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A synopsis of Ireland's Tortured History

Introduction

For almost a millennium, Ireland has been the victim of invasion, conquest, plunder, plantation, annexation and partition by its larger and warmongering neighbor, England

To those of us who believe in normal evolutionary processes, it’s inconceivable that England still reverts to medieval tactics to create and fuel conflicts in today’s interconnected world. Flexing muscles and threatening to re-impose political or economic borders as is happening with the present-day Brexit debacle, is a prime example of England’s perceived exceptionalism in the age of dependency and open borders. Ireland is, and has been, a prime victim of that mindset despite its millennium long struggle to break free. By the same token, it’s now incumbent on Irish leaders to be creative in offering viable solutions to redress the partition of Ireland and to restore its rights of sovereignty over all of Ireland.   

Ever since the Norman/English invasions of 1169/1172, Ireland had entered a new stage of uncertainty putting its evolving institutions, language, and culture in peril. Although it had endured internal conflicts involved territory or possessions that at times had rocked its fiefdoms and kingdoms, such conflicts by their very nature were incapable of changing their way of life. Not so with the intruders from across the waters.

A new way of life was imposed on the Celtic people of Ireland, a cruel and inhuman way that ensnared and condemned its victims to centuries of repression, wars, and cultural genocide. Compounding the situation for the besieged Celts, were the traitors and gombeen men who treasured the usurpers coin for traitorous information or nefarious services. The cravens who fawned for a seat at the usurpers table or a ringside seat at a grotesque display of imperial grandiosity added to the problem.

A detailed litany of that journey is too long to inscribe. However, a scroll through its timeline will suffice to bear testimony to the cruelty endured by the Celtic masses, the courage and bravery of the Celtic warriors, the inspiration flowing from the pens of the Celtic poets and the endurance and resilience of a besieged people.

 Prehistoric Ages.

The Celtic people who originally migrated from the lowlands of Europe circa 7000 BCE roaming eastwards to Galatia in central Anatolia, south and south-west to northern Italy, western Spain, and Portugal and northwest to Ireland. One can assume that the first wave of migratory Celts arrive in Ireland circa 800 BCE where those who choose the shortest northwest route.

The first arrivals were tribal nomads who had found a place welcoming to their wandering spirit and nurturing to their way of life. Over the ensuing thousand years other migratory waves of Celts and unknown others arrived bringing with them the tools, trades and skills, languages and customs picked up along the routes of their travels. Each succeeding wave supplanted the way of life of the former. By the ninth century, the Celts had organized into sedentary clan-based societies ruled by a hierarchy of chieftains and kings.

Leabhar Gabhala Eireann - The Book of Invasions of Ireland describes the various migratory waves in descending order as the Ceasair, the Partholonians, the Nemedians the Fir Bolg, the Tuatha Dé Danann, and the Milesians.

 Early Middle Ages

In the fifth century CE, the Celts earth-based religion was, metaphorically speaking, under attack for supremacy by Christianity, an Abrahamic faith-based monotheistic religion brought to Ireland through interaction and trade with Roman Gaul’s. Despite concerted efforts by the Romans and other antagonists to destroy Christianity in its infancy, it nonetheless managed to survive. Ever since, for good or evil, it has taken center stage in Ireland’s agonized history.

By the tenth century monasticism was flourishing in Ireland. The great monastic centers of Clonmacnoise, Durrow, Armagh, Kells and many of the other centers were built on or close to Celtic religious sites, a devious ploy to facilitate their proselytizing mission. Monistic monks produced many of the ancient manuscripts calligraphed in old Irish and Latin including the books of Kells, Durrow and Armagh, all of which are preserved in the library at Trinity College in Dublin.

The first recorded sightings of Viking raiders were by monastic monks on the islands of Rathlin and Iona circa 795 CE. Believed to house treasures, the monastic centers were prime targets for the Viking raiders from the seventh to the eleventh century. Circa 820 CE, the monks who bore witness to the mayhem caused by the marauding Vikings described the situation as follows,

"The sea spewed forth floods of foreigners over Erin, so that no haven, no landing-place, no stronghold, no fort, no castle might be found, but it was submerged by waves of Vikings and pirates".

After a century of pillage, some of the Viking raiders stayed on and built coastal settlements that eventually became important towns including Dublin, Limerick, Cork, and Wexford. The Viking era ended when Brian Boru, the High King of Ireland, defeated and routed a Vikings army and its slaven Irish allies at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014.

