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Koskenniemi, Martti. The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The

Rise and Fall of International Law, 18701960.
Cambridge, U.K., 2002. See chapters 12.
Nussbaum, Arthur. A Concise History of International Law.
2nd ed. New York, 1954. See chapter 6.
Ziegler, Karl-Heinz. Volkerrechsgeschichte: Ein Studienbuch.
Munich, 1994. See chapter 9.
MARTTI KOSKENNIEMI

IRELAND. The gravitational force of the

French Revolution reoriented the tides of Irish
history, energizing its stagnant ponds. Theobald
Wolfe Tones famous Argument on Behalf of the
Catholics of Ireland cogently demonstrated that if
French Catholics could display such obvious political maturity, so could their Irish counterparts.
The leading Catholic power in Europe had, astonishingly, produced a revolution more radical than
the much vaunted Glorious (and Protestant) Revolution of 1688. The French Revolution was perceived in Ireland as a Catholic effort at liberty, and
it rendered obsolete the old equation between
Catholicism and despotism. It was in this sense that
Tone described the revolution as the morning star
of liberty in Ireland, ushering in the possibility of
a novel alliance between Presbyterian and Catholic
radicals. The Volunteers, with their enthusiastic
Presbyterian backing, had acrimoniously disintegrated over the old bugbear of popery, but the
French Revolution released this sectarian blockage,
which had immobilized Irish political radicalism.
THE UNITED IRISHMEN AND THE 1798
REBELLION

In 1791 the United Irishmen were founded

simultaneously in Belfast and Dublin to give
cohesion and momentum to this new energy. It
represented a novel attempt to breach the sectarian limits of Englands Glorious Revolution
(1688) by extending full citizenship rights to
Catholics. The movement for the first time united in a single political organization a coalition
of Presbyterian, Catholic, and Anglican radicals.
By linking parliamentary reform and what was
called the Catholic question, the United Irishmen offered the possibility of fundamentally
altering the Williamite sectarian state that had

1176

been established in the 1690s and which

excluded Catholics from citizenship rights
through penal laws. The United Irishmen therefore created a moment of political optimism that
lasted throughout the early 1790s. The moment
passed, however, and the decade ended in a
bloody uprising that cost thirty thousand lives.
By the early 1790s, it was becoming increasingly clear that the French Revolution would
unleash a titanic European struggle between
democracy and aristocracy, between republicanism
and monarchy. As France and Great Britain moved
inexorably toward conflict, it became apparent that
the ensuing struggle would be a new kind of war,
one based on principle and ideology and the clash
of ideas, in contrast to earlier wars of tactical and
dynastic advantage. The number of combatants
and casualties escalated to unprecedented levels
and the theater of war expanded to embrace all of
Europe. The 1790s became the pivotal decade in
modern European history as Britain and France
locked horns in an international battle for domination and in the first war in which modernity confronted tradition. In Ireland, the United Irishmen,
and with them political modernity, were among its
casualties.
The success of the republican project in Ireland
ultimately depended on the Franco-British struggle, and in the 1790s the outcome of that struggle
was by no mean self-evident. Once war broke out,
in 1793, the United Irishmen, which had been
grudgingly tolerated in peacetime, was banned as
a treasonable organization. An increasingly rigid
conservative regime under William Pitt (1759
1806) took over in Britain, instinctively siding with
the ancien regime in France and thereby demonstrating how shallow the democratic credentials of
the Glorious Revolution were.
A severe crackdown on the United Irishmen
followed. The founding of the Orange Order and
the Armagh expulsions (the forcible removal of
Catholics) in 1795 made sense in this context.
The Orange Order was established in North
Armagh, discreetly backed by local gentry and generals, to stiffen the loyalist backbone and to drive
an Anglican loyalist wedge between Presbyterian/
United Irish Antrim and Down, on one hand, and
Catholic south Ulster, on the other. The nonsectarian appeal of the United Irishmen would now be

