Fantastic vintage W.& R.Jacob & Co.Ltd Biscuit & Cake Manufacturers Dublin Advert depicting the famous Dublin Landmark which played such a pivotal role in the 1916 Easter Rising which altered the course of Irish History forever.
Clonsilla Dublin 45.5cm x 57.5cm
The biscuit making firm of W. & R. Jacob's were one the largest employers in the Dublin of 1916, and their factory was seized on Easter Monday by perhaps 100 members of the 2nd Battalion of the Dublin Brigade of the Irish Volunteers under Thomas MacDonagh. The factory itself was an enormous and formidable Victorian edifice located on the 'block' enclosed by Bishop St, Bride St, Peter's St and Peter's Row, and between St Patrick's Cathedral and St Stephen's Green. Its seizure helped to complete a loop of building cross the south inner city; the factory had two large towers that could act as observation points, while its location was very close to both Camden St and Patrick St: natural routeways for troops entering the city centre from Portobello Barracks in Rathmines and Wellington Barracks on the South Circular Road.
There were only a few staff present in the building when the Volunteers broke into it; a number of smaller outposts were established in the area around the factory. While the garrison saw some fighting early in the week, their principal enemies proved to be boredom and the locals: the factory was surrounded by tenements, and the Volunteers were attacked and abused by residents, many of whom were Jacob's workers themselves. The families of servicemen were also quite hostile, but there may have been another reason for this hostility: Michael O'Hanrahan, who was in Jacob's, expressed his concern that the choice of location might endanger local residents if the British chose to attack. As it happens, the factory was largely by-passed, though it was fired upon intermittently throughout the week by troops in Dublin Castle and elsewhere. MacDonagh surrendered in nearby St Patrick's Park on Sunday 30 April; some of the factory was looted after the Volunteers had left. Three members of the Jacob's garrison were executed.
Most of the factory was eventually demolished, though fragments of the ground storey and one of the towers are still visible on Bishop St between the DIT campus on Aungier St and the National Archives of Ireland.
Nearly a Che Guevera style to this poster of the rebel hero Sean South from Garryowen in the heart of Limerick City.
Origins : Limerick. Dimensions : 54cm x 42cm Glazed
Sean South ( c. 1928 – 1 January 1957)was a member of an IRA military column led by Sean Garland on a raid against a Royal Ulster Constabulary barracks in Brookeborough, County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, on New Year's Day 1957.South, along with Fergal O'Hanlon, died of wounds sustained during the raid.
Early life
Seán South was born in Limerick where he was educated at Sexton Street Christian Brothers School, later working as a clerk in a local wood-importing company called McMahon's. He was a member of a number of organisations, including Clann na Poblachta, Sinn Féin, the Gaelic League and the Legion of Mary. In Limerick he founded the local branch of Maria Duce, a social Roman Catholic organisation, where he also edited both An Gath and An Giolla. He had received military training as a lieutenant of the Irish army reserve, the Local Defence Force (LDF), which would later become An Fórsa Cosanta Áitiúil (the FCA), before he became a volunteer in the Irish Republican Army.
Being a member of An Réalt (the Irish-speaking chapter of the Legion of Mary),South was a devout Catholic and a conservative, even by the standards of the day.It was at a meeting of An Réalt that he met his only serious girlfriend, Máire de Paor. She was a schoolteacher from Limerick, and was a great lover of the Irish language. He was also a member of the Knights of Columbanus.
In 1949, South wrote a series of letters to his local newspaper, the Limerick Leader. These letters condemned Hollywood films for what South regarded as their immoral messages. South accused these films of promoting a "stream of insidious propaganda which proceeds from Judeo-Masonic controlled sources, and which warps and corrupts the minds of our youth."South also claimed that the American film industry was controlled by "Jewish and Masonic executives dictating to Communist rank and file." In his letters, South also denounced Irish trade unions, and praised the activities of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the United States.
Death
On New Year's Day 1957, 14 IRA volunteers crossed the border into County Fermanaghto launch an attack on a joint RUC/B Specials barracks in Brookeborough. During the attack a number of volunteers were injured, two fatally. South and Fergal O'Hanlon died of their wounds as they were making their escape. Their bodies were brought into an old sandstone barn by their comrades. The stone from the barn was used to build a memorial at the site. A young Catholic constable, John Scalley, was killed in the ensuing gun battle between the IRA unit and the RUC.
Commemoration
The attack on the barracks inspired two popular rebel songs: ‘Seán South of Garryowen' and ‘The Patriot Game '.
"Sean South", also known as "Sean South of Garryowen", written by Sean Costelloe from County Limerick, to the tune of another republican ballad "Roddy McCorley" and made famous by the Wolfe Tones.
South is also mentioned in the Rubberbandits' song "Up Da Ra", which pokes fun at the concept of armchair republicanism using the literary device of the unreliable narrator.
43cm x 38cm Dublin
The Easter Rising (Irish: Éirí Amach na Cásca), also known as the Easter Rebellion, was an armed insurrection in Ireland during Easter Week in April 1916. The Rising was launched by Irish republicans against British rule in Ireland with the aim of establishing an independent Irish Republic while the United Kingdom was fighting the First World War. It was the most significant uprising in Ireland since the rebellion of 1798 and the first armed conflict of the Irish revolutionary period. Sixteen of the Rising's leaders were executed from May 1916. The nature of the executions, and subsequent political developments, ultimately contributed to an increase in popular support for Irish independence.
Organised by a seven-man Military Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the Rising began on Easter Monday, 24 April 1916 and lasted for six days.Members of the Irish Volunteers, led by schoolmaster and Irish language activist Patrick Pearse, joined by the smaller Irish Citizen Army of James Connolly and 200 women of Cumann na mBan, seized strategically important buildings in Dublin and proclaimed the Irish Republic. The British Army brought in thousands of reinforcements as well as artillery and a gunboat. There was street fighting on the routes into the city centre, where the rebels slowed the British advance and inflicted many casualties. Elsewhere in Dublin, the fighting mainly consisted of sniping and long-range gun battles. The main rebel positions were gradually surrounded and bombarded with artillery. There were isolated actions in other parts of Ireland; Volunteer leader Eoin MacNeill had issued a countermand in a bid to halt the Rising, which greatly reduced the number of rebels who mobilised.
With much greater numbers and heavier weapons, the British Army suppressed the Rising. Pearse agreed to an unconditional surrender on Saturday 29 April, although sporadic fighting continued briefly. After the surrender, the country remained under martial law. About 3,500 people were taken prisoner by the British and 1,800 of them were sent to internment camps or prisons in Britain. Most of the leaders of the Rising were executed following courts-martial. The Rising brought physical force republicanism back to the forefront of Irish politics, which for nearly fifty years had been dominated by constitutional nationalism. Opposition to the British reaction to the Rising contributed to changes in public opinion and the move toward independence, as shown in the December 1918 election in Ireland which was won by the Sinn Féin party, which convened the First Dáil and declared independence.
Of the 485 people killed, 260 were civilians, 143 were British military and police personnel, and 82 were Irish rebels, including 16 rebels executed for their roles in the Rising. More than 2,600 people were wounded. Many of the civilians were killed or wounded by British artillery fire or were mistaken for rebels. Others were caught in the crossfire during firefights between the British and the rebels. The shelling and resulting fires left parts of central Dublin in ruins.
BEFORE THE ADVENT of opinion polls, by-elections were the most reliable means of gauging the mood of the electorate.
For decades before the 1916 Rising, Irish nationalists represented by the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) sought Irish home rule – a subordinate parliament and government in Dublin.
But the emergence of Sinn Féin, which championed an independent Irish republic, transformed the political landscape. In 1917 Sinn Féin won four by-elections on the bounce in North Roscommon, South Longford, East Clare and South Kilkenny.
No victory was more emphatic than East Clare and no winning candidate more central to the future history of Ireland.
A political novice
The victor was a political novice with little experience of public speaking outside the classroom. The senior surviving Volunteer from 1916, he was largely unknown before the East Clare by-election.
But after it he was catapulted to national prominence, became president of Sinn Féin and represented East Clare for the next four decades. That soldier turned politician was De Valera .
The East Clare by-election on July 10 was precipitated by the death on the Western Front of the sitting MP: Major Willie Redmond, brother of the leader of the IPP.
Patrick Lynch KC, a barrister, contested the seat for the IPP under the banner: “Clare for a Clareman – Lynch is the Man”. His supporters, who were strongest in Ennis, contended that an Irish republic was a political fantasy. For several reasons, few expected anything other than a Sinn Féin victory.
One of the most rebellious counties in Ireland
First, Clare was one of the most rebellious counties in Ireland and during the by-election the county inspector of the Royal Irish Constabulary had to obtain a draft of 150 soldiers. Eight months after the by-election Clare became the first county to be placed under military rule since the 1916 Rising.
Second, no election had been contested in East Clare since 1895 and the IPP’s constituency machine was decrepit and almost bankrupt. By contrast, the Sinn Féin campaign was highly organised and backboned by the revamped Irish Volunteers who were unafraid to defy the authorities and acted as a private police force.
De Valera, who had only been released from prison on 16 June, campaigned in his Volunteer uniform and told the electors that, “every vote you give now is as good as the crack of a rifle in proclaiming your desire for freedom”.
Third, buoyed up by its earlier electoral successes Sinn Féin attracted not just the support of the young but that of the Clare Champion (the county newspaper) and, more significantly, the endorsement of Bishop Michael Fogarty of Killaloe and the majority of younger clergy. The Catholic card was played astutely and reassuringly by de Valera.
Although everyone expected a victory for de Valera, no one expected so stunning a winning margin. When the result of the election was announced on July 11 de Valera had secured 5,010 votes to Lynch’s 2,035.
A game changer
The rural vote had turned against the IPP. The Freeman’s Journal, the newspaper of the IPP, lamented that, “East Clare has declared for revolution by an overwhelming majority”. Lynch was not the man after all.
The East Clare by-election was a milestone for Sinn Féin because it secured a striking popular mandate which helped the organisation to continue its rapid growth ahead of the 1918 general election.
For de Valera his victory was a pivotal episode in his progression from militant to political republican. More than any other factor, the scale of his success propelled him to the presidency of Sinn Féin in October 1917 and launched his long political career. For a man who in the early months of 1917 wished to have no truck with politics this was quite a turn of events.
Lovely,limited edition commemorative poster celebrating the bicentennial anniversary of the 1798 United Irishmen Rebellion.
78cm x 57cm
The 1798 United Irishmen Rebellion led by Theobald Wolfe Tone was ill fated from the outset.Inspired by the recent successful American and French Revolutions,the Rebels leadership became fragmented and the revolt was only sporadically successful .This poster captures the portraits of such notable United Irishmen as Henry Joy McCracken,Napper Tandy and Wolfe Tone himself.
The united Irish crest.An overview of the insurrection of 1798, by John Dorney.
The 1798 rebellion was an insurrection launched by the United Irishmen, an underground republican society, aimed at overthrowing the Kingdom of Ireland, severing the connection with Great Britain and establishing an Irish Republic based on the principles of the French Revolution.
The rebellion failed in its aim to launch a coordinated nationwide uprising. There were instead isolated outbreaks of rebellion in county Wexford, other Leinster counties, counties Antrim and Down in the north and after the landing of a French expeditionary force, in county Mayo in the west.
The military uprising was put down with great bloodshed in the summer of 1798. Some of its leaders, notably Wolfe Tone were killed or died in imprisonment, while many others were exiled.
The 1798 rebellion was failed attempt to found a secular independent Irish Republic.
The 1790s marked an exceptional event in Irish history because the United Irishmen were a secular organisation with significant support both among Catholics and Protestants, including Protestants in the northern province of Ulster.
However, the unity of Catholics and Protestants was far from universal and the fighting itself was marked in places by sectarian atrocities.
As a result of the uprising, the Irish Parliament, which had existed since the 13th century, was abolished and under the Act of Union (1800) Ireland was to be ruled directly from London until 1922.
Background
The Irish Parliament on Dublin’s College Green.
In the 18th century, Ireland was a Kingdom in its own right, under the Kings of England. Executive power was largely in the hands of the Lord Lieutenant and the Chief Secretary, appointed by the British prime minister.
However, Ireland also had its own parliament, which throughout the century, lobbied for greater control over trade and law making in Ireland. The Irish parliament was subservient to the British parliament at Westminster, but increasingly, as the century wore on, agitated for greater autonomy.
In 1782, the Irish parliament managed to free itself from subservience to the Lord Lieutenant and, to an extent, from the British parliament through the passage of laws that enabled it to make its own laws for the first time without reference to Westminster.
Ireland in the 18th century had its own parliament but the majority of the population was excluded from political participation on religious and property grounds.
However, membership of the parliament was confined to members of the Anglican Church of Ireland, which, allowing for some conversions, was overwhelmingly composed of descendants of English settlers. The parliament was not a democratic body; elections were relatively infrequent, seats could be purchased and the number of voters was small and confined to wealthy, property-owning Protestants.
Under the Penal Laws, enacted after the Catholic defeat in theJacobite-Williamite war of the 1690s, all those who refused to acknowledge the English King as head of their Church – therefore Catholic and Presbyterians – were barred not only from the parliament but from any public position or service in the Army.
United Irish leader Theobald Wolfe Tone.
Catholic owned lands were also confiscated for alleged political disloyalty throughout the 17th century. Catholics, to a large extent the descendants of the pre-seventeenth century Irish population, also suffered from restrictions on landholding, inheritance, entering the professions and the right to bear arms.
Presbyterians, mostly descendants of Scottish immigrants, while not excluded as rigorously as Catholics from public life, also suffered from discrimination – marriages performed by their clergy were not legally recognised for instance.
Although some of the Penal Laws were relaxed in 1782, allowing new Catholic churches and schools to open, and allowing Catholics into the professions and to purchase land, the great majority of the Irish population was still excluded from political power, and to a large extent from wealth and landholding also, as the last decade of the 18thcentury dawned.
Discontent among Catholics was exacerbated by economic hardship and by tithes, compulsory taxes that people of all religions had to pay, for the upkeep of the established, Protestant Church.
Initially the United Irishmen, founded, mainly by Presbyterians in Belfast in 1791, campaigned merely for reform, lobbying for the vote to be extended to Catholics and to non-property holders. The United Irishmen had a determinedly non-sectarian outlook, their motto being, as their leading member Theobald Wolfe Tone put it, ‘to unite Catholic Protestant and Dissenter under the common name of Irishman’.
The United Irishmen, inspired by the American and French revolutions, initially lobbied for democratic reform.
They were greatly inspired by the events of the American and French revolutions (1776 and 1789 respectively) and hoped to eventually found a self-governing, secular Irish state on the basis of universal male suffrage. The leadership of the United Irishmen was largely Protestant or Presbyterian at the start and it recruited men of all sects, mainly in the richer, more urban, eastern half of the country.
