The Irish Landscape: The last Ice Age and after
Human beings had been living in Australia for 40.000 years before the very first people came to live in Ireland.
The Munsterian Ice Age, lasting between 300.000 and 130.000 years ago, covered the entire country with two great elongated domes of ice.
The climate which greeted the first humans was much like our own, but the landscape was dramatically different. A dense forest canopy covered the island.
Mesolithic Ireland
Just south of Coleraine in 1973 archeologists began to unearth evidence of the very first human presence in Ireland.
Human beings had dwelt here between 7000 and 6500 BC.
The last ice sheets had retreated only about three thousand years earlier, and the sea level was around five meters lower than it is today.
Neolithic Ireland: the first farmers
In the fourth millennium BC farming was helped by a significant improvement in the climate.
At Ballynagilly, near Cookstown in Co. Tyrone, the oldest Neoltihic house in either Britain or Ireland was found in 1969.
Neolithic Megaliths
Queen Maeve’s tomb is just about the largest Stone Age monument to be seen anywhere in Europe.
The most awe-inspiring creations of Neolithic farmers in Ireland are the passage tombs. The finest of them is Newgrange situated on top of a small hillock overlooking the Boyne.
Copper, Bronze and Gold: 2000-1000 BC
Mount Gabriel in west Cork is one of the very few prehistoric copper mines to survive in Europe.
The largest gold hoard to be found anywhere in outside the eastern Mediterranean was unearthed close to the hillfort of Mooghaun. Know as the Great Clare Find.
Before the Celts
The population of Ireland was rising, and disputes over the possessions of land almost certainly intensified.
The Broighter hoard of gold demonstrates indisputably that the Celts had arrived in Ireland.
The coming of the Celts
The Celts were the first people north of the Alps to emerge into recorded history. Their distinctive culture evolved during the second millennium BC between the east bank of the Rhine and Bohemia. Then it spreads south east into the Balkans, north towards Denmark, and west to France, northern Spain, Portugal, Netherlands and Britain. By 500 BC they dominated much of the northern half of Europe.
The first Celts arrived in Ireland around 1000 BC. After 500 BC they were arriving in great numbers.
The first to come was Cessair, granddaughter of Noah. Second invasion was led by Partholon. Third by Nemed, a ruler of the Scythians in Greece. The fourth by the Tuatha De Danann. The last conquest recorded in the Lebor Gabala (The Book of the Taking of Ireland) was achieved by Gaels, Fenius. All this was nonsense. The word Gael was originally a Welsh word for the Irish. The term Scot was the Roman word for an Irishman.
Preparing for the other – world in pre-Christian Celtic Ireland
The Tuatha De Danann were the gods of the pre-Christian Celts in Ireland.
The ancient capitals of Ireland were ritual sites. Emain Macha (Navan Fort), Cruachain (Rathcroghan), Dun Ailinne near Kilcullen and Tara in Co. Meath.
Kings and champions
The oldest vernacular epic in western Europe literature is the Tain Bo Cuailgne (The Cattle Raid of Cooley).
Ireland then was a land of many kingdoms, all with constantly shifting frontiers.
Meanwhile the Celtic domination of Europe north of the Alps was collapsing before the might of Rome.
By 43 AD the Emperor Claudius had conquered Britain.
Agricola plans to conquer Ireland
In AD 82 Gnaeus Julius Agricola, governor of Britain, summoned this fleet into the Solway Firth to take aboard his waiting cohorts.
Tactius relied on his father-in-law Agricola for information about the Celts of the British Isles.
The Romans retired behind Hadrian’s Wall. Ireland would not become part of the Roman Empire.
Patrick the Briton
There is good reason to believe that some of the most powerful kingdoms in Ireland at the beginning of the Christian era were carved out by warrior tribes driven west from Gaul and Britain by Roman expansion.
From the north came the Picts, from the east the Angles and Saxons and from the west the Irish. Irish raiders found rich pickings.
In 431 Pope Celestine sent a churchman from Auxerre, Palladius Patrictius, as a bishop to ‘the Irish believing in Christ’.
The main credit for bringing Christianity to Ireland must go to the man we now know as St. Patrick.
Patrick was not yet sixteen when he was seized by Irish pirates from Bannaventum Taburniae a Romanised town somewhere in western Britain.
The early Irish church
The Annals of Ulster state that Patrick died on 17 March 492 in the 120th year of his age.
The earliest monastic foundations in Ireland were established by Finian at Clonard and Ciaran at Clonmacnoise in the early sixth century.
Irish monasteries played a pivotal role in preserving and celebrating the civilization of the classical world now overwhelmed by Germanic conquerors from the north.
A land of many kings
Many Irish people claim to be descended from kings. From the beginning of the Christian era to the coming of the Normans there were probably no fewer than 150 kings in Ireland at any given date.
There were three grades of kings: ri tuaithe – king of twarth, ruirf – king over several petty kingdoms, and ri ruirech – king of a province.
Poets, judges, nobles, the free and the unfree
Equal in status to the warrior nobility were the fill, the poets. These in pagans times were had been druids.
Much of what we know about early Christian Irish society is derived from the Brehon Laws, a name derived from the brithemain, a word meaning judges.
Wives could be passed on from one husband to the next. The famous Gormlaith was first wife of Olaf, King of Dublin, then of Malachy, King of Meath, then of Brian Boru, and was later offered to Sigurd the Fat of the Orkneys.
Homesteads and crannogs
In modern Irish baile means a town. Until the coming of the Vikings, there were no towns in Ireland at all. Only settlements.
The remains of some two thousands lake dwellings have been identified in Ireland. Know as ‘crannogs’.
Living off the land
Ringforts have generally been found in clusters of two or three. They were the homesteads of a derbfine. These were farming communities.
In Ireland’s uncertain climate wheat was a luxury grain, grown mostly in the south-east, to be eaten by kings and nobles.
Cattle formed the mainstay of the mixed Irish farming economy.
Saints and scholars
Skeling rock was chosen by Irish monks as a site for their monastery, where they would leave behind the world of violence and the temptation of ambition and riches.
The greatest Irish monasteries, such as Monasterboice in Co. Louth and Clonmacnoise in Co. Offaly, were placed on fertile lands.
Irish monks were particularly fond of writing invocations – perhaps in the style formerly composed by pagan druids.
Not the work of men but of angels
From the Roman Empire which they helped to destroy the Irish obtained Christianity and, with it, the art of writing. The earliest known form of the Irish language is carved in Ogam, a primitive script.
The high point of manuscript illumination was reached in the Book of Kells.
St Columba, St Columbanus and the wandering Irish
It was from the little kingdom of Dal Riata in the extreme north-east of Ireland that the Gaelic colonization of Scotland began towards the end of the fifth century.
By the middle of the sixth century Bruide, King od the Picts, threatened to overwhelm the Irish interlopers. The necessary pact was sealed at Druim Ceit at Mullagh near Derry in 575. The man who negotiated this alliance was an Ui Neill prince and a renowned churchman, Columcille, St Columba. Born at Gartan in Donegal.
St Columbanus was leading Irish pilgrims not only to Scotland but also to the European mainland. He also founded monastery in Italy at Bobbio, where his tomb can still be seen.
The coming of the Vikings
For almost a thousand years, unlike almost every other part of Europe, Ireland was free from large-scale invasion. Then, in the year 795, Rathlin Island was attacked. Within the next few years a succession of undefended monasteries along the coast fell victim to Viking raids.
Once the Frankish emperor Charlemagne had broken up the fleets of Frisian pirates in the north Sea, nothing formidable stood in the way of the Vikings, leaving them masters of the north Atlantic.
The Irish were unable to put up a united resistance to the Vikings. In 837 two formidable fleets, each made up of the sixty ships, penetrated the Liffey and Boyne rivers. Viking leader was Turgeis.
Some of these Northmen, indeed had decided to stay and make Ireland their home.
The wars of the Gael and the Gall
In the year 837 a fleet of over sixty longships from the Orkneys and the Western Isles passed the headland of Howth and steered into the shelter of Dublin Bay. Four years later they came not to raid but to stay. They came ashore where Dublin castle is now. They were making Dublin the principal colony of the Vikings in Ireland.
In 857 Olaf the White, the first recorded ruler of Viking Dublin, joined forces with Ivar the Boneless, sond of the Danish warrior-king, Ragnar Hairy-Britches. Together they harried Scotland and Northumbria. When Olaf was slain in a skirmish, Ivar won the leadership of all the Norse in Ireland and the Danes in York.
902 – the expulsion of the Unbelivers from Ireland was produced by the Irish. In 914 the grandsons of Ivar, Ragnall and Sitric the Squinty launched and attempt to recover Dublin for Vikings. They come to stay, Dublin was a great trading city in a trading route between Mediterranean and Norway and Iceland.
Viking towns and cities
Ireland is the name the Vikings gave to the land of Erinn.
There had been high-kings in Ireland since the beginning of the island’s recorded history, but none had ever governed the whole country.
Brian Boru – Brian of the Tributes was leading the men of Dal Cais in seizing control over other kingdoms. In 999 they overwhelmed a combined army of Dublin Vikings and Leinstermen. Brian Bour was acknowledged as High-King of Ireland.
Brian Boru and the battle of Clontarf
Dublin was the mightiest Viking city in Ireland. It had become a Viking kingdom even before Denmark, Norway and Sweden had kings.
Good Friday, 23 April 1914: this day the fate of not only Dublin but of all Ireland would be decided. This day, along with King Mael Morda and all his men from Leinster, these Northman (also from Isle of Man, Orkney and Norway and France) would do battle not only with Irishmen from a host of kingdoms but also with Brian’s Viking subject from Limerick and Waterford. King Brodar of Isle of Man reached Brian’s tent and he cleft the head of old king with an axe.
A trembling sod
The assassination of Brian Boru made certain that for long time Ireland would not be ruled by one man. Also Viking would stay.
