Pod Insights The Rest Is History 577. The Irish War of Independence: The Violence Begins (Part 2) About this episode What was Sinn Féin’s totemic first move after winning a majority seat in 1917? Were the IRA’s methods during this early stages of the war as violent as they are commonly believed to have been? How sectarian was the IRA? What crucial strategy did the Irish adopt in order to overwhelm English efforts to re-establish control in Ireland? As a victor of the First World War, was Ireland’s struggle for independence unique amongst the revolutions and changing fortunes of other nations during the post war years? And, what enabled the famous Michael Collins to attain a great leadership role in Irish politics?
In today’s episode on some of the seismic moments of the Irish War of Independence and the rising tide of bloodshed and violence, Tom and Dominic are joined again by historian Paul Rouse. Extraordinary revolutionary leaders, post war politics, and the crucial role of women in this seminal struggle, all feature…
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Transcript 11,576 words · 3 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:02 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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1:07 Tom Holland? This episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile. Right now, all of Mint's plans are $15 per month, even unlimited. So go to mintmobile.com/history.
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1:47 Dominic Sandbrook? This episode is brought to you by TikTok. We obviously love history here. It's always a treat to make a new discovery, especially in unexpected ways.
1:57 Tom Holland? Which is exactly what happens on TikTok. Like, you know, coffee. You make it, add milk, drink it. Nothing more. Except...
2:08 Dominic Sandbrook? Except when you hop on TikTok, you don't just learn how to make an authentic cappuccino. You can also discover videos about how in the 1700s, people would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it.
2:23 Tom Holland? And suddenly, you're imagining how people lived, drank, socialized.
2:29 Dominic Sandbrook? Makes you wonder what will baffle historians about us. And that's the joy of TikTok. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Visit tiktok.com forward slash discover more.
2:58 Speaker 02 I joined the Flying Column in nineteen and sixteen in Cork with Sean Mylan and Tipperary with Dan Breen, arrested by Free Staters and sentenced for to die. Farewell to Tipperary, said the Galtie Mountain Boy. We went across the valleys and o'er the hilltops green, where we met with Dinni Lacey, Sean Hogan and Dan Breen. Sean Mylan and his gallant men, they kept the flag flying high. And farewell to Tipperary, said the Galtie Mountain Boy. I'll bid farewell to Aul Clonmel I never more shall see, and to the Galtie Mountains that oftentimes sheltered me.
3:38 Speaker 02 Those who fought for liberty and died without a sigh, may their cause not be forgotten, said the Galtie Mountain Boy.
3:46 Dominic Sandbrook? So that was The Galtie Mountain Boy, written by Patsy O'Halloran and Christie Moore and delivered quite beautifully by a man we will be introducing in a few moments. And it's the story of a teenage volunteer who joins the Irish Republican cause in nineteen sixteen. He fights the British in the Irish War of Independence, but he's sentenced to death by his own former comrades, the Free Staters, in the Irish Civil War. And Tom, for me, that ticks every Irish ballad box. There's a lot of geography, there's a lot of stuff about freedom and flags, there are random names of folk heroes that would mean a lot to Irish listeners, but perhaps not to British ones, and dare I say, a general air of, is morkishness the right word? There speaks the voice of Dublin Castle. Yeah, exactly.
4:30 Dominic Sandbrook? You a fan of that, are you a fan of an Irish ballad?
4:32 Tom Holland? I love an Irish ballad and I especially love it because it's very convenient for our purposes, because two of the men mentioned in that ballad, Sean Hogan and Dan Breen, will feature in the dramatic story of the ambush at Sollohead Beg, which is the first engagement of the Irish War of Independence. And this is going to be the theme of our episode today. And just to give people a spoiler alert. Some of the characters mentioned, including the two that I've just named, were a bit less romantic, I think, than the song suggests. But for now, let's just remind everyone where we are because we are in Dublin. We are in the Royal Irish Academy, so that's the RIA.
5:14 Tom Holland? And we might be using the same letters in a different form later on in this story. Because we are telling the story of the Irish revolutionary struggle at the end of the First World War. And Dominic, we ended last time in December 1918. We tracked, however, over the two years since the Easter Rising in 1916. There'd been growing radicalisation. Sinn Féin had won a landslide majority in Ireland in the general election. And they had won this massive majority in Ireland on a ticket of building an independent Irish republic. And they had said that they would do that by whatever means were required.
5:50 Dominic Sandbrook? Now, much as I love listening to you, Tom, I think we should have an Irish voice. So we are joined once again by Irish National Treasure, Professor at University of Cois, Dublin, friend of the show, a man described by a listener to the last Irish Sues we did as a pound shop bono. It is Professor Paul Rouse.
6:08 Tom Holland? Well, Paul, to be fair, you didn't sing it, so.
6:10 Speaker 02 Yeah. Oh, yeah, I think there would be, the family members warned me in advance that singing would not be a, not be a wise thing to do. The pound shop bono line was seized on. I'm blessed with friends who don't really worry about the difference between insult and compliment.
6:24 Dominic Sandbrook? Very good.
6:25 Speaker 02 But they seized on the insult after the last time I appeared.
6:27 Dominic Sandbrook? Okay, so come on then, bono. We're in, we ended last time in December 1918 with the election. And Sinn Féin have won, but they're not going to take their seats in the House of Commons in their pledge to an Irish republic. So let's move to January 1919. And there's one day in particular which looms so large. It's the 21st of January because two things happen, two extraordinary events happen on the same day.
6:50 Speaker 02 Each of them in their own right would be remarkable. The fact that they happened on the same day makes it a truly singular day in Irish history. It wasn't planned to happen on the same day as you, as you will see. But the first thing is a meeting in the mansion house, right next door to us here at the academy is the mansion house. It's the official residence of the city mayor. And what happened in that room is a remarkable moment in the Irish national story.
7:18 Speaker 02 Twenty-seven of the seventy-three Sinn Féin MPs who had been elected to the House of Commons, all of them had said they weren't going to take their seats, but they convened in the Mansion House and established what was called Dáil Éireann, the Irish Parliament. It should be said that one of those who was not able to be present was Countess Markiewicz, who was then in Holloway Jail, and she was the first female to be elected as a Member of Parliament in the House of Commons, although, of course, she did not take her seat.
7:49 Tom Holland? So that's another count. Her husband is a Polish count, isn't he, or was he? But she's a very glamorous figure.
7:56 Speaker 02 She's a very glamorous figure, who was also, by the way, is mischaracterised, I think, a lot by history. She's one of those women who was central to the Irish Revolution over the years, but she really laboured. She was not somebody who was a leader who frittered around the margins. She did the dirty, hard organisational work, who anyone who's ever run any organisation knows it's hard to do this, and she is one of the group of women who was fundamental to this whole story.
