Pod Insights The Rest Is History 576. The Irish War of Independence: Rise of the IRA (Part 1) About this episode What are the origins of the Irish War of Independence? What impact did the First World War have on Irish efforts for Home Rule? What was the mood in Ireland following the bloody Easter Rising of 1916? And, who was Éamon de Valera, the man who dominated the story of not only Irish politics in the 20th century, but also the entire story of Irish independence?
As they launch back into the epic and tumultuous Irish War of Independence, Dominic and Tom are joined once again by historian Paul Rouse, to discuss one of the most important conflicts in the history of Britain.
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Transcript 13,247 words · 8 speakers
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0:05 Tom Holland? This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Now, history's biggest leaps started as hard questions that people didn't want asked.
0:16 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, there's a classic example of that at the end of the 15th century. And the hard question in particular was, what is out there beyond the Atlantic Ocean to the west? And as you will know, the man who found the answer to that question was the explorer Christopher Columbus. And he realizes, or rather, everybody else realizes, that there is a vast continent out there. And it is, of course, the Americas. So you know, Anthropic knows the importance of questions. And it's why Anthropic is founded on one hard question above all. How can we ensure that the AI revolution really goes well for ordinary people?
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1:10 Dominic Sandbrook? This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Tom, as you know, I spend all my time working. And in a dream world, I would clone a sort of Tom Holland who would do all the work for me. But sadly, technology has not advanced to that point. If it did, I wish there was a recruiting company that I could use to hire that clone for me.
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3:00 Speaker 02 Let me carry your cross for Ireland, Lord. The hour of her trial draws near. And the pangs and the pains of the sacrifice may be borne by comrades, dear. Let me carry your cross for Ireland, Lord. Let me suffer the pain and shame. I bow my head to their rage and hate, and I take on myself the blame. Let them do with my body whatever they will. My spirit I offer to you, that the faithful few who heard her call may be spared to roisin do. Let me carry your cross for Ireland, Lord, for Ireland weak with tears, for the aged man of the clouded brow and the child of tender years, for the empty homes of her golden plains, for the hopes of her future too. Let me carry your cross for Ireland, Lord,
3:46 Speaker 02 for the cause of roisin do.
3:48 Dominic Sandbrook? So that was the Irish revolutionary Thomas Ashe. And he wrote that poem when he was in Lewis Prison in Sussex in 1917. And roisin do, by the way, is Ireland. So Ashe was a farmer's son from County Kerry. He was a teacher. He was a school principal. He became an Irish language activist before the First World War. Great activist in Irish sport as well. Set up a local branch of the Gaelic Athletic Association. And he joins the Irish Volunteers, a paramilitary group, in 1913. And then was a key figure in the Easter Rising three years later, fighting a five-hour battle against the Royal Irish Constabulary. He was arrested, he was court martialed, he was sentenced to death, but his sentence
4:32 Dominic Sandbrook? was commuted and then he was released after he'd written that poem. And then in 1917, amid growing tension in Ireland, he was arrested again and he went on hunger strike. And Tom, we'll find out how that story played out a little bit later, won't we?
4:48 Tom Holland? Yeah, we will. And this is the first of a three-part series about the Irish independence struggle between 1916, so the year of the Easter Rising, and 1921, which sees a truce established after a period of war between the British state and Irish revolutionaries. There is then a treaty drawn up between Britain and what will become the Free State that grants Ireland limited independence and effectively creates Northern Ireland. And then we'll be looking at the bitter civil war that tore Ireland apart in 1922 and 1923. So there'll be two episodes on that. And that story is bookended by two assassinations.
5:29 Tom Holland? The first of those, the British, and indeed Irish, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson and the Irish National Commander in Chief, Michael Collins. But before we get to this extraordinary story, gripping story, we should say where we are because we did a previous episode, didn't we, on the Easter Rising and we were in the GPO for that, perfect setting. And here, we are in the august environ of the Royal Irish Academy in the heart of Dublin. It contains absolute treasures of old Irish literature, going all the way back to the sixth century. And of course, the Gaelic revival, the fascination of Irish people in the 19th and early 20th century with their early history is a crucial part of the story that we'll be telling.
6:14 Tom Holland? But it was also established, and the clue is in the title, Royal Irish Academy, by George III. And so there is a reminder there of how deep the British roots in Irish history are as well.
6:27 Dominic Sandbrook? Absolutely. And we're here thanks to our guest today. So a great friend of The Rest Is History, well-known as the former caretaker manager of County Offaly, Professor of History at University College Dublin, Irish National Treasure, Paul Rouse.
6:41 Speaker 02 Oh, dear. Paul, I know you're hoping called a national treasure.
6:45 Tom Holland? And Paul, it was you, wasn't it, who read that poem? It wasn't Dominic or me.
6:49 Speaker 02 It was.
6:49 Tom Holland? Doing an impression of Thomas Ash.
6:51 Speaker 02 No, that was me.
6:52 Dominic Sandbrook? So Paul, you joined us a couple of years ago and you took us through a mighty sweep. You covered all Irish history up to 1916. We reached at the end of that amid the rubble of the Easter Rising. And before we get into what happens next, maybe we should remind newer listeners of the sort of the broader context. Because a really important thing for a lot of the Irish revolutionaries is this idea that they have suffered 800 years of British oppression. And is that fair or is the truth a bit more complicated?
7:21 Speaker 02 It's a bit more complicated, but funnily enough.
7:26 Speaker 02 That war cry of 800 years of oppression was particularly bandied about with the start of the modern troubles in Northern Ireland, 1969. Because there's a really nice symmetry in numbers terms, back to 1169 with the arrival of Strongbow, followed two years later by King John and the establishment of an English lordship in Ireland. So there is a certain logic to that cry. But we know, of course, that modern notions of the nation state do not easily apply back across the centuries. But what matters for our purposes is that the lordship existed, but was restricted until the 16th century. So you had an area around Dublin, the inside the Pale, which was part of the lordship.
8:06 Speaker 02 Around the country, then you had Anglo-Irish or English, depending on what title people wish to put on them, massive landowners, and then you had Gaelic chieftains, all interspersed in a kind of a speckled world of Ireland before the 1600s. Everything then changed under King Henry VIII, who set about conquest of Ireland through war, through diplomacy, through favour, patronage, basically. And of course, that conquest was not accepted by the king's enemies here and the Irish enemies fought back. But over the period of the following hundred years, you have the introduction of a new factor that is religion. And religion is tied, because of the Reformation, a kind of a changed religious landscape.
8:51 Speaker 02 And it's led to the plantation of large swathes of Ireland in Ulster and Munster and initially in Leishoffly, of loyal Protestants and the land being taken from people who had previously farmed it. And what this did, of course, was tie religion. To land and power and place within within society. So what you get is an extraordinary, complex society where there is tolerance and even goodwill at times, but there's also fear and loathing. And there were massacres in the 1640s where Catholics massacred probably 4,000 Protestants. And then you have Cromwell, who arrives and by the time he leaves, or his armies leave, there is one fifth of the population dead. So it's time and again,
9:36 Speaker 02 religion had wrapped itself like bindweed around the nature of Irish society. And it shaped every aspect of life in Ireland. But by the 1700s, Protestant and loyal versus Catholic and rebellious is the slightly cartoonish version of history.
9:52 Tom Holland? Right.
9:53 Speaker 02 But it's for our purposes, by the time we get to 1800, or the late 1790s, that's where we are.
10:00 Tom Holland? Right. And then in 1800, it changes. There's the Act of Union and Ireland becomes part of a United Kingdom with Great Britain.
10:05 Speaker 02 Yes, in the wake of a rebellion of 1798, which had been driven by ideas of the republics of America and of France, and imported this idea of republicanism into Ireland to fit around. Now, again, the divides of what of religion are really more complex in the 1790s. But ultimately, that rebellion leads to the passage of an Act of Union in 1800.