No contender for the high-kingship had any hope of succeeding without the support of Dublin.
King Olaf Cuaran Sitric Silkenbeard’s father had been baptized in 979. Sitric had built the first cathedral in Dublin.
Magnus Barelegs, the King of Norway, seized Dublin in 1102.
The rape of Dervorgilla
For the century and half after the Battle of Clontarf the provincial kings of Ireland fought one another to become the High-King of Ireland.
Dermot mac Mael ma mBo, King of Leinster, seized Dublin in 1052. Harold Godwinson spent the winter of 1051-2 in Ireland under Dermot’s protection.
Dermot’s replacement was a grandson of Brian Boru, Turlough O’Brien. His son was Murtagh O’Brien that succeeded him in 1086.
In 1151 the annals record a great battle of Moin Mor in north Cork. This marked the rise of Turlough O’Connor. That lead to coming of the Normans to Ireland. That story begins with a deadly conflict between Tiernan O’Rourke and Dermot MacMurrough. The love between Dermot and Tiernan’s wife Dervorgilla.
‘At Baginbun’, Ireland was lost and won
Early in the tenth century Charles the Simple, King of France, made an agreement to give Rolf the Ganger a province of northern France. Normandy soon became a powerful state and in 1066, led by their Duke William defeated Harold of England at Hastings.
Norman barons penetrated into south Wales and southern Scotland. Other Normans carved out a kingdom for themselves in southern Italy and Sicily.
Dermot fled to England in 1166 together with his family. But he was trying to get some help from Normans. He traveled to visit Henry II and asked him for a help. In 1167 he came back to Leinster with a small army. High-King Robert O’Connor and Tiernan O’Rourke were bought off.
In 1170 Dermot got bigger support. The army arrived in the place called Baginbun. After two ships with which they came: La Bague and La Bonne.
Waterford and Dublin: A tale of two sieges
The foreigners who came to help Dermot MacMurrough recover his kingdom of Leinster were as much Welsh as they were Norman and Flemish.
Raymond le Gros and his men ensconced themselves in the old rath at Baginbun and soon found themselves besieged by a mixed force of Norse from Waterford and Irish from the kingdom of Decies.
Henry II comes to Ireland
Earl Richard Strongbow had seized Waterford and Dublin, and Dermot MacMorrough had been restored to his kingdom of Leinster; but neither Hasculf, Earl of Dublin, nor Rory O’Connor, High-King of Ireland, were prepared to accept this new state of affairs.
In 1171 Henry II came to Ireland and his accepted his new title Lord of Ireland.
The lordship of Ireland
Henry II possessed a great asset. Back in 1155 John of Salisbury, adviser to the Archbishop of Canterbury, had prevailed on Pope Adrian IV to grant Ireland to Henry. This was the notorious bull Laudabiliter.
Conquest and a failed treaty
In 1172 Henry had his own problem at home. He also called for help his Irish vassals.
While Henry and leading Normans were absent from Ireland, Irish kings quickly forgot their loyalty.
Henry tried to keep the stability in Ireland, his representatives meet with representatives of Rory O’Connor in Windsor in 1175, to sign a treaty. The treaty was not working.
In 1177 there was also invasion of Ulster. John de Courcy was de facto ruler of Ulster for the next quarter of the century.
John, Lord of Ireland
King John built some of the most formidable castles in Ireland. He was the youngest son of Henry II. Henry died in 1189.
William de Braose became John’s sworn enemy.
Dreading the fury of the king
There is no detailed account of King John’s momentous expedition to Ireland in the year 1210.
Hugh de Lacy was kinsman of William de Braose and he fled to Carrickfergus when King John was moving to north. Carrickfergus soon surrendered.
William and Hugh fled to France.
In 1204 King John had ordered the building of the Dublin Castle.
The English colony
When Strongbow died in 1176 his successor was his daughter Isabella. She married William the Marshal. He was regent for young Henry III after King John died in 1216.
The Vikings had built Ireland’s first towns, but it was left to the Normans to develop inland towns.
Feudal Ireland
By the late thirteenth century around two-thirds of Ireland had been conquered by the Normans. Wild, mountainous country was left to the Gaelic Irish.
The lordship of Ireland was, in practice, the conquered land ruled by the King of England, who from the time of King John was also the Lord of Ireland.
A great affliction befell the country
The first entry in the Annals of Connacht is for the year 1224.
Cathal Crobhderg was the last great Gaelic king ever to rule in Ireland.
In desperate attempt to halt the Norman expansion, in 1258, a famous agreement was made at Caoluisce. There Hugh O’Connor of Connacht and Tadhg O’Brien of Thomond have the kingship of the Gaels in Ireland to Brian O’Neill.
Brian died at the Battle of Downpatrick.
Edward Bruce caused the whole of Ireland to tremble
Edward I waged endless wars. His son Edward II lost to Scots at Bannockburn in 1314. Robert Bruce led the Scots. His brother Edward was entrusted with invasion of Ireland by Robert.
Edmund Butler and Red Earl were waiting for Edward. Two armies met in battle by the Kellswater at Connor.
On 1 May 1316, Edward had himself crowned King of Ireland. Robert joined him in December.
But the Bruce invasion failed, Scots were weakened by hunger. Hunger was to stalk the land many times in the decades that followed.
Famine filled the country
Edward was defeated and killed by John de Bermingham at the hill of Faughart near Dundalk.
The thirteenth century had been a time of population growth and rising prosperity.
The important area under Gaelic rules was central and western Ulster. The Great Irishry. But due to food shortage Gaelic Irish plundered the Norman lands often.
The Black Death
The Black Death arrived in western Europe in the year 1347. In Ireland it first appeared in late July 1348 in Dublin port of Howth.
The English colony was much more affected than the Gaelic Irish living in the countryside.
Gallowglasses
Galloglaigh were young foreign warriors.
Gallowglasses were of mixed Viking-Gaelic blood, who after the King of Scotland had broken any remaining power the King of Norway had in his land at the Battle of Largs in 1236, sought employment for their arms in Ireland.
During the fourteenth century bands of gallowglasses spread out all over Gaelic Ireland to seek employment for their arms,
More Irish, than the Irish themselves
In 1333, William de Burgo was murdered. Junior branches of the de Burgo family changed their name to Burcach, which later became known in their anglicized from Burke. Gaelicised branches of de Burgo adopted the surname MacWilliam.
The Irish parliament was an institution almost as ancient as the English one. The first recorded parliament was in 1264.
The Statue of Kilkenny
The wasting Hundred Years’ War in France hastened the steady erosion of the lordship of Ireland to the benefit of both Gaelic lords and independent gaelicised warlords.
In 1366 Lionel summoned a parliament at Kilkenny. Its main purpose was to bring a halt to degeneracy, the adoption by the English of Irish way. The Statute of Kilkenny had 36 articles.
Into the land of the savage Irish where king O’Neil reigned supreme
Ramon, Viscount of Perellos and of Roda in Catalonia visited Ireland. John Colton, the English-born Archbishop of Armagh visited Gaelic parts and met Niall Mor O’Neill, the ruler of Tir Eoghain, but he only have Ramon an escort of a hundred man.
O’Neil gave Ramon a warm welcome.
A Catalan pilgrim among the unconquered Irish
Ramon visited Ireland in 1397. He visited St. Patrick’s Purgatory to save the soul of his dead king by his pilgrimage.
He spoke with O’Neill in Latin. He described that Irish had swords like those of Saracens and that they are still at war with the English.
The prize of bringing the war to an end was one that was to elude the English king Richard II.
Richard II’s great expedition to Ireland
In 1394 Richard II announced that he was going to Ireland in person. He was landing in Waterford on 2 October.
From all over Ireland warlords came to submit in person to Richard. After 9 months he returned triumphantly to England convinced that he saved the Irish lordship from destruction.
The Pale
In June 1398 Roger Mortimer, Earl of March, Lord of Trim, Earl of Ulster and Lord of Connacht, was killed I a skirmish against the Gaelic Irish near Carlow. For Richard II this was a disaster that set him on the road to ruin and death.
Richard II decided to come to Ireland again in 1399. But that was too much for England and Duke of Lancaster raised a successful rebellion. Almost a century of internecine warfare followed in England as the Housed of Lancaster and York contested for the crown. War of the Roses was on.
In Ireland the Irish Council reported to Henry VI, that they only control the Pale. Area around the Dublin. The truth was, most of Ireland was beyond the Pale.
Beyond the Pale
The recovery of so much land by Gaelic lords ensured the spread of the old Gaelic way of life. Many descendants of the first Norman conquerors had become completely gaelicized and virtually indistinguishable from the native neighbors.
There was no difference between Gaelic in Scotland and Ireland until the seventeenth century. The real cultural frontiers were the Highland Line, south of which lived Scots speaking English, and the boundary of the Pale, the anglicized region around Dublin.
Garret Mor Fitzgerald, the great Earl of Kildare
The three most powerful Anglo-Irish lords were the Earls od Desmond, Ormond and Kildare.
In 1485 when Henry Tudor won the Battle of Bosworth the War of Roses finished.
The royal governor since 1478 had been Garret Mor Fitzgerald. He had some episodes of troubles with England. But he ruled until 1513, when he died. Garet Of was not the man his father had been. The days of the Kildare hegemony were numbered.
The decline of the House of Kildare
In 1520 Henry VIII invited Kildare to England and kept him there as prisoner.
Garret Og’s son Thomas FitzGerald was known as Silken Thomas. He entered Dublin with a thousand men on 11 June 1534.
The rebellion of Silken Thomas
Silken Thomas forged an alliance with Conor O’Brien, the Lord of Thomond. Thomas hoped that he will get help from Charles V.
Sir William Skeffington brought the biggest English army in Ireland. The landed in Dublin on 24 October.
Thomas surrendered on 24 August 1535 to Lord Leonard Grey.