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met by a resoundingly sectarian Orange stance,

which emphasized Englishness not Irishness, the
past not the future, and disunited rather than united Irishmen. The United Irish project was derailed
by the London and Dublin governments, which
deliberately encouraged sectarianism to counter its
influence. Ireland was to be returned, at a cost of
thirty thousand lives in the 1798 rebellion, to the
sectarian molds from which the United Irishmen
had tried to rescue it.
THE ACT OF UNION

When news of the 1798 rebellion reached London,

Pitt saw the opportunity to implement his plans for
uniting England and Ireland, which had been frustrated until then. The Irish parliament would
become a client parliament, existing solely to do
Englands bidding. The 1782 settlement, Grattans Parliament, which had strengthened the
commercial and political autonomy of Ireland,
had been a disaster for Britain, prized reluctantly
from them at a moment of imperial vulnerability,
and represented a fundamental loss of authority
and of the assumption of Irish subordination. The
Act of Union of 1800, however, which abolished
the exclusively Protestant Irish parliament and
created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and
Ireland, immediately raised the issue of Catholic
emancipation. Catholics had falsely assumed that
their acquiescence in union would guarantee their
emancipation, giving them the right to be elected
as members of Parliament (MPs). The hypocrisy at
the heart of the Union was that it was simultaneously sold to Catholics as a defense against the
Protestants and to Protestants as a defense against
the Catholics. The Act of Union was an imposed
imperial solution to Irish problems. Its central failure was the inability to accompany it with Catholic
emancipation, a failure determined by intense elite
and popular British hostility to the idea of Catholics as fellow citizens.
The Union raised the stakes more for Britain
than for Ireland. With London in the drivers seat,
Irelands problems could no longer be summarily
dismissed as the result of Irish (Protestant and
Papist) inability to rule themselves. Irish separatism
threatened to break up Britain. Three short years
after its passage, the Union itself was called into
question by Robert Emmets insurrection of 1803,

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which was fought on the streets of Dublin and

shocked the complacent London elite, whose
response was to safeguard the Union through a
policy of coercive integration. By prioritizing Orangeism, Britishness, and the empire, while reinstating Protestant ascendancy (the position of Irish
Protestants as a privileged minority within Ireland),
the English ceded the concept of the Irish nation to
the Catholics. In choosing an exclusively Protestant
and coercive strategy, the British government
ensured that Catholics would be turned from neutrality to hostility toward the Union. Once Catholic political activism revived, it would inevitably be
pitted against the sectarian administration at home
and a hostile or indifferent imperial parliament in
London. In such circumstances, Catholic emancipation could only be taken, not granted, and the
adversarial stance between Catholics and Protestants and between Catholics and the British state
would be hardened and perpetuated.
Daniel OConnells political campaign for
Catholic emancipation rocked British politics to
its foundations. The Union had not delivered Ireland from sectarianism, poverty, or violence but
rather deepened their insidious influence. Looked
at in the long term, the Union also marked a
decisive shift in the balance of power between
Great Britain and Ireland. In 1800, when the
Union passed, the ratio of population was two to
one (ten million British to five million Irish). When
the Union began to break up over a century later,
the ratio was ten to one (forty million British to
four million Irish).
CELTS AND SAXONS

It had been assumed by key British decision makers

that Irelands problems emanated from an Irish
(Protestant and Catholic) inability to rule themselves and that the Westminster wand would magically metamorphose the Irish (like the Scots after
their 1707 Union) into pliant British citizens. But
Irish society under the Union became spectacularly
more violent and poorer, posing a difficult question: Was it possible that British liberties were so
narrowly conceived as to be incapable of making
the short crossing to its nearest neighbor? Rather
than conceive of such a devastating failure, they
threw the blame for Irish problems back on Irish
shoulders by blaming an old bugbear, Irish popery,

