from Britain and a civil war between warring Irish factions, most of Ireland was recognised as a free country. This, however, also led to the island’s official separation and opened two new, antagonistic chapters in the 20th century. On the one hand, the creation of a new modern democratic state, the Republic of Ireland, brought about the liberation of the nation, while on the other hand, the separation led to the bloody Northern Ireland conflict, which is still smouldering in the hope of a definitive epilogue.
Hardy Irish even more Irish after 700 years of oppression
Ireland’s history is one great tragedy, as written by many historians and legendary poets and writers who, alongside the Irish diaspora, have taken its name around the world. It is a history of blended identities, emigration and unimaginable poverty, but also of a rich cultural, literary and intellectual heritage, spiced with a resilient Irish pride. The arrival of the Anglo-Normans in the 20th century ushered in seven centuries of English domination and periods of oppression, repression and exploitation, interspersed with periods of attempts at reconciliation and reform, as well as indifference and neglect. But Ireland’s hope of regaining its freedom has never waned, and has manifested itself over time through various forms of organising.
The key to understanding the modern Irish state and society, and the reasons for the long struggle for independence, is also its rich history and the unique religious and cultural traditions that flourished on the island in the days before the Anglo-Norman invasions. Because the Romans never subjugated Ireland – Julius Caesar gave it the meaningful name of Hibernia – it was easier for the indigenous Celtic culture to survive, which, although it merged with Christianity around the 6th century, retained a strong influence on the way of life there. The Gaelic language, as the Irish branch of Celtic is called, has survived to the present day.
In the early Middle Ages, unlike in continental Europe, which experienced an intellectual decline after the fall of Rome, the Irish established a rich monastic intellectual tradition known throughout Europe. A network of monasteries emerged as important classical centres of learning, where monks produced, among other things, masterly illuminated manuscripts of early Christian texts in Latin – most famously the Book of Kells. Prominent Irish missionary scholars, such as Saint Columbanus, spread it throughout Europe.
This was the beginning and the building of a strong Irish self-confidence, an important fact for understanding their proud character and belief in their right to independence many centuries later.
The Vikings, the fear and trembling of Europe, were one of the first to invade Ireland, but after initial marauding incursions, they remained on the island, established Dublin as an important trading centre, and assimilated into the local population from the 9th century onwards. They added to the cultural diversity of an otherwise geographically marginal area.
The Normans who followed them were already powerful regional rulers a century after the successful invasion of England in 1066 and, with the Pope’s blessing, felt called to subdue Ireland after England. And even though the King of one of the Irish provinces intrigued them to help him in a dispute with a neighbouring kingdom, they hit a hard nut. Ireland was then divided into several small kingdoms, only loosely connected to each other and without any centralised authority to take over and control the whole island.
This left the English nobles with no choice but to settle for alliances with local Celtic-Irish dynasties in order to secure at least some influence in an otherwise fragmented land. This often meant marrying the daughters of Irish kings and nobles, and slowly the Anglo-Normans began to blend in with the local population.
The first centuries of their presence on the island were relatively peaceful, and by the end of the 13th century the Irish had taken back most of their land from the English. In fact, English rule was confined to Dublin and a narrow area around it. This, of course, did not sit well with the English Crown, nor did the fact that its nobles so readily adopted an Irish-Celtic lifestyle and assimilated with the local population, who should have been subservient to them. There is even a saying that all those who tried to subjugate Ireland and settled there ended up being more Irish than the Irish themselves. The English tried to prevent assimilation with the infamous Statute of Kilkenny, which banned the mixing of Anglo-Normans with native Irish and introduced a whole set of segregation laws – the medieval prototype of apartheid.
They were not allowed to marry each other, English settlers were not allowed to speak Irish, and even such banal things as wearing Irish hairstyles and clothes and adopting a whole range of customs and traditions were forbidden. But such measures were very difficult to enforce and English power over the Irish was further weakened by the 15th century.
From the Tudors to the awakening of national consciousness
But with the globalisation of colonialism, which coincided with the reign of the powerful Tudor dynasty in the 16th century, the fate of the Irish as subjects of the English was sealed until Irish independence in 1922, when the Tudors decided to take de facto control of the whole island – and, in the time of Elizabeth the First, the whole world. And to prove that they were capable of becoming a major world power, they first had to prove themselves in the neighbourhood. Thus, in the centuries that followed, the English Crown achieved political hegemony, while they were never able to assert complete cultural and social dominance.