The Church of Turmoil
The church throughout Ireland enjoyed strong and warm support.
In May 1536 a parliament in Dublin agreed to accept Henry VIII as the supreme head of the Irish church. Ireland was experiencing the first impact of profound upheaval in western Christianity – the Reformation.
Sober ways, politic drifts, and amiable persuasions’
Henry VIII was determined to recover all the lands in Ireland his predecessors had lost.
Lord Leonard Grey was appointed chief governor in 1536. Thomas Cromwell his ally at court was executed in 1540. One year later lord Leonard followed him.
Sir Anthony St Leger was appointed chief governor in 1540. His scheme, known as ‘surrender and regrant’, was to erase the partition of Ireland between the English Pale and the Great Irishry.
Conn Bacach O’Neill visits London
One by one nearly all the lords submitted and received English titles.
The most powerful Gaelic lord in Ulster was Conn Bacach O’Neill, Lord of Tir Eoghain. ON 1 October 1542 he was in London to receive this new title of Earl of Tyrone.
Henry VIII died in 1547. His son was Edward VI. Real power was with the Lord Protectors. St Leger was sidelined and recalled in 1551. The Lord Deputies that came after him were determined on conquest and on the imposition of the Protestant religion on Ireland.
Religious strife and plantation
Edward died in 1553, his successor, Queen Mary, immediately restored the Catholic religion.
An ambitious scheme was launched to plant or colonise with loyal subjects the two counties westward of the Pale that were confiscated from Irish – Leix that became Queen’s County and Offaly that became King’s County.
Mary died in 1558 and her successor was Elizabeth. It was during her long reign that Ireland was to be conquered end to end by the English for the first time.
Shane the Proud
The branch of Hebridean MacDonnels, the Lord of Islay and Kintyre, made new home in the Glens of Antrim. The Scots inhabit now busily a great part of Ulster.
The most powerful man in Ulster was Shane O’Neill of Tyrone. For his own people he was Sean an Diomais, Shane the Proud.
Elizabeth send over the Earl of Sussex as her viceroy to deal with Shane.
She also invited Shane to London
The fall of Shane O’Neill
On 3 January 1562, Shane entered London. But he was soon back in Ulster and he continued raiding the Ireland.
Elizabet send some expeditions to Ireland but they failed. It was Shane’s neighbors in Ulster who brough about his downfall in 1567.
A failed plantation and a bloody feast in Belfast
Since Elizabeth was not able to increase English power in Ireland, she approved private scheme put forward by Sir Thomas Smith. He wanted to remove all the Irish except for poor labourers. But he was soon killed.
An English Queen, a Scottish Lady and a Dark Daughter
The Lord of the Glens, Sorley Boy MacDonnel, was one of the most astute leaders in the Gaelic world.
Essesx was running out of mean and money. He was a long way from realizing his project of conquering and colonizing Ulster. He died in Dublin in 1567.
Warring against a she-tyrant: holy war in Munster
In 1565 the Earl of Desmond and the Earl of Ormond met in battle. But Elizabeth was not happy with private wars in her realm. Desmond still didn’t accept that. He started a rebellion. Was crushed. He was allowed back to Ireland in 1573.
The Plantation of Munster
For more than a year the forces of the crown had been engaged in crushing a great rebellion led by the FitzGeralds in Munster.
John of Desmond, the military leader of rebellion, was killed in 1582.
Walter Raleigh, who had superintended the slaughter at Smerwick, argued for plantation of estates of Earl of Desmond. In 1586 that decision was taken.
In 1588 invincible Armada was on its way from Spain. The faith of Ireland together with that of England hung in balance
The wreck of the Armada
The Armada was beaten. The Spanish fleet could do no other than take flight up the North Sea, around the Shetlands. Some ships reach the western shores of Ireland.
Ships like La Trinidad Valencera and others stayed forever in the Irish sea.
The last voyage of the Girona
Don Alonso Martinez de Leiva de Rioja, was general-in-chief of the land forces of the Armada.
His ship was Sancta Maria Rata Encoronada.
Only one Spanish ship remained afloat, the Girona. But not for long. Belgian archaeologist Robert Stenuit discovered the wreck three hundred and eighty years later.
Captain Cuellar was rare survivor; he was protected by the MacClancys and O’Rourkes in Leitrim. He describe how those Irish lived.
The adventures of Captain Francisco de Cuellar
He was protected by Irish and by October 1589 he had reached Antwerp in the Spanish Flanders.
The wild Irish are barbarous and most filthy in their diet
There is no doubt that cattle were at the heart of the Gaelic farming economy and that dairy produce formed the most important part of the diet.
A fit house for an outlaw, a meet bed for a rebel, and an apt cloak for a thief
The most popular mantles had a tufted or curled nap raised with the aid of a teasel seed-head. These tufts on the inside of the mantle helped with insulation and were treated with a mixture of honey and vinegar to stop them uncurling.
A ‘glib’ was a thick roll of hair at the forehead; a law of 1537 specifically forbade the English in Ireland to wear their hair in this fashion.
The capture of Red Hugh O’Donnell
Sir John Perrot captured Red Hugh O’Donnel in Ulster, son of one of the most powerful Gaelic chieftains in Ireland, the Lord of Tir Conaill.
One Gaelic lord in particular was determined that Red Hugh should not remain in chains. He was Hugh O’Neill, earl of Tyronne.
The escape of Red Hugh O’Donnel
In the sixteenth century, Tir Eoghain was by far the most powerful Gaelic lordship in England. Tir Conaill was the second most powerful.
In 1585 Hugh O’Neill was formally granted the title of Tyrone and sent back to Ulster to restore obedience to the English crown.
The Earl of Tyrone had many friends in and about Dublin. Using bribes on a spectacular scale, the earl ensured Red Hugh’s escape from Dublin Castle.
The bond between Red Hugh and Hugh O’Donnel would never thereafter be broken.
Granuaile: the Pirate Queen of Connacht
During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries nearly all of the province of Connacht had fallen out of the control of the English crown. Things changed in the sixteenth century.
Grainne O’Malley was a survivor, and for the next twenty years she struggled hard to keep her independence as Queen Elizabeth’s rule spread to every corner of Connacht.
Granuaile and the composition of Connacht
Commanding a large fleet of galleys and ruling the western coastland and islands from Inishbofin to Achill, Grainne O’Malley become the wife of Richard-in-Iron Burke, the greatest lord in all of Mayo. Their combined territories formed one of the most extensive lordship in Connacht.
The pirate queen joined forces with the Gaelic lords of Ulster and made her fleet available to them in the Nine Years War, a great rebellion. That rebellion last until 1603, the year that both Grainne and Elizabeth died.
The Nine Years War begins
Hugh O’Neill had joined Red Hugh O’Donnell and Hugh Maguire in rebellion against the queen, on 7 August 1594.
Freeing the country from the rod of tyrannical evil
Elizabeth’s forces lost control of nearly all of Ulster. Red Hugh carried the revolt successfully into Connacht.
English agree to a truce.
In spite of the truce, O’Neill and O’Donnell signed and sealed a letter to the Prince of the Asturias, son of the King of Spain, appealing for his help.
In June 1596 the English and Dutch fleets joined together to wreak havoc on Spain’s most important naval port Cadiz. It was not until October that eighty-one vessels left Lisbon bound for Donegal. In 1597 Philip II tried to send another fleet to Ireland. Both of them were smashed by terrible storms.
The Battle of the Yellow Ford in 1598 was a victory of Gaelic lords.
The scurvy fort of Blackwater
Thomas Lord Burgh, Lord Deputy of Ireland, launched two-pronged attack on Ulster. He rebuilt the Blackwater Fort.
MacDonnells became powerful allied to Hugh O’Neill.
A quick end made of a slow proceeding: the Earl of Essex’s failure
When the queen hear that her Irish Council had been trying to negotiate a truce with the leader of rebellion O’Neill, she was furious.
By early 1599 there were at least 17.000 English troops in Ireland. Lord of Essex was their leader. But he made a truce with O’Neill. Elizabeth choose another commander, Lord Mountjoy.
Mountjoy and Docwra
Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy was named Lord Deputy of Ireland in 1600.
He planned to break the rebellion by starving the people.
We spare none of what quality or sex soever
In the autumn of 1600 English armies, having recovered control of most of the rest of the island, were closing in on Ulster.
Sir Henry Docwra was advancing up the River Mourne.
Mountjoy received an urgent dispatch telling him that the Spaniards had arrived.
The Battle of Christmas Eve
In September 1601, from Kinsale, Don Juan del Aguilla sent a messenger to Gaelic lords of Ulster. 4.000 Spaniards waited for O’Neill and O’Donnell.
The Spanish in Kinsale, the English besieging them, and the Irish surrounding the English, all suffered terrible losses from hunger, disease and the wet and the cold. On 23 December the Gaelic Irish finally attacked and suffered the most terrible defeat.
In less that two years all of Ireland was conquered by the English crown.
The Treaty of Mellifont
Red Hugh sailed to Spain, but Philip III was unwilling to provide any help. O’Neill tried to negotiate peace with Elizabeth, but she would not hear of it.
On 2 June 1603, Hugh O’Neill and Rory O’Donnell, left Ireland in the company of Lord Deputy Mountjoy.
Remember, remember, the fifth of November
The Old English were descendants of Norman colonists. They lived mostly in Dublin and the Pale. The New English arrived in the sixteenth century. The old English were loyal to the crown. But they were also Catholics and loyal to the pope.
King James was trying to make the Old English protestants.
He issued a proclamation on 4 July 1603 declaring that he would fight to his knees in blood rather that grant toleration.
Hearing that their leader, Sir Patrick Barnewall, had been incarcerated in the Tower of London, some Catholic Old English began to plan an uprising. Earl of Tyrone was the one encouraging them. The plotting was to lead to Flight of the Earls.
