Southern Irish Loyalism from Home Rule Crisis to Republic: An Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Brian Hughes ◽  
Conor Morrissey
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Final Section ◽  
General Election ◽  
Free State ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
The Third ◽  
Thematic Framework ◽  
Irish Free State

This chapter-length introduction provides a chronological, historiographical, and thematic framework for the volume. It begins by setting out the book’s remit, outlining its understanding of loyalism, and broadly defining the individuals and groups under consideration. The introduction then provides an overview of the history and historiography of southern Irish loyalism in three sections. The first covers the period from the third Home Rule bill in 1912 to the 1918 general election while the second takes in the Irish War of Independence (1919–21) and Irish Civil War (1922–23). This is followed by a final section on southern loyalists and loyalism after southern Irish independence, from the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922 to the exit from the commonwealth and declaration of a republic in 1949.

The Parallax of Irish-Language Modernism, 1900–1940

2020 ◽  
pp. 166-184
Author(s):  
Brian Ó Conchubhair
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Free State ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Linguistic Terms ◽  
Irish Language ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
Irish Free State ◽  
Modernist Fiction

This chapter traces the emergence and development of modernism in Irish-language fiction from 1900 to 1940, a period incorporating the rise of cultural and linguistic nationalism, the 1916 Rising, the War of Independence, the Civil War and the establishment of the Irish Free State. In literary and linguistic terms, these decades saw a seismic transition from editing and annotating classical Irish-language texts to the privileging of vernacular forms of the spoken language and the cultivation of contemporary fiction in vernacular dialects. This chapter assesses the importance and relevance of Irish-language modernist fiction in national and wider European terms, paying attention to writers’ narrative strategies in dealing with the complexities of modernity and to the manner in which they expanded the range and scope of Irish-language fiction beyond the nativist folkloric aesthetic endorsed by cultural nationalists.

Models of Government and Anglo-Irish Relations

1988 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan J. Ward
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Free State ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
The People ◽  
Lower House ◽  
Irish People ◽  
Irish Free State ◽  
The Government

In 1922 the Irish Free State began life with a constitution which embodied two contradictory principles. The first recognized that all powers of government derive from the people and provided for a system of government in which the Irish Cabinet was clearly responsible to the popularly elected Irish lower house, Dail Eireann. The second recognized a monarch, King George V, as head of the Irish executive, with substantial prerogative powers derived not from the Irish people but from British common law. The constitution was a compromise between Britain and Irish republicans to end the Irish War of Independence. Though not every compromise in politics makes complete sense, for Britain this one represented more than a short-range expedient. Its contradictions represented the dying gasp in a long, often anguished, and ultimately futile attempt by Britain to devise a formula which would simultaneously permit the Irish a measure of self-government and protect vital British interests in Ireland.This essay will review the attempts to construct a satisfactory Anglo-Irish relationship in the years between 1782 and 1949. It will concentrate on four models of government proposed for Ireland: (a) the independent Irish Parliament of the period from 1782 to 1800, (b) O'Connell's proposals to repeal the union with Britain in the 1830s and 1840s, (c) the devolution proposed in the home rule bills of 1886, 1893, 1912, and the Government of Ireland Act of 1920, and (d) the independence provided in the Irish Free State constitution of 1922 and its successor, the Irish constitution of 1937. It will also place these models in the context of the constitutional evolution of the British Empire. In the Canadian, New Zealand, Australian, and South African colonies, colonial self-government and British imperial interests were reconciled, beginning in Nova Scotia in 1848, by using a kind of constitutional double-think involving the Crown and the colonial Governor. But the problem of the troubled Anglo-Irish relationship could not be resolved so easily.

Bluff, Bluster and brinkmanship: Andrew Bonar Law and the Third Home Rule Bill

1993 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Smith
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
High Risk ◽  
Political System ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
General Election ◽  
The Political ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
The Third

ABSTRACTThe article attempts to show that Bonar Law had an effective and coherent strategy towards home rule. Previous interpretations have stressed his weakness and inexperience, either his ‘pandering’ to the extremists in the Tory party or his readiness to seek a compromise, when civil war began to loom large, in the autumn of 1913. Much of the blame for the political stalemate from 1912 until 1914 is directly, or implicitly, laid upon Bonar Law. Yet the tory leader was a more consummate politician. He sought to use the home rule crisis not only to reinforce his own fragile leadership but to return the Conservatives to office. This he proposed to do by allowing the political system to reach an impasse over home rule, by not helping the Liberals reach a compromise and yet inciting Ulster to resist the bill on its implementation. This left Asquith, the Liberal prime minister, with the impossible choice of imposing the bill onto Ulster (so provoking civil war) or of holding a general election when his government was perceived as unpopular. Bonar Law counted on Asquith preferring to hold an election though Asquith was saved from such a decision by the outbreak of war. It was, then, a ‘high-risk’ strategy to win office for the party he led.

