The Irish War of Independence was a war that was fought between the start of 1919 and the summer of 1921 between Irish nationalists and the British state in order to free Ireland from centuries of British rule. The conflict was the result of the failure of successive British governments to resolve the ‘Irish question’ which had troubled it since the seventeenth century, namely how to reconcile the predominantly Roman Catholic Irish population to British Protestant control. The collapse of the Home Rule movement and the Easter Rising of 1916 led to a surge in nationalist sentiment and in January 1919, just weeks after the end of the First World War, a war of independence broke out. Fighting would last for two and a half years before the British concluded the problem was insurmountable and agreed to establish an Irish Free State comprised of 26 of the 32 counties into which the island was divided. The six Protestant-majority counties in the north of the country were to remain as part of the United Kingdom as Northern Ireland. Population transfers of Irish Catholic nationalists and British Protestant unionists were carried out around the new border area of Ulster in the mid-1920s.[1]
Irish War of Independence chronology of events
Ireland had first experienced English intervention all the way back in the twelfth century when a number of Cambro-Norman knights from Wales and England headed to Ireland with the consent of King Henry II to begin conquering the island in his name. It remained a partial conquest throughout the late medieval period and it was only in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that the Tudors and early Stuarts concluded the English conquest of Ireland through war and colonization. Yet some problems here remained intractable. The Irish, alone amongst the peoples of the North Atlantic seaboard, did not convert to Protestantism in the early modern period and their continuing Roman Catholicism became a major point of difference which was a lightning rod for their unwillingness to accept English and then British domination.[2] Accordingly, there were numerous major wars against English rule in the seventeenth century, as well as low-level agrarian unrest in the eighteenth and a handful of insurrections in the nineteenth.[3]
By the second half of the nineteenth century a general approach towards resolving this ‘Irish question’ had been adopted by policymakers in London. They would organize to provide Ireland with a measure of self-government by re-establishing an Irish parliament in Dublin. But this policy of ‘Home Rule’, as it was termed, was blocked by imperialist and unionist factions at Westminster. It was still under debate when the First World War broke out in 1914. In the course of that conflict a number of different nationalist and socialist agitators in Ireland, led by Padraig Pearse and James Connolly, concluded that Home Rule would never be granted and that Ireland could only be liberated through armed struggle. In late April 1916 they led the Easter Rising against British rule in Dublin.[4] Although it was quickly suppressed, the heavy-handed crackdown by the British garnered enormous sympathy in Ireland for the rebels and reinvigorated the nationalist movement. Thus, when the first post-war election was held in December 1918, the Irish Parliamentary Party which had championed Home Rule lost 68 of their 74 seats while Sinn Féin, a nationalist party calling for an independent state, if necessary through armed struggle, won 73 seats. Having won the election in Ireland, their members refused to take their seats in the British parliament at Westminster in England and instead convened an illegal parliament in Dublin. There they announced the creation of an independent Irish state in January 1919, triggering the outbreak of the Irish War of Independence in the process.[5]
The war which followed was a guerilla conflict in which the Irish Republican Army or IRA engaged in hit and run attacks on the Royal Irish Constabulary, the British military police which controlled Ireland. The violence was low-level by comparison with the chaos which was enveloping much of the rest of Europe in the aftermath of the First World War, but it became more bitter and was also directed against civilians who were believed to be harboring and aiding the IRA in 1920 following the establishment of the Black and Tans, a force of demobilized British troops who were recruited and sent to Ireland as army irregulars.[6]
Eventually, in 1921 negotiations were entered into a concerted fashion between the IRA, led by Michael Collins, and the British government, with Winston Churchill overseeing much of the negotiations on London’s behalf. The agreement reached was that Ireland would be given the status of a ‘free state’, meaning that it would remain tied to the United Kingdom in some respects such as British use of Irish ports for the British Royal Navy, but would effectively be free to run its own internal affairs. The Anglo-Irish Treaty was agreed to, but it was highly divisive in Ireland and led to a civil war between 1922 and 1923. Ultimately Ireland broke entirely with Britain over time, dismantling the last of the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty by the end of the 1930s.[7]
Extent of migration after the Irish War of Independence
The end of the Irish War of Independence saw a notable amount of migration. In the first place, there were the thousands of British administrators, soldiers and other officials and their families who did not feel welcome in post-independence Ireland and often relocated to Britain in the course of the 1920s. More substantial still was the population movement in the north of Ireland. Back in the seventeenth century the province of Ulster in the north of the island had been planted extensively by British colonists, many of them being Scottish Presbyterians. Such was the level of settlement during this time that by the modern era much of Ulster, particularly east Ulster which lies close to Scotland, were regions in which people of a Protestant and British identity were in the majority.[8]
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Ulster Unionists here who wanted to remain part of the United Kingdom had become a major political movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and in order to assuage their concerns, the Anglo-Irish Treaty which was negotiated at the end of the war of independence provided for the creation of a six-county state called Northern Ireland which would be independent of the Irish Free State and would remain a part of the United Kingdom. Once the dust settled on the civil war in the south the newly founded Irish Boundary Commission had to set about establishing the exact location of the border between the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland. Owing to the Boundary Commission’s work tens of thousands of people were moved across the new border in the second half of the 1920s.[9]
Demographic impact of the Irish War of Independence
The major demographic impact was felt in the north of Ireland following the work of the Boundary Commission. The new country of Northern Ireland consisted of six counties, Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry and Tyrone. In order to make these more homogenously Protestant and British in their religion and political identity, and to allay the possibility of sectarian violence in northern cities like Belfast in years to come, over 30,000 northern Catholics were transferred into border counties within the Free State such as Donegal, Monaghan and Cavan. A smaller number of approximately 7,000 southern Protestants were transferred to live in Northern Ireland. Thus, the major demographic impact of the Irish War of Independence was in making Northern Ireland more homogenously Protestant and Unionist, though it still retained a huge Catholic nationalist minority and the Troubles would break out as a sectarian conflict there in the 1960s.[10]
Research Irish census records on MyHeritage
Explore more about the Irish War of Independence
- 1901 Ireland Census record collection on MyHeritage
- Republic of Ireland, Index of Burials, 1900-2019 record collection on MyHeritage
- The Three Cs of Irish Research: Civil Registration, Church Records, and Census at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Using Irish newspapers and other printed material at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
References
- ↑ https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/irish-war-independence
- ↑ Colm Lennon, Sixteenth-Century Ireland: The Incomplete Conquest (Dublin, 1994).
- ↑ Thomas Bartlett, Ireland: A History (Cambridge, 2011).
- ↑ https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/easter-rising
- ↑ https://www.dail100.ie/en/long-reads/the-1918-general-election/
- ↑ https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/irish-war-independence
- ↑ https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9260/
- ↑ https://discoverulsterscots.com/history-culture/story-presbyterians-ulster
- ↑ https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zt7msrd/revision/11
- ↑ Alexander J. Kent, ‘Mapping Northern Ireland: Processes of Partition, Protocol and Peace’, in The Cartographic Journal, Vol. 58, No. 2 (2021), pp. 115–122.