8:22 Tom Holland? And ultimately, she will give away all her inherited wealth and die a poor woman.
8:27 Speaker 02 She died a poor woman. She died very young. She died in ill health, but deserves to be remembered as a significant historical figure. Now, this meeting in the Mansion House of these elected members, twenty-seven of them, was largely ceremonial in nature, but it saw the realisation of four foundational documents. The first is the Constitution of Dáil Éireann, as the Irish Parliament was called, and this was a kind of a short, but it was the basic underpinning of the state, and it's really interesting, but the cabinet that was formed had five departments: financial affairs, home affairs, foreign affairs, the President's and Defence, and it was based on the model of the British Cabinet system.
9:07 Tom Holland? But that kind of makes sense, because that's the model they're familiar with, I guess.
9:10 Speaker 02 Entirely, and they want people to sway from one to the other, to pretend that the other doesn't exist and to come to us. The second is a declaration of independence, which rejects seven hundred years of occupation, because the clock was still ticking at that stage, and it only got to just over seven hundred, and established an Irish republic. And that's a massive thing. It established an Irish republic. It said, "We're going to pretend that your state does not exist." And we are going to establish our own, we're going to graft it on. And this is what Griffith wanted to happen in the early 1900s. That's what he argued for.
9:43 Dominic Sandbrook? So it's kind of creating the republic by sheer force of will, almost.
9:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, making it real, making a practical thing, not just an aspirational thing, or not just words, but actually putting it in place. It had a declaration of independence, as I say, which was there, but there was also a message to the free nations of the world. And that was all about the Paris Peace Conference and it kind of channeled that Woodrow Wilson 14 points about self determination and and anti imperialism. And of course, the choice of French, the fact that that was published and spoken in English, Irish and French tells you the audience that that was was aimed at. And the final thing is a democratic programme, which is a kind of a very socially and economically leftist programme, certainly influenced by socialism and
10:28 Speaker 02 with that kind of idea of of what was happening in Russia in the background, it was pretty radical. And it made some people in the Dalte pretty uncomfortable, not least of whom was Kevin O'Higgins, a later minister in government who described it as largely poetry.
10:43 Dominic Sandbrook? And in due course, Countess Markovitz will become the Minister of Labour, won't she? And the second woman to become a European minister.
10:50 Speaker 02 Yes, and and the fact that it's seen as the fact that it's a shadow government is sometimes used to dismiss that fact. But again, I think it's important. But this was ultimately, in short, a revolutionary assembly.
11:02 Dominic Sandbrook? And then the amazing thing is that on the same day, in Tipperary, I think it is, there is an event that is often seen as the first armed clash of the war. And as you said, it's not meant to be, it's not, it's a coincidence. It's not designed that way. So tell us what happens at Solihedbeg and why it matters.
11:20 Speaker 02 So Tipperary is a county in the centre of Ireland and there is a town called Tipperary Town right in the heart of that county. On a cold, damp morning. In January nineteen nineteen, the twenty first of January, James McDonnell and Patrick O'Connell, who were two local policemen, were leading a horse and cart which were being driven by Patrick Flynn and Edward Godfrey. They were bringing jellic knight from Tipperary Town out to a quarry at Solihad Beg to blow stones for the construction work that was happening around the place. Now Tipperary was a famously rebellious county. Tipperary had been the home of the eighteen sixty seven rebellion and everything to do
12:02 Speaker 02 with Irish nationalism had a Tipperary strain to it, but Tipperary had not risen in nineteen sixteen and that caused deep pain to people such as Sean Tracy in particular, but also Dan Breen, Seamus Robinson and Sean Hogan. And they're among a group of eight volunteers, this newly militarising force, who are desperate for action because they believe that unless somebody is killed, there is no War of Independence beginning. They wish to kill somebody, they wish to start a war, they wish to shoot, and they use the opportunity of this jellic knight being moved to a quarry because they think they can get arms off whatever police are bringing, because the Irish police were armed in the countryside, not in Dublin city, but armed in the countryside.
12:46 Speaker 02 Take their arms, take the jellic knight, and you have both bomb-making potential and you have guns and ammunition. So the cart is going out of country lane, there was an attempt to slow it down with a bicycle, someone stopping with a puncture, fixing a puncture, it slows down and Tracy, Robinson, Hogan and Breen come out and Tracy at least shoots one of them and it's not, they had really poor arms in what they were doing, but Tracy is said to have danced and kissed his rifle after he shot one of the policemen who was left lying on the ground. Sean Hogan took off with the horse and cart with the jellic knight and they dispersed across the countryside. These are the first shots in the Irish War of Independence.
13:28 Dominic Sandbrook? And to be clear, the two policemen who are shot, so McDonnell and O'Connell, they are Irish Catholic policemen, they're not British, they are, they're part of a large number of Irish Catholic policemen who are working for the state at that point.
13:43 Speaker 02 Yes, Patrick O'Connell was a thirty years of age, was from Cork, lived locally, known locally, most likely known to the people who killed him. James McDonnell was from Bellmullet in County Mayo, he was in his fifties, but he was a widower with five youngest children. And an Irish speaker.
13:59 Dominic Sandbrook? Is there a sense this is a terrible thing, this is a terrible tragedy?
14:02 Speaker 02 Oh, there's an outcry against it.
14:03 Dominic Sandbrook? Right.
14:03 Speaker 02 The idea that Breen and Tracy and Robinson and Hogan would somehow be celebrated in the local area for what they did is not correct. There was a revulsion locally about what had happened. The view locally was that this was, these were well-liked policemen who were in the area and Breen and Tracy had to go on the run. And there's outrage in the papers, outrage from the pulpit. And even people in Dublin, people who are involved in the movement are, they don't like this.
14:32 Dominic Sandbrook? Right.
14:32 Tom Holland? Because Paul, you say that the men who do this want it to be a declaration of war. But reading about it and then the events that follow, it actually reminds me of the Wild West. It's like the kind of, it's the subject of a spaghetti western or something like that. Because, and it becomes even more so, doesn't it? Because in due course, the four men who have done the attack disperse, they go into hiding, they're on the run, being hunted down by lawmen. And then one of them gets captured and he gets put on a train to be taken off to trial and presumably ultimately to be hanged. And the other three stage a holdup. They get on the train, there's a massive shootout on the train and they managed to get Hogan free. They're all got blood spurting out of their arms and their
15:17 Tom Holland? chests and things. And then they take him off and they get a butcher's cleaver to hack through the handcuffs. And you could absolutely imagine Clint Eastwood starring in a film of this story.
15:28 Speaker 02 And it is a guerrilla war. The set piece war of 1916 is done. They know, they've learned, they're not going back into a building. This is a hedge war and it's an urban streets war. Now, in the mythology of the Irish Revolution, it's that all of this fighting happened in country lanes and on the sides of mountains and people melted off into the countryside and lived on the land and were fed by people and that. And that did happen. But it was also an urban guerrilla war as well, which spread to the cities, but not yet. 1919 in terms of the War of Independence is really quiet. But Breen and Tracy are at the heart of it and they're on the run immediately.