Then a new divisive factor, religion, entered the complex political jigsaw and the perfect recipe for trouble was created. While in England the infamous Henry VIII had quarrelled with the Pope, renounced the Catholic faith so that he could divorce, and then proclaimed himself head of the new Anglican Protestant Church, the Irish remained firmly committed to the Catholic faith.
From then on, they were an even bigger thorn in the side of the English, and along with the indigenous Celtic Irish, the Anglo-Normans – known as Old English – remained Catholic. Henry VIII proclaimed himself King of Ireland and founded the Protestant Church of Ireland. However, as most Irish people did not recognise it, as they retained their Catholic faith, he began a massive, planned settlement of English Protestants on Irish soil – it was not enough for the new aristocracy and settlers to be English, they had to be Protestants first and foremost. The colonisation of Ireland was steady and systematic, and the more the Irish resisted, the more the English deliberately settled their own people.
One of the worst Irish rebellions occurred shortly before the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of the Puritan government of the now reviled Oliver Cromwell, which turned into his personal dictatorship. He literally resented the Irish, considering them inferior and traitorous subjects of the Pope, and for their rebellion – during which the Catholics were said to have committed brutal massacres of Protestants – he took revenge by taking all their land and titles. “We owe the attack on Ireland to God … for the whole world knows the barbarism of Ireland”.
The atrocities of Cromwell’s army in Ireland – the general devastation and mass killings, the arson, the dispossessions – are still deeply etched in the collective Irish consciousness today. This created another source of animosity between aristocratic Catholic families, both English and Irish, and the newly settled Protestant English gentry. The anti-Reformation mentality became the common denominator of the revolt among the Celtic Irish and the Old English against the new Protestant English elite, as for some time after the restoration of the monarchy there was hope that a Catholic king from the Stuart dynasty would return to the English throne.
But with the Battle of the Boyne, one of the most decisive in English history, the survival of the Protestant monarchy in England was assured with the victory of William of Orange, and the so-called Catholic Jacobins, supporters of the deposed King James, suffered even worse persecution.
This period was marked by the first mass emigrations – religious persecution caused Irish people to flee to Catholic countries such as France and Spain, and very soon across the ocean to new colonies in North America.
And the English have started introducing notorious criminal laws in Ireland. These were a unique example in Europe of the practice of denying the political and economic rights of the majority population. This fuelled nationalist tendencies which reached their peak in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The following account illustrates how the English imagined the Irish: ‘When hungry, Irish children eat their mothers, and old women cook for the children. Their hair is long and over their eyes, and they run around naked. They hardly know the meaning of clothes. They live without any knowledge of God or of good manners, they are lazy and stupid.”
Catholics were made second-class citizens in absolutely every area – even the education of Catholic children was banned, and what little political rights they had were taken away, they could not buy land, could only rent it for a maximum of 31 years, and they could not even own a horse worth more than five pounds.
They were not allowed to hold public office, such as judicial, political or teaching posts. The laws on land ownership and inheritance were the strictest, as land was a source of economic and political power. In 1778, for example, only 5 % of the land was still in Catholic hands, even though 75 % of the population was Catholic. Land ownership was crucial for economic survival and progress, and many Catholics, especially the wealthier ones, converted to Protestantism. But the lower classes and peasants remained loyal to their faith, signing their own prescription for life.
Thus two Irelands began to emerge: a new, modern Ireland with a Protestant ruling class that had nothing to do with Ireland’s long-standing traditions and way of life, and a “hidden” Catholic Ireland that was deprived of virtually all rights to public and religious participation, economic independence and political representation. It had only one institution to fall back on for shelter and hope for Catholics – the Catholic Church.
Catholic emancipation and the looming catastrophe
This kind of fragile and uneasy coexistence of two parallel worlds was not without fatal consequences. Political activism and nationalism flourished in the spirit of the French and American revolutions and their republican ideals and aspirations for national liberation. These were diligently spread by conscious Irish people who emigrated in increasing numbers, many of the better-off being educated in Catholic-friendly countries. Political alliances began to emerge to fight for more independence and against the systematic violation of basic rights. Irish people became nationally aware and organised.
The Irish Patriotic Party campaigned for reform of the Irish Parliament and a reduction in British influence in Irish affairs, as well as for greater rights for Catholics and Presbyterians. It even succeeded in abolishing some penal laws and restoring to Catholics the right to vote, to attend the famous Trinity College, to practise law and so on. The party was, of course, made up of Protestants, since they were the only ones who could sit in the Irish Parliament. This was proof that religious differences had given way to a national consciousness that united, at least for a time, the Irish nation.