I know that they wish to kill him by poison or by any possible means
Arthur Chichester and Sir John Davies were appointed by the crown to handle Ireland.
The government learned of the plot in the summer of 1607.
The Flight of the Earls
Cuchonnacht Maquire, Lord of Fermanagh, had had enough humiliation at the hands of the English.
Philip III send some money to Rory O’Donnell and Hugh O’Neill.
We would rather have chosen to die in our own country
On 4 September 1607 the Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell and their families and followers sailed away from Ireland, never to return. They arrived in Spanish Flanders, now the state of Belgium.
Philip III of Spain had decided to remain at peace with James I.
The earls left Ireland to lead the Spanish army to invade Ireland. But this design was being set aside.
Bring in colonies of civil people of England and Scotland
The Earl of Tyrconnell died in Rome in July 1608. The Earl of Tyrone also died in Rome in 1616.
In 1607 the lands of the departed Gaelic lords were confiscated and put in the possession of the king.
A lucky escape, Scottish lairds and the division of Clandeboye
Conn MacNeill O’Neill, Lord of Upper Clandeboye and the Great Ards. He was placed under arrest. King pardoned him with a condition to give part of his land to Sir Hugh Montgomery and Sir James Hamilton, both secret agents of the king.
In this bizarre way began the most successful scheme of plantation, that is, colonization, of any part of Ireland in the seventeenth century.
The British colonization of Ulster was well under way.
Planting down and Antrim
Very soon after the beginning of James I’s reign in 1603 hundreds of English and Scots began to cross the Irish Sea to start a new life in eastern Ulster.
Sir Arthur Chichester was rarely in Belfast, his duties as a chief governor of Ireland required him to be based largely in Dublin Castle.
The rebellion of Sir Cahir O’Doherty
Sir Cahir O’Doherty had changed sides to join the English towards the end of the Nine Years War.
But he was again pushed too far. His rebellion started on 18 April 1608.
The crushing of O’Doherty’s rebellion had resulted in the seizing of extensive lands to add to the vast territories confiscated before. That offered even more land for plantation.
The plantation of Ulster
The largest group of colonists, known as undertakers, had to clear their estates completely of native Irish inhabitants. Undertakers had to be English or inland Scots who had taken the Oath of Supremacy – that is, the had to be Protestants.
Indeed, it was during the Ulster plantation that the term British came into general use.
Another group of grantees were termed servitors. They were councilors of state, captains and lieutenants with military commands and other servants of the crown.
Make speed, get thee to Ulster
England and Scotland were among the first countries in Europe to have their forests seriously depleted.
The English colonists had more capital, but the Scots were the most determined.
The Londonderry plantation
The part of Ulster which proved to be least attractive to planters was what was called the county of Coleraine. Sir Thomas Phillips suggested to persuade the merchants of London to colonise this wild county in Ulster.
The Coleraine and barony of Loughinsholin as well as slice of Tyrconnell and Antrim were all merged into new county named Londonderry. It was supervised by elected representatives of the London Companies, known as The Honorable The Irish Society.
The luck of the draw
King James regarded the colonization of six counties in the northern provinces of Ireland as the greatest project of his reign.
The king announced the confiscation of the undertakers’ estates in 1619. He returned the lands on condition that fines were paid.
The disillusionment of the Protestant planters was more than matched by the deep discontent of the Catholics, Old English and Gaelic Irish alike.
The heretics intend to vomit out all their poison
In Ireland only the British colonists in Ulster and recently arrived officials and landowners, known as the New English were Protestant.
The Lord Deputy created new parliamentary seats – thirty-four of them in the newly planted countries in Ulster – to ensure a Protestant majority.
Catholic fears of persecution proved justified.
In 1625 James I died and his son Charles I was now king. The years that followed showed that Charles could not be trusted at all.
Thomas Wentworth and the Graces
In January 1632 Thomas Wentworth was appointed as Lord Deputy. He called a meeting of an Irish parliament in 1634. He collected the money for the King and he had no intention to grant any tolerance to Catholics.
The Lord Deputy fell out with Richard Boyle.
Wentworth owned his eventual fall to the planters in Ulster and their friends at Westminster.
The Eagle Wing and the Black Oath
Wentworth after he denied any rights to Catholic has now turned on Protestants who did not toe the line.
The excommunicated ministers sailed away from north Down to make new start in America. Their ship the Eagle Wing, returned due to the storm.
Lord Deputy tried to enforce the Black Oath with soldiers. For Sir John Clothworty, and English Puritan with estates in Antrim and Londonderry that was too much.
Presbyterian anger, Catholic resentment
On 7 November 1640 Clotworthy presented a long petition to the Commons on behalf of the Presbyterians and Puritans of Ireland. He was successful.
The native Irish yearned for a return of the old order. It was the political instability across the Irish Sea that offered them a golden opportunity to realize that dream.
October 1641: the plot that failed
It was in Ulster that the Gaelic lords felt most insecure.
Sir Phelim O’Neill approached Rory O’More in 1641. The plot was planned. But it failed.
Over the next ten years and more Ireland was to endure the most terrible violence.
The 1641 massacres
Sir Phelim O’Neill lost the control over their people after the 1641 plot. The native Irish wanted revenge and they fell ferociously on the planter families in Ulster. The most notorious massacre was at Portadown.
The bloodshed was not all one-sided. The native Irish had overwhelmed most of Ulster. Now they were advancing on Dublin.
The Confederation of Kilkenny
The Catholic Old English joined the Gaelic Irish after the meeting with their commanders at Tara and Knockcrofty.
In 1642 army from England came under the leadership of the Earl of Ormond. He sent troops from Dublin to relieve Drogheda. Scots send army to Ulster.
On 22 August 1642 the English Civil War broke out. It was an opportunity of the Confederate Irish could seize control over the whole island, but they hesitated.
Your word is Sancta Maria
Few periods of Irish history are as confusing as the 1640s.
Confederation of Kilkenny was established in October 1642.
Earl of Ormond negotiated a cessation with the Confederates on 15 September 1643.
The Battle of Benburb in 1646 was the greatest and most annihilating victory in arms the Irish ever won over the British.
Fatally divided, the Confederates would soon be in no condition to face the victors in the English Civil War – the Roundheads and their leader, Oliver Cromwell.
The righteous judgment of god
By the endo of 1648 the Catholic Confederation of Kilkenny joined with Presbyterian Scots in Ulster and royalists, both English and Irish. But in England the cause of Charles I was lost. On 30 January 1649 the king was executed.
Cromwell sailed to Dublin in August 1649. He first besieged the walled port of Drogheda.
Cromwell’s subjugation of Ireland would take more than another two blood-soaked years.
The curse of Cromwell
Kilkenny capitulated at the end of March 1650.
Famine swept through the country, and then bubonic plague began to take the toll.
Cromwell give catholic priests twenty day to get out of Ireland. For Cromwell was now putting into effect his threat that he would send Catholics ‘to Hell or Connacht’.
To hell or Connacht
The Gaelic poet Sean O’Connel described Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland as ‘the war that finished Ireland’.
Cromwell hell or Connacht meant that almost all Catholic landowners were to lose their estates entirely and get smaller ones west of the River Shannon – in the province of Connacht.
Many Irishmen, who had lost everything took to the hills and bogs to live as bandits – or, as they were called at the time, ‘tories’.
Priests and tories
While Cromwell still ruled, Catholic worship was illegal in Ireland. Around a thousand priests left the country.
The restoration of Charles II in 1660 ushered in a new era of toleration for all.
Tories continued their banditry. One of the most notorious was Redmond O’Hanlon.
Restoration Ireland
In 1682 several writers were commissioned to compile what were described as statistical accounts of districts of Ireland for a Grand Atlas.
Ormond
James Butler, the newly created Duke of Ormond, returned from exile in triumph. He entered Dublin on 27 July 1662. 15 years after he has surrendered the city to the forces of parliament.
He created what is still the largest public park in Europe, Phoenix Park.
The 1662 Act to Encourage Protestant Strangers to Settle in Ireland also attracted to Dublin Jews who had taken refuge in Tenerife.
In 1663 and 1667 the Westminster parliament passed Cattle Acts forbidding the export of live cattle from Ireland.
Work, food and leisure
The long period of peace during the reign of Charles II gave the Irish economy ample time to recover.
Potatoes had become an important supplement to the staple diet, Sir William Petty observed.
The Popish plot
The ancient pagan beliefs were intermixed with a strong Catholic piety.
After a long period of service in the Vatican, Oliver Plunkett returned to Ireland in 1669 as Archbishop of Armagh.
In the reign of Charles II two political factions emerged in England. Whigs from ‘whiggamore’, a Scots expression denoting a rebel Covenanter. Supporter of the king become known as Tories, from the Irish word toraidhe, meaning a bandit.
In 1678 details of an alleged Popish Plot were revealed in London.
Ormond was certain the plot was a complete fabrication and he was right. The order to arrest the Catholic Archbishop of Armagh came from London. He was put on trial in 1680.
The trial of Oliver Plunkett
The trial started in London on 8 June 1861. At the end he was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered.
Lilliburlero
On 11 July 1681 Plunkett was hanged.
Charles II died in 1685 and his brother King James II was now King.
In 1687 a Catholic, Richard Talbot was appointed Lord Deputy. He survived Cromwell’s massacre in Drogheda.
The Protestants of England decided that King James would have to go. Fearing that Talbot was about to send a Catholic army across the Irish Sea, they turned to William of Orange for aid.
Three kings and thirteen apprentice boys
William of Orange, ruled of the Dutch Republic, accepted the invitation, and landed in England on 5 November 1668.
Protestants in Ulster were rallying for their own defense against Tyrconnell’s Catholic troops.
On 23 December 1688 James fled to France, and on 13 February 1689 William and his wife Mary, a Protestant daughter of James by his first marriage, were declared joint sovereigns of England, Scotland and Ireland.
