7. Volume 4: Ireland, Revolution and Diaspora, 1882-1923

This is the final volume in my Rebellion Quartet and takes to story of Ireland and its diaspora in its quest for devolution within the United Kingdom and, following the Easter Rising of 1916 and the political shift away from calls for Home Rule towards independence and a republican state. Between 1798 and 1916 Ireland suffered four rebellions; all failed to achieve their immediate objective of an independent Ireland. The Fenian movement, in both the United States and Canada and in Ireland and Britain had been extremely successful in developing a separatist Irish nationalism and in creating organisational structures that sought to make this a reality. Yet the rebellion in Ireland in March 1867 demonstrated that it was unlikely that armed confrontation would bring about an independent Ireland.  The Easter Rising of 1916 was largely confined to Dublin, involved around 1,600 rebels and was defeated after six days when faced with 18-20,000 British troops leaving around 450 dead, 254 of them civilians and more than 2,000 injured. The rebels did not expect to win power, what they planned was a demonstration, a gesture to transform public opinion, something they singularly failed to do until its leaders were court martialled and shot.

The Prologue revisits the material examined in both editions of Famine, Fenians and Freedom providing the context for discussion of developments in Ireland and more broadly across the globe. In Diasporas, the movements of the Irish people in the second half of the nineteenth century through to the 1920s in examines through their emigration to mainland Britain, America, Canada and Australasia.  In doing this, the ways in which the Irish integrated into Britain’s colonial societies and became part of societies beyond the United States in Latin and South America gives support to the notion of the Irish world. Home Rule was the dominant notion from the 1870s through to the outbreak of war in 1914 under Isaac Butt, Charles Stewart Parnell and John Redmond who successively led the Irish Parliamentary Party. In both the United States and Australasia, there was considerable support for a constitutional solution, something successive Irish politicians exploited in their fund-raising tours. It took three Home Rule Bills in 1886, 1893 and 1912 before legislation was finally given Royal Assent in September 1914 by which times battle lines had been drawn between Ulster Unionists for whom Home Rule meant the partition of Ireland creating a separate Ulster and nationalists for whom Home Rule was something that applied to the whole island of Ireland.

War and Rebellion 1914-1918 considers the impact of the outbreak of war in August 1914 on those supporting the constitutional nationalist position associated with the Irish Parliamentary Party and on those nationalists, a minority within a minority, for whom a republican separatist solution was preferable to the Home Rule solution.  Much of this chapter looks at the events leading up to the Easter Rising in April 1916 and its immediate aftermath leading up to the victory of Sinn Fein in the 1918 General election.  There is a section of the planning of the revolution between 1914 and the beginnings of the rebellion on Easter Monday 1916.  This is followed by an examination of the rebellion in Dublin and beyond Dublin and the ways in which both the rebels and the British military forces fought each other.  There is a short section on the active role played by women in the rebellion.  How the Irish diaspora responded to the Rising is considered in Australasia and North America and the tensions this created within their Irish nationalisms.  By the middle of 1916, the deep divisions between Catholics and Protestants made it inconceivable that there could be a united Ireland under Home Rule, something looked at in the section on 1917 and 1918. 

Resistance and Revolution 1919-1923 considers the creation of the Irish Republic.  Between the initial declaration of an independent Irish republic in January 1919 after the decisive election of 1918 and the creation, in December 1921, of the Irish Free State there was a state of conflict.  This is variously known as Cogadh na Saoirse or the Irish War of Independence, the Anglo-Irish War or less commonly, the Black and Tan War and was a war characterised by outrages and bloody reprisals on both sides.  In the midst of war, Westminster partitioned Ireland creating Northern Ireland before negotiation with Sinn Féin began. The choice facing the Irish delegates in London in the autumn of 1921 was whether or not to fight on for some kind of republic or accept Britain’s offer of limited independence. The result was a fraught deal imposed on the Irish delegates after two months of wrangling or else face the immediate and determined resumption of war.  Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins, the two senior delegates, saw the agreement as a stepping-stone towards the goal of a fully independent and united Ireland and signed rather than risk war. The agreement needed to be ratified by both the British Parliament and the Dáil Eireann.  The terms were recommended by a majority of the seven members of the Irish cabinet and most of the deputies agreed with Griffith and Collins.  This was not the view of all and those who opposed the Treaty militarily during 1922 lost a destructive civil war that poisoned Irish politics for a generation, hardened the border and set back the new state.