The liberal political organisation United Irishmen first demanded parliamentary reform and then evolved into the revolutionary Republican Alliance. The English viewed the developments with great nervousness, especially when the Irish were flanked by their eternal rival France. They arrested most of the leaders of the organisation and declared a state of siege.
But in 1798, the United Irishmen, led by the influential radical Theobald Wolfe Tone, organised the Great Irish Rebellion to break British monarchical rule and establish a sovereign Irish Republic. For help, the United Irish turned to the French, who were their traditional allies – not only because of their faith, but also because of their desire to weaken their eternal rival, Great Britain. But the English managed to put down the uprising.
Wolfe Tone said at the time of his arrest: ‘From my earliest youth, I regarded the bond between Ireland and Great Britain as a curse upon the Irish nation, and was convinced that this country would neither be free nor happy as long as that bond existed. I was therefore determined to do everything in my power to separate the two countries.”
Then he slit his throat. He avoided hanging because he was denied the right of a soldier to be executed in front of a firing squad.
Relations between the two neighbours, already frayed, were becoming increasingly strained. To finally clip the Irish wings, the English dissolved the Irish Parliament after a rebellion and declared the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland by the Act of Union in 1801. When the Act of Union was passed, the British promised Catholics rights or Catholic emancipation in return, but the promise was quickly forgotten. Catholic emancipation meant an end to the discrimination that had been introduced over the previous two hundred years through various penal laws, representation in Parliament, the right to hold most public offices and access to universities.
Another Irish patriot, lawyer and orator, capable of mobilising the masses, who quickly achieved the status of a national hero, entered the scene. Daniel O’Connell, or the great “Liberator”, as he made his name in history. He founded the Catholic Association, which attracted thousands of peasants and members of the middle classes. The threat of a general uprising quickly became imminent, and in 1829 the English finally agreed to Catholic emancipation. O’Connell, however, immediately set himself a new goal – the abolition of the Union and Irish self-government.
But his struggle was interrupted by a human tragedy of unbelievable proportions and the greatest catastrophe in Irish history, the Great Potato Famine.
The Great Famine
The famine that struck Ireland in the mid-19th century, most severely between 1845 and 1849, marked a decisive turning point in Irish-English relations. The English not only turned their backs on the Irish, but also helped to make the famine and its consequences even more devastating. One hundred and fifty years later, the then British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, finally issued a formal apology for the actions of the British authorities:
“The Famine was a pivotal event in the history of Ireland and Britain. The thought that as many as one million people died in what was then one of the most powerful and wealthiest countries in the world is still painful today. The people were completely betrayed by those in power in London at the time.”
Ireland’s population grew exponentially in the 18th and 19th centuries. But with little industrialisation in Ireland, except in Ulster, to employ a large labour force, the population was overwhelmingly rural, poor and totally dependent on an unjust land tenure system. As many as two-thirds of the people were engaged in agriculture on estates rented from rich English landlords, since Catholics could not legally own land. There were around eight thousand landlords in Ireland, mostly descendants of English Protestants, who were deliberately settled in Ireland in the 16th and especially the 17th century – from the Tudors to Cromwell.
Most of these landlords lived in England and never dealt directly with their Irish estates, and their agents collected extortionate rents from Irish farmers. This unfair social arrangement made Irish agriculture very inefficient, a fact that was later blamed on the English, who were blamed for it.
In addition, people were totally dependent on potatoes for their diet. In the poorest regions, up to 90% of people were dependent on potatoes.
Potatoes have thrived in Ireland’s mild, humid climate and acidic soil, proving to be a perfect food and a low-maintenance crop with high nutritional value. Thus, with the introduction of the potato in the 16th century, the Irish population began to grow even faster, families became larger and mortality rates lowered. Potatoes were easy to grow and yielded more per hectare than, say, wheat.
Potatoes contain carbohydrates, protein, vitamins – an Irish adult ate an average of five kilos a day – and together with buttermilk, these two foods fed the Irish so well that, despite their poverty, they were healthy, strong, tall and had a longer life expectancy than, say, the English. In the sixty years before the Great Famine, the population grew by as much as 300%, rising from half a million to 8.5 million between 1660 and 1845! Ireland was one of the most densely populated countries in Europe.