James returned with a French fleet. He landed at Kinsale and entered Dublin.
No surrender!
On 7 December 1688, thirteen Protestant apprentice boys closed the gates of Derry against the forces of the Catholic King James II.
The Jacobite were those who remained loyal to King James.
On 14 March 1689 the Protestant lost in the Break of Dromore. The fate of the entire Protestant settlement in Ulster depend on Derry’s ability to hold out. The Jacobite were badly equipped for a long siege.
The relief of Derry
Since December 1688 the citizens of Derry, loyal to King William, had been under siege. For the Protestants, this epic defense gave inspiration for more than three centuries to come.
Schomberg
On 31 July 1689, the very day King James II’s army withdrew from Derry, the men of Enniskillen overwhelmed the Jacobite army at Newtownbutler.
The Duke of Schomberg’s Williamite army met no opposition as it came ashore at Ballyholme Bay in north Down on 13 August.
William III went to Ireland himself. He assembled the army in June 1690 and sailed to Belfast.
The Battle of the Boyne
William III came to Ireland on 14 June 1690.
Jacobite withdrew from Dundalk to the River Boyne just west of Drogheda.
The Battle of the Boyne was decisive. The army of William was much stronger. For Ulster Protestants, the battle ensured the survival of their plantation and a victory to be celebrated from year to year.
Galloping Hogan, Sarsfield and the Walls of Limerick
Following his rout at the Boyne on 1 July 1690. King James II dashed straight for Dublin. Next day he left to Waterford to sail for France, never to return.
William wanted to finish the Jacobite quickly. But it was clear that there would be no quick end to this war.
Athlone and Aughrim: June-July 1691
Williamites withdrew from their attempt to seize the city of Limerick in August 1690, King William returned to direct affairs from London. He appointed Godard van Reede, Baron de Ginkel, as his commander in Ireland.
The Jacobite also acquired a new commander, Charles Chaoumont. Louis XIV send reinforcements and fresh supplies. He tried to stop Ginkel from taking Athlone in June 1691, a town at a vital crossing of the Shannon. But he was unsuccessful. He died in the attack.
Limerick: a second siege and a treaty
The Battle of Aughrim was the bloodiest battle ever fought on Irish soil. It was fought on 12 July 1691.
The second siege of Limerick was conducted on a scale never again equaled in Irish history.
By 3 October 1691 terms had been agreed and both sides signed what become known as the Treaty of Limerick. But neither parliament in Westminster nor Dublin didn’t sign it yet. The Treaty of Limerick was to become known as the Broken Treaty.
The Wild Geese
The Jacobite exile soon became known as the Wild Geese.
The outcome of the Broken Treaty was a succession of acts passed by both parliaments which collectively would become known as the Penal Laws.
The Penal Laws
Penal laws against Catholic started in 1695 and from 1697 they cover majority of people.
In the spring 1702, William died. The protestant daughter of James II Anne was now the queen.
The 1704 ‘Act to prevent the further growth of popery’ was the crowning piece of this legislation. The laws were known as the Penal Code.
Majority of laws were not enforced. But the laws concerned with political rights, jobs, and landed property were rigidly imposed, with long-term consequences.
The minority prevailing over the majority
Similar penal laws were imposed on Huguenots in France and Protestants in Silesia. But the difference was that in Ireland the Penal Code was applied by a minority to a majority.
The Penal Laws were directed principally at Catholics of education and property.
The Protestant Ascendancy
In 1688 Catholic held 22 per cent of the land of Ireland. By the time that Queen Anne died in 1714 only 14 per cent was left to them. By 1780 the proportion of land owned by Catholics – three quarters of the population – had dropped to an all-time low of 5 percent.
The term Protestant Ascendancy describes circle of Anglican (Church of Ireland) aristocrats, landlords, clergy and prosperous lawyers, along with their relatives, which formed Ireland’s highly privileged elite in the eighteenth century.
Meanwhile the island was entering of peace – the longest peace that modern Ireland has enjoyed.
John Dunton eats and sleeps in Connemara
John Dunton was a London bookseller, who visited Ireland in 1698. He sold a lot of books in Dublin. Dublin was fast becoming the second city of the British Empire.
Wood’s Halfpence and the Drapier
In the early eighteenth-century Dublin was thriving. The Irish parliament only represented the Protestant Ascendancy, the country’s landed elite. Yet it was in this privileged, unrepresentative parliament that the origins of modern Irish nationalism can be found.
A modest proposal
Ireland in the early 1700s was an island of stark contrasts.
Johnatan Swift launched a savage attack on the landlords in 1729. His Modest Proposal was brutal.
The poor were particularly vulnerable to weather. In 1740 there was a Great Frost.
1740: The year of the Great Frost
Lasting seven years, the Great Frost froze the sea around both English and Irish ports, stopping the carrying of coal across the Irish Sea to Dublin.
The only outcome now could be famine. A famine so terrible that 1741 would be remembered as the Year of the Slaughter.
1741: The Year of the Slaughter
The First Performance of Handel’s Messiah
The famine of 1741 filled Dublin with refugees from the countryside.
George Frideric Handel arrived in Dublin on 17 November.
Rehearsals for the Messiah began in February 1742. He and all the performers had given their services without payment.
The second city of the Empire
No city in Ireland benefited more from the expansion of the British Empire than Dublin. The population, which had been 58.000 in 1683, was close to 129.000 by 1772.
Dublin: poverty, crime and duels
The poor in Dublin lived just a short distance from Dublin castle.
There were up to thirty-seven people in one house. They were also the most frequent victims of crime.
Duelling was so popular among the Dublin gentry that duelling clubs were established.
The Irish gentry are an expensive people
The population of Ireland rose from around two million in 1700, to about two and a quarter million by 1740, and reached over five million by 1800.
A sort of despot
Arthur Young wrote that the landlord of an Irish estate, inhabited by Roman Catholics, is a sort of despot, who yields in obedience in whatever concerns the poor, but to no law but that of his will.
In addition to money rent, the tenant had also supply labour and food from his farm.
Until 1782, Catholics were not permitted to have leases lasting longer than thirty-one years.
Hearts of Steel, hearts of oak
Angry farmers revolt in what was known as the revolt of Hearts of Steel. Another group was called Hearts of Oak.
Clearing the land
In March 1772 the Heart of Steel issued their proclamation. The government’s response was to send soldiers to Ulster.
An exotic vegetable, the potato, had been introduced in the sixteenth century. Increasingly it formed a crucial part of the Irish diet.
The potato, which tolerated a wide range of soils, was considered the best crop for clearing the land.
The Peasantry
Better-off farmers – known as strong farmers – lived in the thatched stone cottages, whitewashed with lime, now considered to be characteristically Irish.
Superfine Cloth, of home manufacture
Eighteenth century Ireland was an industrial country. Even though an act of 1699 prohibited the export of Irish wool, the home market continued to flourish as the country’s population rose.
Most of Ireland’s manufactures were bought by Irish people themselves. But Ulster’s largest industry, linen, was also directed at the export market.
Ulster’s domestic linen industry
The making of linen in Ulster was a domestic industry, carried on in the home of people who divided their time between farming and the production of yarn and cloth.
Wash-mills, bleach-greens and beetling engines
Early in the eighteenth century weavers bleached their own pieces of webs, each one yard wide and twenty-five yards long.
In the seventeenth century corn mills turned by horizontal wheels transferred to more efficient vertical whells.
The success of rural linen industry provided a good living for the rapidly rising population in central and southern Ulster.
A vast number of people shipping off for Pennsylvania and Boston
The prospect of a better life in America undoubtedly had a very strong appeal for these industrious but poverty-stricken tenants.
Why did Catholic not cross the Atlantic? The truth was that the mainly Puritan colonies in New England did not as yet welcome Catholic.
America offered Ulster Presbyterians access to cheap land.
They voyage of the Sally
Sally reached Philadelphia after a passage of fourteen weeks and five days. The numbers leaving Ulster continued to rise, reaching a peak in the 1770s.
The American revolution and Ireland
By now around quarter of a million Ulster Protestants had emigrated to the America colonies.
When the American Revolution broke, the sympathy of the northern Protestants was with the colonists. In 1778, France joined the war and Ulster Protestants had no difficulty in recognizing the traditional enemy.
Free trade – or else!
Ireland was stripped of troops to fight in America. The island was completely defenseless against a possible French invasion.
The first Volunteer corps had been formed in Belfast in April 1778. Soon every county in Ireland followed Belfast’s example until by the following year there were 40.000 Volunteers drilling to defend Ireland.
French never came, but Volunteers realized they can use their power against England.
On 4 November 1779 the Volunteers organized a massive demonstration in College Green in front of the Parliament House.
The Dungannon Convention
On the morning of 15 February 1782, 242 delegates, representing 143 Volunteer companies, marched two by two along the streets of Dungannon.
The Dungannon Convention was written.
Few of the delegates at Dungannon could have predicted that legislative independence would be won just a few weeks hence.
I am now to address a free people
Henry Grattan seized the opportunity when the Irish parliament opened on 18 April 1782. I am now to address a free people.
In a matter of weeks, the necessary legislation was passed in London. No longer could Westminster pass laws for Ireland.
The failure of reform
The Irish Volunteers, with considerable justification, felt that they represented the Protestants of Ireland rather better than parliament.
The reformers turned to the great orator Henry Flood for leadership.
Flood’s bill was heavily defeated. Volunteers’ moment was over. The Irish parliament would not be reformed.
Fourteenth July 1789; sacred to liberty
Over most of Ireland, Protestants were in a small minority. Only east of the River Bann in Ulster did Protestants have an overwhelming majority.
News of the French Revolution electrified the citizens of Belfast.
A Northern Whig Club was formed in 1790.
The United Irishmen
A group of young Protestants who met in Peggy Barclay’s tavern in Crown Entry on 14 October 1791. Their new organization was called the Society of United Irishmen.