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IRELAND

Irish peasants. A family of Irish peasants photographed in front of their home, 1880s. CORBIS

and a new one, Irish Celticism. Under the Union,

Ireland became the Other within, whose poverty
and violence became a curiously comforting antithesis to British prosperity and virtue. The first half of
the nineteenth century witnessed the reorganization of the older European concept of national
character, with its relatively sympathetic understanding of the interrelationship of geography, history, and culture, into a narrowly racial concept,
which claimed that each country had a unique and
unchanging racial destiny, genetically imprinting its
national character. Ireland was Celtic, and that was
a lower racial order, which accounted for the countrys inferiority to Anglo-Saxon England. Celts were
naturally lazy, feckless, and violent, lacking the integrity, individualism, and self-reliance of the Saxon.
According to the theory, these racial flaws, combined with popery, determined Irelands endemic
poverty and violence. Irish problems were not socioeconomic or political in character but genetically
and religiously rooted. Irish crime and poverty were
endemic, irrational, and natural, and were therefore
impervious to moral or political persuasion. As a

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result, England could deny Irish Catholics democratic freedoms, run Ireland on British and essentially Orange lines, and to establish a lethal distance
between Westminster and its Irish citizensa distance so lethal as to kill over one million during the
Irish famine barely a generation later.
THE FAMINE

By the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the

Irish diet had become ever more potato-dependent. By the 1830s, one-third of the population
(three million people) relied on potatoes for over
90 percent of their calorie intake. Only in the
northeastern oatmeal zone did the potato not triumph utterly. The presence of cheap food in the
form of the potato, fuel in the form of turf, and
housing in the form of mud walls and thatch had
permitted the population to expand prodigiously
between 1760 and 1815, which in retrospect was
the golden age of both the potato and the Irish
poor. That golden age ended in the aftermath of
the Napoleonic Wars, when a sharp depression bit
into the area. Agricultural prices halved, the fickle

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Attack on a Potato Store in Ireland. Engraving from the Illustrated London News, 25 June 1842. Although brought to a crisis by
the blight and failure of the potato crop in 1845, the situation of Irish peasants had already become grave by the beginning of the
decade, due in part to population pressures and partial crop failures. On 13 June 1842, starving peasants in Galway resorted to
violence to obtain food from storehouses. PRIVATE COLLECTION/BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY

herring deserted the west coast (where they had

been abundant between 1780 and 1810), the linen
industry was dislocated by the advent of factorybased spinning and weavingin all, a succession of
hammer blows, accentuated by a series of wet summers and bad harvests.
In these circumstances, a crop failure would
cause disaster; repeated failures would decimate
the population. An unprecedented attack of Phytopthora infestans, the virus that caused potato
blight, destroyed one-third of the crop in 1845,
three-quarters in 1846 and 1847, and one-third in
1848. Massive mortality and emigration ensued:
one million died and two million emigrated, largely

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to America, paralleling the three million people

who had been almost totally dependent on the
potato in the pre-famine period.
The Great Irish Famine (18451852) was the
single most important event in Ireland in the modern period. Famine had become an increasingly
remote event in Europe, and that Ireland should
suffer a devastating episode was made all the more
unusual because it was part of the richest, most
powerful, and most centralized state in the world,
the United Kingdom created by the Act of Union.
The Great Famine disproportionately affected
the three million potato-dependent people who
comprised the notoriously poverty-stricken base

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of Irish society. These effects were compounded by

