In 1916, a small group of rebels seized central Dublin and declared an Irish Republic.
Their uprising failed within a week. What followed was five years of guerrilla war, executions, a treaty, and a civil war that split former allies.
This is the story of how Ireland won its independence, and why the country it became was not the one the rebels had imagined.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] I'm Alastair Budge, and this is the third and final part of our series on Ireland: the nine centuries of struggle between an island and its powerful neighbour.
[00:00:23] In part one, we followed Ireland from the Norman arrival of 1169 to the Cromwellian settlement: how what began as a temporary military favour became a permanent occupation that stripped the Catholic majority of their land.
[00:00:40] In part two, we moved through the nineteenth century: the Act of Union, the Great Famine that killed a million people, and the brilliant, doomed career of Parnell, who came closer than anyone before him to winning Home Rule — and was brought down before he could get there.
[00:00:58] In this episode, we follow Ireland from 1912 to independence in 1922. It is a story of rebellion, guerrilla warfare, negotiation, partition, and civil war. And at the centre of it is one of the most remarkable figures in modern Irish history.
[00:01:19] Just in case you haven't listened to parts one and two yet, I will be picking things up from there, so if you haven't listened to those, now is the time to press pause and go and do that.
[00:01:31] OK then, let's not waste a minute, and get right into it.
[00:01:36] So, let us pick up where we left off.
[00:01:40] The Home Rule Act became law in September 1914. It would create an Irish parliament for domestic affairs while Ireland remained part of the United Kingdom.
[00:01:54] For most Irish nationalists, it was less than they wanted. But it was progress.
[00:02:02] Ulster Protestants did not see it that way.
[00:02:06] You'll remember that Ulster, the northernmost of Ireland's four provinces, had been home to Protestant settlers since the early 1600s, following the Plantation of Ulster.
[00:02:19] Three centuries on, this community was British in identity, Protestant in faith, and deeply opposed to any arrangement that would put them under the rule of a Catholic majority.
[00:02:34] "Home Rule is Rome Rule" was their slogan.
[00:02:40] In September 1912, nearly half a million Ulster Protestants signed something called the Ulster Covenant, pledging to resist Home Rule by all means necessary. And not only this. The Ulster Volunteer Force was formed: an armed militia of around a hundred thousand men, led by Edward Carson, a Dublin-born barrister who had become the most prominent voice of Irish unionism, the belief that Ireland, or at least Ulster, should remain part of the United Kingdom.
[00:03:17] In April 1914, the UVF had brought ashore twenty-five thousand rifles at Larne in County Antrim, in the dead of night, without a single arrest, showing you quite how institutionally tolerated this movement was.
[00:03:35] In response, Irish Nationalists had formed their own armed organisation, the Irish Volunteers.
[00:03:44] Ireland now had two large private militias on opposite sides.
[00:03:51] And then, in August 1914, the First World War began.
[00:03:57] The Home Rule Act was immediately suspended. John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, agreed to the delay, confident the war would be short and Home Rule would follow.
[00:04:12] It would be a decision with enormous consequences.
[00:04:16] For moderate Irish nationalists, this was of course frustrating.
[00:04:21] But for the more radical wing of the movement, those who had never believed Britain would willingly give Ireland meaningful self-government, it was confirmation of everything they had always argued.
[00:04:36] And they began to plan accordingly.
[00:04:40] Now, most Irish political leaders supported Irish participation in the First World War.
[00:04:47] Around two hundred thousand Irishmen eventually served, from both sides of the political and religious divide, in British uniform, fighting in France and Belgium.
[00:05:00] But a small group saw things differently. While their countrymen were dying in the trenches, they saw Britain's difficulty as Ireland's opportunity.
[00:05:14] And they began to move.
[00:05:17] The Irish Republican Brotherhood, the secret republican organisation we met in part two, which had always believed only force could win independence, they had been quietly preparing an uprising.
[00:05:31] Their intellectual leader was a man named Patrick Pearse, a schoolteacher and poet who believed, with an almost religious conviction, that Ireland required a blood sacrifice to be reborn as a nation. He knew from the beginning that it would probably fail militarily. He believed it only needed to inspire.
[00:05:54] Also at the centre of the planning was James Connolly, a trade union leader and socialist with a small private militia of his own. And Tom Clarke, a tobacconist in his late fifties, who had already spent fifteen years in British prisons for republican activities. He was the oldest of the conspirators, and regarded himself as the keeper of a tradition stretching back to the Fenians.
[00:06:23] The plan went wrong almost immediately.
[00:06:28] They had sought help from Germany, which was perfectly willing to oblige; as destabilising Ireland and tying down British troops served German interests quite well.
[00:06:39] The Germans agreed to send weapons, and one of the conspirators sent to manage the arrangement was Roger Casement. Now, he was a fascinating man; he was a former British diplomat who had been knighted for his work exposing human rights abuses in the Congo, and who had since turned to Irish nationalism.