10:27 Tom Holland? And so that's why Catholic identity comes to be associated with the idea of republicanism. It's dating to the period of the French Revolution.
10:34 Speaker 02 It comes from that period onwards. And we will see this as we go through it. It's not a kind of a doctrinaire ideological commitment to revolution. It's it's not a crown and it's not the British crown. It's a driving force for the majority of people. It's the sense of of it being in being different. And even in this unitary state, though, supposed unitary state, Ireland, it was the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. So Ireland was not part of Britain.
10:58 Tom Holland? Yeah.
10:59 Speaker 02 And that's that's a really important.
11:00 Tom Holland? Yeah.
11:01 Speaker 02 Point to remember as as we move through this. And there are probably key defining things that we need to talk about in the 19th century. The first is the fact that there was famine in the 1840s. And that famine left, if we go around numbers, a million people dead and a million people emigrated. I know you've a lot of. Listeners across America, many of them will be descended from people who left during the famine and in its aftermath.
11:23 Tom Holland? But Paul, also, Irish people are emigrating to Britain. And so that is also a crucial part of the story we'll be telling, that there are lots of Irish people growing up in Britain whose identity is conflicted as well.
11:34 Speaker 02 Yeah, and the divides that manifest themselves in Ireland can be seen in places like Liverpool in particular, and Dan Jackson, when he was on, what you previously did this brilliantly, and his book is wonderful, on the nature of those divides. And you go along the Tottenham Court Road in London, it's remade in those places.
11:54 Tom Holland? And we will be meeting significant players in the story who have spent time in London.
11:58 Speaker 02 Oh, they're really important to the story.
12:00 Tom Holland? So the famine leaves this legacy of this tremendous trauma. And in the late 19th century, you have the Gaelic revival and a kind of, is it a revival or an invention of Irish nationalism, would you say?
12:11 Speaker 02 So the famine, first of all, it's important because of the impact it had on Irish nationalism, but it's also important for the emigre communities that are created in America. And we will see how they helped to fund and people the revolution, which ultimately we will end up talking about. In terms of its invention and its creation, there are parts of it which are entirely invented.
12:31 Tom Holland? Yeah.
12:32 Speaker 02 And there are stories made up, but what there is is a reawakening. You saw earlier here, you mentioned the manuscripts that are there and the annals of the four masters that are here in the Royal Irish Academy. What you had in the 19th century was a rediscovery of these, a translation of them into modern language and a general popularisation of Irish myths and sagas. You have a reawakening of interest in the Irish language, you have a creation of an alternative sporting world of Gaelic games.
12:59 Tom Holland? But I mean, this place is fascinating, isn't it? Because it's the royal, you have royal in the title, but it is generating all this passion and enthusiasm for ancient Ireland. And a lot of the key figures in this are actually Protestant. So at this point, it's not a kind of binary.
13:15 Speaker 02 No, it's not a binary, but it's, we again. When it comes to empire and it comes to imperial war, we like to imagine that this is a fairly straightforward narrative with clear sides. But of course, the reality of life is way more complex than that.
13:30 Dominic Sandbrook? So, talking about complexities, let's come to the crucial years of the 1900s and 1910s, which we did in the last series. I know this is a big ask, Paul, but are you able in like three minutes to explain why the home rule crisis? So this is a huge argument in Britain and Ireland about whether Ireland will be granted a home rule parliament, basically its own parliament, under the Liberal government of Herbert Henry Asquith. And why does that have such a toxic effect on politics in Ireland? And why does it lead to this new kind of paramilitary politics?
14:04 Speaker 02 It leads to an enormous crisis in Britain and in Ireland. Because you step back here a few years. So you'd Lord Salisbury, the Tory leader in 1872, saying that Ireland, like India, must be kept as part of the empire, if not by persuasion, then by force. So in the 1880s, there was a land war, first of all waged, where the land of Ireland was held by between 5,000 and 7,000 families. And there was a massive struggle amongst ordinary Irish people to claim that land. And it led to both outrage and passive resistance, mixed in different parts and different places. And that led to a growing sense that of difference. So this is not just the kind of the idea of a different nationality.
14:47 Speaker 02 This is a lived experience which is creating divide. And within that, Gladstone, leader of the Liberal Party, says that his mission is, has said that his mission is to pacify Ireland. And the way he sees that this can be done is to grant a sort of a home rule parliament.
15:03 Dominic Sandbrook? But not independence. I mean, that's the crucial thing. This, no one at this point is talking about independence.
15:08 Speaker 02 Well, there are people in Irish nationalism who wish for independence. There are the Irish Republican Brotherhood, who are secretly arming, secretly drilling, founded in 1858, staged a rebellion in 1867. The great swathe of the population can see no way, even if they wish for independence, the British Empire is the most mighty empire in the world. It's power and it's privilege. ...its prestige of both commerce and culture, as well as military might is, it sits everywhere. And the idea that a group of Irish rebels are going to beat them seems ridiculous. So they settle, they settle for the idea of a home rule parliament. And the idea is that a significant, no, I won't say significant, I will say a considerable amount of power will be devolved to a parliament in Dublin, which will ultimately owe its allegiance,
15:52 Speaker 02 though, to the Imperial Parliament in London. And there is no suggestion that Queen Victoria will not also be Queen of Ireland.
15:58 Dominic Sandbrook? And a huge issue in this is the people in the north east of the, in particular, in the north east of the island, but actually also scattered elsewhere in the island, who don't want that, often because they're Protestants and they think, well, that would just mean I'd be living under the sort of the tyranny of a Catholic home rule parliament and I don't want that. And this is particularly associated with Ulster, with the province of Ulster.
16:19 Tom Holland? The total population in Ireland, the proportion of that is about thirty percent?
16:24 Speaker 02 You're looking at thirty percent allegiance. So that can include some middle class Catholics, et cetera, who owe their allegiance to, or who are more than comfortable with an empire. No sense that they are dismayed by the prospect. And that matters as well, I think, Dominic, in that it's not just that they fear papish rule because of spiritual or religious reasons. Belfast is a place apart. Belfast is the one part of Ireland that has truly industrialized. Belfast grew from sixteen thousand people in eighteen ten, more or less, to three hundred and fifty thousand by the early nineteen hundreds, driven by the shipyards and the linen industries.
17:00 Tom Holland? It's the home of Titanic.
17:01 Speaker 02 Exactly. And it's all of that is really important to creating a different culture around Belfast. And that culture believes that it owes prosperity, as well as religious freedom and other freedoms, to the empire.
17:13 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
17:14 Speaker 02 And so in eighteen eighty, opposition from unionists led or assisted by the Tory Party in England, where Chamberlain played the orange card famously, this idea that we give support to unionists. And it basically collapsed the Home Rule Bill in the eighteen eighties, so it wasn't passed. It wasn't passed again in eighteen ninety two, in the eighteen nineties, when there was another effort. And then it looked like it was dormant until. An upheaval in British politics between 1909 and 1911 transformed the political landscape.
17:46 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, and we did a couple of episodes on this in the first series, so people can go back and listen to it if they want all the complexities. But effectively, what you have is the Liberal Government want to give Home Rule, but the Unionists, particularly in Ulster, don't want it. They start to arm, so you start to have paramilitary politics, kind of the Ulster Volunteers. And then you also have the Irish Volunteers arming, who are in favour of Home Rule. So you have a sort of, you know, there's a sense in which Irish politics is slipping towards armed confrontation, and then that is interrupted in 1914 by the shootings in Sarajevo and the outbreak of the First World War. Now, the Home Rule Bill at this point has been passed, so Home Rule will be granted, that is the thought, but the whole thing is basically frozen, isn't it, by the outbreak of the First War? So it doesn't go away, it's just dormant, is that right?