16:05 Dominic Sandbrook? And just on those men, we mentioned, Tom said, you know, they're Maybe not as romantic as we as the ballad makes them. I mean, these are quite, are these, these are hard men. These are men who like to fight.
16:15 Speaker 02 So Dan Breen was a hard, violent man who was utterly unrepentant about killing people. And you can see that in the interviews that were recorded with him, for example, in in in the nineteen sixties. And it was glorified in hi- his book, My Fight for Irish Freedom. There was a wanted poster for Breen.
16:33 Dominic Sandbrook? So he is very well west.
16:34 Speaker 02 Yeah, and it's it's a reward of one thousand pounds for anyone who who is, who hands him in. But um he's described on the wanted poster as a picture of him, kind of in, you know, relatively well dressed. But the picture on him says, describing of him as having a sulky bulldog appearance and looking like a blacksmith on his way home from work. Like, it's, it's, it's, it's kind of remarkable that people, when you put that on a poster.
17:02 Dominic Sandbrook? But Paul, you can, I I guess see why to the British authorities, um this does seem a law and order issue rather than the declaration of a war, right?
17:11 Speaker 02 And the fact that it was so slow to get going. If you look at what happened, the slow incremental rise in violence, particularly in the first half of nineteen nineteen. It got a little bit quicker later in nineteen nineteen. But what it really was, was assaults, they were looking, they didn't have rifles. They didn't have guns, they didn't have ammunition, they didn't have much bomb making equipment. So what you have are the volunteers raiding for arms, raiding houses for arms, raiding police stations for arms, trying to find guns wherever they can get them, organising boycotts, assaulting the police and loyalists and resisting arrest. So for the first swathe of the Irish War of Independence, the level of violence is is it's really small scale.
17:51 Dominic Sandbrook? So in nineteen nineteen, a lot of the story is about boycotts, isn't it? So you mentioned the importance of boycotts and it's boycotts particularly of people who are like these policemen, people who are in the Royal Irish Constabulary. And it's about not selling them, you wouldn't sell them milk, you wouldn't sell them eggs. You would basically, in in England, we would use the expression, you'd send them to Coventry. You'd basically sort of push them to the margins of life and make their life intolerable. And that works, doesn't it? I mean, people feel, the people who are still in the police feel. They can't understand it, but they're being pushed out and it's harder to recruit policemen and people start dropping out and whatnot.
18:24 Speaker 02 Yeah, so the numbers who are, who, people over time begin to leave the police at a fairly significant rate and that becomes, and this is really important for the story, as we'll tell it later on, but it's, it leads to recruitment from, from England of the black and tans who will become, and of the auxiliaries who become notorious in, in Irish history, but it, the fundamental place of the police in Irish society was destabilised through 1919, through that boycotting that you were talking about, but also when attacks on them, and it shouldn't be dismissed, I suppose, as well. I say the violence was low scale, but there were still 10 policemen shot.
19:01 Dominic Sandbrook? Right.
19:01 Speaker 02 Through the rest of 1919 and then by September, there are attacks and the soldiers are being shot. So there's a group of British soldiers on their way to a Methodist church.
19:12 Dominic Sandbrook? They're Welsh, aren't they?
19:13 Speaker 02 They're from Shropshire, the Shropshire Light Infantry. Yeah, and they're, they're go, they go to the church, uh, to Methodist service and they're ambushed by an IRA unit, um, led by Liam Lynch and George Power. There's about 30 attackers, but they have six guns between them. So, so the rest have big sticks. So the, it's said that what they were trying to do there, they were going to take the men's rifles, not shoot anyone, not kill anyone. They arrived in two cars, there was an exchange of, um, there was a conflict emerged.
19:45 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
19:45 Speaker 02 And one of the soldiers was shot and four were, were injured.
19:47 Dominic Sandbrook? So do you know what, I, I looked him up yesterday, um, and it reminded me of two things. So his name was Private William James and he was from Carmarthen. So actually, Tommy, you're right, some of them were Welsh. And he, that reminded me of two things. One, he just got out of a prisoner of war camp. He'd been held in a prisoner of war camp in Germany. And the second thing, he was only 20 years old. And almost all the people that we'll be talking about in this story are remarkably young.
20:08 Speaker 02 And we'll see that when it comes to, to the IRA and who's involved in, in the IRA on these things. And I think another point to make about what happened, uh, down in Fermoy with, with that incident is the fact that the local coroner's jury declined to record a verdict of murder because they said that they hadn't intended. To be killed, that they were just there to take the arms and that led to members of the British military coming in and wrecking the shops of some of the people who had served on that jury.
20:39 Tom Holland? Paul, can I just give a shout out to anyone who wants more detail on these incidents to the Irish History Podcast presented by Finn Dwyer, which I've been listening to in preparation for this. He has a huge series on the War of Independence and I highly recommend it.
20:54 Dominic Sandbrook? I can't believe Tom's recommending a rival podcast.
20:56 Tom Holland? It's a rival, it's a compliment.
20:57 Dominic Sandbrook? This is literally Tom's last appearance on the show, to be clear. Right, so let's move on into, well, let's look at the politics. So you mentioned the foundation of Dáil Éireann in the beginning of 1919 and the Shadow Government, I mean, they are really doing stuff and they're gaining legitimacy throughout the course of the year, aren't they? Because they're doing things like they've staffed the government, they're raising money, they are dispensing justice. So just give us a quick overview of what they're doing there.
21:25 Speaker 02 So what they actually try and do is to put into operation a state despite the fact that they are continually harassed, particularly in the summer of 1919 and then suppressed, just as the Irish Volunteers then renamed the Irish Republican Army, Tom, which gets you your IRA initials and Sinn Féin. So these are suppressed at that point. But so Deverera is back as president.
21:50 Tom Holland? That's an amazing story, isn't it? Because he's been sprung from Lincoln Jail by, among others, Michael Collins in person and it's an extraordinary story of how he gets, there's a single key that opens all the doors and he makes a copy of the key, sends it off on a design to people outside. They then make the key, send it in and there are kind of various attempts, they put it in a variety of cakes and finally Deverera gets out. Very hair-raising stuff and again in Finn Dwyer's podcast, excellent account of that.
22:17 Speaker 02 And you can see it and so I should say, by the way, if you're doing shout outs, the Royal Irish Academy here, if people are interested in Irish history, all of the main characters that we're spoken about here, short biographies of them are available on the Dictionary of Irish Biography, which is housed here at the Royal Irish Academy. It's free online and you get brilliant, brilliant descriptions of people's lives from Craig and Carson, which is done by Alvin Jackson onward. So really.