Some of their early demands were granted by the Irish parliament, for example Catholics were given the right to vote in 1793, as well as the right to attend university, obtain degrees and to serve in the military and civil service.
However the reforms did not go nearly as far as the radicals wished. Catholics still could not sit in the Parliament for example, nor hold public office and the vote was granted only to holders of property worth over forty shillings a year.
Radicalisation
A contemporary depiction of the ‘the mob’ during the French Revolution.
The United Irishmen did not remain an open reformist organisation for long. The French revolution took a radical turn in 1791. In the following two years it deposed King Louis XVI and declared a Republic. Britain and revolutionary France went to war in 1793.
In Ireland, the United Irishmen, who supported the French Republic, were banned and went underground in 1794. Wolfe Tone went into exile, first in America and then in France, where he lobbied for military aid for revolution in Ireland.
The United Irishmen now stated that their goal was a fully independent Irish Republic.
At the same time, popular discontent was growing, as the government dispatched troops to suppress the United Irishmen and other ‘seditious’ groups. The government also announced that men had to serve in the militia which would maintain internal security in Ireland during the war with France. Resistance to impressment into the militia led to fierce rioting in 1793 that left over 200 people dead.
Repression of United Irish suspects, in this case a ‘half hanging’.
Having been driven underground, the United Irishmen in Ireland began organising a clandestine military structure. In an effort to recruit more foot soldiers for the hoped-for revolution, they made contact with a Catholic secret society, the Defenders, who had been engaged in low level fighting, especially in the north, with Protestant groups such as the so called Peep of Day Boys and the newly founded Orange Order.
As a result, while the majority of the United Irishmen’s top leadership remained Protestant, their foot soldiers, except in north east Ulster, became increasingly Catholic.
That said, the Catholic Church itself was opposed to the ‘atheistical’ Republicans and was, for the first time, courted by the authorities, being granted the right to open a college for the education of priests in Maynooth in 1795.
In 1796 revolutionary France dispatched a large invasion fleet, with nearly 14,000 troops, and accompanied by Wolfe Tone, to Ireland. By sheer chance, invasion was averted when the fleet ran into storms and part of it was wrecked off Bantry Bay in County Cork. Battered by the weather and after losing many men drowned, they had to return to France.
The United Irishmen were banned after Britain went to war with France in 1793 and went underground.
The government in Dublin, startled by the near-invasion, responded with a vicious wave of repression, passing an Insurrection Act that suspended habeas corpus and other peacetime laws.
Using both British troops, militia and a newly recruited, mostly Protestant and fiercely loyalist, force known as the Yeomanry, government forces attempted to terrorise any would-be revolutionaries in Ireland who might aid the French in the event of another invasion. The Crown forces’ methods including burning of houses and Catholic churches, summary executions and the practice of ‘pitch-capping’ whereby lit tar was placed on a victim’s scalp.
By the summer of 1798, the United Irishmen, under severe pressure from their own supporters to act, planned a co-ordinated nationwide uprising, aimed at overthrowing the government in Dublin, severing the connection with Britain and founding an Irish Republic.
The Rebellion breaks out
Edward Fitzgerald is shot dead during arrest in Dublin.
The rebellion was intended to be signalled by the stopping of all mail coaches out of Dublin on May 23, 1798.
However, the authorities in Dublin were aware of the plans and on the eve of the rebellion arrested most of the senior United Irishmen leadership. Their most senior leader in Ireland, Edward Fitzgerald was shot and mortally wounded during his arrest.
While mail coaches were stopped in some areas, other areas had no notice of the planned insurrection and with the United Irish leadership mostly in prison or in exile, the rising flared up in in a localised and uncoordinated manner.
Large bodies of United Irishmen rose in arms in the counties around Dublin; Kildare, Wicklow, Carlow and Meath, in response to the stopping of the mail coaches, but Dublin city itself, which was heavily garrisoned and placed under martial law, did not stir.
The Rising was uncoordinated as most of the United Irish leaders had been imprisoned.
The first rebellions resulted in some sharp fighting but the poorly armed (they mostly had home-made pikes) and poorly led insurgents were defeated by British, militia and Yeomanry troops. In many cases, captured or surrendering rebels were massacred by vengeful government forces.
Wexford, Ulster and Kilalla Bay
The battle of Vinegar Hill.
Only in County Wexford did the United Irishmen meet with success. There, after rising on May 27, the insurgents defeated some militia and Yeomanry units and took the towns of Enniscorthy and Wexford.
The leadership of the Wexford rebels was both Catholic and Protestant (the leader was the Protestant Harvey Bagenal), but included some Catholic priests such as father John Murphy and the rank and file were largely Catholic, in many cases enraged by the sectarian atrocities committed in the previous months by the Yeomonary.
The rebels failed to take the towns of New Ross and Arklow despite determined and costly assaults and remained bottled up in Ireland’s south eastern corner. In response to the government forces’ killing of prisoners at New Ross, the rebels killed over 100 local loyalists at Scullabogue and another 100 at Wexford Bridge. The fighting in the rebellion was marked by an extreme ideological and, increasingly, sectarian, bitterness. Prisoners on both sides were commonly killed after battle.
The rebels in Wexford held most of the country for a month before being defeated at Vinegar Hill.
The Wexford rebellion was smashed about a month after it broke out, when over 13,000 British troops converged on the main rebel camp at Vinegar Hill on June 21, 1798 and broke up, though failed to trap, the main rebel army. Guerrilla fighting continued, but the main rebel stronghold had fallen.
A depiction of the Battle of Antrim 1798 at which the Ulster Irish uprising was crushed.
In the north, the mainly Presbyterian United Irishmen there launched their own uprising in support of Wexford in early June, but again, after some initial success, were defeated by government troops and militia. Their leaders, Henry Joy McCracken and Henry Munro, were captured and hanged.
The last act of the rebellion came in August 1798, when a small French expeditionary force of 1,500 men landed at Killalla Bay in county Mayo.
Led by General Humbert, they defeated a British force at Castlebar, but were themselves defeated and forced to surrender at Ballinamuck. While the French soldiers were allowed to surrender, the Irish insurgents who accompanied them were massacred.
Another, final, French attempt to land an expeditionary force in Ireland, accompanied by United Irish leader Wolfe Tone, was intercepted and defeated in a sea battle by the Royal Navy near Tory Island off the Donegal coast in October. Tone was captured along with over 2,000 French servicemen. Sentenced to death, Tone took his own life in prison in Dublin.
Lord Cornwallis, the Lord Lieutenant, tried to end the bloodshed and reprisals by government forces by forgoing execution of the other imprisoned United leaders in return for their telling what they knew of the clandestine United Irish organisation. An amnesty and pardon was also declared for rank and file United Irishmen.
Aftermath
Cornwallis, the Lord Lieutenant who oversaw the Act of Union.
The fighting in the 1798 rebellion lasted just three months, but the deaths ran into the tens of thousands. A high estimate of the death toll is 70,000 and the lowest one puts it at about 10,000.
Thousands more former rebels were exiled in Scotland, transported to penal colonies in Australia and others such as Miles Byrne went into exile serving in the French revolutionary and Napoleonic armies until 1815.
A brief rebellion led by Robert Emmet, younger brother of one of the 1798 United Irish leaders, in 1802 achieved little beyond Emmet’s own death by execution.
In 1800 the Irish parliament, under pressure from the British authorities, voted itself out if existence and Ireland was ruled directly from London from then until 1922.
The Irish parliament was abolished in 1800 and Ireland ruled directly from London until 1922.
While the radicals of the 1790s had hoped that religious divisions in Ireland could be made a thing of the past, the fierce sectarian violence that took place on both sides during the rebellion actually hardened sectarian animosities. Many northern Presbyterians began to see the British connection as less potentially dangerous for them than an independent Ireland.
The United Irishmen’s hope of founding a secular, independent, democratic Irish Republic therefore ended in total defeat.
Fantastic print depicting all the main protagonists of the United Irishmen Movement of 1798,
60cm x 52cm Ballina Co Mayo
The 1798 United Irishmen Rebellion led by Theobald Wolfe Tone was ill fated from the outset.Inspired by the recent successful American and French Revolutions,the Rebels leadership became fragmented and the revolt was only sporadically successful .This atmospheric and original print represents the camaraderie of the United Irish.This classic print captures the portraits of such notable United Irishmen as Robert Emmett,Mathew Teeling and Wolfe Tone himself.
The united Irish crest.An overview of the insurrection of 1798, by John Dorney.
The 1798 rebellion was an insurrection launched by the United Irishmen, an underground republican society, aimed at overthrowing the Kingdom of Ireland, severing the connection with Great Britain and establishing an Irish Republic based on the principles of the French Revolution.
The rebellion failed in its aim to launch a coordinated nationwide uprising. There were instead isolated outbreaks of rebellion in county Wexford, other Leinster counties, counties Antrim and Down in the north and after the landing of a French expeditionary force, in county Mayo in the west.
The military uprising was put down with great bloodshed in the summer of 1798. Some of its leaders, notably Wolfe Tone were killed or died in imprisonment, while many others were exiled.
The 1798 rebellion was failed attempt to found a secular independent Irish Republic.
The 1790s marked an exceptional event in Irish history because the United Irishmen were a secular organisation with significant support both among Catholics and Protestants, including Protestants in the northern province of Ulster.
However, the unity of Catholics and Protestants was far from universal and the fighting itself was marked in places by sectarian atrocities.
As a result of the uprising, the Irish Parliament, which had existed since the 13th century, was abolished and under the Act of Union (1800) Ireland was to be ruled directly from London until 1922.
Background
The Irish Parliament on Dublin’s College Green.
In the 18th century, Ireland was a Kingdom in its own right, under the Kings of England. Executive power was largely in the hands of the Lord Lieutenant and the Chief Secretary, appointed by the British prime minister.
However, Ireland also had its own parliament, which throughout the century, lobbied for greater control over trade and law making in Ireland. The Irish parliament was subservient to the British parliament at Westminster, but increasingly, as the century wore on, agitated for greater autonomy.
In 1782, the Irish parliament managed to free itself from subservience to the Lord Lieutenant and, to an extent, from the British parliament through the passage of laws that enabled it to make its own laws for the first time without reference to Westminster.
Ireland in the 18th century had its own parliament but the majority of the population was excluded from political participation on religious and property grounds.
However, membership of the parliament was confined to members of the Anglican Church of Ireland, which, allowing for some conversions, was overwhelmingly composed of descendants of English settlers. The parliament was not a democratic body; elections were relatively infrequent, seats could be purchased and the number of voters was small and confined to wealthy, property-owning Protestants.
Under the Penal Laws, enacted after the Catholic defeat in theJacobite-Williamite war of the 1690s, all those who refused to acknowledge the English King as head of their Church – therefore Catholic and Presbyterians – were barred not only from the parliament but from any public position or service in the Army.
United Irish leader Theobald Wolfe Tone.
Catholic owned lands were also confiscated for alleged political disloyalty throughout the 17th century. Catholics, to a large extent the descendants of the pre-seventeenth century Irish population, also suffered from restrictions on landholding, inheritance, entering the professions and the right to bear arms.
Presbyterians, mostly descendants of Scottish immigrants, while not excluded as rigorously as Catholics from public life, also suffered from discrimination – marriages performed by their clergy were not legally recognised for instance.
Although some of the Penal Laws were relaxed in 1782, allowing new Catholic churches and schools to open, and allowing Catholics into the professions and to purchase land, the great majority of the Irish population was still excluded from political power, and to a large extent from wealth and landholding also, as the last decade of the 18thcentury dawned.
Discontent among Catholics was exacerbated by economic hardship and by tithes, compulsory taxes that people of all religions had to pay, for the upkeep of the established, Protestant Church.
Initially the United Irishmen, founded, mainly by Presbyterians in Belfast in 1791, campaigned merely for reform, lobbying for the vote to be extended to Catholics and to non-property holders. The United Irishmen had a determinedly non-sectarian outlook, their motto being, as their leading member Theobald Wolfe Tone put it, ‘to unite Catholic Protestant and Dissenter under the common name of Irishman’.
The United Irishmen, inspired by the American and French revolutions, initially lobbied for democratic reform.
They were greatly inspired by the events of the American and French revolutions (1776 and 1789 respectively) and hoped to eventually found a self-governing, secular Irish state on the basis of universal male suffrage. The leadership of the United Irishmen was largely Protestant or Presbyterian at the start and it recruited men of all sects, mainly in the richer, more urban, eastern half of the country.
Some of their early demands were granted by the Irish parliament, for example Catholics were given the right to vote in 1793, as well as the right to attend university, obtain degrees and to serve in the military and civil service.
However the reforms did not go nearly as far as the radicals wished. Catholics still could not sit in the Parliament for example, nor hold public office and the vote was granted only to holders of property worth over forty shillings a year.
Radicalisation
A contemporary depiction of the ‘the mob’ during the French Revolution.
The United Irishmen did not remain an open reformist organisation for long. The French revolution took a radical turn in 1791. In the following two years it deposed King Louis XVI and declared a Republic. Britain and revolutionary France went to war in 1793.
In Ireland, the United Irishmen, who supported the French Republic, were banned and went underground in 1794. Wolfe Tone went into exile, first in America and then in France, where he lobbied for military aid for revolution in Ireland.
The United Irishmen now stated that their goal was a fully independent Irish Republic.
At the same time, popular discontent was growing, as the government dispatched troops to suppress the United Irishmen and other ‘seditious’ groups. The government also announced that men had to serve in the militia which would maintain internal security in Ireland during the war with France. Resistance to impressment into the militia led to fierce rioting in 1793 that left over 200 people dead.
Repression of United Irish suspects, in this case a ‘half hanging’.
Having been driven underground, the United Irishmen in Ireland began organising a clandestine military structure. In an effort to recruit more foot soldiers for the hoped-for revolution, they made contact with a Catholic secret society, the Defenders, who had been engaged in low level fighting, especially in the north, with Protestant groups such as the so called Peep of Day Boys and the newly founded Orange Order.
As a result, while the majority of the United Irishmen’s top leadership remained Protestant, their foot soldiers, except in north east Ulster, became increasingly Catholic.
That said, the Catholic Church itself was opposed to the ‘atheistical’ Republicans and was, for the first time, courted by the authorities, being granted the right to open a college for the education of priests in Maynooth in 1795.
In 1796 revolutionary France dispatched a large invasion fleet, with nearly 14,000 troops, and accompanied by Wolfe Tone, to Ireland. By sheer chance, invasion was averted when the fleet ran into storms and part of it was wrecked off Bantry Bay in County Cork. Battered by the weather and after losing many men drowned, they had to return to France.