18:31 Speaker 02 Yes, it is. I think it's really important for us, Dominic, to stress the importation of arms through 1913 into 1914, the establishment of the Ulster Volunteer Force and the plans to establish provisional government for Ulster.
18:48 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
18:48 Speaker 02 If it was insisted upon that there should be Home Rule granted to Ireland. That's a really important story in the militarisation of Ireland.
18:54 Dominic Sandbrook? And there are people in the British Army, and indeed in the Tory Party, who are effectively colluding.
18:59 Speaker 02 Well, the great belief is that the leader of the Conservative Party knew that these arms were being imported and was saying that there is no level that I can imagine that Ulster Unionists will go to that I will not support them.
19:10 Dominic Sandbrook? And so that must destabilise Catholic faith in the neutrality of British institutions, of which the Army would be the most obvious.
19:17 Speaker 02 And what it does as well is it inspires the importation of guns by the Irish Volunteer Force. So now you have a second militarised army on the island, and the third one exists where there is a citizen army of socialists who have guns in Dublin as well, so who are also bent on rebellion ultimately.
19:34 Dominic Sandbrook? I think we finished the last series by Asquith saying, "Thank God for the First World War", basically, I parafrase. It can't be as bad as...
19:41 Speaker 02 He said it was a stroke of luck that war broke out. Now, that looks worse in hindsight because of the war lasting as long as it did and the industrial slaughter that ensued, but the crisis was so deep. That it seemed intractable because you had Irish nationalists who would not accept anything other than the entire island under a home rule parliament, and Irish Unionists saying, we're not going into a home rule parliament, we want nothing other than rule from Westminster.
20:06 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, and then, so it appears to be dormant, and then at Easter 1916, the conflict flares into life with the Easter Rising, which actually, at the time, is very quickly put down by British forces. I mean, a lot of Dublin is sort of reduced to rubble, but the British are able to stamp it out. And the British, I guess, get the impression, it's very annoying that this has happened. It's a sort of, it's a betrayal at a time when we're fighting the Germans on the western front. However, hopefully, it's not going to prove a massive deal. And what turns the Easter Rising into such a big deal?
20:37 Speaker 02 I first of all think that everybody says it's the executions that turned everything. So basically, after the Rising, the people who were involved, it was about a thousand went out on Easter Monday. By Easter Saturday, by the time it ended, there were probably fifteen, sixteen hundred who had been on the streets. So it was a really small minority of people who had struck during the war because it presented the opportunity, as they saw it, to rise and drag the people with them.
21:03 Dominic Sandbrook? So England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity?
21:05 Speaker 02 Exactly, in the old saw. And that is not what happened, of course, and it was crushed within a very short space of time. And people said at the time that the rebels were mocked and abused on the streets, and that there was incredible resistance to what they'd done, and just disgust, actually. I think that's overplayed. Yes, there was some of that, but there were also other people who were, you know, admired them for what they were doing.
21:31 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah. So, I mean, it's commonly said, isn't it, the Easter Rising, that at the time, they're a minority, and actually, people are horrified by it. And the British think, well, it's not going to be this big a deal. It's annoying, it's a bit of a betrayal at a time of fighting the Germans on the western front. But of course, it does turn out to be a landmark moment. And so what changes? What makes it so iconic?
21:49 Speaker 02 So it was, first of all, a minority, and the scale of the minority is extraordinarily significant. It's about a thousand people went out on Easter Monday, maybe joined by a few hundred more as the week went along. But it's not a mass uprising. And I think when it comes down to it, there are a series of factors which changed perceptions of people as to why people had reacted adversely to it in the city initially during the rising, although I do believe that that's somewhat overplayed. And it hangs initially on the executions of the leaders. Now, the leaders themselves, it should be said, expected to die on the week. They knew they were rising in time of war. This was their opportunity.
22:31 Tom Holland? And this is the whole key to it being Easter. It's a sacrifice.
22:36 Speaker 02 And the word blood sacrifice is appended to this time and again. But so there are 187 people who rose court-martialed. The rest are put in pens around the place and are ultimately interned. Some in Ballykinler in the north, but many went to Frangock in Wales and others went to places like Lewis Prison and Reading Jail and all of those. We'll talk about those, I think, a little bit later on. But of the 187 who are court-martialed, a number of them were sentenced to death. About 90 of them were given death sentences. As it turned out, 14 of them were executed in Kilmainam Jail, having been tried in secrecy without representation in a series of court martialed. But there was no doubt about guilt, to be fair.
23:19 Speaker 02 And the executions began on the morning of the 3rd of May, when Patrick Pearce, Thomas Clark and Thomas McDonagh were shot by firing squad in the stonebreakers yard of Kilmainam Jail. They continued until the 12th of May. So 14 executions in that jail were strung out over 10 days. The last one to die was Sean McDermott and James Connolly. And James Connolly is a story that was really potent because Connolly was extremely ill and extremely injured. He was so badly, he basically had to be tied to a chair so that he could be shot. His wife and his daughter, his daughter tells this story in heartbreaking detail later in the 60s of going in to see her father the night before he was shot and her mother crying and him saying, "Oh, don't cry, you'll unman me."
24:03 Speaker 02 And it's one of these stories begin to come out afterwards and they're potent ones in the story. So there were two more executions that mattered. Thomas Kent down in Cork. Wasn't really involved in any rising Cork was very quiet for a rebel county in nineteen sixteen. Very little happened in Cork. But the other big one is Roger Casement.
24:23 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
24:23 Speaker 02 So Roger Casement is featured in recent episodes.
24:27 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, the Congo.
24:28 Speaker 02 Did in the Congo where he exposed extraordinary abuses by the Belgians in that area. Also went to the Putumayo region in the Amazon, exposed more there. Was a knight of the realm, had been born in Dublin, but was really associated with Ulster Unionism, was a Protestant. Who increasingly converted to nationalism to the point where Roger Casement went to Germany after the outbreak of war and tried to raise an Irish regiment. From captured prisoners of war held by the Germans, tries to get the Germans to give guns. He doesn't manage to raise a regiment, but he gets the Germans to give them guns, which come back on a submarine. But he's arrested when he arrived on the weekend of the Easter Rising. He's brought to the Tower of London, he's tried, convicted, there's an appeal.
25:11 Speaker 02 It doesn't wash and there's a huge, huge fuss about this. So this were on into August now, the rising took place in April, it's into August. And he was hung a morning early in August in Pentonville Prison by a hairdresser from Rochdale called John Ellis.
25:25 Dominic Sandbrook? Oh, yeah.
25:26 Speaker 02 When he did the execution, there were people out in the road cheering and there were others praying and lamenting in Irish.
25:32 Dominic Sandbrook? An extraordinary scene and we should talk about one person actually who wasn't executed because he'll play a massive part in this story. And this is a man called Eamon de Valera, who any Irish listener will undoubtedly be familiar with. But some of our British and American listeners and whatnot maybe not so much. So tell us a bit about de Valera.
25:48 Speaker 02 Well, I start from the fact that it's probably my first memory in life was going to de Valera's funeral. He was left lying in state in nineteen seventy five, I was five years of age, in Dublin Castle.
25:59 Dominic Sandbrook? So he's about a hundred and fifty.
26:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, I'm aging quite gracefully. And he, he, he was there, the man who was in that box though was, was, we queued up for hours to get in and. Typically of my character, I whinged and cried the whole way through, but when I'd seen it, I wanted to go back and have another look, but.
26:17 Dominic Sandbrook? And presumably a very long coffin because he is.
26:20 Speaker 02 He's known as the longfella, yeah, he's the longfella and his. The man who he's always twinned with in history and reduced by history to caricature both of them, Michael Collins, is the big fellow. So the Devil Era is the long fellow and Collins is the big fellow.