Home Rulers in a New Ireland, 1935–49

2020 ◽  
pp. 169-196
Author(s):  
Martin O'Donoghue
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Statistical Analysis ◽  
World War I ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Social Organisation ◽  
Free State ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
World War ◽  
Border Areas

This chapter examines how such individuals from Irish Party backgrounds coped with the shift from Free State to republic as independent Ireland faced challenges at home and abroad. It charts the struggle of the AOH to reinvent itself as a Catholic social organisation which retained lingering vitality in the border areas while statistical analysis illuminates the home rule legacy in Fine Gael, disclosing that between 30% and 40% of its deputies up to 1949 had traceable Irish Party roots. This chapter analyses responses of such figures to the Spanish Civil War; the introduction of the new constitution, Bunreacht na hÉireann: Irish neutrality during World War II; and the controversial declaration of a republic by Fine Gael Taoiseach John A. Costello — a home ruler in his youth and leader of a government including individuals such as James Dillon, Bridget Redmond, Alfie Byrne, and ex-MP and World War I veteran John Lymbrick Esmonde.

Northern Ireland and ‘Ulster Nationalism’

2020 ◽  
pp. 186-201
Author(s):  
David Torrance
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Free State ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
Republic Of Ireland ◽  
Irish Free State ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Uk

Many analysts of the politics of Northern Ireland have argued that there exists some form of ‘Ulster nationalism’, particularly among Ulster Unionists. After 1886, when Gladstone promised Home Rule for Ireland, Unionists fashioned an Ulster identity predicated on Protestantism and ‘loyalty’ to the British Crown. This was contrasted with the ‘disloyalty’ of Catholics in what would become the Republic of Ireland. This form of ‘nationalist unionism’ was more ethnic in character than the civic variety which existed in Scotland and Wales. It too contained contradictions, not least its suspicion of Westminster and paranoia as to the intentions of successive UK governments towards the constitutional status of Northern Ireland. At various points after 1921, some Ulster Unionists even toyed with the idea of Northern Ireland becoming a ‘Dominion’ (like the Irish Free State) or else pursuing some other form of ‘independence’ from the UK.

The Irish War of Independence and The Irish Civil War

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Weihman
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
Liberal Party ◽  
Irish Republican Army ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
The Third ◽  
The North ◽  
Guerrilla War ◽  
The United Kingdom

The Irish War of Independence (Irish: Cogadh na Saoirse), also known as the Anglo–Irish War, began in January 1919 as a guerrilla war waged by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) against the British Government. Ireland was formally a part of the United Kingdom as a result of the passing of the Acts of Union in 1800. In the late-nineteenth century, the Irish Parliamentary Party, led by Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–1891), advocated home rule for Ireland through cooperation with the Liberal Party in the English Parliament, but it was unsuccessful until the Third Home Rule Bill of 1912. This bill provoked Unionists in the north of Ireland to form the Ulster Volunteers, who feared a predominantly Catholic Irish Parliament in Dublin. In response, Nationalists formed the Irish Volunteers. The Third Home Rule Bill never took effect because of the outbreak of World War I; Irish troops fought with England in the war with the promise that home rule would be granted at the conflict’s end.

scholarly journals Historical revisit: Edmund Curtis, A history of medieval Ireland (1923, 1938)

1999 ◽  
Vol 31 (124) ◽  
pp. 535-548 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Lydon
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Free State ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
History Of ◽  
Irish Free State ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Medieval Ireland

These verses were written by the Irish poet to express his grief at the impact of the Williamite victory at the battle of the Boyne and all that followed for Ireland. They were chosen two hundred years later by the historian Edmund Curtis to make clear his attitude towards Ireland’s past. In 1923, just after home rule was secured for what was officially known as Saorstát Éireann (Irish Free State), he published his history of medieval Ireland, and where a dedication would normally be printed he inserted ‘The Absentee Lordship’ and followed it with these verses. In doing this, Curtis left no doubt that in his view medieval Ireland was a lordship wrongfully attached to the English crown and that it should rightfully have been a kingdom under its own native dynastic ruler. For this he was subsequently denounced as unhistorical, and to this day, especially in the view of the so-called revisionists, he is commonly regarded as not only out of date, but dangerous as well. It was argued that Curtis used the medieval past to justify the emergence of a self-governing state in Ireland. To quote just one example, Steven Ellis, the best of the medieval revisionists, wrote in 1987 that ‘historians like Edmund Curtis concentrated on such topics as friction between the Westminster and Dublin governments, the Gaelic revival, the Great Earl uncrowned king of Ireland, the blended race and the fifteenth-century home rule movement’.