The United Irishmen were banned after Britain went to war with France in 1793 and went underground.
The government in Dublin, startled by the near-invasion, responded with a vicious wave of repression, passing an Insurrection Act that suspended habeas corpus and other peacetime laws.
Using both British troops, militia and a newly recruited, mostly Protestant and fiercely loyalist, force known as the Yeomanry, government forces attempted to terrorise any would-be revolutionaries in Ireland who might aid the French in the event of another invasion. The Crown forces’ methods including burning of houses and Catholic churches, summary executions and the practice of ‘pitch-capping’ whereby lit tar was placed on a victim’s scalp.
By the summer of 1798, the United Irishmen, under severe pressure from their own supporters to act, planned a co-ordinated nationwide uprising, aimed at overthrowing the government in Dublin, severing the connection with Britain and founding an Irish Republic.
The Rebellion breaks out
Edward Fitzgerald is shot dead during arrest in Dublin.
The rebellion was intended to be signalled by the stopping of all mail coaches out of Dublin on May 23, 1798.
However, the authorities in Dublin were aware of the plans and on the eve of the rebellion arrested most of the senior United Irishmen leadership. Their most senior leader in Ireland, Edward Fitzgerald was shot and mortally wounded during his arrest.
While mail coaches were stopped in some areas, other areas had no notice of the planned insurrection and with the United Irish leadership mostly in prison or in exile, the rising flared up in in a localised and uncoordinated manner.
Large bodies of United Irishmen rose in arms in the counties around Dublin; Kildare, Wicklow, Carlow and Meath, in response to the stopping of the mail coaches, but Dublin city itself, which was heavily garrisoned and placed under martial law, did not stir.
The Rising was uncoordinated as most of the United Irish leaders had been imprisoned.
The first rebellions resulted in some sharp fighting but the poorly armed (they mostly had home-made pikes) and poorly led insurgents were defeated by British, militia and Yeomanry troops. In many cases, captured or surrendering rebels were massacred by vengeful government forces.
Wexford, Ulster and Kilalla Bay
The battle of Vinegar Hill.
Only in County Wexford did the United Irishmen meet with success. There, after rising on May 27, the insurgents defeated some militia and Yeomanry units and took the towns of Enniscorthy and Wexford.
The leadership of the Wexford rebels was both Catholic and Protestant (the leader was the Protestant Harvey Bagenal), but included some Catholic priests such as father John Murphy and the rank and file were largely Catholic, in many cases enraged by the sectarian atrocities committed in the previous months by the Yeomonary.
The rebels failed to take the towns of New Ross and Arklow despite determined and costly assaults and remained bottled up in Ireland’s south eastern corner. In response to the government forces’ killing of prisoners at New Ross, the rebels killed over 100 local loyalists at Scullabogue and another 100 at Wexford Bridge. The fighting in the rebellion was marked by an extreme ideological and, increasingly, sectarian, bitterness. Prisoners on both sides were commonly killed after battle.
The rebels in Wexford held most of the country for a month before being defeated at Vinegar Hill.
The Wexford rebellion was smashed about a month after it broke out, when over 13,000 British troops converged on the main rebel camp at Vinegar Hill on June 21, 1798 and broke up, though failed to trap, the main rebel army. Guerrilla fighting continued, but the main rebel stronghold had fallen.
A depiction of the Battle of Antrim 1798 at which the Ulster Irish uprising was crushed.
In the north, the mainly Presbyterian United Irishmen there launched their own uprising in support of Wexford in early June, but again, after some initial success, were defeated by government troops and militia. Their leaders, Henry Joy McCracken and Henry Munro, were captured and hanged.
The last act of the rebellion came in August 1798, when a small French expeditionary force of 1,500 men landed at Killalla Bay in county Mayo.
Led by General Humbert, they defeated a British force at Castlebar, but were themselves defeated and forced to surrender at Ballinamuck. While the French soldiers were allowed to surrender, the Irish insurgents who accompanied them were massacred.
Another, final, French attempt to land an expeditionary force in Ireland, accompanied by United Irish leader Wolfe Tone, was intercepted and defeated in a sea battle by the Royal Navy near Tory Island off the Donegal coast in October. Tone was captured along with over 2,000 French servicemen. Sentenced to death, Tone took his own life in prison in Dublin.
Lord Cornwallis, the Lord Lieutenant, tried to end the bloodshed and reprisals by government forces by forgoing execution of the other imprisoned United leaders in return for their telling what they knew of the clandestine United Irish organisation. An amnesty and pardon was also declared for rank and file United Irishmen.
Aftermath
Cornwallis, the Lord Lieutenant who oversaw the Act of Union.
The fighting in the 1798 rebellion lasted just three months, but the deaths ran into the tens of thousands. A high estimate of the death toll is 70,000 and the lowest one puts it at about 10,000.
Thousands more former rebels were exiled in Scotland, transported to penal colonies in Australia and others such as Miles Byrne went into exile serving in the French revolutionary and Napoleonic armies until 1815.
A brief rebellion led by Robert Emmet, younger brother of one of the 1798 United Irish leaders, in 1802 achieved little beyond Emmet’s own death by execution.
In 1800 the Irish parliament, under pressure from the British authorities, voted itself out if existence and Ireland was ruled directly from London from then until 1922.
The Irish parliament was abolished in 1800 and Ireland ruled directly from London until 1922.
While the radicals of the 1790s had hoped that religious divisions in Ireland could be made a thing of the past, the fierce sectarian violence that took place on both sides during the rebellion actually hardened sectarian animosities. Many northern Presbyterians began to see the British connection as less potentially dangerous for them than an independent Ireland.
The United Irishmen’s hope of founding a secular, independent, democratic Irish Republic therefore ended in total defeat.
25cm x 35cm Limerick
The Irish National Land League was an Irish political organisation of the late 19th century which sought to help poor tenant farmers. Its primary aim was to abolish landlordism in Ireland and enable tenant farmers to own the land they worked on. The period of the Land League's agitation is known as the Land War. Historian R. F. Foster argues that in the countryside the Land League "reinforced the politicization of rural Catholic nationalist Ireland, partly by defining that identity against urbanization, landlordism, Englishness and—implicitly—Protestantism."Foster adds that about a third of the activists were Catholic priests, and Archbishop Thomas Croke was one of its most influential champions.
Background
Following the founding meeting of the Mayo Tenants Defence Association in Castlebar, County Mayo on 26 October 1878 the demand for The Land of Ireland for the people of Ireland was reported in the Connaught Telegraph 2 November 1878.
The first of many "monster meetings" of tenant farmers was held in Irishtown near Claremorris on 20 April 1879, with an estimated turnout of 15,000 to 20,000 people. This meeting was addressed by James Daly (who presided), John O'Connor Power, John Ferguson, Thomas Brennan, and J. J. Louden.
The Connaught Telegraph's report of the meeting in its edition of 26 April 1879 began:
Since the days of O'Connell a larger public demonstration has not been witnessed than that of Sunday last. About 1 o'clock the monster procession started from Claremorris, headed by several thousand men on foot – the men of each district wearing a laural leaf or green ribbon in hat or coat to distinguish the several contingents. At 11 o'clock a monster contingent of tenant-farmers on horseback drew up in front of Hughes's hotel, showing discipline and order that a cavalry regiment might feel proud of. They were led on in sections, each having a marshal who kept his troops well in hand. Messrs. P.W. Nally, J.W. Nally, H. French, and M. Griffin, wearing green and gold sashes, led on their different sections, who rode two deep, occupying, at least, over an Irish mile of the road. Next followed a train of carriages, brakes, cares, etc. led on by Mr. Martin Hughes, the spirited hotel proprietor, driving a pair of rare black ponies to a phæton, taking Messrs. J.J. Louden and J. Daly. Next came Messrs. O'Connor, J. Ferguson, and Thomas Brennan in a covered carriage, followed by at least 500 vehicles from the neighbouring towns. On passing through Ballindine the sight was truly imposing, the endless train directing its course to Irishtown – a neat little hamlet on the boundaries of Mayo, Roscommon, and Galway.
Evolving out of this a number of local land league organisations were set up to work against the excessive rents being demanded by landlords throughout Ireland, but especially in Mayo and surrounding counties.
From 1874 agricultural prices in Europe had dropped, followed by some bad harvests due to wet weather during the Long Depression. The effect by 1878 was that many Irish farmers were unable to pay the rents that they had agreed, particularly in the poorer and wetter parts of Connacht. The localised 1879 Famine added to the misery. Unlike many other parts of Europe, the Irish land tenure system was inflexible in times of economic hardship.
League founded
National Land League plaque Imperial Hotel in Castlebar
The Irish National Land League was founded at the Imperial Hotel in Castlebar, the County town of Mayo, on 21 October 1879. At that meeting Charles Stewart Parnell was elected president of the league. Andrew Kettle, Michael Davitt and Thomas Brennan were appointed as honorary secretaries. This united practically all the different strands of land agitation and tenant rights movements under a single organisation.
The two aims of the Land League, as stated in the resolutions adopted in the meeting, were:
..."first, to bring about a reduction of rack-rents; second, to facilitate the obtaining of the ownership of the soil by the occupiers".
That the object of the League can be best attained by promoting organisation among the tenant-farmers; by defending those who may be threatened with eviction for refusing to pay unjust rents; by facilitating the working of the Bright clauses of the Irish Land Act during the winter; and by obtaining such reforms in the laws relating to land as will enable every tenant to become owner of his holding by paying a fair rent for a limited number of years".
Charles Stewart Parnell, John Dillon, Michael Davitt, and others then went to the United States to raise funds for the League with spectacular results. Branches were also set up in Scotland, where the Crofters Party imitated the League and secured a reforming Act in 1886.
The government had introduced the first Land Act in 1870, which proved largely ineffective. It was followed by the marginally more effective Land Acts of 1880 and 1881. These established a Land Commission that started to reduce some rents. Parnell together with all of his party lieutenants, including Father Eugene Sheehyknown as "the Land League priest", went into a bitter verbal offensive and were imprisoned in October 1881 under the Irish Coercion Act in Kilmainham Jail for "sabotaging the Land Act", from where the No-Rent Manifesto was issued, calling for a national tenant farmer rent strike until "constitutional liberties" were restored and the prisoners freed. It had a modest success In Ireland, and mobilized financial and political support from the Irish Diaspora.
Although the League discouraged violence, agrarian crimes increased widely. Typically a rent strike would be followed by eviction by the police and the bailiffs. Tenants who continued to pay the rent would be subject to a boycott, or as it was contemporaneously described in the US press, an "excommunication" by local League members.Where cases went to court, witnesses would change their stories, resulting in an unworkable legal system. This in turn led on to stronger criminal laws being passed that were described by the League as "Coercion Acts".
The bitterness that developed helped Parnell later in his Home Rule campaign. Davitt's views as seen in his famous slogan: "The land of Ireland for the people of Ireland" was aimed at strengthening the hold on the land by the peasant Irish at the expense of the alien landowners.Parnell aimed to harness the emotive element, but he and his party were strictly constitutional. He envisioned tenant farmers as potential freeholders of the land they had rented.
In the Encyclopedia Britannica, the League is considered part of the progressive "rise of fenianism".
In the United States
The Land League had an equivalent organization in the United States, which raised hundreds of thousands of dollars both for famine relief and also for political action.The Clan na Gael attempted to infiltrate the Land League, with limited success.
Land war
William Gladstone under pressure of Land League. Caricature circa 1880s.
From 1879 to 1882, the "Land War" in pursuance of the "Three Fs" (Fair Rent, Fixity of Tenure and Free Sale) first demanded by the Tenant Right League in 1850, was fought in earnest. The League organised resistance to evictions, reductions in rents and aided the work of relief agencies. Landlords' attempts to evict tenants led to violence, but the Land League denounced excessive violence and destruction.
Irish land League poster
dating from the 1880s
Withholding of rent led on to evictions until "Ashbourne's Act" in 1885 made it unprofitable for most landlords to evict.By then agricultural prices had made a recovery, and rents had been fixed and could be reviewed downwards, but tenants found that holding out communally was the best option. Critics noted that the poorer sub-tenants were still expected to pay their rents to tenant farmers.
The widespread upheavals and extensive evictions were accompanied by several years of bad weather and poor harvests, when the tenant farmers who were unable to pay the full arrears of rents resorted to a rent strike. A renewed Land War was waged under the Plan of Campaign from 1886 up until 1892 during which the League decided on a fair rent and then encouraged its members to offer this rent to the landlords. If this was refused, then the rent would be paid by tenants to the League and the landlord would not receive any money until he accepted a discount.
The first target, ironically, was a member of the Catholic clergy, Canon Ulick Burke of Knock, who was eventually induced to reduce his rents by 25%. Many landlords resisted these tactics, often violently and there were deaths on either side of the dispute. The Royal Irish Constabulary, the national police force, largely made up of Irishmen, were charged with upholding the law and protecting both landlord and tenant against violence. Originally, the movement cut across some sectarian boundaries, with some meetings held in Orange halls in Ulster, but the tenancy system in effect there Ulster Custom was quite different and fairer to tenants and support drifted away.
As a result of the Land War, the Irish National Land League was suppressed by the authorities. In October 1882, as its successor Parnell founded the Irish National League to campaign on broader issues including Home Rule.Many of the Scottish members formed the Scottish Land Restoration League. In 1881, the League started publishing United Ireland a weekly newspaper edited by William O'Brien, which continued until 1898.
Outcomes
Within decades of the league's foundation, through the efforts of William O'Brien and George Wyndham (a descendant of Lord Edward FitzGerald), the 1902 Land Conference produced the Land Purchase (Ireland) Act 1903 which allowed Irish tenant farmers to buy out their freeholds with UK government loans over 68 years through the Land Commission (an arrangement that has never been possible in Britain itself). For agricultural labourers, D.D. Sheehanand the Irish Land and Labour Association secured their demands from the Liberal government elected in 1905 to pass the Labourers (Ireland) Act 1906, and the Labourers (Ireland) Act 1911, which paid County Councils to build over 40,000 new rural cottages, each on an acre of land. By 1914, 75% of occupiers were buying out their landlords, mostly under the two Acts. In all, under the pre-UK Land Acts over 316,000 tenants purchased their holdings amounting to 15 million acres (61,000 km2) out of a total of 20 million acres (81,000 km2) in the country. Sometimes the holdings were described as "uneconomic", but the overall sense of social justice was manifest.
