In 1916 the Irish Republican Brotherhood planned a nationwide rising for Easter Sunday. The hierarchy of the organization was so badly split that the titular head of the group was not informed of the plans and when he heard about the call to arms, he rescinded it. He was a Redmonite, a follower of an Irish politician of the time who believed that the best route for Ireland to achieve her independence was through politics and negotiation.
The rebel leaders of the IRB in turn countermanded his countermanding order, but the result of the confusion and the division was a greatly reduced turnout for the Rising on 24 April 1916. The British easily suppressed the Rising, and then made a great strategic error. The overwhelming public opinion had been against the Rising, but the ferocity with which the British punished the rebels (fifteen were executed in the following two weeks, with more to follow) turned Irish public opinion strongly against them.
The movement for independence began to take another turn. On 21 January 1919 a bloody and vicious struggle began between freedom-minded Irishmen and the British army and their mercenary allies, the much-hated Black and Tans. This war ended in July of 1921 with the factional acceptance of the Free State Treaty offered by the British, and the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December of that year.
But the Treaty did not grant total independence to Ireland, nor did it unite the six counties of Ulster with the twenty-six counties of the south. (For a time, what is now Éire was called Southern Ireland.) Factions of the independence movement resented what they saw as a betrayal of ideals by the party in power that had accepted the Treaty. These groups coalesced into what would become the IRA.
A civil war began in Ireland on 28 June 1922 between those who wanted the Free State Treaty and those who would accept nothing less than complete freedom and independence for all of Ireland. The struggle was every bit as vicious and bloody as the fighting with the British had been, and created angers and resentments that live on to this day in Ireland.
The Free Staters "won," and the civil war ended officially in May of 1923. But ever since, the IRA and its most recent descendant the Provisional IRA has been an underground and supposedly outlawed organization, declared such on 18 June 1936.
A gradual process would, in twenty-six more years, bring Ireland to complete independence with the Republic of Ireland Act on 21 December 1948. This would in turn lead to the declaration of the creation of the Irish Republic on 18 April 1949, followed by the action of the British in the Ireland Act of 2 June declaring the Republic not to be a member of the British Commonwealth. Some of this on-going process of Irish Independence had been characterized by the one-side abrogation of individual points of the Treaty by the Irish Free State. Such an act was de Valera's unilateral announcement of Irish neutrality on 2 September 1939.
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I take full responsibility for these simplifications of an extremely complex issue. Those interested in exploring further the rich convolution of Irish history are advised to consult such general volumes as The Course of Irish History by T. W. Moody and F. X. Martin (RTE, 1984. ISBN 0-85342-715-1) or A Concise History of Ireland by Máire and Conor Cruise O'Brien (Thames & Hudson, 1985. ISBN 0-500-27379-0).
Death
mask of Michael Collins, killed in an IRA ambush, 22
August 1922.