Defending democracy? The legislative response to political extremism in the Irish Free State, 1922–l39

2004 ◽  
Vol 34 (134) ◽  
pp. 156-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bill Kissane
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Free State ◽  
Complex Nature ◽  
Political Extremism ◽  
State Of Emergency ◽  
European Democracy ◽  
Irish Free State ◽  
Irish Case

The Irish Free State was both victim and survivor of the general crisis of European democracy in the inter-war era. Born into civil war in 1922, it saw repeated bouts of instability and political violence, the emergence of radicalised movements on the left and right in the 1930s, and the subsidence of political unrest late in that decade. In this period the state’s reliance on emergency legislation to deal with subversion was obviously an indication of the persistence of unrest, and such laws have usually been seen as an inescapable part of the state’s pursuit of authority and legitimacy. On the other hand, the Irish case is also an example of how a state’s political development can be affected by civil war, since the continuities in the state’s legislative response to political extremism, from 1922 onwards, are too strong to ignore. Of course, the Free State was also one of the few new democracies to survive the period with its democratic institutions intact, but from the outset this achievement was accomplished through the paradox of withholding the conventions of democracy until the period of crisis would pass. One view is that this was the price to be paid for countering the threat to democratic government posed by subversive organisations, while such organisations themselves argue that they remained subject not to a ‘government of laws’ but to ‘a government of men’. As in other situations, the legitimacy of such legislation was inextricably linked to the case governments made for there being a state of emergency, but such arguments were always deeply contested. Either way, the whole issue of emergency legislation reveals both a confused understanding of the requisites of constitutional government in Ireland, and the need to appreciate the complex nature of the decisions states make in an era of violent conflict.

The Irish Constitution

1924 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 340-345 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allan F. Saunders
Keyword(s):  
Free State ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
Traditional Methods ◽  
Sinn Fein ◽  
Political Drama ◽  
Irish Free State ◽  
The Government ◽  
Almost Continuous

The Constitution of the Irish Free State is the result of a political drama extending over a period of eight years. From the Ulster Rebellion and the Home Rule Act of 1914, the action has been tense and almost continuous. The threats and concessions of that time played into the hands of the radical Sinn Fein, and with the Easter Rebellion of 1916 it became evident that the issue was no longer one of home rule but of independence. The government at London, however, did not realize this until once more the traditional methods of settlement had been tried.

The politics of reaction: the dynamics of treatyite government and policy, 1922–33

1997 ◽  
Vol 30 (120) ◽  
pp. 542-563 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. Regan
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Free State ◽  
Executive Council ◽  
Municipal Politics ◽  
Political Career ◽  
Popular Support ◽  
Political Work ◽  
Fianna Fail ◽  
Irish Government ◽  
Irish Free State

On 3 July 1944 William T. Cosgrave, the former President of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State, wrote to his friend and former colleague, Professor Michael Hayes, reflecting on his life in politics. The occasion was Cosgrave’s retirement as leader of the Fine Gael party. I find this break a painful operation in many respects. Even were my physique equal to the Dáil and political work it seems this slip should have been inevitable ... But we must be candid — in the sphere that one considered the least important but which was the most important we failed — viz to retain popular support. It should not and I believe it is not beyond the capacity of able men to discover a way to the people’s confidence and having found it to keep it.The letter remains a lachrymose valediction to a political career which witnessed Cosgrave’s rise from Dublin municipal politics to the leadership of the first independent Irish government. Cosgrave presided over the first decade of independence. Governments under his leadership fought and won the Civil War which was waged against the implementation of the 1921 Anglo-Irish treaty. In the process they created a stable polity which integrated its internal opponents with remarkable success. Within nine years of defeating the anti-treaty forces in the Civil War Cosgrave’s last government was able to pass power peacefully to its former adversaries in the guise, by 1932, of the Fianna Fail party under the leadership of Eamon de Valera.

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