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    The Anglo-Irish War: The Troubles of 1913–1922
    The Anglo-Irish War: The Troubles of 1913–1922
    The Anglo-Irish War: The Troubles of 1913–1922
    Ebook126 pages1 hour

    The Anglo-Irish War: The Troubles of 1913–1922

    By Peter Cottrell

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    The Anglo-Irish War has often been referred to as the war 'the English have struggled to forget and the Irish cannot help but remember'. Before 1919, the issue of Irish Home Rule lurked beneath the surface of Anglo-Irish relations for many years, but after the Great War, tensions rose up and boiled over. Irish Nationalists in the shape of Sinn Féin and the IRA took political power in 1919 with a manifesto to claim Ireland back from an English 'foreign' government by whatever means necessary. This book explores the conflict and the years that preceded it, examining such historic events as the Easter Rising and the infamous Bloody Sunday.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateJun 6, 2014
    ISBN9781472810281
    The Anglo-Irish War: The Troubles of 1913–1922
    Author

    Peter Cottrell

    Peter Cottrell was born on an RAF base in Norfolk to Welsh parents and grew up in South Wales. He joined his local Welsh Territorial Army infantry battalion whilst still at school and subsequently gained a degree in War Studies from Wolverhampton Polytechnic and a PGCE from University College Swansea. In 1988 he attended Britannia Royal Naval College and was commissioned into the Instructor Branch of the Royal Navy as a Defence and Political Studies specialist. After a period of loan service in Saudi Arabia he transferred to the British Army in 1995 and gained a Master's degree in History, specialising in the militarisation of policing in Ireland from 1913-23. In an eclectic service career that included operational service in Bosnia with both UNPROFOR and IFOR as well as Afghanistan, Iraq and Northern Ireland, he finally retired as a major after twenty-one years of naval and military service in 2008 to return to teaching. From 2008-16 he taught English, History, Latin and Classics in Wiltshire and then moved to Cumbria in 2016 to be head of English and Media in a small secondary school in the depths of rural Cumbria. In 2021 he finally retired to live on the Yorkshire coast.

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      The Anglo-Irish War - Peter Cottrell

      Introduction

      It is likely that many people have never heard of the Anglo-Irish War. Many of those who have probably know very little about it, other than that it is one of the many messy conflicts that serve as footnotes to the First World War of 1914–18. Some have probably heard of the ‘Black and Tans’, and doubtless have come across stories of the controversial Michael Collins, subject of many books and a major feature film. Most will be familiar with the Irish Republican Army (IRA), Sinn Féin, Orangemen and the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) because of 35 years of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. Less well known is the fact that none of these organizations emerged in the 1960s, but instead had their roots in a time when Ireland was part of the United Kingdom.

      Although the Anglo-Irish War, or the ‘War of Independence’ or ‘the Troubles’, as it has variously been called, receives little attention in Britain, it is remembered in Ireland through the perpetuation of an ‘official’ Nationalist ‘Liberation myth’. This myth made Nationalist icons of Eamon de Valera, Michael Collins and others whilst vilifying the British as perfidious colonial oppressors to such an extent that this version of history has largely been allowed to go unchallenged. Consequently, it is extremely difficult to discern what is myth and what is fact regarding the events that took place in Ireland and Britain between 1913 and 1923. Unfortunately, some versions of Irish history have been so tainted with half-truths and fabrications that at times it is almost impossible to discern fact from fiction.

      In his book The Black and Tans Richard Bennett labelled the Anglo-Irish conflict as one that ‘the English have struggled to forget and the Irish cannot help but remember’. Yet what is it exactly that the British have struggled to forget and why is it that the Irish cannot help but remember? Arguably the British have no desire to remember a conflict that in their eyes saw the secession of what had been for 121 years an integral part of the United Kingdom, whilst the Irish remember British brutality. Just as many US perceptions of the American Revolution are distorted by their own foundation myth, Irish Nationalist histories tend to throw up stereotypical caricatures of the British as monsters driven by anti-Irish xenophobia. This version of events tends to ignore the fact that both sides committed atrocities.