22:42 Dominic Sandbrook? And you'll be very modesty because you've written 99 of these yourself.
22:45 Speaker 02 I don't want to thank credit for the better ones, I have to say. But I have to say, there were brilliant ones by people like Ronan Fanning and Alvin Jackson, which are utterly superb as pieces of historical scholarship in their own right. But these people who are written about, Devalera and Collins and Griffiths and Owen MacNeil and Konstantin Markovich, they are head up ministries who are trying to do stuff. They have a secretary to a doll committee called Dermot O'Haggerty, who's the clerk of the doll as well, and they keep records and they organise cabinet meetings and they have exchanges. And they do actually do stuff around, they raise a loan, for example, of half a million pounds.
23:24 Tom Holland? And it's Collins who's doing that, isn't it?
23:26 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's Collins.
23:26 Tom Holland? Because he's got this background, he worked in the post office and then an accountancy office, so he's kind of good at this thing. So he's the finance minister, but he's also at the same time kind of in charge of intelligence, isn't he? And there's a brilliant description of this by Charles Townsend in his book, The Republic, that he's a finance minister with the unusual advantage of running a death squad.
23:48 Speaker 02 Which, yeah, and it's, there's a brilliant note actually in the margins where Collins, Collins was a really organised mind and really, really brilliant at administration. So he raised the money from the loan of 150,000 people, there were pilot schemes in fisheries and that, but he got exasperated when people weren't able to live up to the operations of these things and he cut loose. And Devalera has a great note in it where he says, "Michael, not everybody has the same structured mind as you do."
24:16 Tom Holland? Oh, very good.
24:16 Speaker 02 He was, he was really well organised. And so what you say there about the gun squad is important because this money was needed to fund the army and to run the pilot programmes in fisheries and land and housing. But there was an experienced policeman from the land war called Alan Bell. And Alan Bell was coming after this money and going after it and going after it. And Collins knew that he was going after it and Collins had a unit that had him shot when he was coming in on a tram to the centre of the city. So this is thing, so there's, I think the other thing worth noting on this is, yes, it's important what they did with land and tried to do a small bit of land distribution. Important, the local government stuff, but the key thing in this is the courts.
24:59 Speaker 02 They established a court service, which were four tiers, parish courts, minor crimes, district courts, and actually a Supreme Court, a two-member Supreme Court. And they issued fines in local areas, excluded people from being around the place, confiscated things like Poochine stills, which were making illicit whiskey, particularly in rural areas. And what this is, it's symbolic of the withdrawal of allegiance.
25:25 Tom Holland? And the delegitimizing of British.
25:28 Speaker 02 Enormously important.
25:29 Tom Holland? So there's this comment in the Daily Herald in London that refers to this invisible republic with its hidden courts and its prohibited volunteer troops, exists in the hearts of the men and women of Ireland and wields a moral authority, which all the tanks and machine guns of King George cannot command. And that's the key, isn't it? Because they can't hope to win a military victory. It's about persuading the Irish that this republic is real.
25:56 Speaker 02 It's real.
25:56 Tom Holland? But also persuading the British.
25:58 Speaker 02 Yeah.
25:58 Tom Holland? That they can't hope to win.
26:00 Dominic Sandbrook? I mean, you could argue that's the whole strategy. The whole strategy is to basically show the British that they can never win. Because they can't defeat the British by shooting them, but they can make the British lose heart in the whole enterprise.
26:11 Speaker 02 Exactly. And crucial to this as well is to show what's happening in Ireland in front of the world.
26:16 Dominic Sandbrook? So this takes us to the Paris Peace Conference, which you really think matters.
26:19 Speaker 02 Oh, it does. It matters because what isn't realized through it as much as what it was. Now, I didn't really understand at all in depth the symbolic importance of what was happening around the world to this idea. So there was a brilliant exhibition last year in the Irish Museum of Modern Art, led out by Dr Lisa Moore, among others, which brought in these artistic works from all across Eastern Europe, from Europe, from Poland and Ukraine and everywhere along that thing, to show all of those small nations that were establishing states in the years between 1917 and 1919. But every single one of them was being built. From broken empires.
27:05 Tom Holland? Yeah.
27:05 Speaker 02 They're from the Habsburgs, they're from the Russian Revolution.
27:08 Tom Holland? And that's why it's so important to situate this story of Ireland in the broader European context of the post-war world.
27:14 Speaker 02 But what makes the Irish story different than the Habsburgs and the Ottomans and the Russian post-empire states is that Ireland was looking for its independence from a state that had won the war, from an empire that was winning, that was now at the greatest extent of its power imaginable. And it went to Paris, it sent Sean T O Kelly, who I said had come in on the boat in December 1916 on the morning, he went there with his wife and wrote to Georges Clemenceau, looking for a seat at the table and couldn't get one, and went through Wilson and said, listen, we feature 14 points, get us a seat at the table, and it just doesn't happen.
27:57 Tom Holland? Because the implication for Britain, if Ireland leaves the United Kingdom, is that the United Kingdom, one of the victors in the war, will end up with a greater loss of territory than Germany, which has been defeated.
28:08 Dominic Sandbrook? And it's not just that, but one other thing, I mean, I think a massively important thing in the British minds is if we lose Ireland, then Egypt and India are next, because in all this period, if you look at the headlines in British newspapers, often Ireland is actually dwarfed by what's happening in Egypt and India, by risings there, and so Lord George and Co are thinking, if we concede on this, then India is next.
28:32 Tom Holland? 1919 is also the year of the Emirate Sommel.
28:34 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly, exactly.
28:35 Speaker 02 And America then becomes the focus, so Eamon De Valera goes to America in June 1919, Paris hasn't worked out, all the promises of Sinn Fein from the election that they would use Paris is now gone, so De Valera goes to America, he stays most of the time in New York's Waldorf Astoria, but he's basically on a mission to advance recognition for the new Irish Republic and to raise money. Fifty thousand people go to the great baseball stadium, Fenway Park, where the Boston Red Sox play, to hear him, he does a bond drive which raises 5.5 million dollars, but money was really the only real success out there because neither... Democrats, no Republicans, ultimately supported the Irish cause at the conventions
29:17 Speaker 02 that were held in the year because of course Irish America, as Irish America always is, was divided. There were personality disputes and power struggles and also a dispute over strategy while all the while there were local people advancing themselves. So De Valera goes there, raises some money, but really cannot drive the recognition from America to get the British to say, okay, we need to give these guys independence.
29:41 Dominic Sandbrook? And in terms of the personalities, does De Valera's absence in America enable Collins and other figures to attain a greater kind of leadership role?