Dr. William Drennan was one of the leaders.
The Belfast Harp festival of 1792
Dr. James McDonnell threw himself into a project to hold harp festival in 1792.
At war with France
Edmund Burke was an Irishman.
William Pitt the Younger has been Prime Minister of Britain since 1783. Pitt made sure that the parliament in Dublin had less power than it thinks it had. The British government still appointed the Lord Lieutenant and other government ministers in Dublin Castle.
On 2 January 1793 King George received members of Catholic Committee: William Pit, Edmund Burke and Henry Grattan. Back in Ireland the members of the Protestant Ascendancy were horrified hearing rumors of concessions to Catholic.
All the Penal Laws had been removed, except the one that didn’t allow Catholics to sit as members of the parliament.
Earl Fitzwilliam’s failure
William Earl Fitzwilliam was Lord Lieutenant from 1795.
Grattan put forward his Emancipation bill. Without government support, the bill was defeated. The Society of Uniter Irishmen began to plan a rebellion. By December 1796 Wolfe Tone would be an adjutant-general in the French Army, ready to sail to Ireland with a great invasion army.
Peep o’Day boys and defenders
In the late eighteenth century Co.Armagh was certainly the most densely populated rural area in Ireland.
The combatants regrouped Protestants becoming ‘Peep o’Day boys’ and Catholics ‘Defenders’.
The sectarian violence fanned out to the uplands of south Armagh.
In September 1795 Defenders assembled near Loughgall at a crossroads known as the Diamond to face the Peep o’Day Boys in battle.
The victorious Protestants then marched into Loughgall, and there, in the house of James Sloan, the Orange Order was founded.
I will blow your soul to the low hills of hell
William Blacker was one of the very few of the landed gentry who joined the order at the outset.
Meanwhile the United Irishmen had become a secret oath-bound revolutionary body pledged to fight for an Irish republic with the aid of the French.
The French are in the bay
On Febrary 1796 Theobalt Wolfe Tone walked to the Palace de Luxembourg in Paris.
French fleet sailed out of the Breton port of Brest on 15 December 1796. On 21st December they were in Bantry Bay. But due to the storm they soon return to France. But the rising would still go ahead.
Nothing but terror will keep them in order
Recruitment of Defender and United Irishmen doubled in Ulster.
Government under leadership of Lieutenant-General Gerard Lake acted to disarm the people. By the end of 1797 United Irishmen were almost obliterated in Ulster.
But the rebellion was now stronger in the south in the 1798. Sir Ralph Abercromby was appointed commander-in-chief in Ireland. But he was quickly replaced by Lake.
Croppies, lie down
Croppies, those who cropped their hair short in the French revolutionary style, were ready to rise in the spring of 1798.
Rebellion would go on without the French on 23 May as Lord Edward had in mind.
Huge quantities of arms were seized, but the infuriated country people were now flocking to the rebel army in their thousands.
Rouse, Hibernians, from your slumbers
Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the rebel commander-in-chief stabbed Major Swan, the Dublin’s police chief in his house on 17 May 1798. They took him away and he died shorty after.
Every other United Irish leader of any importance had either been hanged or been thrown into jail. The last to be arrested was Samuel Neilson.
On 23 May 1798 many of the coaches leaving Dublin were stopped and destroyed on roads radiating out of the capital. What was to be the bloodiest conflict in Ireland in modern times had begun.
The Boys of Wexford
Father John Murphy was one of the rebellion leaders after terrified people turned to their local priests. He won at Oulart Hill with his followers. And then thousand more joined him.
Soon after a republic would be proclaimed in Wexford.
The Battle of New Ross
Bagenal Harvey, a local Protestan landlord, and a commander of the United Irishmen, planned to take rebellion beyond the country. The first assault was to be on New Ross, a key garrison town of the River Barrow.
On 5 June almost all of the New Ross had fallen to the United Irishmen. But the counter attack from the forces of General Johnston turn the tide of the Battle.
The rebellion spreads north
The crown forces won at New Ross.
John Hope was joined in Belfast by Henry Joy McCraken. They planned to raise the standard of revolt. The planned to attack Antrim Town on 7 June.
But their plan was known to the authorities.
Rebellion in County Antrim
Major-General George Nugent new the plan.
Rebellion in County Down
The armed United Irishmen from Killinchy came to Saintfiled and fight. Nugent issued a proclamation that if they do not stand down, he would totally destroyed the towns of Killinchy, Killyleagh, Ballynahinch, Saintfield.
His army overwhelmed the United Irish on Ednavady Hill.
Vinegar Hill
Co. Wexford remained the storm centre of the rebellion. In the hardest-fought battle of the insurrection, the United Irishmen had been repulsed at Arklow on 9 June.
One of the last to be executed in Ulster was Henry Joy McCraken. The rebellion was effectively over. On 23 August 1798. Three frigates sailed into Killala Bay, the French had come.
The races of Castlebar
Mayo General Jean Humbert was in Killala Bay with 1099 men.
The newly appointed viceroy, Lord Cornwallis, led a great army out of Dublin.
On 8 September 1798 at Ballinamuck, the French and their Irish allies made a last stand. Humbert and his men surrendered.
Even bigger French army came to Ireland, but it was again defeated. The Wolfe Tone was sent to a military court.
The Union proposed
Wolfe Tone killed him self on 10 November 1798.
At least 20.000 men, women and children had met with violent deaths during the great Irish rebellion of 1798.
Pitt wanted to bind the island even more closely to Britain. Catholic emancipation was the key to it.
The Union bill was proposed.
Jobbing with the most corrupt people under heaven
22 January 1799 was the first opportunity the Irish parliament had to express its opinion on the government’s proposal to unite Britain and Ireland under one parliament at Westminster.
Lord Cornwallis and his Chief Secretary Lord Castlereagh did everything to win over the parliament majority for the Union.
The passing of the act of Union
The crucial vote came on 26 May and the Union Bill was accepted. Pitt promised Catholics that they could sit in parliament and they voted for the bill.
In Westminster the bill passed on 2 July 1800. It came into action on 1 January 1801. From now on Ireland would be ruled from London.
Robert Emmet
Pitt was not able to get Emancipation for Catholics and he resigned.
Rober Emmet had helped to revive the Society of United Irishmen after the rebellion of 1798.
Thomas Russell, a founder member of the United Irishmen, returned from France,
Now is your time for liberty!
23 July 1803 was the date fixed by Robert Emmet for the overthrowing of British rule in Dublin. But the rebellion did not succeed.
Let no man write my epitaph
Robert Emmet went into hiding and was arrested later.
Russel was trying to set up rebellion in north.
Many Irishmen fought in Wellington’s army at the Battle of Waterloo and now they returned home to swell the ranks of the poor in Ireland.
Caravats and Shanavests
Ireland was doing well. The population rose.
The class war started.
There were so many secret societies and feuding gangs. Two of the Caravats, who followed Nicholas Harley, know by their elegant cravat and crowd of tenant farmers led by Paudeen Gar Connors, noted for his battered old waistcoat, or shanavest. They fought for six years.
Ribbonmen, Orangemen and Rockites
On 26 July 1813 the Catholic Ribbonmen intended to destroy the tavern where the Orange lodge met in Garvagh. They failed.
Emancipation refused
George III publicly declared his opposition to Catholic Emancipation. In 1806 Pitt was dead.
The Tories were against the Emancipation too. The Whigs were in favor.
Gratan died in 1820. The Bill of Emancipation still didn’t pass.
Daniel O’Connel was the new leader of Catholic men
The Catholic Association
Richard Lalor Sheil met with O’Connel to unite all in favor of Emancipation in one organization – the Catholic Association.
The Invasion of Ulster
King George IV instructed his Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, to stand firm against Emancipation.
Support for Emancipation was hard to find among ordinary Protestants in Ulster, but O’Connell’s movement was only a few months away from complete victory.
The Clare election
The Duke of Wellington agreed to become Prime Minister in January 1828. Daniel O’Connela, the leader of Catholic Association won against Vesey Fitzgerald (Wellington’s candidate) the President of the Board of Trade.
The Catholic Emancipation would have to be conceded.
Scum condensed of Irish Bog
The Emancipation Bill became law in April 1829. The property qualification for voting in country elections in Ireland was raised from forty shillings to ten pounds.
O’Connell’s next great objective was repeal of the Union.
O’Connell’s alliance with the Whigs was to last for six years.
A social laboratory
When the new Union Flag was unfurled for the first time on 1 January 1801, it was assumed that, now Ireland was part of the UK, the island would be ruled in just the same way as England, Scotland and Wales.
British governments were using Ireland as a social laboratory.
The Peace Preservation Force, which later became the Irish Constabulary, came into being in 1814 – the first police force in any part of the UK.
The Tithe War
Perhaps the most hated tax in early nineteenth-century Ireland was the tithe, which earmarked about one-tenth of the produce of the land for the upkeep of the clergy of the Established Church.
The 1832 revolt was described as the Tithe War.
O’Connell succeeded in getting the government to reduce the tithe by quarter in 1838 and making landlords responsible for its collection.
Property had its duties as well as its rights
In 1831 Chief Secretary Edward Stanley established a national system of primary education, with teachers’ salary almost entirely paid by the government.
Thomas Drummond took up his post as Under Secretary – in effect, the head of the Irish civil service. He played a major part in reducing the influence of the Orange Order.
The repealer repulsed
O’Connell launched a great campaign for repeal of the Union and the restoration of the Irish parliament. O’Connell decided to begin with Ulster.
Monster meetings
“The Repeal and the Repeal alone is and must be the grand basis of all future operations.”[1]
One of the greatest meetings of the monster meetings O’Connell had to move forward appeal for repeal was on the Hill of Tara on 15 August 1843.
A nation once again
On 30 May 1844 O’Connell was sentenced to one year’s imprisonment.
