Jeffrey Hopkins

EDUC 657
Final Mini-Unit: Rationale
The Causes of the Irish War of Independence

On its surface, the process by which southern Ireland achieved Home

Rule (control over local affairs), seems like a historical blip. Within the
history of Europe, especially during the first quarter of the 20th century,
Irelands drama can easily be seen as peripheral. In fact, Roger B. Beck et
al.s textbook, World History: Patterns of Interaction, which is used for the
9th grade world history course at the school where I student taught this
year, does just that. In three paragraphs under the heading Rebellion and
Division, the authors cover everything from the Easter Rising in 1916an
event where rebels took hold of the main post office in Dublin and declared
Ireland a free republicto the eventual Home Rule agreement. As would be
expected with such elision, certain nuance is lost. In its place is a quick run
down of the key events, with cause-and-effect from one to another heavily
implied. For example, they write, British troops put down the Easter Rising
and executed its leaders. Their fate, however, aroused wider popular
support for the nationalist movement (Beck et al, 2005, 755). A quick jump
to the next paragraph: After World War I, the Irish nationalists won a
victory in the elections for the British Parliament, and subsequently,
Formed an underground Irish government and declared themselves
independent (Beck et al, 2005, 755). All of which leads to fighting that
culminates in 1921 when, Britain divided Ireland and granted home rule,
i.e., control lover local affairs, To southern Ireland. (Beck et al, 2005,

Jeffrey Hopkins
EDUC 657
Final Mini-Unit: Rationale
755). The implication is that one thing lead to another: the Irish people
were so inspired by the Rising, and how it was snuffed out, that a majority
voted to end British control, and a subset of that majority mobilized to form
a military that could enforce that decision. This, in turn, led to southern
Ireland achieving autonomy in 1921.
The reality though is much trickier. While the Easter Rising and the
execution of its leaders certainly played a role, they are not often presented
as the sole causes by scholars. Rather, they share that distinction with two
others: how the Easter Rising tapped into the legacy of Irish independence
movements and efforts to conscript Irish volunteers into the British army
towards the end of World War I (Leeson, 2011). Beck et al. try to give
credence to the first of these two, but their overview of the centuries-long
tension around British rule in Ireland only spans parts of two pages, and is
unsurprisingly cursory as a result. Meanwhile the second, conscription,
earns no mention at all. By bringing in primary documents that speak to
role of each in Irish life in the years before southern Ireland was granted
Home Rule in 1921 and supplement the textbook as part of an OUT lesson, I
hope to give students a more comprehensive understanding of the its
causes.
Of course, my desire to teach a more comprehensive lesson on the
subject raises a question: why is doing so valuable? I have been critical of
how Beck et al. have shaped their content on Irish history, but I do
understand the impulse. Their book has the goal of covering everything

Jeffrey Hopkins
EDUC 657
Final Mini-Unit: Rationale
from Human Origins in Africa to the modern day. To state the obvious,
that leaves a whole lot to cover; I can understand them not having time to
explain everything in-depth. That said, I think the textbook misses an
opportunity by offering such a superficial look at Irish history. As Robert
Cremins points out, the upheavals in Ireland very much reflected the tenor
of times in Europe due to World War I. Its not possible to understand the
Easter Rising without frequent reference to the Great War, he writes,
They form a historical double helix (Cremins, 2014, 1). But more than
being an interesting lens through which to view a global conflict, the Irish
War presaged the kind of conflicts that would arise in the postcolonial age.
For example, in kicking of their chapter, The Indian Subcontinent Achieves
Freedom, Beck et al. write that after World War II, The people of
colonized regions continued to press even harder for their freedom. All of
this led to independence for one of the largest and most populous colonies
in the world: British-held India (Beck et al., 2005, 997). The parallels may
not perfect, but they are most certainly there. As a result, how southern
Ireland gained Home Rule can be a handy bridge lesson between a unit (or,
more likely, units) on the Europe-focused conflicts of first half of the 20th
century and units on the more global conflicts of that centurys second half.
While that probably would be a slightly incoherent movement in terms of
timegoing from 1946 to 1916 to the 1948it would be a very smooth one
thematically.