But most people lived in substandard conditions, in one-room huts made of straw and mud. Potatoes, the staple and only food for many poor Irish people, were attacked by a serious blight in 1845, the germs of which arrived in Europe on ships from America. After black spots appeared on the potato leaves, the mould turned the tubers into rotten mush within a few weeks. No one knew how to prevent the disease. Potato blight partially or completely destroyed at least five harvests and the response of the British authorities to what happened in Ireland was catastrophic.
God sent famine to the Irish as a hint
In the initial period, London did introduce some short-term measures, such as free kitchens for the poor, but these quickly proved insufficient as the scale of hunger was simply too great. Major public works were also launched, notably road building, and those who were able to do hard physical work were then given ‘free’ meals. This was, of course, no long-term solution, as people were too physically weak to do such work. In England, however, public opinion branded them lazy.
In the second year of the famine, when the really hellish times were just beginning, the English stopped all aid. They showed an extremely macho attitude towards the Irish, not only the politicians, but everyone saw them as inferior and lazy people, to be taught a lesson by the famine. At the same time, it would halt their population growth, which made the English uncomfortable. Hunger was an Irish problem and the Irish should take care of their own problems, was the established paradigm. It was joined by the laissez-faire economic doctrine, which announced that market mechanisms would sort out any anomalies and that supply and demand would regulate themselves.
Most perverse of all, Irish farmers had to continue selling all other crops not affected by the disease to the UK. Exports of cereals, as well as meat, milk and butter, continued uninterrupted, as this was the only way they could continue to pay the rent. In the event of rent arrears, the English landlords began to evict Irish families. The evictions were ruthless, with people having only a few hours to gather up their meagre possessions and leave – their squalid cottages were often set on fire so that the poor could not return at night.
It even went so far as to quote Charles Trevelyan, the Westminster Chancellor of the Exchequer, as saying that hunger was an inevitable consequence of the social evils that had spread in Ireland and that it presented a good opportunity to reform Irish society. If they got used to state aid once, they would never get used to it again, the rich in London argued over sumptuous dinners.
Trevelyan said, “What we have to deal with is not the physical evil of hunger, but the moral evil of the selfish, depraved and restless character of these people.” A more belittling, condescending and patronising mentality could hardly be imagined. Trevelyan is one of the most reviled British historical figures in Ireland today.
Scenes of the worst human tragedy were unfolding simultaneously on Irish country roads. Columns of huddled people with bruised cheeks and blank stares were dragged from place to place like grim processions of death, people were left where they had succumbed to death, and the ditches were full of bodies. There was no time, no will, no means for funerals. Many people went mad with hunger and foreign observers, who were, however, slowly beginning to draw attention to the tragedy, described horrifying scenes of small children playing with or even biting the limbs of dead mothers in order to satisfy their unimaginable hunger. Rats multiplied and made a living in all this human misery – often gnawing on living bodies in their last gasps. Disease spread like wildfire – typhus, dysentery, cholera, smallpox.
There were frequent riots, and the English spent more money on security forces than on famine relief, sending the army and police to Ireland instead of food. Meanwhile, humanitarian aid began to arrive from all over the world, from Indian princes, Australians, Indian chiefs from the USA, the Sultan of Turkey, the Pope, and above all, of course, the Irish diaspora, all raising money for the starving Irish.
Mass exodus
The Great Potato Famine did not end until 1852. It left despair and devastation in its wake. It left scars on the Irish national consciousness, a stain on the English, and eventually a sense of guilt. According to various estimates, at least 1.5 million people died during the famine and at least that many emigrated. It completely changed Irish society and the structure of agriculture, which shifted to sheep and cattle farming and tried to abandon potato growing.
Many of the small farmers who had been working in the fields had no work left, and the exodus continued unabated. By the beginning of the 20th century, a further three million people had left Ireland and there were more Irish in New York alone than in Ireland. Unlike the rest of Europe, Ireland has fewer people today than it did in 1845, on the eve of the potato famine.
Even before the Great Famine, the Irish emigrated frequently, mainly because of religious tensions and the severe discrimination against Catholics, which prevented them from making any economic progress. Most of them left for North America, especially the USA, in search of bread. Before the famine, these were mainly younger and single people, while the famine led to a mass exodus; many families tried to emigrate, but many often suffered a harsher fate at sea than at home.