Thomas David joined O’Connell’s Repeal Movement. With John Blake Dillon and Charles Havan Duffy found a newspaper The Nation in 1842.
Unlike Daniel O’Connell, Young Ireland believed that it was not wrong to shed blood for Ireland’s freedom.
The misery of Ireland descends to degrees unknown
By 1844 the Young Ireland and O’Connell were quarrelling openly.
So much wretchedness
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, poor farmers and laborers had supplemented their incomes by spinning and weaving wool and linen in their homes.
All being poor, the only food they use is the cheapest in the country – potatoes. It was the cause of the great tragedy in modern Irish history.
The census of 1841
The first thorough census in Ireland was completed in 1841. The population of island was enumerated as 8.175.124.
In the 1840 the gap between the rich and the poor was yawning wide.
Phytophthora infestans
On 13 September 1845 the newspaper wrote about the potato murrain. This microscopic fungus, also called phytophthora infestans, spread by the wind and the rain.
Sir Robert Peel, the Tory Minister, acted swiftly by the standards of the day. In June 1846, he committed an act of political suicide. He brought about the repeal of the Corn Laws. He resigned.
Give us food, or we perish
When the potato blight struck for a second time in 1846, every part of Ireland was affected.
Charles Trevelyan, the civil servant at the head of the Treasury, devised the new system of public works.
The harvest across Europe in 1846 had been very poor, and there was no surplus for sale.
During the terrible winter of 1846-1847 conditions were even worse in the west and the south.
The famine in Skibbereen
Skibbereen is a village on the coast of west Cork. Nicholas Cummins, a local magistrate and Elihu Burrit, an America writer both wrote about the consequences of great famine in Skibbereen.
Fever
An Act for the Temporary Relief of Destitute Persons in Ireland, passed in February 1847 and it was an open admission by Lord John Russell’s Whig government that its policies had failed.
By July 1847 more than 3 million people were being feed every day.
The government declared the Famine was over in September 1847.
Emigration
In eleven years, during and after the Famine, Ireland sent abroad over two million people.
By the middle of the summer of 1847 the line of ships waiting for inspection at Grosse Isle was several miles long.
A lot of Irishmen just crossed the Iris Sea, going to Liverpool or Glasgow.
Other Irishmen, excited by events in other parts of Europe, took up arms against the government.
The Battle of Widow McCormack’s Cabbage Patch
John Mitchel, a Presbyterian solicitor was preaching revolution in his newspaper The United Irishmen, saying that the British created the Famine.
The Battle of Widow McCormack’s Cabbage Patch is Ireland’s sole contribution to the Year of Revolutions.
The 1851 census revealed the consequences of the Famine. The count was 6.552.385.
The Fenian Brotherhood
James Stephen had been present at the Battle of Widow McCormack’s Cabbage Patch. In 1856 Stephens returned to Ireland with the intention of reviving the revolutionary movement.
At his lodgings behind Lombard Street in Dublin, on St Patrick’s Day 1858, Stephens founded a secret society dedicated to the establishment of an Independent Democratic Republic of Ireland, later to be known as the Irish Republican Brotherhood.
The IRB, soon popularly known as the Fenian Brotherhood, would certainly keep the Irish revolutionary tradition alive.
The green flag will be flying independently
Terence Bellew McManus’s funeral was propaganda coup for the IRB in 1861.
Stephens staked everything on Irish-American support. The American Civil War in 1861 upset his plan. The right moment was in 1865, when the war finished and great numbers of disbanded soldiers, particularly in the Union armies, were eager to play their part in helping Irish. But Stephens faltered.
Also the Fenian Brotherhood in America was attacking Canada, the nearest part of British Empire in February 1866 under the command of Colonel John Roberts. But they didn’t succeed.
Stephens was replaced by Colonel Thomas Kelly and Kelly was send to Ireland to start a rebellion.
God save Ireland
On 5 March 1867 the Fenian rising began. It was doomed to fail. The government had a spy in the brotherhood, John Corydon.
Thoman Kelly was arrested on 11 September 1867. But he escaped.
Other leaders like Michael O’Brien, Allen and Larkin were hanged on 23 November 1867.
The growth of Belfast
On 1o July 1849, the Victoria Channel was open. It was a vital step in the rapid development of Belfast.
Party fights
Orange Order announced that they planned to march on 12 July 1849. The riots followed. And they were repeated in 1857. Riots regularly erupted every summer in Belfast.
My mission is to pacify Ireland
Willaim Ewart Gladstone was the leader of the Liberal Party. In 1868 he was asked to form a government.
In 1869 he knocked away one of the principal pillars of the Union; he disestablished the Anglican Church of Ireland.
He then put through a Land Act in 1870.
In 1872 the secret ballot was introduced in elections.
Benjamin Disraeli headed a Conservative government.
Charles Stewart Parnell would soon transform the Irish political landscape.
Keep a firm grip of your homesteads
Isac Butt was a leader of the Irish Homer Rule.
The Land War
In March 1879, John Devoy, the head of Clan na Gael, the main Fenian organization in America, met Parnell.
The Land League, the tenant farmers organization, demanded substantial reduction of rents.
The relief of captain Boycott
Boycotting now swept the country. Any landlord attempting to evict tenants suddenly found himself powerless.
Assassination in the Phoenix park
In 1881 Gladstone offered fair rent, fixity of tenure and free sales to Land League in the new Land Act.
On 6 May 1882 Irish Chief Secretary Lord Frederck Cavendish was murdered in the Phoenix Park.
Lord Salisbury formed a Conservative government with Parnell’s help.
The first Home Rule Bill
Gladstone in 1886 was supporting Home Rule.
Churchill was a speaker at a Monster Meeting of Conservatives and Orangemen in Belfast’s Ulster Hall on 22 February 1886. He said that Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right.
Is them ‘uns bate?
In the 1881 there were 866.000 Protestants in Ulster that opposed Home Rule.
The Belfast riots in 1886
On 9 June 1886 the Home Rule was defeated.
The official death toll of the riot was thirty-one.
Belfast: an imperial city
Charles Vane-Tempest-Stewart visited Belfast on 13 October 1888. He was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.
Belfast really enjoyed economic success under the Act of Union.
Committee room 15
Parnell was for 15 years in a relationship with married women. His political career was finished on 6 December 1890 in Committee Room 15.
Keep our noble kingdom whole
Parnell died on 25 June 1891.
Gladstone won the election in 1892 and he introduced his Second Home Rule Bill.
The Second Home Rule Bill
The House of Commons accepted the Bill but the House of Lords rejected it.
Gladstone retired in 1894.
The Conservatives were to be in power without a break for the next ten years.
The country is bleeding to death
The emigration was still strong at the end of the century. America was the preferred destination.
Killing Home Rule with kindness
The extension of the railroad network brought about a vast improvement in the quality of life of the Irish people.
Chief Secretary Arhtur Balfour set up the Congested Districts Boards in 1891, to provide the regeneration of west. His brother Gerald was appointed Chief Secretary in 1895. His most lasting achievement was the introduction of democracy into the Irish countryside.
De-anglicising the Irish people
In January 1900, the Irish Party reunited under the leadership of Parnellite John Redmond.
George Wyndham took office as Chief Secretary in November 1900. He despised Ulster Unionists.
Two nations?
National identity was important for Ireland. But we had a quarter of population being Protestants and three quarters were Catholics.
Cultural revival
National Schools taught through English and were not allowed to have Irish on the curriculum until 1878.
Eoin MacNeill was largely responsible for formation of the Gaelic League in July 1893.
It was through the Gaelic League that future revolutionaries, including Patrick Pearse, Eamon de Valera and Sean T. O’Kelly acquired their separatist principles.
By 1912 Home Rule appeared to be just round the corner.
Home Rule promised
Sinn Fein – meaning Ourselves – party was established in 1905. The party was founded by Arthur Griffith.
Liberal needed support from Irish Party to stay in power in 1910. Asquith promised in return Home Rule.
The Covenant
On 18 September 1912, the Protestant of Ulster sign Ulster’s Solemn League and Covenant as the sign of opposing The Third Home Rule Bill.
The gun was returning to Irish politics.
The great Dublin lock-out
Dublin had struggled to prosper under the Union.
The leading figure in the Dublin Employers’ Federation, William Martin Murphy, set out to smash Larkin’s union. The strike finished on January 1914.
The Curragh Mutiny
Ulster Volunteer Force was formed in January 1913.
On November 1913 the Irish Volunteers also formed in Dublin.
Sir Edward Carson, the Unionist leader, had gone to set up a Provisional Government of Ulster. Winston Churchill, now First Lord of the Admiralty, ordered a naval cordon into position at Belfast. Meanwhile German guns for Unionist left Hamburg.
To the brink of Civil war
On 25 April 1914 guns for UVF arrived. Captain Wilfrid Spender played an important role. The guns had returned center-stage to Irish politics.
Asquith faced a lot of problems. George V tried to get the parties to unite on Home Rule question, unsuccessfully.
Irish and Ulster volunteers both fought for England in the WWI.
Faithful to Erin, we answer her call!
The new Secretary of War Lord Kitchener was impressed by Carsons’s Ulster Volunteer Force. But he refused to create a new division for Irish National Volunteers under Redmond.
Some of the Irish National Volunteers didn’t want to fight for England, so under the leadership of Eoin MacNeill, they formed their own organization under the original name Irish Volunteers. Only 11.000 followed MacNeill, the rest 170.000 stayed loyal to Redmond.
The conspirators prepare
Very soon after the outbreak of war the Irish Republican Brotherhood had decide on rebellion. Patrick Pearse was a frontman. But the real organizers were Tom Clarke and Joseph Mary Plunkett.
We’re going to be slaughtered
James Connolly was a commandant of the Irish Citizen Army in 1916. He prepared for a revolution in Dublin. The action was planned on Easter Monday. The plan was to seize prominent buildings in Dublin.