26:32 Tom Holland? Quite. Rest is history.
26:33 Dominic Sandbrook? So Devil Era, I mean, he dominates Irish politics in the 20th century.
26:37 Speaker 02 Yeah.
26:38 Dominic Sandbrook? And he also dominates the story in some ways. So tell us a bit about his character. The perception of him is this very chilly, sort of austere clerical character. Is that fair?
26:49 Speaker 02 And that's right. And this image of him, by the time he was president of Ireland from the late 50s to the early 70s, he was almost blind. He was very old, doddery figure. And that's the one that television captured. So it's the one that has stuck in the public mind. But the Devil Era, who was born in New York to an Irish woman and apparently a Spanish father.
27:10 Tom Holland? So hence his name.
27:11 Speaker 02 So, but it must be said, David McCullough's biography on this, on Eamonn Devil Era is really good and it throws question marks over quite exactly what the parentage is. Something, by the way, which Devil Era's opponents threw at him all his life. He was brought home when he was very young, to the old family home and brewery in County Limerick, though his mother remained in New York.
27:33 Tom Holland? Right.
27:34 Speaker 02 And Devil Era was raised by wider family members. He was a really bright kid, got a scholarship to the elite Blackrock College in the city here, was skilled at mathematics, discovered the Irish language. And the caricature of this man, who was presented in a very particular way, you can't see it from those periods. He was more than happy to go out drinking. He certainly went courting and down in, he went working in Rockwell College as a maths teacher at one stage and loved rugby, absolutely loved rugby, and got a trial for the Munster rugby team. He was trialled as fullback and the guy who was picked ahead of him played for Ireland that year. So Devil Era could easily have been an international rugby player.
28:11 Tom Holland? But very keen on maths. And he comes up with all kinds of complicated mathematical schemes in due course, doesn't he? Pyre and square circles and so on.
28:19 Speaker 02 He had a very interesting mind. And, yes, but is also, again, kind of caricatured in that because he's portrayed as being someone who was austere. But he went out with a gun in 1916 and joined a rebellion.
28:33 Tom Holland? But he does kind of lean into the stereotype, doesn't he, himself? So there's this famous phrase of him, that every instinct of mind would indicate that I was meant to be a dyed-in-the-wool Tory or even a bishop, rather than the leader of a revolution.
28:45 Speaker 02 Yes, he's, again, we keep using the word complex, but he is a complex individual throughout all of this.
28:50 Dominic Sandbrook? And here's the thing, he's not executed, he could have been executed, but he is not executed because he's an American citizen.
28:56 Speaker 02 Yeah, again, that's what's said, that it's because he was an American citizen. But it is also the case, the British Prime Minister, Asquith, had been telling the military authorities in Ireland, stop killing these people, because already there are Catholic bishops calling for the executions to stop, there are newspapers calling for it.
29:12 Dominic Sandbrook? So this takes us to the crucial next step, which is that there's clearly a change in atmosphere in the, I don't know, six months, 12 months after the Easter Rising. There is a sense of a change in the tone, in a gathering momentum towards nationalism. And just talk us through some of that. So this is to do with, obviously, the reactions to the executions and to the Rising, but there are also books being published, it's a sporting story. How does the mood change in this period?
29:42 Speaker 02 The first way the mood changes is by the people who are sent to camps, being brought home. So they're coming home, they're released early from Froncar. The military intelligence, the police intelligence was useless. They lifted a whole load of people who had nothing to do with the Rising, so they let them out sometimes after three, four weeks. But across that autumn and winter of 1916, as far as Christmas morning 1916, a ship carrying both soldiers from the Western Front and released republican prisoners from English jails sails into Dublin port. The dawn is breaking and there's four in particular who pushed their way up from steerage to first class. There's Collo Shannon and Terence McSweeney, later Lord Mayor of Cork, Sean T O Kelly,
30:22 Speaker 02 later President of Ireland, and Ernest Blyde, who is later in the first cabinet and himself a Protestant. But up on the top, as the ship pulls in is Thomas MacCurtain, later also Lord Mayor of Cork, and he's playing the fiddle. And on the quay to greet them as they come out of the murk are loads of people with tricolours, because they're cheering another group of people who were home. Around that, there's a film, Ireland the Nation, which kind of depicts the famine and 1798, which celebrates Irishness. That's been shown in cinemas around America. There are books like the Sinn Féin Rebellion. Italian handbook hugely popular on the All Ireland hurling final of nineteen sixteen, not played nineteen seventeen, the Tipperary hurlers who feature hugely in this story later
31:04 Speaker 02 on come up and they go to the GPO and they say prayers amidst the rubble. So that's becoming an iconic sight. There are collections for the funds of prisoners which Michael Collins gets involved in and we'll be talking about Collins later on. And then a year after the Rising, on the day that James Connolly, the anniversary of James Connolly's execution, a huge sign is put up onto the Liberty Hall, that home of trade unionism in Ireland, the place which had the sign before the Rising, which said, we serve neither King or Kaiser, now has a sign on it which says, James Connolly murdered, twelfth of May nineteen sixteen. It was only up for a very short period, possibly only an hour, but it was
31:47 Speaker 02 photographed as part of propaganda to be sold alongside the books and rosettes and flags that were now ubiquitous amongst people who had been swayed.
31:56 Dominic Sandbrook? And is there a sense that the nationalist movement is breaking new ground with propaganda? That it's out thinking the royalist British assumptions about propaganda?
32:10 Speaker 02 Well, you must remember that at this point, British interest in Ireland was so minimal as to be exceptionally difficult to quantify because the war was raging in Europe. Britain was in an existential fight. The United Kingdom was really in turmoil. The minds were focused elsewhere. It wasn't focused on Ireland. Ireland never truly mattered in British politics after nineteen fourteen. I'm not saying it didn't matter at all, but it was not central to the story in the way it had been in nineteen fourteen, despite the rebellion.
32:41 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, you can see that in newspapers, cabinet meetings and all these kinds of things. It's there, but it's never the biggest thing. Before we go to the break, let's talk about two groups in particular. So one is, you've already mentioned the fact that not everybody is a nationalist. So about thirty percent of the population of Ireland would regard themselves as unionists. And these are predominantly, but not exclusively Protestants. So while all this is going on, are they just watching?
33:05 Tom Holland? In kind of in horror and indifference, what do they think?
33:08 Speaker 02 Well, it's it's even more complex than that because their leaders, including Edward Carson, Edward Carson is now in the British Cabinet. And so so the connections between the the formation of coalition government in England allowed for Ulster Unionism to reach right into the Cabinet table and the shift in power. Whereas previously, the Liberals had depended on Irish nationalist votes, that is gone now. It's now Unionists who sit in in Cabinet and in power. They still stand rejecting our home rule. Nothing has changed there. Indeed, the myth of Ulster continues to grow. Built incredibly in another event in 1916, the Battle of the Somme, at which the 36th Ulster Division suffered horrendous losses on the first day.
33:51 Speaker 02 And if I went to see those trenches that they were fought in, I went to see the monument in Títhúil, which was erected to the Ulster Unionists who were there. It's an incredibly well-kept, preserved, iconic part of that story. And it fed in to the myth of Ulster and supported by Kipling and Elgar and all the voices of empire.
34:10 Tom Holland? And so, Paul, that's another Irish blood sacrifice offered up in 1916.
34:14 Speaker 02 Yes, and again, it sits right at the heart of the mythology of Unionism, just as 1916.
34:20 Tom Holland? It's so extraordinary, isn't it, that the two communities are both creating these mythic blood sacrifices in their imaginings.
34:29 Speaker 02 And it's in the language that's been used in in all of this. You see, James Dillon stood in in the House of Commons and talked about the blood that was going to flow in Ireland. He was the really potent member of the Irish parliamentary party, a moderate, stood in the House of Commons and said to us, you're creating a revolution here.