doctrinaire government policies, designed as much
to appease British opinion and to promote social
engineering as to alleviate poverty or save lives. The
population of the island had been halved by 1900, a
change precipitated in part by a new social regime of
endemic emigration by young people, delayed marriages, and abnormally high rates of celibacy.
How did the wealthy and powerful British state
allow so many of its citizens to die of starvation? Its
failure to shoulder the fiscal burden of the famine
was clear. From 1845 to 1850, the British treasury
spent 7 million on relief, less than half a percentage point of British gross national product over
two years. It also expended millions on futile
imperial wars in the same period. The culture of
the pre-Darwinian mid-nineteenth century was still
predominantly religious. The early nineteenth century witnessed numerous efforts to reconcile new
sciences such as geology, botany, and economics to
Christian doctrine, and it was in this hybrid form
that they gained greater popular currency. The
dynamics of religious enthusiasm and scientific
advance combined to produce an interpretative
framework for natural and social phenomena, and
the British response to the famine was profoundly
informed by the prevalent Protestant religious sensibility. The phenomenon of faminesaturated in
biblical resonanceswas understood in essentially
religious terms as a form of providentialismGods
direct, personal intervention in the natural world.
From within this providentialist perspective, the
evangelicals stressed the necessity of allowing the
unrestricted operation of natural moral law,
encouraging a minimalist response to the famine.
This evangelical economics married Malthusian pessimism and a strident eschatological emphasis, both
stressing the inevitability of the famine and its function as a retributive sign. The blight would allow the
pernicious potato to be replaced as a food source by
a better form such as grain, and this change in itself
would force the feckless Irish up the ladder of civilization. The famine would thus present a shortterm loss for a long-term gain. It would teach the
Irish poor the immutable laws of political economy,
encouraging them to exercise moral and religious
restraint; by eliminating the potato that underpinned their monstrous overpopulation, it would
give them room to become civilized.

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CULTURAL IMPACT OF THE FAMINE

The Great Famine marked a watershed in many

areas of Irish life, including demographics, economics, society, and culture. Yet the immediate
response was sluggish. Ireland remained culturally
comatose in the immediate post-famine period.
The period beginning in the 1880s, however,
when the post-famine generation took over,
witnessed the creation of a series of radical
responses to the famine legacy, including the Land
League (1879), the Gaelic Athletic Association
(1884), the Gaelic League (1893), and the Irish
Literary Revival of the 1890s.

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE

DEVOTIONAL REVOLUTION

Among the most significant impacts of the Great

Famine was a shift in religious practice. The Devotional Revolution marks a startling transformation
within Irish Catholicism, which occurred within a
generation of the famine. It created an entirely
revamped religious practice that hardened into a
powerful and rigid cultural formation and
remained essentially intact for over a century, only
slowly dissolving from the 1960s onward.
In the pre-famine period, a vernacular style
Catholicism had inserted deep roots among those
social formations that the famine would decimate.
This vernacular inheritance evolved organically out
of the life of an intensely agrarian society, whose
ritual rhythm was dominated by calendar custom
and embedded in a numinous landscape of holy
wells and pilgrimage sites. In this cultural matrix,
behavior was regulated by custom and tradition:
the central religious events were rites of passage
and communal occasion like the pattern (annual
commemorations at the local graveyard), the wake
(ritualized mourning of the dead), and the station
(community-based celebrations of the Mass). The
trauma of the Great Famine, the associated decline
of vernacular religion and popular culture, and the
erosion of the Irish language created a cultural
vacuum, which the Devotional Revolution filled.
It institutionalized going to mass, new devotional
practices such as novenas, forty-hour devotions,
exposition of the host, and other ritualistic practices. The devastation wreaked by the famine
strengthened the churchs hand in the imposition
of its modernizing moral crusade. Catholicism

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invaded the vacated cultural space and solved an

identity crisis by offering a powerful surrogate language of symbolic identity in which Irishness and
Catholicism were seen as reciprocal and congruent
and religion articulated an artificial, symbolic language of identity to replace the living one being
swept away by famine, emigration, and jolting
sociocultural transformations. The institutional
Catholic Church could also take advantage of the
more homogenized post-famine social structure,
which was receptive to bourgeois Roman Catholicism while the pre-famine potato people, the
bruscair an bhaile (trash of the town), with their
vigorous popular culture, were decimated and
demoralized. The culture of poverty was supplanted by the culture of piety as the church
injected a new social discipline of respectability. A
growing political rapprochement with nationalists
from these same bourgeois classes cemented an
unusually cohesive and ideologically impregnable
marriage of church and nation.
THE LAND LEAGUE