Easter week
On 24 April 1916 the Easter rebellion started. Attack on Dublin castle failed.
The organizers counted on people to join the rebellion and that the Germans will help later. It didn’t happen that way.
Eamon de Valera, Michael Malone were part of the rebellion.
The government proclaimed martial law.
After O’Connolly was wounded Michael O’Rahilly took command.
Executions and internment
On 28 April 1916 Patrick Pearse, the rebel commander in-chief ordered the evacuation of the Postal office.
Sir John Grenfell Marwell took command of the English forces. The rebellion was finished. Ninety men were condemned to death, only fifteen sentences were executed. Eamon de Valera was spared.
The executions after the rebellion changed the nationalist opinion in Ireland. People were shocked.
The Irish Parliamentary Party was in difficult position. Redmond stance on fighting for England was now under a lot of pressure.
Sacrifice at the Somme
At the Somme the whole Ulster Divison was lost.
The rise of Sinn Fein
David Lloyd George who replaced Herbert Asquith released the remaining Irish internees.
Michael Collins and other released supported George Plunkett in the elections. He was running against the candidate of the Irish Party. And he won. After the election, he announced that he was following Sinn Fein policy. They created new Sinn Fein in 1917 and Arthur Griffith agreed to lead the party. But he soon allowed de Valera to took over.
The First Dail
Lloyd George called an Irish Convention in Trinity College Dublin to move Home Rule forward, but Sinn Fein refused to attend.
John Redmond died in 1918. John Dillon succeeded him.
General elections was called in 1918. All man over 21 could vote and some woman. The Irish electorate had been tripled. Sinn Fein defeated the Irish party.
Return to violence
Attack at Solonheadbeg on 21 January 1919 was on the same day as the first meeting of Dail Eireann.
De Valera who was in prison, escaped and went to America.
Michael Collins was convinced that the violence was the only way. He and Cathal Brugha encouraged local groups of Irish Volunteers, now officially designated the Irish Republican Army, to wage war against the Royal Irish Constabulary.
Collins created an elite of skilled assassins in Dublin, known as the Squad.
The year 1920 was full of violence. Lloyd George unleashed Black and Tans on the Irish countryside.
Terror and reprisal
The situation in Ireland on 1920 was similar to a war. The IRA formed the flying columns.
In 1921 worse was to come.
The dreary steeples
The trouble began in Derry city in April 1920. Trouble also erupted in the Belfast shipyards.
The violence only started in 1920.
Partition
Conservatives were prepared to accept Home Rule, but only if Ulster remained within the UK.
The bill for ‘the Better Government of Ireland’ proposed two Irish parliaments. One for the six north-eastern counties to be called Northern Ireland and another for the remaining twenty-six counties to be known as Southern Ireland.
Unionists soon got to like the idea of having their own parliament in Belfast.
On 23 December 1920 the Government of Ireland Act entered the statue book. Northern Ireland came into being, with elections due on 24 May 1921.
Stretch out the hand of forbearance
On January 1921 the Irish War of Independence entered its most terrible phase.
Violence was intense but the IRA could not fight any more. A truce was agreed on 9 July 1921, to come into force on 11 July.
The treaty
On 14 July 1921 Eamon de Valera, President of Dail Eireann, made this was to No. 10 Downing Street. It was agreed that a delegation from the Dail would go to London. De Valera refused to go, Griffith agreed together with Collins.
They were forced to sign a Treaty, but de Valera refused it.
The split
The Anglo-Irish Treaty signed on 6 December 1921 in London went far beyond Home Rule. The Irish Free State was to become a Dominion, just like Canada. It was accepted by Dail, with de Valera opposing it.
There was the ‘Treaty split’. The Irish Free State would be plunged into civil war.
Troubles north and south
Treaty was accepted by Dail on 7 January 1922.
De Valera was not re-elected, Griffith became President. De Valera and his followers did not return to Dail until 1927.
IRA was still trying to de-stabilize Northern Ireland. England raised a Special Constabulary to fight them.
Civil War
Griffith and Collins and Provisional Government tried to prevent civil war. But the IRA – now called Irregulars, didn’t accept the Treaty. The English army left.
On 22 June 1922 the IRA shot Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson in London, Lloyd George demanded action. On 28 June the Irish Civil War had begun.
Green against green
On 12 August 1922 Griffith died. Ten days later Collins was mortally wounded. William T. Cosgrave now headed the government.
Liam Lynch took command of the Irregulars. He also died in April 1923.
Divided Ulster
The Irish Civil War as a stroke of good fortune for the Northern Ireland government.
By the end of 1922 Craig’s Protestants supporters had come to the conclusion that Catholics were aiming for nothing less than the destructions of Northern Ireland.
Catholics formed one third of population.
Not an inch
Article XII of the Anglo-Irish Treaty provided for a Boundary Commission to revise the frontier between Northern Ireland and the Free State.
Most nationalists expected large chunks of Northern Ireland to be assigned to the Free State. But they had been forced to accept that they were all citizens of Northern Ireland.
Northern Ireland: depression years
Hunger marked the years between the two world wars in Northern Ireland.
On October 1932 unemployed Protestant and Catholic both protested. The government increased relief. Peace returned, prosperity not.
An empty political formula
By the end of May 1923 the Provisional government in Dublin had crushed the anti-Treaty forces.
W. T. Cosgrave headed the governing pro-Treaty party, Cumann na nGeadheal , which means club (or party) of the Irish. Anti-Treaty Sinn Fein formed the second-largest party. De Valera created a new political party, Fianna Fail, the Soldiers of Destiny.
Anti-Treaty electorate preferred Fianna Fail, since they got 44 seats in 1927 election. Sinn Fein only got 5.
The economic war
In 1932 de Valera won the elections. He was supported in parliament by Labour Deputies.
In Aprila 1932 de Valera removed the oath of allegiance to the crown. He also withheld the land annuities from Britain.
The democracy was tested by IRA and by Blueshirts, now led by Eoin O’Duffy.
Democracy in peril
Cumann na nGaedheal joined forces with the small Centre Party and with the Blueshirts. The names assumed by the new party was Fine Gael, the Family of the Irish.
O’Duffy than created new party. Blueshirts still battles with IRA.
De Valera banned the IRA in 1936, he also finished economic war with Britain in the 1938.
He also reduced the original 1922 Free State constitution.
Neither the 1937 constitution nor the agreement of 1938 were to the liking of the Northern Ireland government.
Forget the unhappy past
De Valera 1937 constitution claimed in the Articles 2 and 3 that the Dublin government can exercise jurisdiction over the whole of Ireland.
Craigavon called the elections in Northern Ireland in 1938. The Unionists won a crushing majority. He had made his point to de Valera.
Crying for a happier life
Ireland was hit hard by the world depression in the 1930s.
Dublin Corporation did build 7.637 houses between 1933 and 1939. Belfast Corporation in the entire period between the two world wars put up only just over 2.000 council houses.
The emergency
WWII started. De Valera decided on neutrality.
Eire’s defenses were miserably inadequate. At the beginning of September 1939, the army had only 6.000 regular soldiers.
The Blitz and after
Lord Craigavon died in November 1940. John Miller Andrews replaced him.
The USA took over the defense of Northern Ireland.
The inter-party government
In power without a break since 1932, Fianna Fail seemed incapable of restoring Eire’s fortunes.
In the elections 1948 de Valera was not able to form a government. John A. Costello lead the government and Sean MacBride was Minister of External Affairs. MacBride didn’t want to join the NATO.
Ireland also moved from Commonwealth.
The mother and the child crisis
India also became a republic in 1949 but, unlike Ireland, remained in the Commonwealth.
Dr. Noel Browne drafted a Health Bill in 1950 similar to that of 1947.
What we have we hold
The National Health service came to operation in Britain in July 1948. Almost identical legislation followed in Northern Ireland in the same year.
For the first time free and compulsory education was available.
John A. Costello announced that Eire would become a republic in September 1948.
In December 1956 a revitalized IRA launched Operations Harvest.
The vanishing Irish
In the 1951 census the population of the Republic of Ireland grew a little from 1946. But in 1956 the number was the lowest since 1841. Only 2.900.000.
64 per cent of Ireland’s population was single, 6 per cent widowed and only 30 per cent married – the lowest in the civilized world.
The years of stagnation
At a time when the rest of western Europe was enjoying spectacular growth, the Republic’s economy remained in the doldrums.
In June 1959 de Valera stepped down. Sean Lemass succeeded as Taoiseach – President of Ireland.
Church and state and the IRA
The controversy over Dr. Noel Browne’s Mother and Child Scheme in 1950 proved a gift to propagandists of the Ulster Unionist Party.
Over the next few years, the IRA campaign continued fitfully. On 26 February 1962 the IRA Chief of Staff, Ruairi O’Bradaigh called off the campaign.
New Brooms North and South
The Northern Ireland government had no need to overcome ideological objections to opening up the region to overseas capital.
Multinational firms, including Grundig, British Enkalon, ICI, Michelin and Goodyear, were induced to establish branches in Northern Ireland. Terence O’Neill economic strategy was working.
The O’Neill – Lemass meeting 14 January 1965
Terence O’Neill invited the Taoiseach of the Irish Republic, Sean Lemass, to Stormont, and he had not informed his cabinet.
The meeting send a signal.
Epilogue
The Troubles in Northern Ireland became the longest-running conflict in Europe since the end of the WWII.
The restoration of peace in the north was hastened in no small way by the transformation of the south.
It is now widely agreed that rigorous control of the public finances in the 1980s laid firm foundation for the Celtic Tiger.
Ireland well-educated workforce today offers multinational businesses perhaps Europe’s best ratio of skills to wages.
In Northern Ireland a whole generation had at last grown up with little or no experience of political violence. Given the breathing space of real peace, the northern economy made a remarkable recovery.
[1] In the book on page 362