Jeffrey Hopkins
EDUC 657
Final Mini-Unit: Rationale
Even more importantly, it can be used to explain, in miniature, how
social change occurs, one that would run counter to students expectations.
This lesson, like the textbook excerpts I have used, is designed for a 9th
grade world history course, and it is easy to imagine the students within it
having a simplistic sense of how social movements achieve success. This is
largely due to the fact these students will view the Irish campaign for
autonomy through the schemas they have developed via American events
like the Civil Rights Movement. While these types of events are not
intrinsically unrepresentative, the historiographies around them can be,
presenting them as purely moral struggles. Ta-Nehisi Coates, writing about
how the non-violent approach of Martin Luther King, Jr. were often invoked
to criticize protestors in Ferguson, notes this tendency. What clearly
cannot be said is that violence and nonviolence are tools, and that violence
like nonviolencesometimes works, he writes. Violence, lingering on
the outside, often backed nonviolence during the civil-rights movement
(Coates, 2014, 1).
Beck et al. frame southern Ireland achieving autonomy in a way that
similarly reduces its complexities to a question of simplistic morality. For
students like the ones I taught this year, who, excepting those who are IrishAmerican, have little concept of Irish history, the narrative presented is a
straightforward one: the Irish tried to assert their autonomy with the Easter
Rising and in response the Irish people were galvanized to fight for their
independence, which eventually led to Britain granting Home Rule. After

Jeffrey Hopkins
EDUC 657
Final Mini-Unit: Rationale
all, it is only natural that the executions of those trying to lead a peoples
revolution would increase the peoples desire to fight off those oppressing
them.
On top of all that, Beck et al.s description completely excludes the
violent nature of the Easter Rising. As its leaders asserted in the Risings
manifesto The Proclamation of the Irish Republic, they were not stating
their case peacefully. Rather, they said, Asserting it in arms in the face of
the world, we hereby proclaim the Irish Republic as a Sovereign
Independent State (Clarke et al., 1924). The absence of such details from
Beck et al.s account of the Rising makes it likely students will superficially
see the Easter Rising, and the war that followed soon after, as being the
result of moral tensions alone, exactly the kind of understanding Coates
laments when it comes to the Civil Rights Movement.
The ultimate end with this lesson then is to move students, by doing
OUT lesson, from this kind of understanding to one where they recognize
that Irish war was the result of certain factors coming together, the Easter
Rising and the British reaction to it just being two of them. In the process,
they will move from social movements as moral struggles where the
righteousness of the oppressed naturally wins out to seeing them as the
outcomes of particular decisions and policies. With every type of assessment
I do then, the goal will be to see how far students are moving along this
path. How this will actual translate into my unit is that I will be sure to use

Jeffrey Hopkins
EDUC 657
Final Mini-Unit: Rationale
my final writing prompt, small and large group discussions, and sets of
questions attached to the documents as means of assessing their progress.
Changing students views on social progress will not just be valuable
on its own merits. It will also help achieve an equally valuable learning goal:
it will further students understanding of history as a discipline of dynamic
debate instead of static facts. As Grant Wiggins writes, The aim of
curriculum is to awaken, not stock or train the mind. That goal makes the
basic unit of a modern curriculum the question (Wiggins, 1989, 46).
Getting students to a place where they see the success of social movements
not as a matter of morality will help acclimate them to seeing questions as
the basic unit of historical study. No longer will they view learning these
events as a matter of determining who was on the right and wrong side of
history. Rather, they will look to understand just what exactly the confluence
of events was that allowed social movements to overcome the inertia of
their times. My learning goal then will less be students coming to any one
conclusion about what caused southern Ireland to gain Home Rule in 1921.
Instead, it will be them gaining an appreciation for the role of each of the
four factors mentioned before and working in the problem space of
determining just what the balance between those factors was.

Jeffrey Hopkins
EDUC 657
Final Mini-Unit: Rationale
Works Cited
Beck, R. B., Black, L., Krieger, L. S., Naylor, P. C., & Shabaka, D. I. (2005).
World History: Patterns of Interaction. Evanston, IL: McDougal Littell.
Clarke, T. J., Ceannt, E., Connolly, J., Mac Diarmada, S., MacDonagh, T.,
Pearse, P. H., & Plunkett, J. (1916, April 24) [Proclamation of the Irish
Republic]. The 1916 Rising: Personalities and Perspectives
(http://www.nli.ie/1916/pdf/1.intro.pdf), The National Library of Ireland,
Dublin.
Coates, T.-N. (2014, November 25). Barack Obama, Ferguson, and the
Evidence of Things Unsaid. Retrieved April 30, 2015, from
www.theatlantic.com:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/11/barack-obamaferguson-and-the-evidence-of-things-unsaid/383212/
Cremins, R. (2014, November 15). 1916 Revisited . Retrieved April 30,
2015, from www.lareviewofbooks.org:
http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/1916-revisited.
Leeson, D. (2011). The Black & Tans: British Police and Auxiliaries in the
Irish War of Independence. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wiggins, G. (1989). The Futility of Trying to Teach Everything of
Importance. Educational Leadership , 44-59.