34:48 Tom Holland? Yeah.
34:49 Speaker 02 Because you're killing these men, there is blood flowing out from under the cell doors. The British ambassador in America writes home and says, there are blood in the eyes of Irish Americans. So things have been fundamentally transformed by the 1916 Rising, both North and South.
35:04 Tom Holland? And so the second group, just before we go to the break, are the British. What are the British thinking is going to be the medium to long term outcome? What is their plan? So Asquith is Prime Minister, but he is toppled and replaced by David Lloyd George, who is basically in coalition with the Conservatives and increasingly reliant upon the Conservatives, who as we know are great friends of the Ulster Unionists. What does Lloyd George think is going to happen to Ireland? He's still, they're still planning Home Rule, aren't they?
35:32 Speaker 02 So in the middle of 1916, in the summer of 1916, before he became Prime Minister, David Lloyd George was Minister of Munitions and he attempted to introduce Home Rule. He was charged with Asquith of fixing the crisis. Lloyd George went at it with, he celebrated as a cunning mind, but you could equally say he was a man so crooked, he couldn't lie straight in bed. And Lloyd George told different things to both sides in promising Home Rule. He told Carson that Home Rule-
36:02 Tom Holland? He was the head of the Unionists.
36:03 Speaker 02 Head of the Unionists, sorry, he was the head of Unionists, that, well, listen, we'll give a separate Parliament for the six counties and you can permanently stay out of Home Rule. The rest of Ireland can get their 26 counties. But he told John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Moderates, that, well, no, listen, we're going to keep the North out, but only for a while. He kind of went between the two things, but he couldn't square the language to get it through, so that fell apart.
36:27 Tom Holland? The devil era's mastery of maths.
36:28 Speaker 02 Yeah. But by the time you get to 1917, there is no plan.
36:33 Tom Holland? Right.
36:34 Speaker 02 There is no sense of what can be done here. There's the idea that we'll put in Home Rule and we might get a partition, a settlement, but how that's going to be delivered to Irish nationalists who might consider a temporary exclusion for Ulster, but not a permanent one. And Ulster Unionists were saying, well, we don't want Home Rule at all, but if we must do something, it's permanent.
36:54 Tom Holland? So Paul, you mentioned John Redmond, who is the leader of the moderate nationalists, the party that has been campaigning for Home Rule, supportive of Home Rule. But lurking in the background all along, there is another party, another organisation that we haven't mentioned yet, but will be playing a huge part in the story. And that is a party called Sinn Féin, in English, ourselves alone. And I think we should take a break now and when we come back, we will look at the role played by Sinn Féin in this story.
37:29 Tom Holland? Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History and the clock is ticking on British rule in Ireland. And Paul, we mentioned Sinn Féin just before the break, so tell us about Sinn Féin.
37:41 Speaker 02 So Sinn Féin is described in the Commission of Inquiry to the Rebellion as being the driving force behind the rebellion of 1916 and it had nothing to do with it in the sense of nothing practical, but it had an impact on the ideas that were swirling around Irish society from the early 1900s onwards. And those ideas coalesced particularly around an individual called Arthur Griffith, who was one of the most important people in this whole story. So Griffith was a man who went to national school but never went to secondary school really, and did his learning beside us here in the National Library of Ireland. He, like so many other, so many other revolutionaries in so many other countries,
38:24 Speaker 02 had work as a printer. So he went into that world of books and of newspapers and became a journalist. He went to live in South Africa for a while, and then when he came back, he founded new newspapers, which he kind of shared this idea of Irish nationality, Irish nationalism, and this idea that little countries around the world, he wrote a lot about other countries.
38:49 Tom Holland? And in particular Hungary, because he has this idea that basically the United Kingdom can become an Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy, where King George or whoever is the king in Ireland, but Ireland has its...
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41:12 Dominic Sandbrook? Its own separate parliament.
41:14 Speaker 02 And this is just to make sure things are particularly complicated. It makes the fact that Sinn Féin is not a Republican Party until 1917, when it changes its particular policies until in the autumn of 1917. It did wish for independence though, and huge power with the figurehead of the monarch.
41:31 Tom Holland? But the notion that Sinn Féin began as a monarchist party is one of my favourite Irish history facts.
41:38 Speaker 02 It is a slight reduction, but I take the point. I take the point though. And in Ireland, Griffith's notion of nationality was that he was a geographic determinist, as Michael Laffan has said, so that irrespective of... Background or religion, if you were born on the island, you're Irish. That's how he saw it.
41:54 Dominic Sandbrook? And that's a tradition of Irish identity that again goes back to the Napoleonic period, the revolutionary period.
42:02 Speaker 02 The thing with Griffith is that Griffith was actually a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, though he kind of drifted away from that, not because he was against the use of arms, but because he didn't think it was possible for the Irish Republicans to go in armed rebellion and win. And he was only interested in winning. He was a pragmatic man. He pushed ideas around industrialisation and forestation and the production of Irish goods against those things. So he wanted to build up a movement that was based on this.
42:28 Dominic Sandbrook? He's not a tariffs fan, is he?
42:29 Speaker 02 He was, funnily enough, a tariffs fan, very much of the moment. He was involved in the gun-running for the Irish Volunteers. So that shows you again, even though he didn't fight in the Rising, he was not against revolutionary nationalism. His newspaper was suppressed during World War One. So he did something that was, I think, a piece of genius. He set up a new newspaper called Scissors and Paste. And there are copies of Scissors and Paste in the National Library and out in UCD. But what they are is, what he did was he took cuttings from other newspapers that had got by the censor and put them into a newspaper called Scissors and Paste and made his journalism out of stories that had already been published to get around. Now, it didn't really work for too long and that too was suppressed.
43:11 Speaker 02 But the ideas that he had propagated over the first 16, 17 years of the 20th century were wrapped around ideas of Irish independence to the extent that the name Sinn Féin was applied to a rebellion of which they were not involved as a constituent organisation.
43:31 Dominic Sandbrook? So in a sense, the British and the authorities, they haven't exactly invented the idea of Sinn Féin, but they've changed Sinn Féin because they've turned it into something that it wasn't, which is this sort of incredibly potent underground revolutionary organisation. You see British politicians and newspapers talking about the dangers of Sinn Féin and their Sinn Féin murder gang and whatnot all the time. So they've kind of created this chimera, I guess.
43:53 Speaker 02 And you see this as the people who were in the internment camps, they came up with plans in those camps. It was, it's... It was quite a remarkable thing to put people together who didn't know each other particularly well.
44:05 Tom Holland? Because it's often described as, the prison camps are described as a university.
44:08 Speaker 02 The university, exactly, the University of the Revolution, and they come home and through nineteen seventeen, as Sinn Féin begin to organise again, as people come home, they, they begin to do things that, that are not just about independence. So they do practical things, they don't just make speeches and spout. They, they do things like, they say, okay, we're going to boycott people who support this government, we're going to boycott the Crown forces, we're going to boycott the police, number one. Number two, we're going to go involved in land agitation. So we're going to argue that the remaining land that is held by landlords that hasn't been distributed amongst tenant farmers must now be given out. Number three, they do into food agitation. Food agitation is important
44:49 Speaker 02 because of, of course, it's wartime and there's price issues and there's scarcity issues. And someone like Dermot Flynn, for example, Commandeur Sinn Féin, Director of Food, he, he comes and he gets thirty-four pigs that are about to be exported from Dublin Port, he takes them away, they're slaughtered and they're dispersed amongst the population. So these are, that's an example, I think, of popular engagement. And you recognise this from revolutionary organisations around the world. This is not, these are things that revolutionary organisations do. It's a wider story made real here.
