The first comprehensive account to record and analyze all
deaths arising from the Irish revolution between 1916 and
1921 This account covers the turbulent period from the
1916 Rising to the ...Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921-a period
which saw the achievement of independence for most of nationalist
Ireland and the establishment of Northern Ireland as a
self-governing province of the United Kingdom. Separatists fought
for independence against government forces and, in North East
Ulster, armed loyalists. Civilians suffered violence from all
combatants, sometimes as collateral damage, often as targets. Eunan
O'Halpin and Daithí Ó Corráin catalogue and analyze the deaths of
all men, women, and children who died during the revolutionary
years-505 in 1916; 2,344 between 1917 and 1921. This study provides
a unique and comprehensive picture of everyone who died: in what
manner, by whose hands, and why. Through their stories we obtain
original insight into the Irish revolution itself.
In Dublin, the War of Irish Independence (1919-1921) was an intense and dirty battle between military intelligence agents. While IRA flying columns fought the British Army and the Black and Tans in ...the countryside, the fighting in Ireland's capital city pitted the wits of IRA commander Michael Collins against the cloak-and-dagger innovations of British Intelligence chief Colonel Ormonde de l'Epee Winter. Drawing on detailed witness statements of Irish participants and documents and biographies from the British side, this history chronicles the covert war of assassinations, arrests, torture and murder that climaxed in the Bloody Sunday mass assassination of British intelligence officers by IRA squads in November 1920.
Geoffrey Bell's Hesitant Comrades is the first published history of the policies, actions and attitudes of the British working class towards the Irish national revolution of 1916-21. Drawing ...principally on primary sources, Bell brings to light for the first time important incidents in British/Irish history, including how the leaders of British trade unions were complicit in Belfast loyalist sectarianism; the troubled nature of the Labour Party's relations with its Irish community; and how the Bolsheviks criticised British Marxists over their inaction on Ireland. The author also looks at socialist debates on the compatibility of Irish nationalism with socialism and the contentious 'Ulster question'. Participants examined range from Ramsay MacDonald to Sylvia Pankhurst. Based on in-depth research - with sources ranging from newly discovered writings to reports of police spies - Hesitant Comrades is a scholarly, provocative and groundbreaking perspective on the fragile relationship between the British left and the Irish revolution.
i Women have too often been written out of history. This is especially true in the fight for Irish independence. The women's struggle was three-fold, beginning with the suffragettes' fight to win the ...vote. Then came the push for fair pay and working conditions. Binding them together became part of the national struggle, first for home rule, then for the establishment of an Irish Republic. The Easter Rising of 1916 brought them together as soldiers of the Republic. Through the terrible years that followed, they became the conscience of Republicanism. Following independence, they were betrayed by the men they had served alongside. DeValera and the Catholic Church restricted their roles in society--they were to be wives and mothers without a voice. It was not until Ireland's entry into the European community and the self destruction of a corrupt Church that Irish women were acknowledged for what they had achieved.
This book provides a scholarly yet accessible account of the Irish nationalist youth organisation Na Fianna Éireann and its contribution to the Irish Revolution in the period 1909–23. Countess ...Constance Markievicz and Bulmer Hobson established Na Fianna Éireann, or the Irish National Boy Scouts, as an Irish nationalist antidote to Robert Baden-Powell’s scouting movement founded in 1908. Between their establishment in 1909 and near decimation during the Irish Civil War of 1922–23, Na Fianna Éireann recruited, trained and nurtured a cadre of young nationalist activists who made an essential contribution to the struggle for Irish independence. This book will be of interest to historians and students specialising in the history of the Irish Revolution, youth culture, paramilitarism and twentieth-century Ireland. It will also appeal to the general reader with an interest in the history of the Irish Revolution.
As leader of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and then the Irish Republican Army (IRA), Michael Collins developed a bold, new strategy to use against the British administration of Ireland in the ...early twentieth century. His goal was to attack its well-established system of spies and informers, wear down British forces with a sustained guerrilla campaign, and force a political settlement that would lead to a free Irish Republic.Michael Collins and the Anglo-Irish Warreveals that the success of the Irish insurgency was not just a measure of Collins's revolutionary genius, as has often been claimed. British miscalculations, overconfidence, and a failure to mount a sustained professional intelligence effort to neutralize the IRA contributed to Britain's defeat.Although Britain possessed the world's most professional secret service, the British intelligence community underwent a politically driven and ill-advised reorganization in early 1919, at the very moment that Collins and the IRA were going on the offensive. Once Collins neutralized the local colonial spy service, the British had no choice but to import professional secret service agents. But Britain's wholesale reorganization of its domestic counterintelligence capability sidelined its most effective countersubversive agency, MI5, leaving the job of intelligence management in Ireland to Special Branch civilians and a contingent of quickly trained army case officers, neither group being equipped-or inclined-to mount a coordinated intelligence effort against the insurgents. Britain's appointment of a national intelligence director for home affairs in 1919-just as the Irish revolutionary parliament published its Declaration of Independence-was the decisive factor leading to Britain's disarray against the IRA. By the time the War Office reorganized its intelligence effort against Collins in mid-1920, it was too late to reverse the ascendancy of the IRA.Michael Collins and the Anglo-Irish Wartakes a fresh approach to the subject, presenting it as a case study in intelligence management under conditions of a broader counterinsurgency campaign. The lessons learned from this disastrous episode have stark relevance for contemporary national security managers and warfighters currently engaged in the war on terrorism.