The major land reforms came when Parliament passed laws in 1870, 1881, 1903 and 1909 that enabled most tenant farmers to purchase their lands, and lowered the rents of the others. From 1870 and as a result of the Land War agitations and the Plan of Campaign of the 1880s, various British governments introduced a series of Irish Land Acts. William O'Brien played a leading role in the 1902 Land Conference to pave the way for the most advanced social legislation in Ireland since the Union, the Wyndham Land Purchase Act of 1903. This Act set the conditions for the break-up of large estates and gradually devolved to rural landholders, and tenants' ownership of the lands. It effectively ended the era of the absentee landlord, finally resolving the Irish Land Question.
45cm x 38cm
The Sunday Press was a weekly newspaper published in Ireland from 1949 until 1995. It was launched by Éamon de Valera's Irish Press group following the defeat of his Fianna Fáil party in the 1948 Irish general election. Like its sister newspaper, the daily The Irish Press, politically the paper loyally supported Fianna Fáil.
The future Taoiseach Seán Lemass was the managing editor of the Irish Press who spearheaded the launch of the Sunday paper, with the first editor Colonel Matt Feehan. Many of the Irish Press journalists contributed to the paper. 'When I open the pages, I duck' was Brendan Behan's description of reading The Sunday Press, for the habit of published memoirs of veterans (usually those aligned to Fianna Fáil) of the Irish War of Independence.
It soon built up a large readership, and overtook its main competitor the Sunday Independent, which tended to support Fine Gael. At its peak The Sunday Press sold up to 475,000 copies every week, and had a readership of over one million, around one third of the Irish population.
Like the Evening Press, the paper's readership held up better over the years than that of the flagship title in the group, The Irish Press, and it might have survived as a stand-alone title had it been sold. However, with the collapse of the Irish Press Newspapers group in May 1995, all three titles ceased publication immediately. The launch of Ireland on Sunday in 1997 was initially interpreted by many observers as an attempt to appeal to the former readership of The Sunday Press, seen as generally rural, fairly conservative Catholic, and with a traditional Irish nationalist political outlook.
When Christmas Day fell on Sunday in 1949, 1955, 1960, 1966, 1977, 1983, 1988 and 1994 the paper came out on the Saturday.
Vincent Jennings at the age of 31 became editor of The Sunday Press in 1968, serving until December 1986, when he became manager of the Irish Press Group. Journalists who worked at the press include Stephen Collins served as political editor his father Willie Collins was deputy editor and Michael Carwood became sports editor of The Sunday Press in 1988 until its closure in 1995.
Seán Keating (born John Keating, Limerick, 28 September 1889 – Dublin, 21 December 1977) was an Irish romantic-realist painter who painted some iconic images of the Irish War of Independence and of the early industrialization of Ireland. He spent two weeks or so each year during the late summer on the Aran Islands and his many portraits of island people depicted them as rugged heroic figures. However, he ceased to visit the Aran Islands in 1965.
Seán Keating studied drawing at the Limerick Technical School before a scholarship arranged by William Orpen allowed him to go at the age of twenty to study at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin. Over the next few years, he spent time on the Aran Islands. In 1914 Keating won the RDS Taylor award with a painting titled The Reconciliation. The prize included £50 which allowed him to go to London to work as Orpen's studio assistant in 1915. In late 1915 or early 1916, he returned to Ireland where he documented the War of Independence and the subsequent Civil War. Examples include Men of the South (1921–22) which shows a group of IRA men ready to ambush a military vehicle and An Allegory (first exhibited in 1924), in which the two opposing sides in the Irish Civil War are seen to bury a tricolour-covered coffin amid the roots on an ancient tree. The painting includes a self-portrait of the artist.
Keating was elected an Associate of the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) in 1918, and a full member in 1923. One of the cardinal achievements of the Irish Free State in the 1920s was the building, in partnership with Siemens, of a hydro-electric power generator at Ardnacrusha, near Limerick. Between 1926 and 1927 Keating, at his own initiative, produced a considerable number of paintings related to this scheme. He exhibited several examples of the paintings in the RHA exhibitions in 1927 and 1928. Most are now in the collection of ESB Group. His work was also part of the art competitions at the 1924 Summer Olympics and the 1928 Summer Olympics.
In 1936 a group of prominent Limerick politicians, artists and patrons established the first Limerick City Collection of Art, made up of various donations and bequests. Keating was part of this artist-led initiative to form a municipal art gallery in Limerick similar to those already in Dublin and Cork. As a pivotal member of the committee, Keating himself donated many works to the collection which was first exhibited in the Savoy Cinema, Limerick City, on 23 November 1937. It was not until 1948, however, that an extension to the rear of Limerick Free Library and Museum became the permanent home to the City Collection, acquiring the name of the Limerick Free Art Gallery. In 1985 the Library and Museum were transferred to larger buildings.
In 1939 Keating was commissioned to paint a mural for the Irish pavilion at the New York World's Fair. He was President of the Royal Hibernian Academy from 1950 to 1962, and showed at the annual exhibition for 61 years from 1914 onwards. Keating was an intellectual painter in the sense that he consciously set out to explore the visual identity of the Irish nation, and his paintings show a very idealised realism. He feared that the modern movement would lead to a decline in artistic standards. Throughout his career, he exhibited nearly 300 works at the RHA, and also showed at the Oireachtas.
Keating married political campaigner, May Walsh, in 1919. She was a frequent model for his paintings until her death in 1965. He died on 21 December 1977 at the Adelaide Hospital and was buried at Cruagh Cemetery, Rathfarnham. The 1978 RHA Exhibition featured a small memorial collection of his work.
Posthumous exhibitions of his paintings were held by The Grafton Gallery, Dublin (1986) and the Electricity Supply Board (1987). Sean Keating – The Pilgrim Soul, a documentary presented and written by his son, the politician Justin Keating, aired on RTÉ in 1996.
The Troubles, also called Northern Ireland conflict, violent sectarian conflict from about 1968 to 1998 in Northern Irelandbetween the overwhelmingly Protestantunionists (loyalists), who desired the province to remain part of the United Kingdom, and the overwhelmingly Roman Catholic nationalists (republicans), who wanted Northern Ireland to become part of the republic of Ireland. The other major players in the conflict were the British army, Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), and Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR; from 1992 called the Royal Irish Regiment), and their avowed purpose was to play a peacekeeping role, most prominently between the nationalist Irish Republican Army(IRA), which viewed the conflict as a guerrilla war for national independence, and the unionist paramilitary forces, which characterized the IRA’s aggression as terrorism. Marked by street fighting, sensational bombings, sniper attacks, roadblocks, and internment without trial, the confrontation had the characteristics of a civil war, notwithstanding its textbook categorization as a “low-intensity conflict.” Some 3,600 people were killed and more than 30,000 more were wounded before a peaceful solution, which involved the governments of both the United Kingdom and Ireland, was effectively reached in 1998, leading to a power-sharing arrangement in the Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont.
Deep origins
The story of the Troubles is inextricably entwined with the history of Ireland as whole and, as such, can be seen as stemming from the first British incursion on the island, the Anglo-Norman invasion of the late 12th century, which left a wave of settlers whose descendants became known as the “Old English.” Thereafter, for nearly eight centuries, England and then Great Britain as a whole would dominate affairs in Ireland. Colonizing British landlords widely displaced Irish landholders. The most successful of these “plantations” began taking hold in the early 17th century in Ulster, the northernmost of Ireland’s four traditional provinces, previously a centre of rebellion, where the planters included English and Scottish tenants as well as British landlords. Because of the plantation of Ulster, as Irish history unfolded—with the struggle for the emancipation of the island’s Catholic majority under the supremacy of the Protestant ascendancy, along with the Irish nationalist pursuit of Home Rule and then independence after the island’s formal union with Great Britain in 1801—Ulster developed as a region where the Protestant settlers outnumbered the indigenousIrish. Unlike earlier English settlers, most of the 17th-century English and Scottish settlers and their descendants did not assimilate with the Irish. Instead, they held on tightly to British identity and remained steadfastly loyal to the British crown.
The formation of Northern Ireland, Catholic grievances, and the leadership of Terence O’Neill
Of the nine modern counties that constituted Ulster in the early 20th century, four—Antrim, Down, Armagh, and Londonderry (Derry)—had significant Protestant loyalist majorities; two—Fermanagh and Tyrone—had small Catholic nationalist majorities; and three—Donegal, Cavan, and Monaghan—had significant Catholic nationalist majorities. In 1920, during the Irish War of Independence (1919–21), the British Parliament, responding largely to the wishes of Ulster loyalists, enacted the Government of Ireland Act , which divided the island into two self-governing areas with devolved Home Rule-like powers. What would come to be known as Northern Ireland was formed by Ulster’s four majority loyalist counties along with Fermanagh and Tyrone. Donegal, Cavan, and Monaghan were combined with the island’s remaining 23 counties to form southern Ireland. The Anglo-Irish Treaty that ended the War of Independence then created the Irish Free State in the south, giving it dominion status within the British Empire. It also allowed Northern Ireland the option of remaining outside of the Free State, which it unsurprisingly chose to do.
Thus, in 1922 Northern Ireland began functioning as a self-governing region of the United Kingdom. Two-thirds of its population (about one million people) was Protestant and about one-third (roughly 500,000 people) was Catholic. Well before partition, Northern Ireland, particularly Belfast, had attracted economic migrants from elsewhere in Ireland seeking employment in its flourishing linen-making and shipbuilding industries. The best jobs had gone to Protestants, but the humming local economy still provided work for Catholics. Over and above the long-standing dominance of Northern Ireland politics that resulted for the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) by virtue of the Protestants’ sheer numerical advantage, loyalist control of local politics was ensured by the gerrymandering of electoral districts that concentrated and minimized Catholic representation. Moreover, by restricting the franchise to ratepayers (the taxpaying heads of households) and their spouses, representation was further limited for Catholic households, which tended to be larger (and more likely to include unemployed adult children) than their Protestant counterparts. Those who paid rates for more than one residence (more likely to be Protestants) were granted an additional vote for each ward in which they held property (up to six votes). Catholics argued that they were discriminated against when it came to the allocation of public housing, appointments to public service jobs, and government investment in neighbourhoods. They were also more likely to be the subjects of police harassment by the almost exclusively Protestant RUC and Ulster Special Constabulary (B Specials).
The divide between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland had little to do with theological differences but instead was grounded in culture and politics. Neither Irish history nor the Irish language was taught in schools in Northern Ireland, it was illegal to fly the flag of the Irish republic, and from 1956 to 1974 Sinn Féin, the party of Irish republicanism, also was banned in Northern Ireland. Catholics by and large identified as Irish and sought the incorporation of Northern Ireland into the Irish state. The great bulk of Protestants saw themselves as British and feared that they would lose their culture and privilege if Northern Ireland were subsumed by the republic. They expressed their partisan solidarity through involvement with Protestant unionist fraternal organizations such as the Orange Order, which found its inspiration in the victory of King William III (William of Orange) at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 over his deposed Catholic predecessor, James II, whose siege of the Protestant community of Londonderry had earlier been broken by William. Despite these tensions, for 40 or so years after partition the status of unionist-dominated Northern Ireland was relatively stable.
Recognizing that any attempt to reinvigorate Northern Ireland’s declining industrial economy in the early 1960s would also need to address the province’s percolatingpolitical and social tensions, the newly elected prime minister of Northern Ireland, Terence O’Neill, not only reached out to the nationalist community but also, in early 1965, exchanged visits with Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Seán Lemass—a radical step, given that the republic’s constitution included an assertion of sovereignty over the whole island. Nevertheless, O’Neill’s efforts were seen as inadequate by nationalists and as too conciliatory by loyalists, including the Rev. Ian Paisley, who became one of the most vehement and influential representatives of unionist reaction.
Civil rights activism, the Battle of Bogside, and the arrival of the British army
Contrary to the policies of UUP governments that disadvantaged Catholics, the Education Act that the Northern Ireland Parliament passed into law in 1947 increased educational opportunities for all citizens of the province. As a result, the generation of well-educated Catholics who came of age in the 1960s had new expectations for more equitable treatment. At a time when political activism was on the rise in Europe—from the events of May 1968 in France to the Prague Spring—and when the American civil rights movement was making great strides, Catholic activists in Northern Ireland such as John Humeand Bernadette Devlin came together to form civil rightsgroups such as the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA).
Although more than one violently disrupted political march has been pointed to as the starting point of the Troubles, it can be argued that the catalyzing event occurred on October 5, 1968, in Derry, where a march had been organized by the NICRA to protest discrimination and gerrymandering. The march was banned when unionists announced that they would be staging a counterdemonstration, but the NICRA decided to carry out their protest anyway. Rioting then erupted after the RUC violently suppressed the marchers with batons and a water cannon.
Omagh bombing
August 15, 1998
Similarly inflammatory were the events surrounding a march held by loyalists in Londonderry on August 12, 1969. Two days of rioting that became known as the Battle of Bogside (after the Catholic area in which the confrontation occurred) stemmed from the escalating clash between nationalists and the RUC, which was acting as a buffer between loyalist marchers and Catholic residents of the area. Rioting in support of the nationalists then erupted in Belfast and elsewhere, and the British army was dispatched to restore calm. Thereafter, violent confrontation only escalated, and the Troubles (a name that neither characterized the nature of the conflict nor assigned blame for it to one side or the other) had clearly begun.
The emergence of the Provisional IRA and the loyalist paramilitaries
Initially, the nationalists welcomed the British army as protectors and as a balance for the Protestant-leaning RUC. In time, however, the army would be viewed by nationalists as another version of the enemy, especially after its aggressive efforts to disarm republican paramilitaries. In the process, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) became the defender of the nationalist cause. From its base in Ireland(which had formally left the Commonwealth in 1949), the IRA had mounted an ineffectual guerrilla effort in support of Northern Ireland’s nationalists from 1956 to 1962, but, as the 1960s progressed, the IRA became less concerned with affairs in the north than with advancing a Marxist political agenda. As a result, a splinter group, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (Provos), which was prepared to use force to bring about unification, emerged as the champion of Northern Ireland’s nationalists. (The Official IRA would conduct operations in support of the republicans in Northern Ireland until undertaking a cease-fire in 1972, after which it effectively ceded the title of the IRA in the north to the Provos.) Believing that their fight was a continuation of the Irish War of Independence, the Provos adopted the tactics of guerrilla warfare, financed partly by members of the Irish diaspora in the United States and later supplied with arms and munitions by the government of Libyan strongman Muammar al-Qaddafi. Unionists also took up arms, swelling the numbers of loyalist paramilitary organizations, most notably the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and Ulster Defence Association UDA).
In an attempt to address nationalist grievances, electoral boundaries were redrawn more fairly, efforts were made to rectify discrimination in housing and public employment, and the B Specials were decommissioned. At the same time, the government of Northern Ireland responded to the growing unrest by introducing increasingly stringent security measures, including internment (detention without trial). The overwhelming majority of those arrested, however, were nationalists.