[00:07:04] He returned to Ireland by German submarine, was arrested on the coast before the Rising could begin, and was later hanged in London.
[00:07:15] Then, a German ship carrying twenty thousand rifles was intercepted by the Royal Navy and sunk.
[00:07:24] Eoin MacNeill, the head of the Irish Volunteers, who had only been told of the plan at the last minute, issued a public order cancelling the planned mobilisation for Easter Sunday.
[00:07:37] The Military Council went ahead anyway.
[00:07:41] On Easter Monday, the twenty-fourth of April 1916, around 1,600 volunteers seized key positions across Dublin. The General Post Office on O'Connell Street, Dublin's main thoroughfare, became the headquarters of the rebellion. Patrick Pearse stood outside it and read aloud the Proclamation of the Irish Republic.
[00:08:08] "We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland," the proclamation said. It was signed by seven men — the members of the Military Council, who had planned the rising in secret and who knew, as they signed, that they were in all likelihood signing their own death warrants.
[00:08:30] The British response was swift. Around twelve thousand soldiers were deployed to Dublin within days. A gunboat on the River Liffey, the river running through the heart of the city, shelled the centre. Buildings burned.
[00:08:49] The fighting lasted six days. Around 450 people died, more than half of them civilians caught in the crossfire.
[00:08:59] The rebels surrendered on the twenty-ninth of April.
[00:09:04] And public reaction in Dublin was not sympathetic to the rebels' cause. Many Dubliners were angry. The city had been damaged. With so many Irish families having sons, brothers and husbands in France, the Rising felt, to many, like a betrayal. When the rebel leaders were marched through the streets after their surrender, some were jeered, shouted at by passers-by.
[00:09:34] Then the British government made a terrible miscalculation.
[00:09:40] Fourteen rebel leaders were executed in Dublin over ten days in May, one or two at a time, so that each execution arrived in the newspapers as a separate shock. A fifteenth, Thomas Kent, was executed in Cork. And a sixteenth, Roger Casement, was hanged in London in August.
[00:10:04] James Connolly had been so badly wounded during the fighting that he could not stand. He was tied to a chair and shot.
[00:10:14] This caused a shift in public opinion. The men who had been jeered as troublemakers became, one by one, as their executions were announced in the press, martyrs. The Rising, which had been a complete military failure, had become the founding myth of a revolution.
[00:10:35] The British government had handed its opponents exactly what they needed.
[00:10:42] In the two years that followed, Irish politics was transformed.
[00:10:47] Sinn Féin, a small nationalist party that had existed since 1905, and which the British press had wrongly blamed for the Uprising, it grew rapidly to become the dominant voice of Irish nationalism. The old Irish Parliamentary Party, which was associated with the failed policy of waiting for Home Rule, well, it collapsed.
[00:11:12] And in December 1918, the United Kingdom held a general election.
[00:11:19] Sinn Féin won seventy-three of Ireland's hundred and five Westminster seats.
[00:11:26] But they had no intention of going to Westminster. They had campaigned on a policy of abstentionism: refusing to sit in the British Parliament even if elected.
[00:11:39] Instead, on the twenty-first of January 1919, the elected members assembled in Dublin as the First Dáil Éireann, meaning the Assembly of Ireland, and declared themselves the parliament of an independent Irish Republic.
[00:11:55] On that same day, in County Tipperary, two members of the Royal Irish Constabulary, the British-controlled police force in Ireland, were ambushed and shot dead.
[00:12:08] The War of Independence had begun.
[00:12:12] Now, the War of Independence was not a conventional conflict. There were no front lines, no pitched battles. It was a guerrilla campaign, with the Irish Republican Army, as the Irish Volunteers had now become, carrying out ambushes and assassinations, and then melting back into the civilian population.
[00:12:36] In towns and villages across Ireland, police barracks were attacked, patrols were ambushed on country roads, and local officials seen as agents of British rule were targeted. The British responded with raids, arrests, burnings, and reprisals against civilian communities. It was a dirty, intimate war, fought street by street in some places and hedge by hedge in others.
[00:13:08] And no single person shaped that campaign more than Michael Collins.
[00:13:13] Collins was from West Cork, in the south of the country. He had worked in London as a young man, returned to Ireland for the Easter Rising, and was interned in Wales afterwards with hundreds of other rebels. He was twenty-five years old at the time.
[00:13:33] The months in the internment camp gave Collins time, contacts, and a very clear idea of what the movement needed to do differently. He had seen a rising fail. He was not going to repeat it.
[00:13:49] His role in the War of Independence was not that of a battlefield commander. He was an organiser, a spymaster, and a strategist, which made him, in some ways, even more dangerous.