29:49 Speaker 02 Yeah, while he's away, it's Collins and Griffith, but particularly Collins is growing in stature and importance. And of course, Collins straddles the two worlds in a way that De Valera now doesn't anymore. De Valera is much more on the, even though he had been out with a gun in 1916, that world is, he's now back in the politics side of things where Collins is absolutely straddles both sides of the movement.
30:13 Dominic Sandbrook? So with the failure to get a seat at the Paris Peace Talks, it's pretty obvious that if there's a struggle is going to be one, it's going to be one in Ireland.
30:19 Speaker 02 Yeah.
30:19 Dominic Sandbrook? And there's obviously the propaganda, but there's also the Labour movement, which plays a big part in this. There are a series of strikes, strikes and boycotts, I guess.
30:27 Tom Holland? Well, there's the Limerick Soviet, isn't there?
30:28 Speaker 02 There is, which is, and it is kind of a term which is bandied around a little bit. The key, the key thing is the strikes that took place at various stages, four key strikes, I think, one in support of conscription that we've talked about already in 1919, a general strike in Limerick against the imposition of a special military area where permits needed to come in and out. And the third one, a two day strike in support of political prisoners and railway munitions strike, which ran from May to December 1920, an enormous strike. And then you have Dublin Dockers, who refused to handle war material. So all of this had a huge impact later on the British ability to combat the IRA. I should say, by
31:11 Speaker 02 the way, that there was the prospect of recognition from the USSR for the New Irish Republic. And it was, what ended up actually happening was the dog got. Kind of recognition from the International Socialist Conference in Bern in February 1919. But it didn't move quick enough to secure the agreement with Moscow and left it too late. And instead, it was Britain who actually smoothed it over its relationships with Moscow, which stopped that recognition coming in the end.
31:41 Tom Holland? Pathetic, Albion.
31:43 Dominic Sandbrook? So before we get to the break, you mentioned the IRA a couple of moments ago. So the IRA, that's the term now being used for the Irish volunteers.
31:51 Tom Holland? But it never becomes official, does it?
31:53 Speaker 02 It's a term that's used always by 1920, it is the term, the Irish Republican Army that's pushed out.
31:59 Dominic Sandbrook? The thing that struck me reading about this was, I mean, this is a slightly, might seem an odd and indeed heretical comparison to Irish nationalists, but how similar the people who joined the IRA are to people who join paramilitary groups, let's say in Eastern Europe, or indeed the very famous one, the Freikorps, the German paramilitary group, is fighting in the Baltic at the same time. So men who've either spent a couple of years in the war or perhaps have just missed it and are eager for action and excited, there's a kind of cult of manliness and heroism and bravado. Is that a fair comparison, do you think?
32:32 Speaker 02 So there are a lot of different groups of people who were involved in the IRA and its ancillary organisation, incumbent among men and women who were involved in the War of Independence. And they were dismissed at the time and condemned as a rabble, as corner boys and gurriers.
32:48 Tom Holland? Gurriers.
32:49 Speaker 02 Gurriers is just this phrase that's used to describe the rabble of every town and city with a few intellectuals thrown in at the top of the movement. That was the idea of it. And it really missed the point of what was happening. This is a huge generational shift. And I agree, I can see the parallels with those organisations that you're talking about. These are men and women in their late teens and in their twenties, most of whom had been born in the 1890s. They were, in very many cases, they were literate, they were educated, they were skilled. They had a group of people who were denied emigration, which was the great Irish safety shoot. Since the famine was to go to New York, to go to London, to go ultimately to Australia and later times in South Africa and Argentina, actually, a huge focus of Irish things.
33:32 Speaker 02 But that was denied them during the war, so they stayed around. But they span people from farm labourers and farm workers up to medical students. Again, it's age often that binds them together. Manny had been through a Christian Brothers School education. We should actually have spoken about this, the importance of radicalisation and how history is perceived and how it was taught in various places. There was a brilliant Methodist conference in Belfast after the Rising where this guy turned up. He was a Commissioner of Education and he says he worried about Ireland because there didn't seem to be enough history to go around to solve or to base every cause on it. In other words, there was a shared history here which people wished to pull apart. And the nature of the teaching of history was a contested space here.
34:16 Speaker 02 So it was said in the Commission on the Rebellion and repeatedly by people like Mahaffey, who is the Provost of Trinity, and by British Castle officials, that a huge problem here was the history of rebellion and of rejection of Englishness and of Britishness that was taught in the Irish National Schools and then by its Christian brothers. So that's lurking there in the background. There are the ballads that we started with. Now, that wasn't a ballad at the time, but before that you had stuff like A Nation Once Again. It's A Nation Once Again that's sung when Markovich comes back.
34:48 Tom Holland? And Paul, can I bowl you up a half volley, to use an English phrase? The sport, isn't there?
34:53 Speaker 02 There is. We'll probably, when in the third episode, talk a little bit about sport when it comes to Bloody Sunday and what happened in Croke Park on Bloody Sunday. But what it is, is an Irish imitation of the English Sporting Revolution. The English Sporting Revolution, which saw the construction, people have always played sport. We know that across every society. And in the English Sporting Revolution, what you have is the formalisation of games and they're squeezing them into a modern playing field. And you get the spread of cricket, most popular field game in Ireland in 1870s and in the 1880s.
35:25 Tom Holland? We'll be doing an episode on exactly this.
35:26 Speaker 02 Rugby and soccer, rugby and soccer as well spread. But the G A turned that revolution on its head. And by founding the Gaelic Athletic Association for the Cultivation and Preservation of the Irish National Pastimes and founded a game, invented a game which it called Gaelic Football in an opposition. And reimagined the game of hurling for a modern era. I should say before I finish on the G A, why the G A matters in this context of revolution is there are people like Michael Collins and Harry Boland and J J Walsh, who learn their administrative skills and come to prominence and confidence through leadership within the Gaelic Athletic Association and it gives them a status which they can then use elsewhere.
36:04 Tom Holland? And Paul, one other thing before we come to the break, you talked about men and women.
36:09 Speaker 02 Yes.
36:10 Tom Holland? And to pursue Dominic's analogy with the situation in Germany, Rosa Luxemburg, an example of the way that women in the aftermath of the war are stepping forwards and taking a much more prominent role in revolutionary movements than they would ever have done before the war. And the same thing is happening in Ireland, isn't it? We've talked about Countess Marchewitz, but there are others as well.
36:30 Speaker 02 Okay, so women matter in the Irish War of Independence in multiple ways. They are, it is true, the victims of violence at various stages from both sides. You have women who get their head shaved and are also the victim of rapes during this period. There is degrading treatment on both sides, it should be said. There are women who are involved in the IRA. It is so important to remember when you talk about the IRA, the majority of members of the IRA didn't fire a gun. They were there for logistical support, they may be involved in espionage, they may be involved in the trafficking of guns, in the provision of intelligence, all the ancillary supports that are involved in that. And women did all of those things during those years.