As the 1970s progressed, rioting became more common in Belfast and Derry, bombings of public places (by both loyalists and republicans) increased, and both sides of the conflict perpetrated violent, deadly atrocities. Barbed wire laid by British soldiers to separate the sectarian communitiesevolved into brick and steel “peace walls,” some of which stood 45 feet (14 metres) high, segregating loyalist and republican enclaves, most famously the Falls Road Catholic community and the Shankill Protestant community of Belfast.
On January 30, 1972, the conflict reached a new level of intensity when British paratroopers fired on Catholic civil rights demonstrators in Londonderry, killing 13 and injuring 14 others (one of whom later died). The incident, which became known as “Bloody Sunday,” contributed to a spike in Provos recruitment and would remain controversial for decades, hinging on the question of which side fired first. In 2010 the Saville Report , the final pronouncement of a British government inquiry into the event, concluded that none of the victims had posed a threat to the troops and that their shooting had been unjustified. British Prime Minister David Cameron responded to the report by issuing a landmark apology for the shooting:
There is no point in trying to soften or equivocate what is in this report. It is clear from the tribunal’s authoritative conclusions that the events of Bloody Sunday were in no way justified….What happened should never, ever have happened….Some members of our armed forces acted wrongly. The government is ultimately responsible for the conduct of the armed forces and for that, on behalf of the government, indeed, on behalf of our country, I am deeply sorry.
In all, more than 480 people were killed as a result of the conflict in Northern Ireland in 1972, which proved to be the deadliest single year in the Troubles. That total included more than 100 fatalities for the British army, as the IRA escalated its onslaught. On July 21, “Bloody Friday,” nine people were killed and scores were injured when some two dozen bombs were detonated by the Provos in Belfast. Earlier, in March, frustrated with the Northern Ireland government’s failure to calm the situation, the British government suspended the Northern Ireland Parliament and reinstituted direct rule by Westminster.
Beginning in the mid-1970s, the IRA shifted the emphasis of its “Long War” from direct engagements with British troops to smaller-scale secretive operations, including the bombing of cities in Britain—a change of tactics the British military described as a shift from “insurgency” to “terrorism.” Similarly, the loyalist groups began setting off bombs in Ireland. Meanwhile, paramilitary violence at mid-decade (1974–76) resulted in the civilian deaths of some 370 Catholics and 88 Protestants.
A glimmer of hope was offered by the Sunningdale Agreement , named for the English city in which it was negotiated in 1973. That agreement led to the creation of a new Northern Ireland Assembly, with proportional representation for all parties, and to the establishment of a Council of Ireland, which was to provide a role for Ireland in the affairs of Northern Ireland. Frustrated by the diminution of their political power and furious at the participation of the republic, loyalists scuttled the power-sharing plan with a general strike that brought the province to a halt in May 1974 and eventually forced a return to direct rule, which remained in place for some 25 years.
For the remainder of the decade, violence ebbed and flowed, cease-fires lingered and lapsed, and tit-for-tat bombings and assassinations continued, including the high-profile killing at sea in August 1979 of Lord Mountbatten, a relative of both Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. In 1976 the opening of the specially designed Maze prison brought with it a shift in the treatment of IRA inmates from that of prisoners of war to that of common criminals. Seeking a return to their Special Category Status, the prisoners struck back, first staging the “blanket protest,” in which they refused to put on prison uniforms and instead wore only blankets, and then, in 1978, the “dirty protest,” in which inmates smeared the walls of their cells with excrement. The government of recently elected Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher refused to buckle, even in the face of hunger strikes in 1980–81 that led to the deaths of 10 prisoners, including Bobby Sands, who had won a seat in the British Parliament while incarcerated and fasting.
Sands’s election helped convince Sinn Féin, then operating as the political wing of the IRA, that the struggle for unification should be pursued at the ballot box as well as with the Armalite rifle. In June 1983 Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams won a seat in Parliament representing West Belfast, though he refused to take it to avoid taking the compulsory oath of loyalty to the British queen.
The Anglo-Irish Agreement and Downing Street Declaration
In October 1984 an IRA bomb attack on the Conservative Party Conference in Brighton, England, took five lives and threatened that of Thatcher. Though she remained steadfast in the face of this attack, it was the “Iron Lady” who in November 1985 joined Irish Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald in signing the Anglo-Irish Agreement, under which both countries guaranteed that any change in the status of Northern Ireland would come about only with the consent of the majority of the people of Northern Ireland. The accordalso established the Intergovernmental Conference, which gave Ireland a consultative role in the political and security affairs of Northern Ireland for the first time. Finally, the agreement stipulated that power would be devolved back upon the government of Northern Ireland only if unionists and nationalists participated in power sharing.
Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Garret FitzGerald and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher signing the Anglo-Irish Agreement, November 15, 1985.
Peter Kemp/AP
The loyalists’ vehement opposition to the agreement included the resignation of all 15 unionist members of the House of Commons and a ramping up of violence. In the meantime, IRA bombings in London made headlines, and the reach of the British security forces extended to the killing of three Provos in Gibraltar. Behind the scenes, however, negotiations were underway. In 1993 British Prime Minister John Major and Irish Taoiseach Albert Reynolds issued the so-called Downing Street Declaration , which established a framework for all-party peace talks. A cease-fire declared by the Provos in 1994 and joined by the principal loyalist paramilitary groups fell apart in 1996 because Sinn Féin, which had replaced the more moderate Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) as the leading nationalist party, had been excluded from peace talks because of the IRA’s continuing bombing campaign. Nevertheless, the unionists were at the table, prepared to consider a solution that included the participation of the republic of Ireland. After the IRA resumed its cease-fire in 1997, Sinn Féin was welcomed back to the talks, which now included the British and Irish governments, the SDLP, the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland, the UUP, and the Ulster Democratic Party, among others, though not the Paisley-led DUP, which was protesting the inclusion of Sinn Féin.
The Good Friday Agreement, the Omagh bombing, peace, and power sharing
Those talks, mediated by former U.S. senator George Mitchell, led to the Good Friday Agreement (Belfast Agreement), reached April 10, 1998. That landmark accordprovided for the creation of a power-sharing Northern Ireland Assembly, established an institutional arrangement for cross-border cooperation between the governments of Ireland and Northern Ireland on a range of issues, and lay the groundwork for continued consultation between the British and Irish governments. On May 22 Ireland and Northern Ireland held a joint referendum on the agreement, which was approved by 94 percent of those who voted in the republic and 71 percent of those voting in Northern Ireland, where Catholic approval of the accord (96 percent) was much higher than Protestant assent (52 per cent). Nonetheless, it was an IRA splinter group, the Real Irish Republican Army, which most dramatically violated the spirit of the agreement, with a bombing in Omagh in August that took 29 lives.
Elections for the new Assembly were held in June, but the IRA’s failure to decommission delayed the formation of the power-sharing Northern Ireland Executive until December 1999, when the IRA promised to fulfill its obligation to disarm. That month the republic of Ireland modified its constitution, removing its territorial claims to the whole of the island, and the United Kingdom yielded direct rule of Northern Ireland. Ostensibly the Troubles had come to end, but, though Northern Ireland began its most tranquil era in a generation, the peace was fragile. Sectarian antagonism persisted, the process of decommissioning was slow on both sides, and the rolling out of the new institutions was fitful, resulting in suspensions of devolution and the reimposition of direct rule.
In July 2005, however, the IRA announced that it had ordered all its units to “dump arms,” would henceforth pursue its goals only through peaceful means, and would work with international inspectors “to verifiably put its arms beyond use.” At a press conference in September, a spokesman for the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning stated, “We are satisfied that the arms decommissioned represent the totality of the IRA’s arsenal.” Decommissioning by unionist paramilitaries and other republican groups followed..
In March 2007 an agreement to form a power-sharing government was reached by Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley,respectively the leaders of Sinn Féin and the DUP, the two parties which had won the most seats in the election for the Assembly that month. On May 8 direct rule was rescinded as Paisley was sworn in as first minister and Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness, a onetime IRA commander, became deputy first minister.
The Troubles, also called Northern Ireland conflict, violent sectarian conflict from about 1968 to 1998 in Northern Irelandbetween the overwhelmingly Protestantunionists (loyalists), who desired the province to remain part of the United Kingdom, and the overwhelmingly Roman Catholic nationalists (republicans), who wanted Northern Ireland to become part of the republic of Ireland. The other major players in the conflict were the British army, Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), and Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR; from 1992 called the Royal Irish Regiment), and their avowed purpose was to play a peacekeeping role, most prominently between the nationalist Irish Republican Army(IRA), which viewed the conflict as a guerrilla war for national independence, and the unionist paramilitary forces, which characterized the IRA’s aggression as terrorism. Marked by street fighting, sensational bombings, sniper attacks, roadblocks, and internment without trial, the confrontation had the characteristics of a civil war, notwithstanding its textbook categorization as a “low-intensity conflict.” Some 3,600 people were killed and more than 30,000 more were wounded before a peaceful solution, which involved the governments of both the United Kingdom and Ireland, was effectively reached in 1998, leading to a power-sharing arrangement in the Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont.
Deep origins
The story of the Troubles is inextricably entwined with the history of Ireland as whole and, as such, can be seen as stemming from the first British incursion on the island, the Anglo-Norman invasion of the late 12th century, which left a wave of settlers whose descendants became known as the “Old English.” Thereafter, for nearly eight centuries, England and then Great Britain as a whole would dominate affairs in Ireland. Colonizing British landlords widely displaced Irish landholders. The most successful of these “plantations” began taking hold in the early 17th century in Ulster, the northernmost of Ireland’s four traditional provinces, previously a centre of rebellion, where the planters included English and Scottish tenants as well as British landlords. Because of the plantation of Ulster, as Irish history unfolded—with the struggle for the emancipation of the island’s Catholic majority under the supremacy of the Protestant ascendancy, along with the Irish nationalist pursuit of Home Rule and then independence after the island’s formal union with Great Britain in 1801—Ulster developed as a region where the Protestant settlers outnumbered the indigenousIrish. Unlike earlier English settlers, most of the 17th-century English and Scottish settlers and their descendants did not assimilate with the Irish. Instead, they held on tightly to British identity and remained steadfastly loyal to the British crown.
The formation of Northern Ireland, Catholic grievances, and the leadership of Terence O’Neill
Of the nine modern counties that constituted Ulster in the early 20th century, four—Antrim, Down, Armagh, and Londonderry (Derry)—had significant Protestant loyalist majorities; two—Fermanagh and Tyrone—had small Catholic nationalist majorities; and three—Donegal, Cavan, and Monaghan—had significant Catholic nationalist majorities. In 1920, during the Irish War of Independence (1919–21), the British Parliament, responding largely to the wishes of Ulster loyalists, enacted the Government of Ireland Act , which divided the island into two self-governing areas with devolved Home Rule-like powers. What would come to be known as Northern Ireland was formed by Ulster’s four majority loyalist counties along with Fermanagh and Tyrone. Donegal, Cavan, and Monaghan were combined with the island’s remaining 23 counties to form southern Ireland. The Anglo-Irish Treaty that ended the War of Independence then created the Irish Free State in the south, giving it dominion status within the British Empire. It also allowed Northern Ireland the option of remaining outside of the Free State, which it unsurprisingly chose to do.
Thus, in 1922 Northern Ireland began functioning as a self-governing region of the United Kingdom. Two-thirds of its population (about one million people) was Protestant and about one-third (roughly 500,000 people) was Catholic. Well before partition, Northern Ireland, particularly Belfast, had attracted economic migrants from elsewhere in Ireland seeking employment in its flourishing linen-making and shipbuilding industries. The best jobs had gone to Protestants, but the humming local economy still provided work for Catholics. Over and above the long-standing dominance of Northern Ireland politics that resulted for the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) by virtue of the Protestants’ sheer numerical advantage, loyalist control of local politics was ensured by the gerrymandering of electoral districts that concentrated and minimized Catholic representation. Moreover, by restricting the franchise to ratepayers (the taxpaying heads of households) and their spouses, representation was further limited for Catholic households, which tended to be larger (and more likely to include unemployed adult children) than their Protestant counterparts. Those who paid rates for more than one residence (more likely to be Protestants) were granted an additional vote for each ward in which they held property (up to six votes). Catholics argued that they were discriminated against when it came to the allocation of public housing, appointments to public service jobs, and government investment in neighbourhoods. They were also more likely to be the subjects of police harassment by the almost exclusively Protestant RUC and Ulster Special Constabulary (B Specials).
The divide between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland had little to do with theological differences but instead was grounded in culture and politics. Neither Irish history nor the Irish language was taught in schools in Northern Ireland, it was illegal to fly the flag of the Irish republic, and from 1956 to 1974 Sinn Féin, the party of Irish republicanism, also was banned in Northern Ireland. Catholics by and large identified as Irish and sought the incorporation of Northern Ireland into the Irish state. The great bulk of Protestants saw themselves as British and feared that they would lose their culture and privilege if Northern Ireland were subsumed by the republic. They expressed their partisan solidarity through involvement with Protestant unionist fraternal organizations such as the Orange Order, which found its inspiration in the victory of King William III (William of Orange) at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 over his deposed Catholic predecessor, James II, whose siege of the Protestant community of Londonderry had earlier been broken by William. Despite these tensions, for 40 or so years after partition the status of unionist-dominated Northern Ireland was relatively stable.
Recognizing that any attempt to reinvigorate Northern Ireland’s declining industrial economy in the early 1960s would also need to address the province’s percolatingpolitical and social tensions, the newly elected prime minister of Northern Ireland, Terence O’Neill, not only reached out to the nationalist community but also, in early 1965, exchanged visits with Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Seán Lemass—a radical step, given that the republic’s constitution included an assertion of sovereignty over the whole island. Nevertheless, O’Neill’s efforts were seen as inadequate by nationalists and as too conciliatory by loyalists, including the Rev. Ian Paisley, who became one of the most vehement and influential representatives of unionist reaction.
Civil rights activism, the Battle of Bogside, and the arrival of the British army
Contrary to the policies of UUP governments that disadvantaged Catholics, the Education Act that the Northern Ireland Parliament passed into law in 1947 increased educational opportunities for all citizens of the province. As a result, the generation of well-educated Catholics who came of age in the 1960s had new expectations for more equitable treatment. At a time when political activism was on the rise in Europe—from the events of May 1968 in France to the Prague Spring—and when the American civil rights movement was making great strides, Catholic activists in Northern Ireland such as John Humeand Bernadette Devlin came together to form civil rightsgroups such as the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA).