[00:14:04] He built an intelligence network inside the British administration in Dublin. He had sources in the post office, in the police, among domestic staff in the homes of senior British officials. He knew, often within hours, what the British were planning. He used that intelligence to systematically dismantle the British intelligence operation in Ireland, targeting the detectives and officers gathering information on the IRA.
[00:14:35] Meanwhile, Collins moved around Dublin openly, on a bicycle, going to meetings and social events, known by sight to half the city. For three years, the British authorities who desperately wanted to capture him could not find him.
[00:14:54] And by 1920, the Royal Irish Constabulary was demoralised and barely functional in many areas. The British government responded by recruiting thousands of former First World War soldiers as temporary constables. There were not enough proper uniforms, so they were issued a mix of dark police uniforms and khaki army clothes.
[00:15:20] The combination gave them their nickname: the Black and Tans.
[00:15:26] A second force, the Auxiliaries, were former officers; they were better paid but considerably less disciplined.
[00:15:35] Neither improved the situation. Both became notorious for reprisals against civilian communities: villages burned, homes destroyed and people shot.
[00:15:49] The most concentrated single day of violence came on the twenty-first of November 1920: Bloody Sunday.
[00:15:58] In the early morning, Collins's men moved across Dublin and killed fourteen British intelligence officers in their homes and lodgings.
[00:16:09] That afternoon, a group of Auxiliaries drove to Croke Park, the main Gaelic football stadium in Dublin, where a crowd of thousands had gathered for a match. They opened fire on the pitch and the crowd. Fourteen people died, including a player on the field.
[00:16:30] Bloody Sunday did not end the war. But for Britain, it made the conflict impossible to ignore. The public was beginning to ask what exactly its government was doing in Ireland.
[00:16:44] And a truce was called on the eleventh of July 1921.
[00:16:50] Neither side had got what it wanted. Britain had not crushed the independence movement, but the IRA had not driven Britain out of Ireland either. So both sides now turned to negotiation.
[00:17:07] And the negotiations that followed were among the most consequential in modern Irish history.
[00:17:14] The Irish delegation was led by Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Féin, and Michael Collins. Collins did not want to go to London. He understood the position he would be in: any agreement short of a full republic would be opposed by a significant part of the movement.
[00:17:35] He told a friend, as he left for London, that he was probably signing his death warrant. He did not mean it metaphorically.
[00:17:44] David Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, and his negotiating team understood how to apply pressure. At the end of the talks, Lloyd George presented the Irish delegation with an ultimatum: sign the treaty as it stood, or face "immediate and terrible war."
[00:18:05] Griffith and Collins signed, in the early hours of the sixth of December 1921.
[00:18:13] The Anglo-Irish Treaty created the Irish Free State: self-governing, but within the British Empire, with the same constitutional position as Canada or Australia. Ireland would have its own government and parliament. But it would not be a republic. Members of the new parliament would have to swear an oath of allegiance to the British Crown.
[00:18:39] And Northern Ireland, the six counties in the north-east, was already a separate jurisdiction. A British Act of Parliament in 1920 had created it as a distinct region, with its own parliament in Belfast. The treaty gave it the right to opt out of the new Free State, which it did, remaining in the United Kingdom.
[00:19:05] Collins's defence of the treaty was pragmatic. It was not the republic. He knew that. But it was, he said, "the freedom to achieve freedom." A stepping stone. You fight from where you are, not from where you wish you were.
[00:19:23] The Dáil voted sixty-four to fifty-seven to approve it. A margin of seven votes.
[00:19:32] The narrow vote split the independence movement in two. The anti-Treaty side, which included a significant portion of the IRA's fighting men, refused to accept the result and kept their weapons. Collins's new Provisional Government had to build an army while its opponents remained armed. For several months, both sides tried to avoid the worst.
[00:20:00] But, they could not.
[00:20:03] This led, in June 1922, to the Irish Civil War.
[00:20:09] Anti-Treaty forces occupied the Four Courts, the main courts complex in Dublin, as a statement of defiance against the new Provisional Government. Collins, who was now leading that government, gave the order to attack. Free State forces bombarded the building with artillery borrowed from the British Army.
[00:20:33] The irony was not lost on anyone.
[00:20:37] The war that followed was smaller in scale than the War of Independence but more poisonous. These men had fought alongside each other. Some were friends. Some were brothers. Around 1,500 people were killed, including Collins.
[00:20:57] In the end, the government won. Anti-Treaty forces laid down their arms in May 1923. But the bitterness lasted for generations.
[00:21:10] And yet, in a strange way, Collins's argument, that the treaty was a stepping stone, was eventually proved right.
[00:21:20] The anti-Treaty leader, Éamon de Valera, founded a new political party and won the 1932 election. He then spent the next fifteen years dismantling the treaty piece by piece: abolishing the oath of allegiance to the Crown, reducing the role of the British monarchy, and passing a new constitution in 1937 that effectively created a republic in all but name.