37:12 Speaker 02 And they were also fundamental to propaganda. So you see people like Mary and Muriel McSweeney, whose brother in Mary's case and whose husband in Muriel's case, he died on hunger strike while he was Lord Mayor of Cork. So they went to the United States after the death of Terence McSweeney and they went on a fundraising campaign through United States. Mary spoke to 300 meetings in 58 cities. And again, the most recent biography of her, or the biography of her written by Leanne Lane, does this brilliantly as a series of, she comes on from people, after people like Rosamund Jacob, who are all women who are central
37:52 Speaker 02 to this world of kind of the construction of a nationalism which goes way beyond just those boys who are in their late teens and early twenties.
38:03 Dominic Sandbrook? All right, well, let's get back to the narrative. We're still in 1919. So as we've heard, the Doyle is raising money, the IRA recruiting all these young men. There are women in the organisation, the propaganda making converts, the strikes have gained momentum. But so far, if you've been through the fighting on the Western Front, this does not look like an all-out war by any means. And that's all going to change when we get through into 1920 and the death toll begins to mount. So we will do that side of the story after the break.
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39:14 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.
39:26 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 realises, or rather, everybody else realises, that there is a vast continent out there. And it is, of course, the Americas. So 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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41:07 Tom Holland? Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. We opened with a misty-eyed and, in the opinion of Dominic, mawkish ballad about freedom fighters on the run. But actually, Paul, so far in this episode, we've had very little fighting. It's basically been Wild West shootouts. So how does the pay start to pick up? When do the British start to realise they are in a war?
41:27 Speaker 02 By the time you get to early 1920, the war is beginning to get much more fierce. So the IRA go after police barracks and by Easter 1920, there are 350 police barracks around the country which have been destroyed and the RIC, the Irish Police, basically have to withdraw to just the larger towns. On top of that, there was about 30 courthouses which are demolished, destroyed, and local taxation offices too, and they kept that from the rest of us. So this is the retreat of the British state.
42:01 Dominic Sandbrook? But here's a question. Tom said, when does the British ever, ever, you know, when does it strike them that it's a war? And as we'll find out, there are people all through this story who basically dispute that it is a war. There are kind of British hardliners, diehards, who say, we're facing a murder campaign. This is a criminality pure and simple and these people are, you know, this is what we're facing. It's a law and order issue.
42:22 Tom Holland? Just to follow up on that, British power is being projected through the police force or through the army?
42:26 Speaker 02 Through the police force, but then the police force proves unable to do it and the army is around the place as well, always. So it's, I wouldn't separate one from the other. I think, I think you look at it all in the round as crown forces.
42:38 Dominic Sandbrook? But it's seen as a policing issue to begin with.
42:40 Speaker 02 It's seen as a policing issue and that's the problem as well, because what happens with the policing issue is that the police are unable to cope. As you mentioned earlier, Dominic, they are leaving the organisation. There are about fifty policemen a week leaving by the summer of nineteen twenty. You need to get recruitment somewhere. So what they do is they recruit unemployed soldiers from Britain. And they do that at a rate about a hundred a week until June nineteen twenty. And these new soldiers, or these new policemen, wear distinctive khaki and green, dark green uniforms, and they become famous in Irish history as the Black and Tans. And this is one of the terms that is used for this War of Independence is the Tan War, because in the popular mind, it's remembered some of
43:22 Speaker 02 the things that they did. They are joined also in the summer of nineteen twenty by another crucial group who are involved in, again, in policing, called the Auxiliaries. And these are mainly former officers within the British Army. And between both of those forces, you're looking at possibly around ten thousand people, and they are famous within Irish history, and in reality, from the reports at the time, for their brutality, for their drunkenness, and for the unrestrained violence, which characterised some of their behaviour in some places.
43:52 Dominic Sandbrook? So here the parallel, I would say, is again with what's happening in Eastern Europe, where you have large numbers of ex-servicemen joining paramilitary groups, basically, often because they're unemployed, because there's been a massive economic downturn at the end of the First World War. They need a job, they want regular pay, they like having a uniform, they like carrying a gun. But also, I mean, this is a thing that I think is always underappreciated in all these stories. For a lot of these men, it's fun. It's, it gives them a sense of, I mean, rather like joining any paramilitary group. It gives you a sense of brotherhood and belonging and excitement and all of these kinds of things.
44:23 Speaker 02 And they say this, they say this in interviews, which were recorded later in the sixties for various television documentaries, where, for example, there was one who was on his way to join the French Legion in Early nineteen twenty for a really small sum of money and then he goes, oh, the pay here is good, I'm going to join this, it'll put me into fellowship again. That world which he had lived in, in the army for years is now recreated in a different context in, in, in Ireland. Now, you're right in what you said earlier, Tom, this is not the battlefields of the Somme or Verdun, this is the complete opposite and it drives people crazy that they do not know where the enemy is coming from, that they're coming from Hedges, they
45:06 Speaker 02 melt from the population, they come from it, they kill and they go back into it.
45:11 Tom Holland? And is this a new kind of warfare?
45:12 Speaker 02 In the Irish context, yes, it is. It is a new kind of warfare. It is seen and it is seen as kind of a prototype guerrilla warfare, which is then taken on in different countries afterwards. I, I, I'm not enough of a military historian to, to say that this is some sort of a pioneering way of.
45:29 Tom Holland? But the way in which it's kind of joined in with the ballads and everything else that we've been talking about, there is a sense, isn't there, that the British are confronting a form of combat that no militarized army has, has faced before. And this in part must be why they struggle to get a handle on a strategy for coping with it, because no army has had to deal with something like this.
45:51 Speaker 02 Yes, but it's more than that as well. They are singularly failed by the quality of the leadership in Dublin Castle and in the viceroy. So Lord French was the Field Marshal at the time. Now, he wasn't helped by the fact that his sister Charlotte Despard was actually in full swing with the republican movement. He failed to take the republicans seriously until it was too late and he was shot in December nineteen twenty, or shot at in December nineteen twenty and, and, and almost killed. But you had people like Ian MacPherson and Edward Scott and people like that who were just overwhelmed by the nature of their task, so much so that. The head of the British Civil Service, Sir Warren Fisher, was sent to Dublin Castle to have a look at how the castle was run, and he wrote a report which is savage on
46:36 Speaker 02 the nature of the castle. He said it was almost woodenly stupid in how it did, how it conducted its affairs. So you have a situation whereby you have a creaking administration, then you don't have a unified military command because the police and the army are separate and they, it's not quite clear. And then you have at the top of this, a government who does not know what to do.
46:57 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
46:58 Speaker 02 And they oscillate between, oh, we'll allow for reprisals if someone's killed in an area, but we're not going to go down the route of absolutely going after everybody here and razing the place. So it gets caught in a swinging boat ways.