Although more than one violently disrupted political march has been pointed to as the starting point of the Troubles, it can be argued that the catalyzing event occurred on October 5, 1968, in Derry, where a march had been organized by the NICRA to protest discrimination and gerrymandering. The march was banned when unionists announced that they would be staging a counterdemonstration, but the NICRA decided to carry out their protest anyway. Rioting then erupted after the RUC violently suppressed the marchers with batons and a water cannon.
Omagh bombing
August 15, 1998
Similarly inflammatory were the events surrounding a march held by loyalists in Londonderry on August 12, 1969. Two days of rioting that became known as the Battle of Bogside (after the Catholic area in which the confrontation occurred) stemmed from the escalating clash between nationalists and the RUC, which was acting as a buffer between loyalist marchers and Catholic residents of the area. Rioting in support of the nationalists then erupted in Belfast and elsewhere, and the British army was dispatched to restore calm. Thereafter, violent confrontation only escalated, and the Troubles (a name that neither characterized the nature of the conflict nor assigned blame for it to one side or the other) had clearly begun.
The emergence of the Provisional IRA and the loyalist paramilitaries
Initially, the nationalists welcomed the British army as protectors and as a balance for the Protestant-leaning RUC. In time, however, the army would be viewed by nationalists as another version of the enemy, especially after its aggressive efforts to disarm republican paramilitaries. In the process, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) became the defender of the nationalist cause. From its base in Ireland(which had formally left the Commonwealth in 1949), the IRA had mounted an ineffectual guerrilla effort in support of Northern Ireland’s nationalists from 1956 to 1962, but, as the 1960s progressed, the IRA became less concerned with affairs in the north than with advancing a Marxist political agenda. As a result, a splinter group, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (Provos), which was prepared to use force to bring about unification, emerged as the champion of Northern Ireland’s nationalists. (The Official IRA would conduct operations in support of the republicans in Northern Ireland until undertaking a cease-fire in 1972, after which it effectively ceded the title of the IRA in the north to the Provos.) Believing that their fight was a continuation of the Irish War of Independence, the Provos adopted the tactics of guerrilla warfare, financed partly by members of the Irish diaspora in the United States and later supplied with arms and munitions by the government of Libyan strongman Muammar al-Qaddafi. Unionists also took up arms, swelling the numbers of loyalist paramilitary organizations, most notably the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and Ulster Defence Association UDA).
In an attempt to address nationalist grievances, electoral boundaries were redrawn more fairly, efforts were made to rectify discrimination in housing and public employment, and the B Specials were decommissioned. At the same time, the government of Northern Ireland responded to the growing unrest by introducing increasingly stringent security measures, including internment (detention without trial). The overwhelming majority of those arrested, however, were nationalists.
As the 1970s progressed, rioting became more common in Belfast and Derry, bombings of public places (by both loyalists and republicans) increased, and both sides of the conflict perpetrated violent, deadly atrocities. Barbed wire laid by British soldiers to separate the sectarian communitiesevolved into brick and steel “peace walls,” some of which stood 45 feet (14 metres) high, segregating loyalist and republican enclaves, most famously the Falls Road Catholic community and the Shankill Protestant community of Belfast.
On January 30, 1972, the conflict reached a new level of intensity when British paratroopers fired on Catholic civil rights demonstrators in Londonderry, killing 13 and injuring 14 others (one of whom later died). The incident, which became known as “Bloody Sunday,” contributed to a spike in Provos recruitment and would remain controversial for decades, hinging on the question of which side fired first. In 2010 the Saville Report , the final pronouncement of a British government inquiry into the event, concluded that none of the victims had posed a threat to the troops and that their shooting had been unjustified. British Prime Minister David Cameron responded to the report by issuing a landmark apology for the shooting:
There is no point in trying to soften or equivocate what is in this report. It is clear from the tribunal’s authoritative conclusions that the events of Bloody Sunday were in no way justified….What happened should never, ever have happened….Some members of our armed forces acted wrongly. The government is ultimately responsible for the conduct of the armed forces and for that, on behalf of the government, indeed, on behalf of our country, I am deeply sorry.
In all, more than 480 people were killed as a result of the conflict in Northern Ireland in 1972, which proved to be the deadliest single year in the Troubles. That total included more than 100 fatalities for the British army, as the IRA escalated its onslaught. On July 21, “Bloody Friday,” nine people were killed and scores were injured when some two dozen bombs were detonated by the Provos in Belfast. Earlier, in March, frustrated with the Northern Ireland government’s failure to calm the situation, the British government suspended the Northern Ireland Parliament and reinstituted direct rule by Westminster.
Beginning in the mid-1970s, the IRA shifted the emphasis of its “Long War” from direct engagements with British troops to smaller-scale secretive operations, including the bombing of cities in Britain—a change of tactics the British military described as a shift from “insurgency” to “terrorism.” Similarly, the loyalist groups began setting off bombs in Ireland. Meanwhile, paramilitary violence at mid-decade (1974–76) resulted in the civilian deaths of some 370 Catholics and 88 Protestants.
A glimmer of hope was offered by the Sunningdale Agreement , named for the English city in which it was negotiated in 1973. That agreement led to the creation of a new Northern Ireland Assembly, with proportional representation for all parties, and to the establishment of a Council of Ireland, which was to provide a role for Ireland in the affairs of Northern Ireland. Frustrated by the diminution of their political power and furious at the participation of the republic, loyalists scuttled the power-sharing plan with a general strike that brought the province to a halt in May 1974 and eventually forced a return to direct rule, which remained in place for some 25 years.
For the remainder of the decade, violence ebbed and flowed, cease-fires lingered and lapsed, and tit-for-tat bombings and assassinations continued, including the high-profile killing at sea in August 1979 of Lord Mountbatten, a relative of both Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. In 1976 the opening of the specially designed Maze prison brought with it a shift in the treatment of IRA inmates from that of prisoners of war to that of common criminals. Seeking a return to their Special Category Status, the prisoners struck back, first staging the “blanket protest,” in which they refused to put on prison uniforms and instead wore only blankets, and then, in 1978, the “dirty protest,” in which inmates smeared the walls of their cells with excrement. The government of recently elected Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher refused to buckle, even in the face of hunger strikes in 1980–81 that led to the deaths of 10 prisoners, including Bobby Sands, who had won a seat in the British Parliament while incarcerated and fasting.
Sands’s election helped convince Sinn Féin, then operating as the political wing of the IRA, that the struggle for unification should be pursued at the ballot box as well as with the Armalite rifle. In June 1983 Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams won a seat in Parliament representing West Belfast, though he refused to take it to avoid taking the compulsory oath of loyalty to the British queen.
The Anglo-Irish Agreement and Downing Street Declaration
In October 1984 an IRA bomb attack on the Conservative Party Conference in Brighton, England, took five lives and threatened that of Thatcher. Though she remained steadfast in the face of this attack, it was the “Iron Lady” who in November 1985 joined Irish Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald in signing the Anglo-Irish Agreement, under which both countries guaranteed that any change in the status of Northern Ireland would come about only with the consent of the majority of the people of Northern Ireland. The accordalso established the Intergovernmental Conference, which gave Ireland a consultative role in the political and security affairs of Northern Ireland for the first time. Finally, the agreement stipulated that power would be devolved back upon the government of Northern Ireland only if unionists and nationalists participated in power sharing.
Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Garret FitzGerald and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher signing the Anglo-Irish Agreement, November 15, 1985.
Peter Kemp/AP
The loyalists’ vehement opposition to the agreement included the resignation of all 15 unionist members of the House of Commons and a ramping up of violence. In the meantime, IRA bombings in London made headlines, and the reach of the British security forces extended to the killing of three Provos in Gibraltar. Behind the scenes, however, negotiations were underway. In 1993 British Prime Minister John Major and Irish Taoiseach Albert Reynolds issued the so-called Downing Street Declaration , which established a framework for all-party peace talks. A cease-fire declared by the Provos in 1994 and joined by the principal loyalist paramilitary groups fell apart in 1996 because Sinn Féin, which had replaced the more moderate Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) as the leading nationalist party, had been excluded from peace talks because of the IRA’s continuing bombing campaign. Nevertheless, the unionists were at the table, prepared to consider a solution that included the participation of the republic of Ireland. After the IRA resumed its cease-fire in 1997, Sinn Féin was welcomed back to the talks, which now included the British and Irish governments, the SDLP, the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland, the UUP, and the Ulster Democratic Party, among others, though not the Paisley-led DUP, which was protesting the inclusion of Sinn Féin.
The Good Friday Agreement, the Omagh bombing, peace, and power sharing
Those talks, mediated by former U.S. senator George Mitchell, led to the Good Friday Agreement (Belfast Agreement), reached April 10, 1998. That landmark accordprovided for the creation of a power-sharing Northern Ireland Assembly, established an institutional arrangement for cross-border cooperation between the governments of Ireland and Northern Ireland on a range of issues, and lay the groundwork for continued consultation between the British and Irish governments. On May 22 Ireland and Northern Ireland held a joint referendum on the agreement, which was approved by 94 percent of those who voted in the republic and 71 percent of those voting in Northern Ireland, where Catholic approval of the accord (96 percent) was much higher than Protestant assent (52 per cent). Nonetheless, it was an IRA splinter group, the Real Irish Republican Army, which most dramatically violated the spirit of the agreement, with a bombing in Omagh in August that took 29 lives.
Elections for the new Assembly were held in June, but the IRA’s failure to decommission delayed the formation of the power-sharing Northern Ireland Executive until December 1999, when the IRA promised to fulfill its obligation to disarm. That month the republic of Ireland modified its constitution, removing its territorial claims to the whole of the island, and the United Kingdom yielded direct rule of Northern Ireland. Ostensibly the Troubles had come to end, but, though Northern Ireland began its most tranquil era in a generation, the peace was fragile. Sectarian antagonism persisted, the process of decommissioning was slow on both sides, and the rolling out of the new institutions was fitful, resulting in suspensions of devolution and the reimposition of direct rule.
In July 2005, however, the IRA announced that it had ordered all its units to “dump arms,” would henceforth pursue its goals only through peaceful means, and would work with international inspectors “to verifiably put its arms beyond use.” At a press conference in September, a spokesman for the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning stated, “We are satisfied that the arms decommissioned represent the totality of the IRA’s arsenal.” Decommissioning by unionist paramilitaries and other republican groups followed..
In March 2007 an agreement to form a power-sharing government was reached by Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley,respectively the leaders of Sinn Féin and the DUP, the two parties which had won the most seats in the election for the Assembly that month. On May 8 direct rule was rescinded as Paisley was sworn in as first minister and Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness, a onetime IRA commander, became deputy first minister.
The Troubles, also called Northern Ireland conflict, violent sectarian conflict from about 1968 to 1998 in Northern Irelandbetween the overwhelmingly Protestantunionists (loyalists), who desired the province to remain part of the United Kingdom, and the overwhelmingly Roman Catholic nationalists (republicans), who wanted Northern Ireland to become part of the republic of Ireland. The other major players in the conflict were the British army, Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), and Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR; from 1992 called the Royal Irish Regiment), and their avowed purpose was to play a peacekeeping role, most prominently between the nationalist Irish Republican Army(IRA), which viewed the conflict as a guerrilla war for national independence, and the unionist paramilitary forces, which characterized the IRA’s aggression as terrorism. Marked by street fighting, sensational bombings, sniper attacks, roadblocks, and internment without trial, the confrontation had the characteristics of a civil war, notwithstanding its textbook categorization as a “low-intensity conflict.” Some 3,600 people were killed and more than 30,000 more were wounded before a peaceful solution, which involved the governments of both the United Kingdom and Ireland, was effectively reached in 1998, leading to a power-sharing arrangement in the Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont.
Deep origins
The story of the Troubles is inextricably entwined with the history of Ireland as whole and, as such, can be seen as stemming from the first British incursion on the island, the Anglo-Norman invasion of the late 12th century, which left a wave of settlers whose descendants became known as the “Old English.” Thereafter, for nearly eight centuries, England and then Great Britain as a whole would dominate affairs in Ireland. Colonizing British landlords widely displaced Irish landholders. The most successful of these “plantations” began taking hold in the early 17th century in Ulster, the northernmost of Ireland’s four traditional provinces, previously a centre of rebellion, where the planters included English and Scottish tenants as well as British landlords. Because of the plantation of Ulster, as Irish history unfolded—with the struggle for the emancipation of the island’s Catholic majority under the supremacy of the Protestant ascendancy, along with the Irish nationalist pursuit of Home Rule and then independence after the island’s formal union with Great Britain in 1801—Ulster developed as a region where the Protestant settlers outnumbered the indigenousIrish. Unlike earlier English settlers, most of the 17th-century English and Scottish settlers and their descendants did not assimilate with the Irish. Instead, they held on tightly to British identity and remained steadfastly loyal to the British crown.
The formation of Northern Ireland, Catholic grievances, and the leadership of Terence O’Neill
Of the nine modern counties that constituted Ulster in the early 20th century, four—Antrim, Down, Armagh, and Londonderry (Derry)—had significant Protestant loyalist majorities; two—Fermanagh and Tyrone—had small Catholic nationalist majorities; and three—Donegal, Cavan, and Monaghan—had significant Catholic nationalist majorities. In 1920, during the Irish War of Independence (1919–21), the British Parliament, responding largely to the wishes of Ulster loyalists, enacted the Government of Ireland Act , which divided the island into two self-governing areas with devolved Home Rule-like powers. What would come to be known as Northern Ireland was formed by Ulster’s four majority loyalist counties along with Fermanagh and Tyrone. Donegal, Cavan, and Monaghan were combined with the island’s remaining 23 counties to form southern Ireland. The Anglo-Irish Treaty that ended the War of Independence then created the Irish Free State in the south, giving it dominion status within the British Empire. It also allowed Northern Ireland the option of remaining outside of the Free State, which it unsurprisingly chose to do.
Thus, in 1922 Northern Ireland began functioning as a self-governing region of the United Kingdom. Two-thirds of its population (about one million people) was Protestant and about one-third (roughly 500,000 people) was Catholic. Well before partition, Northern Ireland, particularly Belfast, had attracted economic migrants from elsewhere in Ireland seeking employment in its flourishing linen-making and shipbuilding industries. The best jobs had gone to Protestants, but the humming local economy still provided work for Catholics. Over and above the long-standing dominance of Northern Ireland politics that resulted for the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) by virtue of the Protestants’ sheer numerical advantage, loyalist control of local politics was ensured by the gerrymandering of electoral districts that concentrated and minimized Catholic representation. Moreover, by restricting the franchise to ratepayers (the taxpaying heads of households) and their spouses, representation was further limited for Catholic households, which tended to be larger (and more likely to include unemployed adult children) than their Protestant counterparts. Those who paid rates for more than one residence (more likely to be Protestants) were granted an additional vote for each ward in which they held property (up to six votes). Catholics argued that they were discriminated against when it came to the allocation of public housing, appointments to public service jobs, and government investment in neighbourhoods. They were also more likely to be the subjects of police harassment by the almost exclusively Protestant RUC and Ulster Special Constabulary (B Specials).