45:22 Tom Holland? But there is a strong sense that Sinn Féin are kind of leading the way in this, that Irish nationalists are kind of inventing a new kind of revolutionary agitation.
45:31 Speaker 02 And this really is said about the guerrilla war, which comes, which we'll talk about, I think, in the next episode and, and the one afterwards. But for the moment, it's about Sinn Féin now beginning to compete in parliamentary politics. It puts up candidates.
45:45 Tom Holland? And they are obviously opposed to being a part of the Westminster Parliament, but they are prepared to play the Westminster game to that degree, that they are happy to, to stand candidates in by-elections, for instance.
45:55 Speaker 02 They will stand candidates in by-elections, but they will not take their seats in the House of Commons. So it begins in February nineteen seventeen, when Count Plunkett, the father of an executed nineteen sixteen leader, wins a by-election in Roscommon.
46:09 Tom Holland? And it has to be said, there's a surprising
46:10 Dominic Sandbrook? Number of counts and countesses involved in this story.
46:14 Speaker 02 Yeah, papal counts in this case.
46:16 Dominic Sandbrook? And then the South Longford by-election, that's in May. That's another Shinnfae, great Shinnfae in Triumph. And it's a key moment because it brings us to the other big character of this story, who's very involved in that campaign, who is Michael Collins. So he's not standing in that election, but he's behind the scenes. He's putting a lot of the strings, isn't he? And tell us a little bit about Collins, because he's such a massive character.
46:38 Speaker 02 So just as De Valera is reduced in history to this, as you say.
46:42 Dominic Sandbrook? The long fella.
46:43 Speaker 02 The long fella. So Michael Collins is seen as this gun blazing rebel. Who just appears young and handsome, died at 33. Later, that story, you'll come across that story in the Civil War. He was a man who was feted in society. Really handsome individual.
47:05 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, he's called the big fella, isn't he? Because it's expressive of his charisma rather than his size. He's not particularly large.
47:11 Speaker 02 It's personality and charisma and this sense of. Now, he divided opinion because there were people who found him brusque and overbearing as well as people who swore absolute allegiance to him. But Collins is much more than a gunman. In fact, Collins was a military organizer and had a brilliant brain for detail and organization, which he kind of flourished in London because he emigrated to London as a teenager.
47:39 Dominic Sandbrook? He's from Cork originally.
47:39 Speaker 02 Yes, he's from Cork. He's from Cork and he went to London, worked in the post office and then.
47:45 Dominic Sandbrook? So he loves post offices, doesn't he?
47:47 Speaker 02 He's a good man for the GPO. He ends up in a different type of post office.
47:50 Dominic Sandbrook? And he does wrestling and hurling on Clapham Common, apparently.
47:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, he was secretary to a G A club, a hurling club over there. He played for London, he played in the competitions over there. But it was in London that he joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood. He got into this emigre world of people who were unreconciled to the crown. And he was slowly radicalized or rather quickly radicalized in fairness. And he came back from London to fight in the Rising in 1916, just before. He was interned initially, but he was a nobody in the Rising. He'd been in the GPO, but he wasn't a well-known figure. But there's a leadership gap in the end of 1916 and 1917. De Valera and other ones of the significant leaders of the 1916 Rising who hadn't been killed are in jail.
48:38 Speaker 02 And Collins emerges as this figure who gets a job setting up Republican prisoners' funds around the place and he becomes a permanent organizer who helps build Sinn Féin through 1917 to run in the by-elections. And it is his push of Joe McGinnis. Now, Joe McGinnis is one of seven children who'd spent time in America, who'd set up a Gaelic League Irish language branch around Longford. He'd worked in the Draper shops in Camden Street, not too far from us here. He'd fought in the Easter Rising in the Four Courts, where I think you're going to go later in this series. That's where he was based, under Ned Daly, there. And he was sent to Lewis Prison. And it was from Lewis Prison that he was elected as the MP for South Longford in May 1917.
49:23 Speaker 02 And he won by apparently 37 votes. And it was Collins who pushed that he run in the first place, against the wishes of other people who thought it was ridiculous and that he could not win. It was Collins who drove the campaign, who brought men in cars down to Longford to campaign for him. And he stayed all the time in the Greval Arms Hotel, a great Arms Hotel in the middle of Granada. And it was there where he met Kitty Kiernan, who he ended up engaged. Julia Roberts. Julia Roberts. So you had to say it. You could not let that go.
49:55 Dominic Sandbrook? So you talked about a leadership gap, and Collins is sort of emerging, he's rising up the ladder. But of course, the person who does become the president of Sinn Féin is the person who ends up being his rival, which is Eamon De Valera. How is it that De Valera, rather than Griffiths, becomes the president of Sinn Féin at the end of 1917?
50:11 Speaker 02 So there's distrust of Griffith. Despite his years in the movement, he had left the IRB and he was still a monarchist in early 1917, in the sense he was willing to accept that. So you have a man who didn't fight in 1916 and still gave allegiance to monarchy, and then you have Eamon De Valera, the most powerful surviving leader of that rebellion, who comes back from... Jail in the summer of 1917, De Valera and Griffith meet and they have a conversation and it's agreed that De Valera will be president and Griffith will be his vice president. And Griffith serves faithfully the cause after that point.
50:52 Tom Holland? And Paul said all this parliamentarian shenanigans, but what about the military aspect to this, or I should probably say the paramilitary aspect to this?
51:02 Speaker 02 So in October 1917, when there was an Ardesh or kind of an annual conference of Sinn Féin, at which Eamon De Valera was elected as president, and it was agreed that the policy of Sinn Féin would be to establish, and I quote, "an independent Irish republic." And De Valera formulated a kind of a unanimously accepted compromise around the nature of what that republic would be, when it was said Sinn Féin aims at securing the international recognition of Ireland as an independent Irish republic. Having achieved that status, the Irish people may by referendum choose their own form of government. So that's what pulled everyone together, and that's the point at which the movement coalesced
51:45 Speaker 02 from that point onwards. And then there were still by-elections being won. But at precisely the same weekend, there was a volunteer convention around the Ardesh of Sinn Féin. So that is to say, the Irish Volunteers, the military wing, is beginning to manoeuvre again. Many of those who'd been interned after the Rising and who are now home, get involved in the founding of volunteer companies, militarising around the company. On top of that, the Irish Republican Brotherhood had not gone away. They had formed with Collins largely as their head, with Richard Mulcahy, who was also involved in the 1916 Rising, and the man whose poem we read earlier, Thomas Ash, at its core. And they have gone around
52:27 Speaker 02 from earlier in 1917, advertising for, or organising, sorry, for the Volunteers. And it's in this point, in the summer of 1917, that Thomas Ash was arrested for a seditious speech, that he was put in Mountjoy Jail ultimately, and went on hunger strike to demand essentially prisoner of war status. And it was declined to him.
52:53 Speaker 02 And you said you would tell Tom what happened next, so what happened next?
52:57 Dominic Sandbrook? So Thomas Ash was, he's held for just under a month and he goes on hunger strike and it's this incredibly powerful moment, the idea of sort of sacrificing yourself for the cause. And he's on hunger strike for just two or three days and then they force feed him and force feeding is a, you know, it's incredibly brutal and evasive process. And, and basically he dies during the course of being force fed. It's, it's, you know, he's, he's weakened, he's sick, he's starving and his death becomes this great sacrifice for the cause. And then his funeral becomes a huge deal, doesn't it? I mean, massive turnout at this funeral of, of these volunteers, of people who've joined the cause. And the famous, maybe you read it, Paul, the, the famous oration that is given by Michael
53:42 Dominic Sandbrook? Collins after shots are rung out over the grave.
53:45 Tom Holland? Because it's not a long oration, is it?
53:46 Speaker 02 It's one of those where Collins says after the volley of shots, nothing additional remains to be said. That volley which we have just heard is the only speech which it is proper to make above the grave of a dead Fenian.