 Middle Ages

For the ensuing 150 years, Ireland conducted its affairs peacefully without interference or the need for outside help.

As early as the seventh century Ireland had an established a natural law system aka the Brehon Laws. The system was based on the sustainable principle of common sense. It continued to be used long after the Norman and English invasions, surviving in remote parts of Ireland into the seventeenth century.

By the eight century CE Ireland was divided into five self-governing Kingdoms, described in ancient law texts such as Miadslechta and the legendary tales of the Ulster Cycle, as the Five Kingdoms of the Pentarchy. The Pentarchy, in this case, were the five ancient provinces of Ulster, Meath, Leinster, Munster, and Connacht.

By the time of the Norman and English invasions, Ireland had its own system of governance, an advanced legal system, a cohesive language, earth-based and belief-based religious systems coexisting and at peace. It was a functioning and well-established society, on the right footing heading into the future.

The first major casualty of the Norman and English invasions was Ireland’s monarchical systems of government in existence since ancient times. Rory O’Connor, the last High King of Ireland was deposed in 1168 when Ireland became a Lordship under the King of England, The Lordship was a papal fief granted to the kings of England by the Holy See. The Irish monarchy was replaced by an Irish Parliament in 1264 whose members were knights, prelates, and magnates.

For the first century of occupation, the enemy occupiers extended their control across the country. They did so by seizing and turning poorly defended Church lands into fortified strongholds. The Irish chieftains who mistrusted the church and its spreading influence were not about to defend the church or its property. From the fortified strongholds the enemy occupiers were in a stronger position to extend their control to surrounding lands and settlements. By the end of the thirteenth century, they were in control of two-thirds of the country.

Starting in the fourteenth century, a number natural and man-made events stalled their progress. The Great European Famine (1313-1315) and the Bubonic Plaque 1335-1350 impacted the settlers who lived mostly in port cities, more so than rural native populations. In addition to those setbacks, the ongoing English Scottish and English Welsh wars diverted resources and attention away from Ireland, setbacks exploited by the Irish chieftains. To complicate matters for the invaders, their descendants over time had morphed into Irish society by the normal process of assimilation. By the early sixteenth century, at the time of the English reformation, the Norman/English rule had shrunk to the area known as the pale, a relatively small area surrounding Dublin.

In 1367 during the reign of King James III, the Irish parliament passed a series of laws referred to as the Statutes of Kilkenny to halt the Celticization of the descendants of English settlers who were rapidly adapting to the Celtic way of life. The intent of the statutes was to prohibit the settlers from intermarrying with the Irish, speak their language, doing business with them, playing their game of hurling, using Brehon law to settle disputes, wearing Celtic clothing, riding horses bareback or engaging in any of their activities or succumbing to their customs or way of life. The statutes, thirty-five in all, had no practical effect on the settlers or their interaction with the native Irish.

 The Early Modern Era

The Tudor re-conquest of Ireland was predestined when Henry Tudor became King Henry VIII of England in 1509. His reign was one of the most consequential for Ireland, setting the stage for centuries of repression, dispossession, and inhumanity.

After having been denied an annulment by the Pope of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon who did not give him a male heir, King Henry VIII broke ties with Rome and declared himself head of the English church thus heralding the beginning of the English Reformation. The consequences of that act would thenceforth negatively impact the lives of the Irish people by creating a faith-based exploitable line of division to incite and set people apart.

An example of that divisiveness in the present-day Northern Ireland Protocol where religious baggage trumps unity, economics, and peaceful coexistence.

In 1542, Henry VIII was declared King of Ireland by the Irish Parliament. At the same time, Ireland’s status was changed from a Lordship to the Kingdom of Ireland. Kink Henry’s objective was to bring the lands ceded by the Norman and English barons back under his control and to capture the remaining Irish earldoms in the southern, western, and northern regions. That objective was accomplished at the Battle Kinsale in 1601 when the English army defeated the allied armies of the Irish Earls and Spain. The Battle Kinsale was the decisive battle of the Nine-Year-War (1593 – 1603).

Several years later in 1607, the Flight of the Earls cemented the reconquest of Ireland and heralded the death knell of Gaelic Ireland.