47:12 Dominic Sandbrook? So this is one thing that strikes me, that if you're criticizing the British strategy, the British are, either, either you don't do any reprisals, I would say, and you try to kill with kindness, or you're sort of, you know, the Russians in Chechnya, and you just go in and say, listen, we're just going to kill as many people as it takes, we'll get this done, and we have far more force than you do. And actually, the British completely fall between those two stools. They're never going to go for the sort of utterly brutal, raise everything to the ground.
47:39 Speaker 02 They can't, Dominic, they can't.
47:40 Dominic Sandbrook? They don't have the legitimacy, they don't have the support at home, you know, they're inhibited, I think, from doing it even if they wanted to.
47:45 Speaker 02 They can't do it with America apart from anything else.
47:48 Dominic Sandbrook? Right.
47:49 Speaker 02 And they can't do it because of British public opinion.
47:51 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly.
47:52 Speaker 02 Because there's enough people in Britain who are appalled at what's going on.
47:55 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
47:56 Speaker 02 The Labour Party sends over delegations, The Manchester Guardian is filled, filled with articles of people opposing what's happening.
48:02 Dominic Sandbrook? But they're still doing enough reprisals to turn opinion against them in Ireland.
48:07 Speaker 02 And really, kind of localized, brutal acts, the destruction of Cork, the sackening of Balbriggan, various other places, Boyle in County Roscommon, Le Hinch in County Clare, the towns of Trilly and Listowel and Kerry. You get these, you get these havoc wrought by the Black and Tans or the Auxiliaries when they arrive in.
48:29 Dominic Sandbrook? There's a magnificent comment by Sir Neville McCready, who gets appointed Supreme Military Commander in Ireland in Early nineteen twenty and he is comically pessimistic. He the whole way through this campaign, he's kind of saying it's all awful. And he's he says, whatever we do, we are we are sure to be wrong. And I mean, he's right.
48:50 Speaker 02 But the world had changed, like their world had changed.
48:54 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
48:54 Speaker 02 And the British state was also incredibly sick of war and it was in financial turmoil as well. And it was right really clear that if you want to keep a really major army in the field here, it's going to cost you a lot of money that you don't necessarily want to spend. And all the while, there there's no obvious political solution.
49:14 Dominic Sandbrook? And also, there's there are, as Dominic said, colonial situations in Egypt and in India, which may actually be prioritized.
49:21 Speaker 02 Yes, and you can't be seen to lose Ireland significantly while those situations are unraveling or unless you get to a certain to a certain point with them. They're in the horns of a dilemma, they don't know what to do. Their legitimacy has been utterly destroyed in large sections of the country.
49:38 Dominic Sandbrook? So let's go through to the summer of nineteen twenty. We started with that that mention of I joined the flying column in nineteen sixteen. You couldn't have joined a flying column then because they didn't have them. But they do have them from summer nineteen twenty. Why do the flying columns matter? Why do they change things?
49:53 Speaker 02 So of course, the great thing about ballads are that they don't have to be slavish to history. They create an atmosphere and an idea.
50:00 Dominic Sandbrook? We create an atmosphere, but we're also slavish to history, which is why podcasts are better than ballads. So the IRA are changing their tactics. Is that what they're doing?
50:07 Speaker 02 Yes, they are changing their tactics and they go on the run and they're getting more arms. Their arms have been run in from around America. They tried to get Tommy guns from America, which come across through Liverpool. The IRA in England and in Scotland are sending arms over and there's money coming through. So there's a little bit more there. The army is its intelligence is much better than it was previously. Unrun by Michael Collins and Intel War, which was really, really important. He managed to get four junior members of the detectives in Dublin Castle, basically the turn notably Ned Broy and David Nelligan, and they gave him. Names and inspiration and disintelligence were always vital because there were women in this as well.
50:51 Dominic Sandbrook? And there were typists, aren't there?
50:52 Speaker 02 Yeah, there are typists and there's people who work in Dublin Castle more generally and there are typists in the GPO Nancy O'Brien, who is a cousin of Collins and people who work on the trains are passing information. And a special unit is set up in Dublin in mid 1919 in which they killed various people. And that really is flourishing through the 1920s. And this is an army which is developing its power. It runs flying columns around the place. Now, it has to be said that it was very localized, the violence, where there were some counties where it was extremely potent and successful and other counties where there was no real action at all during these years.
51:32 Dominic Sandbrook? And is that just because the movement is a kind of bottom up movement rather than top down?
51:37 Speaker 02 Yes, it's impossible. Dublin does not run what's happening in the IRA around the country, what the IRA does locally. There is communication and there are weapons flows, but broadly speaking, it's up to local commandants to run them. And that's not a straightforward operation.
51:53 Dominic Sandbrook? So talking about the IRA and its activities on the ground brings us to probably the single most controversial question of this whole subject. This is the issue of whether the violence is sectarian. And I know probably the most contentious book ever written about Irish history by Peter Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies. He published this groundbreaking book, it's got a lot of criticism, in which he said, "This is an aspect of the fighting that has been undervalued and kind of erased, which is there's a lot of sectarian violence and Protestants are the victims of it in some areas." Of course, there's an awful lot of, we should say, there's an awful lot of sectarian violence, undoubtedly in the North, in which, you know, both sides are carrying it out by Catholics are predominantly the victims. But just on the IRA and its violence, do you think there's a sectarian edge to it?
52:39 Speaker 02 I don't think you can make the point that religion. Is central to Irish identity and to broader identities a hundred years ago. I don't think you can make that point and then pretend that there is no sectarian element to what happens in the Irish War of Independence. I am not for a minute saying it was a sectarian war and I wouldn't want that to be mischaracterised. But to imagine that there were not people in the IRA who were sectarian, who disliked Protestants intensely, who were excluded from land ownership or from positions of power and wealth, who had not, who had inherited a history in which their people and their religion had been stripped of the land, as against others who won't.
53:21 Speaker 02 I think it is a denial of reality to imagine that there is no sectarian element in it. I think the question is, and it has to be posed on an individual basis, to what extent somebody was motivated by sectarianism or by other, by other impulses in causing them both to join the IRA and then to kill. You'll notice in a lot of Irish ballots, it's all about dying for Ireland. Nobody really wants to talk about killing for Ireland, but killing, killing is massive in its impact on the lives, obviously of the people who also do the killing. And it's an extremely difficult conversation for people to have. And Peter Hart, so I was on a train to Belfast.