The divide between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland had little to do with theological differences but instead was grounded in culture and politics. Neither Irish history nor the Irish language was taught in schools in Northern Ireland, it was illegal to fly the flag of the Irish republic, and from 1956 to 1974 Sinn Féin, the party of Irish republicanism, also was banned in Northern Ireland. Catholics by and large identified as Irish and sought the incorporation of Northern Ireland into the Irish state. The great bulk of Protestants saw themselves as British and feared that they would lose their culture and privilege if Northern Ireland were subsumed by the republic. They expressed their partisan solidarity through involvement with Protestant unionist fraternal organizations such as the Orange Order, which found its inspiration in the victory of King William III (William of Orange) at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 over his deposed Catholic predecessor, James II, whose siege of the Protestant community of Londonderry had earlier been broken by William. Despite these tensions, for 40 or so years after partition the status of unionist-dominated Northern Ireland was relatively stable.
Recognizing that any attempt to reinvigorate Northern Ireland’s declining industrial economy in the early 1960s would also need to address the province’s percolatingpolitical and social tensions, the newly elected prime minister of Northern Ireland, Terence O’Neill, not only reached out to the nationalist community but also, in early 1965, exchanged visits with Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Seán Lemass—a radical step, given that the republic’s constitution included an assertion of sovereignty over the whole island. Nevertheless, O’Neill’s efforts were seen as inadequate by nationalists and as too conciliatory by loyalists, including the Rev. Ian Paisley, who became one of the most vehement and influential representatives of unionist reaction.
Civil rights activism, the Battle of Bogside, and the arrival of the British army
Contrary to the policies of UUP governments that disadvantaged Catholics, the Education Act that the Northern Ireland Parliament passed into law in 1947 increased educational opportunities for all citizens of the province. As a result, the generation of well-educated Catholics who came of age in the 1960s had new expectations for more equitable treatment. At a time when political activism was on the rise in Europe—from the events of May 1968 in France to the Prague Spring—and when the American civil rights movement was making great strides, Catholic activists in Northern Ireland such as John Humeand Bernadette Devlin came together to form civil rightsgroups such as the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA).
Although more than one violently disrupted political march has been pointed to as the starting point of the Troubles, it can be argued that the catalyzing event occurred on October 5, 1968, in Derry, where a march had been organized by the NICRA to protest discrimination and gerrymandering. The march was banned when unionists announced that they would be staging a counterdemonstration, but the NICRA decided to carry out their protest anyway. Rioting then erupted after the RUC violently suppressed the marchers with batons and a water cannon.
Omagh bombing
August 15, 1998
Similarly inflammatory were the events surrounding a march held by loyalists in Londonderry on August 12, 1969. Two days of rioting that became known as the Battle of Bogside (after the Catholic area in which the confrontation occurred) stemmed from the escalating clash between nationalists and the RUC, which was acting as a buffer between loyalist marchers and Catholic residents of the area. Rioting in support of the nationalists then erupted in Belfast and elsewhere, and the British army was dispatched to restore calm. Thereafter, violent confrontation only escalated, and the Troubles (a name that neither characterized the nature of the conflict nor assigned blame for it to one side or the other) had clearly begun.
The emergence of the Provisional IRA and the loyalist paramilitaries
Initially, the nationalists welcomed the British army as protectors and as a balance for the Protestant-leaning RUC. In time, however, the army would be viewed by nationalists as another version of the enemy, especially after its aggressive efforts to disarm republican paramilitaries. In the process, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) became the defender of the nationalist cause. From its base in Ireland(which had formally left the Commonwealth in 1949), the IRA had mounted an ineffectual guerrilla effort in support of Northern Ireland’s nationalists from 1956 to 1962, but, as the 1960s progressed, the IRA became less concerned with affairs in the north than with advancing a Marxist political agenda. As a result, a splinter group, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (Provos), which was prepared to use force to bring about unification, emerged as the champion of Northern Ireland’s nationalists. (The Official IRA would conduct operations in support of the republicans in Northern Ireland until undertaking a cease-fire in 1972, after which it effectively ceded the title of the IRA in the north to the Provos.) Believing that their fight was a continuation of the Irish War of Independence, the Provos adopted the tactics of guerrilla warfare, financed partly by members of the Irish diaspora in the United States and later supplied with arms and munitions by the government of Libyan strongman Muammar al-Qaddafi. Unionists also took up arms, swelling the numbers of loyalist paramilitary organizations, most notably the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and Ulster Defence Association UDA).
In an attempt to address nationalist grievances, electoral boundaries were redrawn more fairly, efforts were made to rectify discrimination in housing and public employment, and the B Specials were decommissioned. At the same time, the government of Northern Ireland responded to the growing unrest by introducing increasingly stringent security measures, including internment (detention without trial). The overwhelming majority of those arrested, however, were nationalists.
As the 1970s progressed, rioting became more common in Belfast and Derry, bombings of public places (by both loyalists and republicans) increased, and both sides of the conflict perpetrated violent, deadly atrocities. Barbed wire laid by British soldiers to separate the sectarian communitiesevolved into brick and steel “peace walls,” some of which stood 45 feet (14 metres) high, segregating loyalist and republican enclaves, most famously the Falls Road Catholic community and the Shankill Protestant community of Belfast.
On January 30, 1972, the conflict reached a new level of intensity when British paratroopers fired on Catholic civil rights demonstrators in Londonderry, killing 13 and injuring 14 others (one of whom later died). The incident, which became known as “Bloody Sunday,” contributed to a spike in Provos recruitment and would remain controversial for decades, hinging on the question of which side fired first. In 2010 the Saville Report , the final pronouncement of a British government inquiry into the event, concluded that none of the victims had posed a threat to the troops and that their shooting had been unjustified. British Prime Minister David Cameron responded to the report by issuing a landmark apology for the shooting:
There is no point in trying to soften or equivocate what is in this report. It is clear from the tribunal’s authoritative conclusions that the events of Bloody Sunday were in no way justified….What happened should never, ever have happened….Some members of our armed forces acted wrongly. The government is ultimately responsible for the conduct of the armed forces and for that, on behalf of the government, indeed, on behalf of our country, I am deeply sorry.
In all, more than 480 people were killed as a result of the conflict in Northern Ireland in 1972, which proved to be the deadliest single year in the Troubles. That total included more than 100 fatalities for the British army, as the IRA escalated its onslaught. On July 21, “Bloody Friday,” nine people were killed and scores were injured when some two dozen bombs were detonated by the Provos in Belfast. Earlier, in March, frustrated with the Northern Ireland government’s failure to calm the situation, the British government suspended the Northern Ireland Parliament and reinstituted direct rule by Westminster.
Beginning in the mid-1970s, the IRA shifted the emphasis of its “Long War” from direct engagements with British troops to smaller-scale secretive operations, including the bombing of cities in Britain—a change of tactics the British military described as a shift from “insurgency” to “terrorism.” Similarly, the loyalist groups began setting off bombs in Ireland. Meanwhile, paramilitary violence at mid-decade (1974–76) resulted in the civilian deaths of some 370 Catholics and 88 Protestants.
A glimmer of hope was offered by the Sunningdale Agreement , named for the English city in which it was negotiated in 1973. That agreement led to the creation of a new Northern Ireland Assembly, with proportional representation for all parties, and to the establishment of a Council of Ireland, which was to provide a role for Ireland in the affairs of Northern Ireland. Frustrated by the diminution of their political power and furious at the participation of the republic, loyalists scuttled the power-sharing plan with a general strike that brought the province to a halt in May 1974 and eventually forced a return to direct rule, which remained in place for some 25 years.
For the remainder of the decade, violence ebbed and flowed, cease-fires lingered and lapsed, and tit-for-tat bombings and assassinations continued, including the high-profile killing at sea in August 1979 of Lord Mountbatten, a relative of both Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. In 1976 the opening of the specially designed Maze prison brought with it a shift in the treatment of IRA inmates from that of prisoners of war to that of common criminals. Seeking a return to their Special Category Status, the prisoners struck back, first staging the “blanket protest,” in which they refused to put on prison uniforms and instead wore only blankets, and then, in 1978, the “dirty protest,” in which inmates smeared the walls of their cells with excrement. The government of recently elected Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher refused to buckle, even in the face of hunger strikes in 1980–81 that led to the deaths of 10 prisoners, including Bobby Sands, who had won a seat in the British Parliament while incarcerated and fasting.
Sands’s election helped convince Sinn Féin, then operating as the political wing of the IRA, that the struggle for unification should be pursued at the ballot box as well as with the Armalite rifle. In June 1983 Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams won a seat in Parliament representing West Belfast, though he refused to take it to avoid taking the compulsory oath of loyalty to the British queen.
The Anglo-Irish Agreement and Downing Street Declaration
In October 1984 an IRA bomb attack on the Conservative Party Conference in Brighton, England, took five lives and threatened that of Thatcher. Though she remained steadfast in the face of this attack, it was the “Iron Lady” who in November 1985 joined Irish Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald in signing the Anglo-Irish Agreement, under which both countries guaranteed that any change in the status of Northern Ireland would come about only with the consent of the majority of the people of Northern Ireland. The accordalso established the Intergovernmental Conference, which gave Ireland a consultative role in the political and security affairs of Northern Ireland for the first time. Finally, the agreement stipulated that power would be devolved back upon the government of Northern Ireland only if unionists and nationalists participated in power sharing.
Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Garret FitzGerald and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher signing the Anglo-Irish Agreement, November 15, 1985.
Peter Kemp/AP
The loyalists’ vehement opposition to the agreement included the resignation of all 15 unionist members of the House of Commons and a ramping up of violence. In the meantime, IRA bombings in London made headlines, and the reach of the British security forces extended to the killing of three Provos in Gibraltar. Behind the scenes, however, negotiations were underway. In 1993 British Prime Minister John Major and Irish Taoiseach Albert Reynolds issued the so-called Downing Street Declaration , which established a framework for all-party peace talks. A cease-fire declared by the Provos in 1994 and joined by the principal loyalist paramilitary groups fell apart in 1996 because Sinn Féin, which had replaced the more moderate Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) as the leading nationalist party, had been excluded from peace talks because of the IRA’s continuing bombing campaign. Nevertheless, the unionists were at the table, prepared to consider a solution that included the participation of the republic of Ireland. After the IRA resumed its cease-fire in 1997, Sinn Féin was welcomed back to the talks, which now included the British and Irish governments, the SDLP, the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland, the UUP, and the Ulster Democratic Party, among others, though not the Paisley-led DUP, which was protesting the inclusion of Sinn Féin.
The Good Friday Agreement, the Omagh bombing, peace, and power sharing
Those talks, mediated by former U.S. senator George Mitchell, led to the Good Friday Agreement (Belfast Agreement), reached April 10, 1998. That landmark accordprovided for the creation of a power-sharing Northern Ireland Assembly, established an institutional arrangement for cross-border cooperation between the governments of Ireland and Northern Ireland on a range of issues, and lay the groundwork for continued consultation between the British and Irish governments. On May 22 Ireland and Northern Ireland held a joint referendum on the agreement, which was approved by 94 percent of those who voted in the republic and 71 percent of those voting in Northern Ireland, where Catholic approval of the accord (96 percent) was much higher than Protestant assent (52 per cent). Nonetheless, it was an IRA splinter group, the Real Irish Republican Army, which most dramatically violated the spirit of the agreement, with a bombing in Omagh in August that took 29 lives.
Elections for the new Assembly were held in June, but the IRA’s failure to decommission delayed the formation of the power-sharing Northern Ireland Executive until December 1999, when the IRA promised to fulfill its obligation to disarm. That month the republic of Ireland modified its constitution, removing its territorial claims to the whole of the island, and the United Kingdom yielded direct rule of Northern Ireland. Ostensibly the Troubles had come to end, but, though Northern Ireland began its most tranquil era in a generation, the peace was fragile. Sectarian antagonism persisted, the process of decommissioning was slow on both sides, and the rolling out of the new institutions was fitful, resulting in suspensions of devolution and the reimposition of direct rule.
In July 2005, however, the IRA announced that it had ordered all its units to “dump arms,” would henceforth pursue its goals only through peaceful means, and would work with international inspectors “to verifiably put its arms beyond use.” At a press conference in September, a spokesman for the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning stated, “We are satisfied that the arms decommissioned represent the totality of the IRA’s arsenal.” Decommissioning by unionist paramilitaries and other republican groups followed..
In March 2007 an agreement to form a power-sharing government was reached by Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley,respectively the leaders of Sinn Féin and the DUP, the two parties which had won the most seats in the election for the Assembly that month. On May 8 direct rule was rescinded as Paisley was sworn in as first minister and Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness, a onetime IRA commander, became deputy first minister.
Fantastic vintage W.& R.Jacob & Co.Ltd Biscuit & Cake Manufacturers Dublin Advert depicting the famous Dublin Landmark which played such a pivotal role in the 1916 Easter Rising which altered the course of Irish History forever. Clonsilla Dublin 45.5cm x 57.5cm The biscuit making firm of W. & R. Jacob's were one the largest employers in the Dublin of 1916, and their factory was seized on Easter Monday by perhaps 100 members of the 2nd Battalion of the Dublin Brigade of the Irish Volunteers under Thomas MacDonagh. The factory itself was an enormous and formidable Victorian edifice located on the 'block' enclosed by Bishop St, Bride St, Peter's St and Peter's Row, and between St Patrick's Cathedral and St Stephen's Green. Its seizure helped to complete a loop of building cross the south inner city; the factory had two large towers that could act as observation points, while its location was very close to both Camden St and Patrick St: natural routeways for troops entering the city centre from Portobello Barracks in Rathmines and Wellington Barracks on the South Circular Road. There were only a few staff present in the building when the Volunteers broke into it; a number of smaller outposts were established in the area around the factory. While the garrison saw some fighting early in the week, their principal enemies proved to be boredom and the locals: the factory was surrounded by tenements, and the Volunteers were attacked and abused by residents, many of whom were Jacob's workers themselves. The families of servicemen were also quite hostile, but there may have been another reason for this hostility: Michael O'Hanrahan, who was in Jacob's, expressed his concern that the choice of location might endanger local residents if the British chose to attack. As it happens, the factory was largely by-passed, though it was fired upon intermittently throughout the week by troops in Dublin Castle and elsewhere. MacDonagh surrendered in nearby St Patrick's Park on Sunday 30 April; some of the factory was looted after the Volunteers had left. Three members of the Jacob's garrison were executed. Most of the factory was eventually demolished, though fragments of the ground storey and one of the towers are still visible on Bishop St between the DIT campus on Aungier St and the National Archives of Ireland.