The first Plantation of Ireland, albeit on a small scale, started in 1556 as part of the Tudor reconquest of Ireland. In 1583 a much larger effort was instituted in retaliation for the Desmond’s Munster rebellion of 1579 to 1583. The official Plantation of Ulster started with an organized import of loyal settlers from Scotland and to a lesser extent England who were required to be Church of England or Presbyterians adherent’s and English speaking only. Apart from the colonization aspects, the Plantation also served to eliminate Ulster as a hotbed of rebellion, seed the anglicization of Ireland, and diminish the influence of the Catholic Church.

The Irish Rebellion of 1641 wherein the Catholic landowners in Ulster rebelled against the crown to end anti-Catholic discrimination, allow for Irish self-governance, and reverse the plantation of Ireland. The rebellion swiftly spread throughout Ireland. As a result, the Irish Catholics formed their own government, Confederate Ireland. For the following ten years fierce fighting took place throughout Ireland, wherein the Irish Confederate forces were for a time in control of most if not all of the country. In 1649, Oliver Cromwell and his New Model Army arrived in Ireland. By 1653 he had defeated the Irish Confederate army in what became known as the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland.

The Jacobite-Williamite War of 1689-91 between the armies of Catholic King James II and his Protestant successor William III added to Ireland’s woes. Having supported the vanquished James II, the Catholics were further weakened by the Flight of the Wild Geese i.e., the departure of the Irish Jacobite army under the command of Patrick Sarsfield to France, as agreed in the 1691 Treaty of Limerick.

The present-day Orange Order in Northern Ireland provocatively celebrates the 1690 Battle of the Boyne, the decisive battle of that war, with bonfires, marching bands, banners and flags every July.

 The Modern Era

By the turn of the eighteenth century, British control of Ireland was secure. However, the anglicization of Ireland was an ongoing project requiring ever increasing measures to overcome resistance and obstacles to its eventual success. To that end, a series of repressive laws, referred to as the Penal Laws, were passed to punish recalcitrant or recusancy Catholics and Protestant dissenters.

The ongoing granting of confiscated Irish land to loyal English Protestants had transformed the Irish countryside by the mid nineteenth century. By then small Irish owned farms and commonage had made way to large, landed estates with big houses. Landlordism and its inherent cruelty had come to Ireland. The native Irish were seething once again.

Inspired by the American colonists who had successfully revolted against their imperialist English masters in 1775, the Society of United Irishmen, comprised of Protestant and Catholic intellectuals, conspired to overthrow British rule in Ireland and declare Ireland a Republic. The ensuing French supported Uprising of 1798 ended in failure and in the brutal killings of tens of thousands of Irishmen and women. The leaders who did not manage to escape were either executed or exiled. 

Late Modern Era

The British blamed their surrogate Irish Parliament for the Uprising. In retaliation they abolished the Irish Parliament and transferred policy decision making to London through the enactment of the 1800 Act of Union of Great Britain and Ireland. They believed that the annexation of Ireland would prevent future Uprisings and speed up the anglicization process.

That expectation was short lived as the first in a series of attempted Uprisings took place in Dublin in 1803 led by Robert Emmet. The attempted Uprising of 1803 cost Emmet his life in a heinous act of British savagery. In 1848, the Irish Confederation aka Young Ireland attempted to launch the second Uprising. The attempted Uprising of 1848 was to wrest control of Ireland from England so that the starving millions could be fed with the abundance of food being exported to England.

On the constitutional front, the only concession to Catholics was the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, a concession ceded to avoid a potential Catholic insurgency. A concerted Repeal Campaign in the 1830/40s to undo the Act of Union failed as the British were not about to give up on their final solution to the Irish problem. Unlike Catholic Emancipation that did not threaten the political landscape, repeal of the Act of Union would inalterably upset the apple cart.

In 1845 the potato blight was taking hold in Ireland and across Europe. In areas of Ireland where the potato was the primary food source, a disaster was beginning to unfold. In the ensuing six years in what became known as the Great Hunger over one million died and another one and a half million fled to avoid starvation and death. Excerpts from John Mitched description of the calamity are as follows,

A million and a half of men, women, and children, were carefully, prudently, and peacefully slain by the English government. They died of hunger in the midst of abundance, which their own hands created, ---Further, I have called it an artificial famine: that is to say, it was a famine which desolated a rich and fertile island, which produced every year abundance and superabundance to sustain all her people and many more. --- The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine.