54:00 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, and so, and one of these kind of symbolic moments, isn't it? And do you think there's a sense at this point, so we're in the second half of 1917, that the momentum has, has shifted beyond recovery, that, that effectively the revolutionaries have, have seized control of the narrative?
54:16 Speaker 02 I think they are seizing rather than seized. I don't think the momentum is entirely with them yet. I think there was a large wind in their sails and Dublin Castle is clear, the leading officials are clear on this. The Thomas Ash funeral is massive. Now, it's probably one of the most noted things in history that, that the Irish love a good funeral in any point, but the political funerals in Ireland are something else entirely. And what this meant on the day was a huge organisation of volunteer strength. They basically took over the middle of, of Dublin, took over the middle of the city and marched the coffin from beside where you're staying alongside Dublin Castle from
54:59 Speaker 02 City Hall, which they got from the city to run. In state, huge crowds come to see his body lying in state. He is then walked through the city behind a cottage with guns, everyone, there's guns being fired in the city again. Over his body and Dublin Castle are there, this is a huge moment. And swells of people begin to join the volunteers now.
55:19 Tom Holland? But Paul, could I also ask, what also happens famously in 1917 is the Russian Revolution.
55:23 Speaker 02 Yeah.
55:24 Tom Holland? And Dublin Castle, so will be the intelligence authorities there, will start to frame what is happening in Irish nationalist circles as informed by Bolshevism. And is that serving to kind of raise alarm bells back in London, where of course the government is still focused on winning the war?
55:41 Speaker 02 It really isn't, Tom. There's things being thrown left and right and it's, the words are there, but what's happening in Ireland is seen to be manageable. Compared to what's happening on the western front. Everything is suborned to the war and everything, by the way, has been suborned to get America into the war and on their side. So Irish policy is almost framed with the idea of not upsetting Irish America too much to the point that it will, that will keep Wilson, the President Wilson of America, out of the war.
56:10 Tom Holland? So America much more important than Russia and British?
56:13 Speaker 02 Enormously.
56:14 Dominic Sandbrook? So let's come to a massive, a game changing moment, a real watershed in this story. So Britain had introduced conscription in 1916 and it was an issue that had effectively split the liberal movement, the Liberal Party. A lot of liberals, kind of Asquithian liberals, were horrified by the idea of conscription. They thought, you know, it's a complete attack on civil liberties and whatnot. But it'd been introduced in Britain, but not in Ireland, because they recognized that in Ireland it would be incendiary to force people to fight for king and country. And there'd been lots of talk about it. And then in 1918, the picture completely changes. And here we go back to the importance of the First World War. The Germans launched their last throw, Ludendorff's last throw, the spring offensive.
56:59 Dominic Sandbrook? They look like they're going to get through all the way to Paris. It looks like the war is going to be lost for the Allies. And at that point, the Tories in particular in Britain say to Lloyd George, come on, mate. This is ridiculous that we're not conscripting men in Ireland when we're already doing it in Britain. We have to do it in Ireland as well because it just looks terrible to people in Britain that we're not doing it. And of course, as we know, this is an absolute own goal. I mean, it's like Lloyd George is taking a rifle and aiming it at his foot.
57:25 Tom Holland? The Irish Chief Secretary famously says, you might as well recruit Germans.
57:30 Dominic Sandbrook? So why is it, so conscription is such a colossal disaster, isn't it, for the cause of moderate nationalism as well as unionism, I guess?
57:39 Speaker 02 It is a disaster on every front for people who wish for the union to be maintained. For the government, it was a humiliating moment for the government. It was a disaster for the Irish Parliamentary Party, moderate nationalism, which was already under threat from Sinn Féin, but was destroyed by what happens, what happens next. And what happened next was, first of all, the Irish Parliamentary Party walked out of the House of Commons, where it had still had its seats, led by John Dillon. John Renddall at this stage was dead. He had died earlier in 1918. His brother Willie, also an MP, had died fighting for the British Army.
58:20 Speaker 02 So again, so this is a man whose life ended coming so close to the ultimate success that had eluded Parnell, eluded Daniel O'Connell. And this was a man who was on the cusp when the war started of absolute success. Now the war is going on, he dies in pain, his brother is dead, and now his party is taken over by John Dillon, leader of the party in Dublin, and he walks out of the House of Commons.
58:43 Dominic Sandbrook? Following the example of Sinn Féin.
58:45 Speaker 02 Yeah, so the Irish Parliamentary Party, well, the Irish Parliamentary Party had successfully resisted the implementation of conscription in Ireland before then. But everything that the Irish Parliamentary Party had stood for was gone in that moment. They come home and they are now on a platform, in meetings with Sinn Féin, who they would have previously looked on as corner boys in a rabble to some extent. And Catholic bishops are there as well. So this is the respectability of the Catholic Church. And Tom, you've made the point about how central religion was to society 100 years ago, much more so than now, for Catholic bishops to be sharing with Republicans, who had, some of whom had previously been excommunicated from, from the Church, and with moderate nationalism.
59:29 Speaker 02 And Sinn Féin is saying, we told you so.
59:31 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
59:32 Speaker 02 And they have the power, they run now, and the conscription, they managed. To create a conscription, it should be said by the way that the Labour movement and the Labour Party was huge in this as well because of the general strikes that were run during this period, which basically showed the government that this wasn't going to be workable. You're going to need to bring 100,000 soldiers here to get people to conscript.
59:54 Tom Holland? I mean, just to kind of stick up for Lloyd George, I mean, he, and you've been saying this throughout, that the focus of the British government is on the Western Front, and Lloyd George is staring down the barrel of defeat. So again, he must be thinking, you know, I've got to throw everything at this. And he actually compares himself to Lincoln, doesn't he?
1:00:12 Dominic Sandbrook? But he's also, the reason Lloyd George is doing this is not just because of the military situation, it's because of his own political situation. He relies on Conservative support, and the Conservatives effectively are saying to him, if you don't do this, we'll withdraw support because we think it's, you know, as a matter of principle, Ireland is treated the same as Britain.
1:00:26 Speaker 02 He was not someone who had an instinctive connection or sympathy with the Irish cause in any shape or form. He didn't really see why Ireland should be different than Wales or Scotland.
1:00:36 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, this is actually a really interesting thing with Lloyd George. His Welshness actually works against, because he says, come on, we're Celts too, and we have our own differences with the English, so why can't you be just like us?
1:00:45 Speaker 02 Yes, and he was a part of that strain also of, of English society or Welsh society, British society, which was anti-Catholic. He had, he had, it kind of converged, depending on who you were talking to, in that area between distaste and distrust, as a, or blind hatred, depending on which way you go, not necessarily Lloyd George, but that community all told.
1:01:05 Dominic Sandbrook? We're approaching the end of the episode. What's obviously happened is the conscription crisis has turbocharged, has accelerated a process that was already underway, which is radicalisation. So you get a massive influx, don't you, into people, they're signing pledges and petitions, they're joining Sinn Fein, young men, well, we will talk about this-
1:01:24 Tom Holland? And young women as well.
1:01:26 Dominic Sandbrook? Young women are joining groups, young men, and we'll talk about this in the next episode, what kind of people are joining the paramilitary groups. Young men are joining the Irish Volunteers. And the government have really lost control of the story.
1:01:40 Tom Holland? What do, so you're the Irish man and woman in the street, if we can massively simplify and generalize, what do they think at this stage? Is it possible to say, or is there a sort of general picture? How much does the propaganda matter in changing their, their outlook?