The founder of the Land League, Michael Davitt

(18461906), was the son of evicted peasants who
had emigrated from County Mayo to Lancashire as
a result of the Great Famine, and he used his
personal famine experiences as the spur to undermine Irish landlordism, which he blamed for his
predicament. When Davitt returned to County
Mayo in 1877, his goal was to organize a war
against landlordism for a root settlement of the
land question. Remarkably, in a society that was
still profoundly agrarian, Davitts grassroots organization set in motion the legislative displacement
of an entire landed class, predating the massive
upheavals in Russia a few decades later. This
achievement was predicated on his ability to fuse
the agrarian and the political issues, bringing
together under a common umbrella the Fenians
tradition of physical force and constitutional
nationalism of the proponents of Home Rule.
The Irish landed class had generally forfeited British sympathy during the famine, when they were
blamed for having selfishly allowed huge pauper
populations to build up on estates in order to swell
their rentals. They were therefore seen as disposable, and this encouraged the British government in
endorsing unusually broad state intervention in the
rights of private property. This remorseless legisla-

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tive euthanasia and the shift toward peasant proprietorship accelerated in the wake of the Land
League and the novel and potent combination of
agrarian and nationalist issues in Parnellite politics.
The Gladstone (1881), Ashbourne (1885), Balfour
(1891), and the generous Wyndham (1903) and
Birrell (1909) Land Acts all encouraged or forced
Irish landlords to divest themselves of their lands.
By 1914, two-thirds of Irish tenants owned their
land and a remarkably quiet social revolution had
been effected.
CHARLES STUART PARNELL

In 1880 the political stage was set for a new

development in Anglo-Irish relations with the
election of William Ewart Gladstone (1809
1898) as British prime minister. Gladstone wooed
the rising star of Irish Home Rule politics, Charles
Stuart Parnell (18461891), who led a block of
sixty-one Home Rule MPs at Westminster. The
aloof and patrician Parnell, who disdained theory
for political practice, ran a disciplined party
machine. The Irish nationalist Patrick Pearse
(18791916) described him as an embodied
conviction, and his single-minded pursuit of
Home Rule generated messianic fervor. In the
1880s, Parnell launched the New Departure, with
its three defining elements: (1) link the land and
the national questions, identifying land agitation
as the engine that would pull the Home Rule
train; (2) bring together under Parnells leadership the hitherto bitterly opposed traditions of
constitutional and physical-force nationalism;
and (3) hammer out an alliance between the
Catholic Church and nationalist politics. These
innovations united Irish politics around him and
allowed Parnell to position Home Rule at the
heart of the British political agenda. The downside was that the issue polarized British politics.
Gladstones Liberals traded Parnells votes in
Westminster for Liberal support for Home Rule,
but the rival Conservatives supported the Ulster
Unionists (playing the Orange card). Home Rule
eventually became a casualty of internal British
political divisions.
In 1890, just when it seemed that Parnell had
generated irresistible momentum behind home
rule, a sensational sex scandal involving his married
mistress, Kitty OShea, erupted and overnight

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Land League protestors, Kildare, Ireland, January 1881. Violence and protests against the 1870 Land Act escalated
throughout the following decade, forcing the passage of the second Land Act in 1881. This engraving depicts the burning of leases
held by the Duke of Leinster; the burning of a lease held by such a prominent landowner was a particularly provocative form of
protest.

CORBIS

destroyed Parnells carefully constructed alliances.

The fallout poisoned Irish politics for a generation.
A broken Parnell died soon after.
IN
THE RISE OF SINN FE

On 11 October 1899, the Boer War broke out.

When it was revealed that the British had maintained concentration camps for Boer women and
children, where at least 16,000 died in a single
year, the brutality of the British imperial mission
was exposed and sympathy was created for the
Boers. A pro-Boer Transvaal Committee was established in 1899, which provided the nucleus of the
deeply anti-imperial Sinn Fein. By contrast, the
Irish Parliamentary Party, under the leadership of
John Redmond (18561918), espoused Home
Rule within the empire and supported the Boer
War. A growing divide between radical separatists
and conservative parliamentarians was emerging.