Despite the failed Uprisings of 1803 and 1848, the Fenians, a militant organization, led by survivors of the 1848 uprising attempted another Uprising in 1867. That attempt was doomed from the beginning by the lack of top-level leadership and the abundance of traitors within its ranks. That Uprising took place on two fronts, in Canada where it had some initial success and in Ireland and England where it sparked and fizzled.

In 1870 Isaac Butt, an Irish Member of the British Parliament, founded the Home Government Association, a pressure group advocating for self-government for Ireland. By 1873 it had morphed into the Home Rule League and by1882 into the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP). Despite having campaigned for Home Rule for over a quarter century, the IPP were unsuccessful until 1914 when the third Home Rule bill passed the British House of Commons. It was not instituted owing to the onset of WWI. The version that eventually passed in 1920 partitioned Ireland into two states, the six-county Northern Ireland State and the 26-county Southern Ireland State.

In 1879 an agrarian movement led by Michael Davitt, a former Fenian, took root in Co. Mayo.

The movement was a reaction to high rents, evictions and other egregious acts by landlords who had by then become the bulwark to British Rule in Ireland. The movement spread throughout the country resulting in what is described as the Land Wars of the 1880s with tenant farmers taking the fight to the landlords.

It was the first-time in Ireland that women, The Ladies Land League, took over control of an organization, i.e., the Irish National Land League, when its male leadership was imprisoned. In subsequent negotiations, the British government agreed to some of the League’s demands, providing that Ladies’ Land League arm be disbanded, a demand agreed to by the Charles Stewart Parnell.

Nonetheless, by the turn of the century the end of landlordism in Ireland was fast approaching due in no small measure to the tenacity and organizational and fundraising skills of women activists in Ireland and in the United States.

The other movement countering the Anglicization of Ireland was the Gaelic Revival movement. One of the first organizations of that movement to emerge was the Ulster Gaelic Society in 1830. Other Gaelic oriented organizations followed including the Ossianic Society and the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language.

Other organizations founded in the nineteenth century that are still active include the Gaelic Athletic Association founded in 1884 to preserve Ireland's unique games and athletic pastimes and the Gaelic League founded in 1893 to teach and encourage the use of Irish, music and other Celtic art forms in everyday life. These two organizations were the foundation blocks for the broad-based cultural nationalism movement of the early twentieth century that provided the moral and intellectual justification for the revolutionary period that followed.

The revolutionary period (1912 to 1923)

The revolutionary period  is generally regarded as the time when Home Rule polemics gave way to Irish Republicanism i.e., total separation from England. It was an intense period in Irish history fueled by cultural nationalism and led by a group of activists’ men and women from a wide range of social and educational backgrounds. Suffragism, civil rights and worker’s rights were also contentious issues at play and seeking redress.

The third Home Rule bill being debated in London in 1912 is regarded by many historians as the catalyst for the onset of the revolutionary period. Opponents and proponent of Home Rule dug in, resulting in the formation of the northern based Ulster Volunteers in 1912 who opposed Home Rule followed by the formation of the southern based Irish Volunteers in 1913 who supported Home Rule. Cumann na mBan, an auxiliary organization to the Irish Volunteer was founded in 1914. Members of that organization went on to fight alongside the men in the Easter Rising, the War of Independence and the Treaty War aka Civil War.

At the onset of WWI, John Redmond, split the Irish Volunteers into factions by cajoling the majority to join the British army and serve alongside the Ulster Volunteers on the Western Front and on the beaches of Gallipoli. Those who rejected his call formed the core of the combatants who took part in the Easter Rising of 1916. The Volunteers (the Redmondites) who had joined the British army and survived the war would later constitute the bulk of the Irish Free State army during the Treaty War.

Trade unionism was an active component of the redress movement that fueled the broader cultural nationalism movement. A case in point was the Dublin Lockout of 1913 that pitted exploited workers against intransigent businessmen, ended in failure for both sides. Many of the businesses folded and many thousands of workers lost their jobs. The beneficiary was the British army who found easy pickings in the ranks of idled workers.

One legacy of the Lockout was the Irish Citizen Army originally set-up to protect striking workers from intimidation by the police who were baton charging striking workers at the behest of the businessmen. Less than a year and a half later, under the leadership of James Connelly, the Irish Citizen Army fought alongside the Irish Volunteers during the Easter Rising.