      It also ignores a significant fact about British rule in Ireland: that it would have been impossible without the support of thousands of Irishmen, in the army, the police and the Civil Service; or, indeed, without the acquiescence of the vast majority of the population of Ireland. Although the history of British Ireland is littered with rebellions, nearly all of them were put down by both British and Irish troops. The rebels may have labelled these Irishmen as ‘traitors’ but in the words of Sean O’Faolain, who was both in the IRA and the son of a policeman during the conflict, ‘Men like my father were dragged out … and shot down as traitors to their country … they were not traitors. They had their loyalties, and stuck to them.’

      Despite the contentious issues of Unionist and Nationalist politics that dogged pre-First World War Ireland, over 200,000 Irishmen volunteered to fight for ‘King and Country’ in the war. Some, like Tom Barry and Emmett Dalton, returned to join the IRA and became violent revolutionaries, whilst others drifted into the ranks of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC). In that respect the Anglo-Irish War was as much a civil war as an ‘international’ conflict, and as such did not end with British withdrawal in 1922 but with the end of the ‘official’ civil war in 1923, and arguably not even then. Equally, it is sometimes difficult to establish when the Anglo-Irish War actually began. Traditionally it is seen as beginning when Dan Breen and members of the Tipperary IRA ambushed and killed two Irish Catholic policemen – Constables James McDonnell and Patrick O’Connell – in a quarry near Soloheadbeg, Co. Tipperary on 21 January 1919. This is because this was the first of many incidents when the IRA deliberately targeted policemen. Some analysts see the Easter Rising in 1916 as the start of the war, whilst others place its roots even earlier in Anglo-Irish history.

      Republican interpretations tend to see every rebellion from the Anglo-Norman invasion of 1169 to the present day as part of a continuous struggle for liberation from English, or British, rule. However, this is far too simplistic an interpretation of Anglo-Irish relations, since the Catholic rebels of the 1640s recognized Charles I’s right to be King of Ireland, as did the Irish Army that fought for James II. Only the predominantly Protestant-led United Irishmen fought for a non-sectarian Republic along Franco-American lines. Republicanism was not the central thread of Nationalist resistance to British domination of Ireland, and even Sinn Féin was a constitutional monarchist party when it was founded in 1905.

      Although Ireland’s many insurrections were not part of a continuous struggle for liberation, it would equally be wrong to say that earlier rebellions did not inspire or affect those that came after them. If Republicanism was not a significant feature of Irish rebellions before 1798, it was to become the dominant feature of 19th-century Irish subversion. Despite financial and moral support from Irish émigrés in the US, none of the Republican efforts before 1921 were successful in freeing Ireland from British rule. In fact, from the failure of the Fenian Rising in 1867 to the period immediately before the First World War, Ireland was a relatively peaceful and prosperous part of the UK. However it was by no means united, and despite the high-minded non-sectarian ideals of the United Irishmen, Ireland was a deeply divided society. Sectarian violence bubbled beneath the surface and political allegiances were often dictated by sectarian tribal loyalties. In the non-conformist Protestant heartland of Ulster most of the residents feared any form of devolved or independent Dublin-based government, because they would become a minority in a Catholic-dominated independent Ireland, which re-awoke folk memories of the massacres of Protestants during the 1640s and the 1798 rebellion.

      In response to the rising tide of constitutional Nationalism, with its goal of a devolved Irish government in Dublin, the Protestant North began to mobilize against the possibility of Irish Home Rule. The year 1913 saw the creation of pro- and anti-Home Rule paramilitary groups, firstly in the guise of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and then in response the National Volunteers; both promptly began to smuggle arms into the country. The battle lines of some form of Irish ‘civil war’ were being drawn in 1913, and although hostilities were temporarily postponed in August 1914 when the UK declared war on Germany, it was only a stay of execution that lasted until 1919.

      The compromise treaty that ended the conflict and partitioned Ireland turned out to be the catalyst for the civil war that bitterly divided southern Irish society, and created the political parties that still define the Republic’s politics. Within living memory, veterans of these events dominated Irish politics and it is hardly surprising that they cast a shadow over Anglo-Irish diplomatic relations and bequeathed a bitter legacy to both the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and the Garda Síochána (Garda).

      Ultimately, it is only since the deaths of the likes of Eamon de Valera, who took part in the struggle, that Irish historians have begun to question traditional Nationalist interpretations and come to terms with their past as a piece of historical study rather than an emotional experience. Despite this revisionist renaissance, very little has been written about the conflict in the United Kingdom outside of Ulster or the realms of academia, and the British public remain largely ignorant of the conflict that shaped modern Ireland and its relationship with Britain.

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