1182

Cultural energies were also flooding into the

political arena. The Parnell scandal poisoned young
peoples attitude to Home Rule infighting, and an
entire generation turned instead toward cultural
activities. Building on the cultural separatism of
the Gaelic Athletic Association (promoting the
games of hurling and Gaelic football in place of
soccer and rugby) established by Michael Cusack
in 1884, other organizations were created, notably
the Gaelic League, founded by Douglas Hyde in
1893 (with the aim of reviving the Irish language),
and the Irish Literary Theatre of 1899, which
evolved into the Abbey Theatre in 1904. A positive
emphasis on the Celtic nature of Ireland also
emerged. By a strategic inversion, the attributes
that were previously ascribed to the Celts and
despised as vicesnon-materialism, dreaminess,
instabilitywere reinvented as virtues, with Celtic
charm rebuking the Saxon culture, which was

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The Riots in Belfast: The Police Charging the Mob in the Brickfields. Engraving from The Illustrated London News, 19 June
1886. Protestants in Ulster demonstrate in opposition to Gladstones 1886 proposal for Home Rule. PRIVATE COLLECTION/BRIDGEMAN ART
LIBRARY

recast as stolid and slavish, bringing with it a filthy

modern tide (Yeats). Ironically, that inversion
began at the metropolitan center with the English
critic Matthew Arnold, but it was quickly championed by the poet William Butler Yeats and appropriated by the Irish Literary Revival. The belief
grew that a Home Rule parliament in Dublin
meant little if no distinctive Irish nationality existed
to be guarded and developed.
The Irish Revival was not some dreamy Celtic
literary movement of writers and mystics looking
nostalgically backward to a romantic past. It was a
progressive movement, featuring a series of self-help
groups that focused on local modes of production
both cultural and economic: Irish literature, Irish
theater, Irish games, Irish economic development.
A considerable overlap in membership existed in
these cultural organizations at both executive and
grassroots levels, and their activities crossed class,
party, and sectarian divisions. These networks
shaped the emerging nationalist political movement.

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They did not involve a clear-cut severance of (highminded) culture from (grubby) politics. No conflict
between Protestant Anglo-Ireland, representing
high culture, and a philistine Catholic/Gaelic middle class or peasant culture was involved. Cultural
self-belief was the bedrock of the struggle for
national independence, for economic advances, for
cultural autonomy. These ostensibly different activities shared a common goal: to generate a new
public sphere in Ireland, which would form the basis
of a revitalized citizenship and a new civic nationalism based on republicanism.
The spirit of self-reliance was the spirit of Sinn
Fein (Ourselves), the separatist party founded in
1907 to harness these energies in the political
sphere. Sinn Fein saw culture as instrumental:
The language itself is not an end but a means to
an end. The party was viciously anti-Redmondite,
espoused abstention from the Westminster parliament, and claimed the right to use physical force if
necessary to win Irelands freedom. The split

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IRELAND

Evictions in County Donegal c. 1889. Carts stand ready to transport the possessions of families being evicted from their
homes in the town of Falcarragh. SEAN SEXTON COLLECTION/CORBIS

between the constitutional and the militant versions of Irish nationalism was widening dramatically, and tensions rose.
HOME RULE

The British Liberals under Gladstone initially

aligned themselves with the Irish Parliamentary
Party to secure party political advantage over the
British Tories. After the 1910 election, Redmonds
Irish Parliamentary Party held the balance of power
at Westminster. The Liberal Party had to turn to
Redmond to shore it up, and his price was the
passage of the Third Home Rule Bill, which gained
royal assent in May 1914. This created a massive
Ulster Unionist backlash. In July 1912, thirteen
thousand people attended an antiHome Rule rally
in London, which was addressed by Andrew Bonar
Law, leader of the Tory-Orange Alliance, who
ratcheted up the tension by proclaiming that I
can imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster

1184

will go in which I should not be prepared to

support them.
The Ulster Unionists were led by the talented
and aggressive lawyer Edward Carson (1854
1935), who had achieved notoriety through his
brutal prosecution of Oscar Wilde in the celebrated
1895 law case. In 1912 Carson organized the
Solemn League and Covenanta potent brew of
history, religion, and imperialism that cemented
the diversities of Ulster Protestantism into a common political causeto resist Home Rule on the
grounds that it would be Rome rule. Two hundred
thousand people signed the covenant. Belfast was
then at its zenith as a British industrial giant and
saw no advantages in being yoked to the agrarian
south. The idea of partition began to be floated in
British political circles. The paramilitarization of
Irish society started with the Ulster Volunteer
Force, established by Carson in 1913 with the
aim of defending Ulster militarily against Home

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Rule, by force if necessary. It quickly organized the

Larne gunrunning, illegally importing twenty-four
thousand German rifles.
Nationalists were provoked to respond in kind.
Redmond established the Irish Volunteers to
match Carsons. The Fenians regrouped as the
Irish Republican Brotherhood and the workers
movement had its Irish Citizen Army. As all these
paramilitary bodies mobilized in a massive militarization north and south, many felt that a civil war
was looming.
THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND THE
1916 RISING

When the First World War unexpectedly broke out

in 1914, Redmond offered unconditional support
for the British war effort, and with his assent the
Home Rule bill was shelved until the end of
war. Sinn Fein, adept at propaganda, now broke
with Redmond over Irish involvement in what it
portrayed as a futile imperial war and organized
vigorously against recruitment and the threat of
conscription. This aligned Sinn Fein for the first
time with the hitherto Redmondite Catholic
Church, which also opposed conscription. Between
140,000 and 200,000 Irish enlisted in the war,
and a minimum of 27,000 died. The Ulster regiments were decimated at the Battle of Somme
in 1916.
Physical-force nationalists saw the war as
offering the possibility of achieving independence
though insurrection on the ground that Englands difficulty is Irelands opportunity.
Others, notably Patrick Pearse, believed that the
Irish cause needed to be redeemed through a
blood sacrifice. At Easter 1916, Pearse led an
insurrection, seizing the General Post Office
(GPO) and proclaiming an Irish Republic. The
rebels fought against overwhelming odds and
Pearse surrendered to prevent bloodshed.
The Irish public, aghast at the center of Dublin
being reduced to rubble, were initially hostile to
the rebels. However, the British shot sixteen leaders at Kilmainham Gaol following peremptory
courts-martial. Public sympathy then swung back
behind the rebels as the executed men were seen as
martyrs. Sinn Fein unexpectedly benefited from the
1916 Rising partly because they were credited for
organizing it (the British insisted on calling it the

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Sinn Fein rising). As a result, Sinn Fein grew in

authority and used 1916 as an effective propaganda
and recruiting device. Support leached away from
Redmond as the carnage of the unpopular world
war deluged Europe in blood.
THE AFTERMATH

Eamon de Valera (18821975), the senior survivor

of 1916, was elected president of Sinn Fein and
soon eclipsed Redmond as the principal Irish leader. In 1918, the recruit-starved British decided to
extend conscription to Ireland. Sinn Fein could
now legitimately present itself as a peace party that
alone could save the country from the horrors of
war into which Redmond had so recklessly plunged
Ireland. In the general election of 1918, two million voted, delivering a Sinn Fein landslide. They
stood on an abstentionist platform and claimed
that they had now been given an overwhelming
democratic mandate to withdraw from Westminster. On 21 January 1919, they unilaterally set up
their own parliament, Dail Eireann, in the Mansion
House in Dublin with de Valera as the first president. The seeds were now sown for a war of independence, a divisive treaty, a bloody civil war, and
partition. As the critic Edward Said put it: Imperial powers begin by divide and rule: they end by
divide and quit.
See also Colonies; Dublin; Great Britain; OConnell,
Daniel; OConnor, Feargus; Peasants; Scotland.
BIBLIOGRAPHY

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