In April of 1916, the week-long Easter Rising took place and in its aftermath the execution of its leaders. The British believed that the executions would deter Irish Republicans from launching another Uprising for a thousand years. Within a thousand days the ‘cowed’ Irish had garnered seventy-three of the 105 seats in the 1918 general election, setup their own parliament Dail Eireann in Dublin, declared Ireland to be a sovereign 32-counrty Republic, and launched the War of Independence.

John Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary Party lost sixty-seven of the seventy-three seats they held leading up to the 1918 general election primarily due to Redmond’s handling of the Home Rule debacle and his impassioned recruitment for the British army.

On January 21, 1919, the Fist Dail Eireann convened in Dublin. Its first order of business was to declare Ireland an independent 32-county Republic. That same day the War of Independence started in Tipperary when two Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) constables were ambushed and killed while escorting a consignment of gelignite to a quarry. The Irish Volunteers, whose members were responsible for the ambush, were renamed the Irish Republican Army (IRA) by the end of January 1919.

By April 1920, fifteen months after the onset of the war, the RIC had withdrawn from much of the countryside leaving the IRA in control. Over four hundred abandoned RIC barracks were set afire by the IRA to prevent their future use. One hundred income tax offices were also abandoned. Republican courts were competing with British courts and in the vast areas of the countryside replaced them.

After two and a half years of fighting a stalemated guerilla war in Ireland and facing mounting criticism at home and abroad of their extreme tactics, the British government called for a truce in June of 1921. Within a month an agreement was reached after De Valera, the President of Dail Eireann, met the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George in London. The truce ended the War of Independence. No report of the De Valera Lloyd George meeting was ever published.

During the aforementioned meeting, it would be naive to believe that details of the fourth Home Rule bill being formulated by the British government for Ireland was not discussed. After all, the Home Rule bill and the ensuing Government of Ireland Act provided for the partition of Ireland into two self-governing polities, i.e., the six North-eastern counties and the twenty-six Southern counties. Both entities would remain part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland with the British monarch the head of state for both entities.

The five-man delegation sent to London by De Valera to negotiate a Treaty did not include committed Republicans. Those sent were honorable and worldly men more tuned to British norms and politicking than to Ireland desire for total independence. Arthur Griffith, the Chairman of the delegation had advocated earlier in in his public life that “Ireland should become a separate kingdom alongside Great Britain, the two forming a dual monarchy with a shared monarch but separate governments” a solution he believed would be acceptable to the British.

The inclusion of Michael Collins as a delegate member was insisted upon by De Valera who refused to go sending Collins as his replacement. Collins, who in his own right was a brilliant military tactician, was nonetheless a political and diplomatic novice as he himself alluded to in his initial refusal. Nonetheless, de Valera got his way and Collins joined the delegation that was granted plenipotentiary status, i.e., the right to sign an Agreement without having to refer back to the Dail for prior approval. de Valera, knowing what the outcome of the talks would be wanted to avoid inserting decisions points where he would be required to agree or disagree. Someone else would be the scapegoat.

The agreement signed on December 26, 1921, bore no resemblance to the Proclamation of 1916 or the Republic declared by Dail Eireann in February of 1919. To all intent and purposes, it was an agreement that mirrored the already British enacted Government of Ireland Act 1920.

The Truce and Treaty were but the first steps in a comprehensive British plan to extend their control of Ireland into the unseeable future. The Treaty debates in the Dail, the ensuing split within the Dail, the acceptance of the Treaty terms by the Dail and the official ratification of the Treaty by the Southern Ireland parliament, convened by Arthur Griffith, were all taken from the British playbook.

The Treaty War that followed was initiated by Winston Churchill when he ordered Michael Collins to attack the Four Court garrison manned by Republicans, or he would. The Free State army that prosecuted the war was overwhelmingly manned by Redmondites, Irish-born ex-British soldiers who survived WWI. The money and guns that fueled the war were all British issued.

The toxic residue from the Treaty is what has and still fuels the political situation in Ireland. The Northern Ireland protocol is but the latest twist in the saga. Britain will, as it always has, via for another British solution that at best would kick the can down the road. After a thousand years of interference in Irish affairs its time they were stopped.