Starving and sick people made the several-week journey across the ocean, spending all their savings and sometimes financed by landlords to get rid of their worries. At least half of them died during the voyage in horrible and unworthy circumstances, on battered and derelict ships, crammed into the hold, a breeding ground for disease. These ships were called “floating coffins” and only the really strong survived.
Between 1801 and 1921, eight million people emigrated from Ireland. Unfortunately, the Irish, mostly from the lowest classes, were often treated even worse in their new homelands than at home. The Irish diaspora became one of the largest in the world, but also one of the most cohesive, with strong ties to the homeland and the preservation of cultural traditions and customs. But memories of the famine did not fade and the diaspora became radical and militant.
Self-government movement and Celtic revival
In Ireland, too, after the Great Famine, anti-English sentiment only intensified and nationalism ran high. Irish MPs in the English Parliament, led by the charismatic new leader Charles Stewart Parnell, fought hard to achieve Home Rule and to change the land tenure system to limit the catastrophic consequences in the event of another famine. Despite several agreements during the Liberal governments, the proposal always ended up in the House of Lords, the traditionally Conservative upper house of the English Parliament.
By 1900, there were many different organisations fighting for independence, both radical and moderate, Protestant and Catholic. The more militant ones advocated armed revolutionary struggle and took their inspiration from 18th century revolutionaries such as Wolfe Tone. For example, the paramilitary Irish Volunteers, which by 1913 had over 180,000 members. A less violent group was Sinn Fein (Sami for themselves in Gaelic), which worked by boycotting the English administration.
Parallel to political activism, another social phenomenon has emerged, namely the romantic revival of the nation’s distant past. During the so-called Celtic revival, Irish intellectuals, poets and writers sought to reimagine Irish identity. The cultural renaissance was led by literary geniuses such as the novelist James Joyce and the poet William Butler Yeats, the playwrights Seán O’Casey and Edmund Millington Synge, and above all by the great lady and patron of Irish culture, language and folklore, Augusta Gregory.
Dublin has become a world literary capital. Their works celebrated Ireland’s rich cultural heritage and history, its natural beauty, and gave a central place to the revival of the Gaelic language and even traditional Gaelic sports. In 1893, the Gaelic League was formed, in which Patrick Pearse, one of the later leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising, became active. Pearse was convinced that without a language there is no nation. All this strengthened the pride and self-confidence of the Irish nation.
After two decades of hot-blooded pressure and political horse-trading on both sides, an agreement on self-government is finally passed in both Houses of the British Parliament, just before the outbreak of the First World War. It provided for an Irish government and parliament in charge of most domestic affairs, with only foreign affairs, the judiciary and fiscal policy remaining under London’s control.
However, to prevent friction or even armed conflict between North and South, Ulster was excluded from the agreement and its fate was to be decided at a later date. During this period, those who advocated the partition of the island also became increasingly vocal. Most Irish people were, however, very happy with this type of agreement and were also resigned to the fact that it would have to wait until the end of the war before it could be implemented. This satisfied Ulster loyalists, but not Irish nationalists in the south, who once again found themselves on the sidelines of their own history.
A small group of radical Irish Volunteers were prepared to use all available means to recruit rebels who would be willing to join the revolt. These included mainly members of the underground Irish Republican Brotherhood, the forerunner of the Irish Republican Army. They wanted to use the war to their advantage and surprise the already weakened English, who had no time to deal with a perpetually discontented Ireland, with a rebellion.
And so, during the most important Christian feast, Easter, Dublin was shaken by the uprising of a small group of zealous people who, knowing that they had virtually no chance of success, patriotically went to their deaths. They believed that their courageous act would serve as an example and spark the uprising of an entire nation. And indeed they have gone down in history as martyrs who hastened the independence of the majority of Ireland.
Easter Rising
The main architects were an interesting set of romantic fanatics who embodied the dream of freedom. They were the schoolmaster and poet Patrick Pearse, the Marxist trade unionist Joseph Connolly, the divorced countess, the eccentric suffragette Constanze Markiewicz, the tobacco shop owner Thomas Clarke, and the man who would later shape much of 20th century Irish politics as the sole surviving leader of the Rising, the future President and American-born Eamon de Valera.
The intellectual leader of the revolt was Patrick Pearse. He believed that every generation of true Irishmen should stand up to the English, even if they knew in advance that the rebellion would fail. His words have gone down in history:
“Life springs from death, and from the graves of patriotic wives and husbands spring living nations. They think they have subjugated Ireland, they think they have bought half of us and bullied the other half. They think they foresaw everything. They think they have taken care of everything. But fools, fools, fools. /…/ An unfree Ireland will never be peaceful.”