1:01:53 Speaker 02 I think the propaganda does matter because you are basically now faced with a movement which is placing a very straightforward proposition in front of a population. And it is this, we are either patriots fighting the regime, or we are complicit in its tyranny. And there's a new mass movement now, which is kind of a populist national movement. It's changed from that kind of ginger groups of Republicans, or radicals, or feminists, or socialists. And it's got broad ideas of patriotism now, which are hung always on kind of ideas of the ballads that are being sung, or the flags that are being flown, or a broad swathe of programme where, I mean, look at the agrarian programme.
1:02:38 Speaker 02 It wasn't just that Ireland were going to redistribute large farms to the people who tended and farmed them, or the tended farmers would get their farms made larger. People who are land labourers were going to be given farms as well. I mean, they basically planned they were going to expand the landmass of the island so much, were they, were they going to do?
1:02:55 Tom Holland? Right.
1:02:56 Speaker 02 But that's what you do, isn't it? When you're trying to win any argument, and that's what they went for.
1:03:01 Tom Holland? And so the British government feel that they're facing a Hydra, and when faced with a Hydra, the temptation is to try and cut off the heads. And so this is what they do in the summer of 1918, when essentially they manufacture a plot that comes to be known as the German plot. The idea that the heads, you know, basically all the people they want to intern are complicit with the Germans, and it's done on very, very sketchy information, but it's enough for them to start arresting people that they want to have in prison rather than out on the streets.
1:03:31 Speaker 02 The information is so sketchy that it's based on that members of the British Cabinet and around it are kind of going, they're utterly disbelieving of it, but, but Lloyd George is humiliated and they're bent on making a statement. So it hangs around the fact that an Irishman who had been in the British Army, had been captured, had been a POW in Germany, tried to be recruited to Casemate's cause to come back over here. He was found in a, in a boat off County Clare, on his own. So wild rumours then begin to spread of a German plot. And 73 leaders of Sinn Féin were arrested, including Deverera and Griffiths. But Michael Collins knew it was going to happen. And so did Richard Mulcahy, because they already had spies deep within the British
1:04:12 Speaker 02 system, both in Dublin Castle and in its military forces, and they were able to tip people off. Now, some of the Sinn Féin leaders were more than happy to be arrested because, of course, there was an enormous value in the publicity of it, but Collins and Mulcahy slipped away.
1:04:26 Dominic Sandbrook? And Dublin Castle don't even have photographs of Collins, so they don't know what he looks like. But, of course, they don't have photographs of, they have very few photographs. This is an age when you don't have many photographs of people. But you can, the, the, the strategy can either be, you put yourself centre and you take your martyrdom, you go to prison, or you slip into the shadows and you preserve your mystique as the master of spies, which is what Collins does.
1:04:47 Speaker 02 And the amazing thing about this is, in the report, the Commission of Investigation into the Rising of 1916, the report was, it's, it's a fantastic document which people can find online, it's 16 pages and must be read, because it's, it's, it's, it's so bizarre. The Lord Lieutenant is excused of all blame. Everything is placed on Dublin Castle's Chief Secretary, Augustine Burrell, and its Under-Secretary, Matthew Nathan. And they say there was, the police and the military were brilliant, they'd done nothing wrong, they told everything what happened, and that their intelligence was really good. And time and time again, it's revealed the opposite is the case. It was proven to be so, when it came to internment,
1:05:26 Speaker 02 it was proven to be so again in the German plot. So this is a state which is really creaking.
1:05:33 Dominic Sandbrook? So at this point, just before we move into the, the, the election at the end of 1918, at this point, do you think the game is actually already up for the British? Do you think there's any way back for them?
1:05:43 Speaker 02 There is no doubt that there has to be a Home Rule Parliament of some description. The question is how much power that parliament is going to get, and is it going to take war, or the, the, the giving of dominion status, for example, which doesn't seem to be on the agenda. And all the while, all the while, there is the problem of Ulster, which has not been resolved by anybody, not by the British and not by Irish nationalists who don't have a plan.
1:06:06 Dominic Sandbrook? Right. So, November 1918, the war ends, the German offensive has petered out, the Germans have collapsed, there are great celebrations, the war is over, and a month later, on the 30th 18th of December 1918, at last the United Kingdom goes to the polls. And effectively, you've got two separate elections going on, one in Great Britain and one in Ireland. And this is a landmark election for all kinds of reasons. All men over the age of 21 can now vote, all the women over the age of 30. So the electorate in Ireland has, what, more than doubled?
1:06:38 Speaker 02 It's trebled, I think, Tom, or Dominic, it's trebled from 700,000 to almost 2 million.
1:06:44 Dominic Sandbrook? Something like seven out of 10 people are voting for the first time.
1:06:47 Speaker 02 For the first time.
1:06:47 Dominic Sandbrook? So it's impossible to predict how they'll vote. And the big winners of this are Sinn Féin. And their manifesto is, it's a brilliant manifesto because it's simultaneously vague, but also very clear, because they have basically three big goals, don't they? Talk us through their goals.
1:07:06 Speaker 02 So their three big goals are to establish an independent Irish republic. And there was a brilliant phrase after this, which is hugely important for what happens next in the War of Independence, which we will be talking about in the next episode. It says, "We will establish an independent Irish republic by any and every means available to render impotent the power of England to hold Ireland in subjection by military force or otherwise." That's the phrase that is used to legitimize a war of independence. It says it has the support of the public as given by the polls on it. So its first plan is to establish an independent Irish republic. Its second plan is to withdraw from the House of Commons. So they think they're going to win 80 seats. There's 100 odd seats in Ireland, but they think they're going to win 80 seats in this
1:07:51 Speaker 02 election. And they say, "We're not going. We're going to establish our own parliament here." And the third point is hugely important. And this is massive in the papers at the time, and I think it's been lost a little bit in it, is the importance of the Paris Peace Conference. The Paris Peace Conference, Sinn Féin said, "We are going to Paris." Wilson has his. 14 points. You've just fought a war for Little Belgium.
1:08:14 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
1:08:15 Speaker 02 You talk about the rights of small nations. So we're a small nation, we're a small country. We're going to Paris, we're going to get a seat in Paris. And we're going to use our American leverage because of the power and potency of the Irish American lobby to get Wilson to support us, to get a seat at that table. And we will be independent.
1:08:37 Dominic Sandbrook? Right. So the results, Sinn Féin win 73 seats, the Unionists win 26, and what's left of the moderates, the Irish Parliamentary Party, they're reduced to just six seats. So, I mean, this is really a revolution in Irish politics, isn't it?
1:08:52 Speaker 02 It's enormous. And it's, it's a complete wipeout. But the wipeout was on the way beforehand. When Sinn Féin predicted 80 seats, it wasn't blind in what they were doing. This was an aging party whose time was done. Everything the Irish Parliamentary Party had fought for and won, they'd won Home Rule, they just hadn't got it implemented. They had said that they had stopped conscription coming in for long periods, but Redmond had called for recruitment, so they got no good out of that at all. They said that they had argued that the prisoners should be released early from prison in England. But they weren't the prisoners themselves, they were standing against the prisoners now, and loads of them just retired.
1:09:34 Speaker 02 And in large swathes of the country, they had not been opposed in elections for 40 years. So they didn't have a machine to fight back against Sinn Féin.
1:09:42 Dominic Sandbrook? So it's a complete changing of the guard. I mean, one might almost say a revolution. And I suppose for people in Ireland, there's the question of where next? How is the state going to be governed? What's the future? And in Britain, there's the prospect that, that even as the guns, the crumping of the guns are falling silent on the Western Front, storm clouds of war may be gathering over Ireland and over the United Kingdom. So if people want to find out what happens next, they could join our own revolutionary brotherhood, The Rest Is History Club. And as Paul undoubtedly knows, you can do that at therestishistory.com. But we will be back with Paul for the next instalment of this thrilling story with the
1:10:26 Dominic Sandbrook? Irish War of Independence. Goodbye.
1:10:29 Speaker 02 Goodbye. Goodbye.
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