Ireland (Lonely Planet, 9th Edition) - Fionn Davenport [17]
The Easter Rising would probably have had little impact on the Irish situation had the British not made martyrs of the rebel leaders. Of the 77 given death sentences, 15 were executed, including the injured Connolly, who was shot while strapped to a chair. This brought about a sea change in public attitudes, and support for the Republicans rose dramatically.
By the end of WWI, Home Rule was far too little, far too late. In the 1918 general election, the Republicans stood under the banner of Sinn Féin and won a large majority of the Irish seats. Ignoring London’s Parliament, where technically they were supposed to sit, the newly elected Sinn Féin deputies – many of them veterans of the 1916 Easter Rising – declared Ireland independent and formed the first Dáil Éireann (Irish assembly or lower house), which sat in Dublin’s Mansion House under the leadership of Éamon de Valera (1882–1975). The Irish Volunteers became the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the Dáil authorised it to wage war on British troops in Ireland.
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A KIND OF FREEDOM
The War of Independence lasted 2½ years and resulted in around 1200 casualties, not considered a large number in the context of the times. Nevertheless, it was a particularly nasty affair, as the IRA fought a guerrilla-style campaign against the British, their numbers swelled by returning veterans of WWI known as ‘Black and Tans’ (on account of their uniforms, a mix of khaki and black), whose experiences in the trenches had traumatised them to the point that they were prone to all kinds of brutality. The IRA campaign was masterminded by the charismatic and ruthless Michael Collins (1890–1922), whose use of ‘flying columns’ to ambush British forces eventually led to the truce of July 1921.
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To gain some insight into the mind of Michael Collins, read In His Own Words, a collection of Collins’ writings and speeches.
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After months of difficult negotiations in London, the Irish delegation signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty on 6 December 1921. It gave 26 counties of Ireland – now known as the Irish Free State – limited independence and allowed six largely Protestant Ulster counties the choice of opting out. If they did (a foregone conclusion), a Boundary Commission would decide on the final frontiers between north and south. But the thorny issue of partition, coupled with the status of the newly established state – still headed by the British monarch, with Irish MPs still having to swear an oath of allegiance to the Crown – was, at best, a bad compromise. Even the signatories of the Treaty knew it: as he was affixing his signature, Collins commented that he was signing his own death warrant.
Yet Collins wasn’t entirely naive. He regarded the issue of the monarchy and the oath of allegiance as largely symbolic and hoped that the six northeastern counties wouldn’t be a viable entity and would eventually become part of the Free State. During the Treaty negotiations he was convinced that the Border Commission would decrease the size of the part of Ireland remaining outside the Free State. Alas, a series of inflammatory press leaks meant that the eventual findings of the commission in 1925 – basically redividing the frontier so as to include more Nationalists in the Free State – were never instituted and to this day Northern Ireland’s borders are as they were in 1921, when the Northern Ireland Parliament first sat with James Craig as the first prime minister. From the start, Northern Ireland was an entity divided along strictly religious grounds, with Catholic Nationalists taking up seats in the new Parliament