Nearly a Che Guevera style to this poster of the rebel hero Sean South from Garryowen in the heart of Limerick City. Origins : Limerick. Dimensions : 54cm x 42cm Glazed Sean South ( c. 1928 – 1 January 1957)was a member of an IRA military column led by Sean Garland on a raid against a Royal Ulster Constabulary barracks in Brookeborough, County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, on New Year's Day 1957.South, along with Fergal O'Hanlon, died of wounds sustained during the raid.
43cm x 38cm Dublin The Easter Rising (Irish: Éirí Amach na Cásca), also known as the Easter Rebellion, was an armed insurrection in Ireland during Easter Week in April 1916. The Rising was launched by Irish republicans against British rule in Ireland with the aim of establishing an independent Irish Republic while the United Kingdom was fighting the First World War. It was the most significant uprising in Ireland since the rebellion of 1798 and the first armed conflict of the Irish revolutionary period. Sixteen of the Rising's leaders were executed from May 1916. The nature of the executions, and subsequent political developments, ultimately contributed to an increase in popular support for Irish independence. Organised by a seven-man Military Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the Rising began on Easter Monday, 24 April 1916 and lasted for six days.Members of the Irish Volunteers, led by schoolmaster and Irish language activist Patrick Pearse, joined by the smaller Irish Citizen Army of James Connolly and 200 women of Cumann na mBan, seized strategically important buildings in Dublin and proclaimed the Irish Republic. The British Army brought in thousands of reinforcements as well as artillery and a gunboat. There was street fighting on the routes into the city centre, where the rebels slowed the British advance and inflicted many casualties. Elsewhere in Dublin, the fighting mainly consisted of sniping and long-range gun battles. The main rebel positions were gradually surrounded and bombarded with artillery. There were isolated actions in other parts of Ireland; Volunteer leader Eoin MacNeill had issued a countermand in a bid to halt the Rising, which greatly reduced the number of rebels who mobilised. With much greater numbers and heavier weapons, the British Army suppressed the Rising. Pearse agreed to an unconditional surrender on Saturday 29 April, although sporadic fighting continued briefly. After the surrender, the country remained under martial law. About 3,500 people were taken prisoner by the British and 1,800 of them were sent to internment camps or prisons in Britain. Most of the leaders of the Rising were executed following courts-martial. The Rising brought physical force republicanism back to the forefront of Irish politics, which for nearly fifty years had been dominated by constitutional nationalism. Opposition to the British reaction to the Rising contributed to changes in public opinion and the move toward independence, as shown in the December 1918 election in Ireland which was won by the Sinn Féin party, which convened the First Dáil and declared independence. Of the 485 people killed, 260 were civilians, 143 were British military and police personnel, and 82 were Irish rebels, including 16 rebels executed for their roles in the Rising. More than 2,600 people were wounded. Many of the civilians were killed or wounded by British artillery fire or were mistaken for rebels. Others were caught in the crossfire during firefights between the British and the rebels. The shelling and resulting fires left parts of central Dublin in ruins.
30cm x 65cmBEFORE THE ADVENT of opinion polls, by-elections were the most reliable means of gauging the mood of the electorate.For decades before the 1916 Rising, Irish nationalists represented by the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) sought Irish home rule – a subordinate parliament and government in Dublin.But the emergence of Sinn Féin, which championed an independent Irish republic, transformed the political landscape. In 1917 Sinn Féin won four by-elections on the bounce in North Roscommon, South Longford, East Clare and South Kilkenny.No victory was more emphatic than East Clare and no winning candidate more central to the future history of Ireland.A political noviceThe victor was a political novice with little experience of public speaking outside the classroom. The senior surviving Volunteer from 1916, he was largely unknown before the East Clare by-election.But after it he was catapulted to national prominence, became president of Sinn Féin and represented East Clare for the next four decades. That soldier turned politician was De Valera .The East Clare by-election on July 10 was precipitated by the death on the Western Front of the sitting MP: Major Willie Redmond, brother of the leader of the IPP.Patrick Lynch KC, a barrister, contested the seat for the IPP under the banner: “Clare for a Clareman – Lynch is the Man”. His supporters, who were strongest in Ennis, contended that an Irish republic was a political fantasy. For several reasons, few expected anything other than a Sinn Féin victory.One of the most rebellious counties in IrelandFirst, Clare was one of the most rebellious counties in Ireland and during the by-election the county inspector of the Royal Irish Constabulary had to obtain a draft of 150 soldiers. Eight months after the by-election Clare became the first county to be placed under military rule since the 1916 Rising.Second, no election had been contested in East Clare since 1895 and the IPP’s constituency machine was decrepit and almost bankrupt. By contrast, the Sinn Féin campaign was highly organised and backboned by the revamped Irish Volunteers who were unafraid to defy the authorities and acted as a private police force.De Valera, who had only been released from prison on 16 June, campaigned in his Volunteer uniform and told the electors that, “every vote you give now is as good as the crack of a rifle in proclaiming your desire for freedom”.Third, buoyed up by its earlier electoral successes Sinn Féin attracted not just the support of the young but that of the Clare Champion (the county newspaper) and, more significantly, the endorsement of Bishop Michael Fogarty of Killaloe and the majority of younger clergy. The Catholic card was played astutely and reassuringly by de Valera.Although everyone expected a victory for de Valera, no one expected so stunning a winning margin. When the result of the election was announced on July 11 de Valera had secured 5,010 votes to Lynch’s 2,035.A game changerThe rural vote had turned against the IPP. The Freeman’s Journal, the newspaper of the IPP, lamented that, “East Clare has declared for revolution by an overwhelming majority”. Lynch was not the man after all.The East Clare by-election was a milestone for Sinn Féin because it secured a striking popular mandate which helped the organisation to continue its rapid growth ahead of the 1918 general election.For de Valera his victory was a pivotal episode in his progression from militant to political republican. More than any other factor, the scale of his success propelled him to the presidency of Sinn Féin in October 1917 and launched his long political career. For a man who in the early months of 1917 wished to have no truck with politics this was quite a turn of events.
Lovely,limited edition commemorative poster celebrating the bicentennial anniversary of the 1798 United Irishmen Rebellion. 78cm x 57cm The 1798 United Irishmen Rebellion led by Theobald Wolfe Tone was ill fated from the outset.Inspired by the recent successful American and French Revolutions,the Rebels leadership became fragmented and the revolt was only sporadically successful .This poster captures the portraits of such notable United Irishmen as Henry Joy McCracken,Napper Tandy and Wolfe Tone himself.
Fantastic print depicting all the main protagonists of the United Irishmen Movement of 1798, 60cm x 52cm Ballina Co Mayo The 1798 United Irishmen Rebellion led by Theobald Wolfe Tone was ill fated from the outset.Inspired by the recent successful American and French Revolutions,the Rebels leadership became fragmented and the revolt was only sporadically successful .This atmospheric and original print represents the camaraderie of the United Irish.This classic print captures the portraits of such notable United Irishmen as Robert Emmett,Mathew Teeling and Wolfe Tone himself.
25cm x 35cm Limerick The Irish National Land League was an Irish political organisation of the late 19th century which sought to help poor tenant farmers. Its primary aim was to abolish landlordism in Ireland and enable tenant farmers to own the land they worked on. The period of the Land League's agitation is known as the Land War. Historian R. F. Foster argues that in the countryside the Land League "reinforced the politicization of rural Catholic nationalist Ireland, partly by defining that identity against urbanization, landlordism, Englishness and—implicitly—Protestantism."Foster adds that about a third of the activists were Catholic priests, and Archbishop Thomas Croke was one of its most influential champions.
National Land League plaque Imperial Hotel in Castlebar
William Gladstone under pressure of Land League. Caricature circa 1880s.Withholding of rent led on to evictions until "Ashbourne's Act" in 1885 made it unprofitable for most landlords to evict.By then agricultural prices had made a recovery, and rents had been fixed and could be reviewed downwards, but tenants found that holding out communally was the best option. Critics noted that the poorer sub-tenants were still expected to pay their rents to tenant farmers. The widespread upheavals and extensive evictions were accompanied by several years of bad weather and poor harvests, when the tenant farmers who were unable to pay the full arrears of rents resorted to a rent strike. A renewed Land War was waged under the Plan of Campaign from 1886 up until 1892 during which the League decided on a fair rent and then encouraged its members to offer this rent to the landlords. If this was refused, then the rent would be paid by tenants to the League and the landlord would not receive any money until he accepted a discount. The first target, ironically, was a member of the Catholic clergy, Canon Ulick Burke of Knock, who was eventually induced to reduce his rents by 25%. Many landlords resisted these tactics, often violently and there were deaths on either side of the dispute. The Royal Irish Constabulary, the national police force, largely made up of Irishmen, were charged with upholding the law and protecting both landlord and tenant against violence. Originally, the movement cut across some sectarian boundaries, with some meetings held in Orange halls in Ulster, but the tenancy system in effect there Ulster Custom was quite different and fairer to tenants and support drifted away. As a result of the Land War, the Irish National Land League was suppressed by the authorities. In October 1882, as its successor Parnell founded the Irish National League to campaign on broader issues including Home Rule.Many of the Scottish members formed the Scottish Land Restoration League. In 1881, the League started publishing United Ireland a weekly newspaper edited by William O'Brien, which continued until 1898.
Irish land League poster dating from the 1880s
45cm x 38cm The Sunday Press was a weekly newspaper published in Ireland from 1949 until 1995. It was launched by Éamon de Valera's Irish Press group following the defeat of his Fianna Fáil party in the 1948 Irish general election. Like its sister newspaper, the daily The Irish Press, politically the paper loyally supported Fianna Fáil. The future Taoiseach Seán Lemass was the managing editor of the Irish Press who spearheaded the launch of the Sunday paper, with the first editor Colonel Matt Feehan. Many of the Irish Press journalists contributed to the paper. 'When I open the pages, I duck' was Brendan Behan's description of reading The Sunday Press, for the habit of published memoirs of veterans (usually those aligned to Fianna Fáil) of the Irish War of Independence. It soon built up a large readership, and overtook its main competitor the Sunday Independent, which tended to support Fine Gael. At its peak The Sunday Press sold up to 475,000 copies every week, and had a readership of over one million, around one third of the Irish population. Like the Evening Press, the paper's readership held up better over the years than that of the flagship title in the group, The Irish Press, and it might have survived as a stand-alone title had it been sold. However, with the collapse of the Irish Press Newspapers group in May 1995, all three titles ceased publication immediately. The launch of Ireland on Sunday in 1997 was initially interpreted by many observers as an attempt to appeal to the former readership of The Sunday Press, seen as generally rural, fairly conservative Catholic, and with a traditional Irish nationalist political outlook. When Christmas Day fell on Sunday in 1949, 1955, 1960, 1966, 1977, 1983, 1988 and 1994 the paper came out on the Saturday. Vincent Jennings at the age of 31 became editor of The Sunday Press in 1968, serving until December 1986, when he became manager of the Irish Press Group. Journalists who worked at the press include Stephen Collins served as political editor his father Willie Collins was deputy editor and Michael Carwood became sports editor of The Sunday Press in 1988 until its closure in 1995.
Seán Keating (born John Keating, Limerick, 28 September 1889 – Dublin, 21 December 1977) was an Irish romantic-realist painter who painted some iconic images of the Irish War of Independence and of the early industrialization of Ireland. He spent two weeks or so each year during the late summer on the Aran Islands and his many portraits of island people depicted them as rugged heroic figures. However, he ceased to visit the Aran Islands in 1965.Seán Keating studied drawing at the Limerick Technical School before a scholarship arranged by William Orpen allowed him to go at the age of twenty to study at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin. Over the next few years, he spent time on the Aran Islands. In 1914 Keating won the RDS Taylor award with a painting titled The Reconciliation. The prize included £50 which allowed him to go to London to work as Orpen's studio assistant in 1915. In late 1915 or early 1916, he returned to Ireland where he documented the War of Independence and the subsequent Civil War. Examples include Men of the South (1921–22) which shows a group of IRA men ready to ambush a military vehicle and An Allegory (first exhibited in 1924), in which the two opposing sides in the Irish Civil War are seen to bury a tricolour-covered coffin amid the roots on an ancient tree. The painting includes a self-portrait of the artist.
Men of the South, 1921–22, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork.Keating was elected an Associate of the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) in 1918, and a full member in 1923. One of the cardinal achievements of the Irish Free State in the 1920s was the building, in partnership with Siemens, of a hydro-electric power generator at Ardnacrusha, near Limerick. Between 1926 and 1927 Keating, at his own initiative, produced a considerable number of paintings related to this scheme. He exhibited several examples of the paintings in the RHA exhibitions in 1927 and 1928. Most are now in the collection of ESB Group. His work was also part of the art competitions at the 1924 Summer Olympics and the 1928 Summer Olympics. In 1936 a group of prominent Limerick politicians, artists and patrons established the first Limerick City Collection of Art, made up of various donations and bequests. Keating was part of this artist-led initiative to form a municipal art gallery in Limerick similar to those already in Dublin and Cork. As a pivotal member of the committee, Keating himself donated many works to the collection which was first exhibited in the Savoy Cinema, Limerick City, on 23 November 1937. It was not until 1948, however, that an extension to the rear of Limerick Free Library and Museum became the permanent home to the City Collection, acquiring the name of the Limerick Free Art Gallery. In 1985 the Library and Museum were transferred to larger buildings. In 1939 Keating was commissioned to paint a mural for the Irish pavilion at the New York World's Fair. He was President of the Royal Hibernian Academy from 1950 to 1962, and showed at the annual exhibition for 61 years from 1914 onwards. Keating was an intellectual painter in the sense that he consciously set out to explore the visual identity of the Irish nation, and his paintings show a very idealised realism. He feared that the modern movement would lead to a decline in artistic standards. Throughout his career, he exhibited nearly 300 works at the RHA, and also showed at the Oireachtas. Keating married political campaigner, May Walsh, in 1919. She was a frequent model for his paintings until her death in 1965. He died on 21 December 1977 at the Adelaide Hospital and was buried at Cruagh Cemetery, Rathfarnham. The 1978 RHA Exhibition featured a small memorial collection of his work. Posthumous exhibitions of his paintings were held by The Grafton Gallery, Dublin (1986) and the Electricity Supply Board (1987). Sean Keating – The Pilgrim Soul, a documentary presented and written by his son, the politician Justin Keating, aired on RTÉ in 1996.
An Allegory, 1924, National Gallery of Ireland.
25cm x 30cm Glasgow
Omagh bombingAugust 15, 1998
25cm x 30cm Glasgow
25cm x 30cm Glasgow