The radical Irish Volunteers were joined by, among others, the trade unionist Irish Citizen Army and even a 200-strong women’s militia. The leaders of the uprising tried to obtain arms from the Germans, with the help of the eminent diplomat Roger Casement, whom the world came to know when he campaigned for the human rights of slaves in the Congo. But his arms shipment was intercepted by the British and Casement was later hanged for high treason.
But this has not stopped the rebels, although some organisations have withdrawn at the last minute due to a lack of weapons. Despite much confusion about the announced start of the uprising, it began on Easter Monday, 23 April. However, due to conflicting orders from the leadership, the number of insurgents was much smaller than expected, no more than 1600.
The headquarters of the Rising became Dublin’s main post office, where they proudly hoisted the new green, white and orange flag of the newly proclaimed Irish Free Republic. It was there that Pearse solemnly read out the Declaration of Independence of Ireland. But a few passers-by hardly showed any interest in this unusual act, and some even booed him. Few people were in an insurrectionary mood in these difficult times of war.
How, then, did this uprising become the most decisive event in the whole Irish struggle for independence?
The British, of course, crushed it in less than a week and declared martial law in its aftermath, but then made so many tactical mistakes that Irish public opinion quickly swung fully to the side of the insurgents. The popular reaction to the harsh reprisals was mainly emotional – the fifteen main leaders of the uprising were executed one by one, and the personal story of each of them was tragic-romantic.
O’Connolly had to be tied to a chair, badly injured, so that he could sit upright and be placed in front of a firing squad, while another man was allowed to marry his chosen wife in a prison cell just hours before his execution. As details emerged that most of the insurgents knew that the uprising would in all likelihood end in their deaths, they became national heroes and martyrs.
A bitter-tasting fulfilment of a historic dream
Most of the other members of the organisations involved in the uprising were sentenced without trial to serve their sentences in English prisons. Among them was Eamon de Valera, who probably escaped death because of his US citizenship. Together with Michael Collins, he soon became the new hope of Irish freedom.
The draconian reaction of the British authorities to the rebellion gave Irish separatism a new impetus, and instead of autonomy, demands for genuine independence grew. In the 1918 parliamentary elections, Sinn Feinn won a majority, establishing an Irish Parliament and adopting the Declaration of Independence as a continuation of the republic proclaimed during the Easter Rising. But the British quickly poached the leading politicians and threw them in jail. De Valera escaped and was declared President of the Irish Republic.
Between 1918 and 1921, a bloody war of independence raged, with both sides using extreme methods. While the Irish perfected terrorist and guerrilla actions, often with civilian casualties, the British sent in the notorious Reservist police forces, who had no choice in how they fought the Irish. The David and Goliath conflict took place in full view of the world, which cast Britain in particular in a very bad light. The Irish were the victims and the English were the bullies.
Westminster slowly began to give in, and the Anglo-Irish Treaty followed, granting Ireland a Dominion status similar to Canada’s. But the Irish Government Act kept Northern Ireland, with its six counties, outside the newly created Irish Free State. Two separate parliaments were created.
The bloodshed was not over, however, as not all Irish factions agreed to the treaty, and civil war broke out. The pro-Treaty side won the war and the development of the Irish Free State in the following years proceeded fairly smoothly under the unchallenged leadership of Eamon de Valera. In 1949, the Republic of Ireland was also formally established and all remaining ties with the British monarchy were amicably severed.
Waiting for the epilogue
In a letter to his mother shortly before his execution, Patrick Pearse wrote: “You must not grieve. Our actions of the last few weeks have been the most glorious in Irish history. Future generations will remember and celebrate us.” How right he was.
Ireland quickly became a modern democracy and its constitution clearly enshrined political and civil rights, as well as the role of the Catholic Church. But the Green Isle continued to be rocked by turmoil in the 20th century, especially between the Republic of Ireland and breakaway Ulster. Recently, grim details have emerged of scandals linked to the conduct of the Catholic Church in the second half of the 20th century. It clearly had too much social authority and was blindly followed by the people, as it was the constant and the shelter of Irish life for centuries.
But most of all, Ireland’s history has been marked by seven centuries of dependence on its master neighbour, Great Britain. The story of this complex relationship continues with the partition of Ireland into two parts.
