Ireland

THE MODERN POLITICAL history of Ireland dates from the British Glorious Revolution of 1688, in which the Catholic Irish supported King James II against William of Orange. When James's army in Ireland was defeated in 1691, and the Treaty of Limerick signed, British rule in Ireland became complete. However, thousands of Catholic Irish would leave Ireland to carry on the fight against Protestant William of Orange in the armies of the Holy Roman Empire and France. Catholics who remained behind were subjected to the heavy penal laws if they did not abjure (disavow) their ancestral religion.

The 18th century saw a period of formative peace in Ireland, a fact noted by the repeal of many of the penal laws against Irish Catholics in 1778, 1782, and 1792, as the BBC noted in Prosperity, Revolution, and Famine. A growing crisis continued between Catholic groups, known as Defenders, and Protestants who called themselves the Peep O'Day Boys, and earned their sobriquet [Page 706]by striking at dawn. This guerrilla war merged into the Rebellion of 1798, “The Rising of the Moon.” However, in 1798, both Irish Catholics and Protestants, inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution, rose up as the United Irishmen, led by Theobald Wolfe Tone and Lord Edward Fitzgerald. The rebellion was put down with singular brutality by Lord Charles Cornwallis, anxious to redeem his ragged reputation suffered at his defeat in the Battle of Yorktown in the American Revolution in 1781.

Irish leader Eamon de Valera crushed a fascist, far-right movement that wanted Ireland to adopt Hitlerian policies.

Then, in 1845, the potato crop, the staple of the Irish diet, was struck by a blight, a new disease, as the BBC explained, “Phytophthora infestans, a microscopic fungus for which there was then no remedy, and which struck again with virulent force in 1846.” Persistent English governance and the simultaneous shipping out of the country of valued food stock for sale led to a massive famine. Noted the BBC, “It is estimated that about a million people died during the Famine and that another million emigrated, the vast majority to Britain and North America. The government declared in 1848 that the Famine was over, but it continued to rage in 1849 and to a lesser extent until 1852.” The Irish famine, An Gorta Mor, killed any hopes for a further reconciliation between the Irish people and the English government. Within 20 years, the first modern Irish revolutionary group, the Fenians, was active in Ireland. All future Irish “rebel” groups would look to the Fenians as their spiritual progenitors.

In 1916, the Easter Rebellion signaled the beginning of the final struggle for Irish independence, which would not end until a treaty with England in 1922 led to the evacuation of the 26 southern counties. However, a faction of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) refused to accept the treaty and a brutal civil war ensued in the south. Before it ended in 1923, more Irish had died than in the war against the British.

However, an unforeseen legacy of the civil war was that the anti-treaty faction of the IRA would be the latter-day breeding ground for rightist parties in Ireland, much like the German freikorps after World War I provided the seed of the later Nazi movement. Although with Eamon de Valera, the last commander of the IRA in the civil war, most veterans would constructively enter Irish politics, some would remain dangerously perched on the right-wing fringe. Under the banner of his Fianna Fail Party, the Warriors of Destiny Party, de Valera became the dominant figure in Irish politics.

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