54:03 Speaker 02 It's 20 years ago now, more or less, and I ended up talking to somebody across from me in the time when people used to talk to each other on trains before phones really got going. And I had this great chat with this Canadian bloke and after about half an hour, really because I'm obviously not the greatest detective of all time, I realised it was Peter Hart. And we're going to a conference in Belfast, which I was talking at as well. And in the way of these things, he was a really, really nice fellow. We went for a pint on the way to the conference, which Of course you did. Saw him to blow. Belfast at lunchtime is most enjoyable. And we walk around the corner into the, into the conference and there's people protesting
54:47 Speaker 02 about him outside. They've set up a table, they're handing out material against him and his book and his reading of history. And so they view the work as being a scurrilous assault on the legacy of the IRA, particularly in Cork. So what Peter Hart did was he wrote a study of the IRA in Cork during the War of Independence. And It's a brilliant book in large measure. It is, it gives a study of the so of social class. It gives a statistical basis around the violence and everything around really, really formidable, original piece of scholarship. The two controversial parts of it, largely speaking, are a Kilmeikle ambush, which was a major ambush run by a man called Tom Barry.
55:32 Tom Holland? And we'll come to in the next episode.
55:33 Speaker 02 We will come to Tom Barry. And so Tom Barry. And the second part of it is the murders of of thirteen Protestants in the Banden Valley after the truce. And Peter Hart charted all of those. And he did so, I think the mistakes he made in them, and he did make mistakes in them, and they are significant and serious mistakes in that he, he, his footnoting, first of all, of interviews was inadequate. And that left the door open. And we can pass that off as the fallibility of historical scholarship, which we are all prone to, and there's to to imagine that we, any of us escape from that is, is, is not right.
56:17 Speaker 02 The sense was that, that Peter Hart had kind of used interviews in a way, however, that were not accurate and that he had invented interviews with people who were dead. Now, I think that's subsequently been proven not to be the case, but that argument still continues. The second point is a much more important point. And that is the point that he used the lang, he used language to describe what happened in West Cork or in, in, and in the Banden Valley in a really loose way, in a way to be provocative, not almost. He used language around ethnic cleansing in some of the stuff that he wrote and stuff like that. And it was very much of the time of the Balkans and Rwanda. And you can see how this happened.
56:59 Speaker 02 And it is also the work of a historian who's trying to make his name in a field. And you can see it when you do a PhD and you turn it into a book, that you can get lured into over, into a use of language. And he got stuff entirely wrong, in my view. And he did, not entirely, but he significantly walked back some of that language.
57:20 Tom Holland? Could I, I mean, just going back to, to, to the war itself, could I frame the question a slightly different way, which is to ask?
57:28 Dominic Sandbrook? The ideal that dates from Napoleonic period of Protestants and Catholics as part of a single island, which of course is expressed in the Tricola, the green and the orange are both there, is that starting to fade over already in 1920?
57:45 Speaker 02 Through the 19th century, the identification of Irish nationalism with Catholicism was something that gathered momentum through that century. It was given a huge amount of momentum by Daniel O'Connell and his campaigns in the 1820s and onwards. The identification, the growth of power in the Catholic Church and the kind of deal around education and health that they did with the British government to allow them a pastoral role and much more is vital in all of this. And the increasing identification of Irishness with Catholicism was well underway by the time there was a revolution in 1916. And you can see that in the poetry that was written and in the beliefs of other things. But there is also
58:27 Speaker 02 a strand of republicanism which utterly rejects the Catholic Church and believes in secularism.
58:32 Dominic Sandbrook? And is that starting to go into shade in this period?
58:35 Speaker 02 It is well into shade at that period, as the nationalist movement expanded, particularly before 1919.
58:41 Dominic Sandbrook? Right. So just as we move towards the end of the episode, let's remind ourselves that we are in 1920. The British have been flailing around, they've got a divided command, they don't really have a clear strategy or clear instructions from London, where David Lloyd George is still leading this coalition, this wartime coalition that he has managed to perpetuate after the end of the war, which is reliant on the Tories in particular, and they of course are very close to the Ulster Unionists. So the British finally pass the Government of Ireland Act, and they hope this is going to somehow magically fix the whole issue. And the key thing here is that you're going to have two new Home Rule Parliaments,
59:23 Dominic Sandbrook? one in Dublin and one in Belfast. And this is massively important because this is what effectively establishes Northern Ireland, which is going to be six counties, three of which, well, two and a half of which are overwhelmingly Catholic.
59:40 Speaker 02 So if you have six counties... Ulster was historically a nine-county province, but the number of Catholics in the nine counties in the 1911 census was about forty-three percent, which was a little bit close to the fifty percent rule, which would have left things tricky for the future Northern Ireland. If you went with six counties, you had a thirty-four percent Catholic population, which was still seen as a big enough area to be viable. But there was enough of a majority basis, a present majority on which to do it. So that was chosen. But what this meant, and this is the deep irony of all of this, is that the one thing that Ulster unionism had been founded on initially was the rejection of the idea of home rule,
1:00:22 Speaker 02 any home rule. It wanted only to be ruled from London. And now they're left with the situation whereby they must take, as they see it, their own parliament on a permanent basis to keep them out of an all-Ireland, thirty-two-county home-rule parliament.
1:00:40 Dominic Sandbrook? Right.
1:00:41 Speaker 02 But they gladly take this, gladly take it, and in the context of the situation. And you're left then, on the other hand, with a twenty-six-county home-rule plan. The Government of Ireland Act are reheating of the 1914 Government of Ireland Act, which is nowhere near enough for Sinn Féin.
1:00:59 Dominic Sandbrook? Right. So this is not going to fix it at all. I mean, it might fix it in the North while leaving a massive Catholic minority, but in the remainder of Ireland, the Government of Ireland Act is kind of irrelevant?
1:01:09 Speaker 02 Oh, it's entirely irrelevant.
1:01:11 Dominic Sandbrook? Right. So we've reached the autumn of 1920. The conflict's been going on for almost two years. You know, we began with a misty-eyed ballad, but there's a real edge to the story now. You've described the reprisals of the black and tans and the exhilarers, houses being burned down, families being driven from their homes and so on. And now we're going to come to the 21st of November, 1920, the most controversial day of the entire conflict, the game at Croke Park between the Dublin and Tipperary Gaelic football teams. And that day will go down in history as Bloody Sunday. And Tom, we will be moving now to Croke Park for the next part of the story. And can anybody, is there any way
1:01:52 Dominic Sandbrook? that people desperate to hear that episode with Paul, is there any way they can do that?
1:01:57 Tom Holland? Well, Dominic, it will stun you, it will stun Paul, and it will stun all our listeners to learn that there is, because members of the Rest is History Club can hear that episode right now by signing up to therestishistory.com.
1:02:10 Dominic Sandbrook? That's brilliant.
1:02:11 Tom Holland? And that is a website that no one has ever heard before. therestishistory.com. Go there and you can hear all about the most notorious episode in the entire history of the Irish Revolution. For everyone else, people who don't want to do that, we will be back on Monday and we will see you then. Bye bye.
1:02:31 Dominic Sandbrook? Thanks so much, Paul. Bye bye.
1:02:32 Speaker 02 Goodbye.
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