The guerilla war waged between the IRA and the crown forces between 1919 and 1921 was a pivotal episode in the modern history of Ireland. This book addresses the War of Independence from a new ...perspective by focusing on the attitude of a powerful social elite: the Catholic clergy. The close relationship between Irish nationalism and Catholicism was put to the test when a pugnacious new republicanism emerged after the 1916 Easter rising. When the IRA and the crown forces became involved in a guerilla war between 1919 and 1921, priests had to define their position anew. Using a wealth of source material, much of it newly available, this book assesses the clergy's response to political violence. It describes how the image of shared victimhood at the hands of the British helped to contain tensions between the clergy and the republican movement, and shows how the links between Catholicism and Irish nationalism were sustained.
An in-depth look at how the Irish Free State was born, from a variety of perspectives. In the aftermath of the First World War, a political revolution took place in what was then the United ...Kingdom. Such upheavals were common in postwar Europe, as new states came into being and new borders were forged. What made the revolution in the UK distinctive is that it took place within one of the victorious powers, rather than any of their defeated enemies. In the years after the Easter Rising of 1916 in Ireland, a new independence movement had emerged, and in 1918-19 the political party Sinn Féin and its paramilitary partner, the Irish Republican Army, began a political struggle and an armed uprising against British rule. By 1922 the United Kingdom had lost a very substantial portion of its territory, as the Irish Free State came into being amid a brutal civil war. At the same time Ireland was partitioned and a new, unionist government was established in what was now Northern Ireland. These were outcomes that nobody could have predicted before 1914. In The Irish War of Independence and Civil War, experts on the subject explore the experience and consequences of the latter phases of the Irish revolution from a wide range of perspectives
In 1922, just after the end of the Irish War for Independence, the British Army's 'Irish Command' drafted an official four-volume historical record of their experiences and their understanding of the ...war in Ireland, titled The Record of the Rebellion in Ireland, 1919-1921 and the Part Played by the Army in Dealing with It. Ground Truths, an annotated collection, is based on the first of those four volumes and is edited to include material that was missed, was incorrect, or was deliberately changed by the original authors before final drafts had been concluded. Largely a defense of the perception that the British army 'lost' the war in Ireland, this collection of original documents features aspects of everyday warfare, such as military intelligence worries and rebel press propaganda, as well as the more intense key moments of the War of Independence, including the arrest and death of Terrence McSwiney, the murder of Thomas MacCurtain, the hunger-strikes of 1920, the murders of British Army officers that subsequently led to the Croke Park massacre on November 21, 1920, and the arrests of Arthur Griffith and Eamon De Valera. Essentially, Ground Truths contains the testimony of the British Army officers who lead the fight against the Irish republicans. The book is a unique, exciting, and original insight into the experiences and operations on a side of the War of Independence rarely studied in Irish history - the British side.
In this sequel to his bestselling Easter Rising 1916: The Trials, Sean Enright puts the great legal cases of the period into context with exacting clarity, including the Mac Curtain Inquest, the ...trials of MacSwiney, Markievicz, Maher and Foley, the Bloody Sunday courts martial and the trials under martial law.Following the executions of the 1916 leaders, a new government policy of conciliation was attempted but quickly faltered. Rebel prisoners were released, the Great War reached its climax, and Ireland was gripped by the conscription crisis and subsequent resentment over exclusion from the Versailles Peace Conference. It was in this atmosphere that revolution took hold. Raids and reprisals became widespread, dozens of police barracks were raided and over 90 courthouses were burned down. Under such pressures, Westminster abandoned jury trial in favour of trial by court martial, and martial law was introduced in the south and west.After the Rising provides a vibrant account of Ireland's slow descent into turmoil as the law unravelled and the country engaged in a new and shocking conflict.