[00:21:49] And on Easter Monday 1949, the thirty-third anniversary of the Rising, the Irish Free State formally became the Republic of Ireland. The choice of date was not an accident.
[00:22:05] So what does it all amount to?
[00:22:08] Nine centuries of history, from the Norman landing of 1169 to the Civil War ceasefire of 1923.
[00:22:18] In part one, we watched Ireland absorbed by its more powerful neighbour, step by step.
[00:22:24] In part two, we saw how Ireland spent the nineteenth century trying to escape that legacy.
[00:22:31] And in this episode, we followed the final act: a small group of rebels who turned a military failure into a revolution, a guerrilla war that forced Britain to the negotiating table, and an independence that came at an enormous cost, and with a wound built into it from the start.
[00:22:53] The decades that followed saw continued violence, especially in Northern Ireland, a conflict known as the Troubles, which lasted from the late 1960s until the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 and claimed more than 3,500 lives.
[00:23:12] If you haven't listened to our episode on that, it's episode number 507.
[00:23:18] As for the relationship between Ireland and Britain today, it is no longer the relationship this series began with.
[00:23:26] Ireland is now an independent, wealthy European state. Britain is no longer an imperial power. And yet the two countries remain bound together by geography, trade, history, and people.
[00:23:42] Brexit was a reminder that the old questions never disappeared completely. The issue of the Irish border, which many had come to take for granted, suddenly returned to the centre of British and Irish politics. But for the most part, the relationship now is not one of domination or rebellion. It is one of two neighbours living with a history that neither can escape.
[00:24:08] What runs through all of it, perhaps, is a simple and enduring fact. You can suppress a people’s sense of identity. You can take their land, outlaw their language, ban their religion, and plant strangers on their soil.
[00:24:24] But you cannot make them forget who they are.
[00:24:28] OK, then, that is it for the third and final part of this mini-series.
[00:24:33] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:24:36] As always, I'd love to know what you thought of this episode. Have you been to Ireland? Are there parallels between the history of Ireland and the history of your country?
[00:24:46] I would love to know, so let's get this discussion started. You can head right into our community forum which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:24:58] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:25:03] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] I'm Alastair Budge, and this is the third and final part of our series on Ireland: the nine centuries of struggle between an island and its powerful neighbour.
[00:00:23] In part one, we followed Ireland from the Norman arrival of 1169 to the Cromwellian settlement: how what began as a temporary military favour became a permanent occupation that stripped the Catholic majority of their land.
[00:00:40] In part two, we moved through the nineteenth century: the Act of Union, the Great Famine that killed a million people, and the brilliant, doomed career of Parnell, who came closer than anyone before him to winning Home Rule — and was brought down before he could get there.
[00:00:58] In this episode, we follow Ireland from 1912 to independence in 1922. It is a story of rebellion, guerrilla warfare, negotiation, partition, and civil war. And at the centre of it is one of the most remarkable figures in modern Irish history.
[00:01:19] Just in case you haven't listened to parts one and two yet, I will be picking things up from there, so if you haven't listened to those, now is the time to press pause and go and do that.
[00:01:31] OK then, let's not waste a minute, and get right into it.
[00:01:36] So, let us pick up where we left off.
[00:01:40] The Home Rule Act became law in September 1914. It would create an Irish parliament for domestic affairs while Ireland remained part of the United Kingdom.
[00:01:54] For most Irish nationalists, it was less than they wanted. But it was progress.
[00:02:02] Ulster Protestants did not see it that way.
[00:02:06] You'll remember that Ulster, the northernmost of Ireland's four provinces, had been home to Protestant settlers since the early 1600s, following the Plantation of Ulster.
[00:02:19] Three centuries on, this community was British in identity, Protestant in faith, and deeply opposed to any arrangement that would put them under the rule of a Catholic majority.
[00:02:34] "Home Rule is Rome Rule" was their slogan.
[00:02:40] In September 1912, nearly half a million Ulster Protestants signed something called the Ulster Covenant, pledging to resist Home Rule by all means necessary. And not only this. The Ulster Volunteer Force was formed: an armed militia of around a hundred thousand men, led by Edward Carson, a Dublin-born barrister who had become the most prominent voice of Irish unionism, the belief that Ireland, or at least Ulster, should remain part of the United Kingdom.
[00:03:17] In April 1914, the UVF had brought ashore twenty-five thousand rifles at Larne in County Antrim, in the dead of night, without a single arrest, showing you quite how institutionally tolerated this movement was.
[00:03:35] In response, Irish Nationalists had formed their own armed organisation, the Irish Volunteers.
[00:03:44] Ireland now had two large private militias on opposite sides.
[00:03:51] And then, in August 1914, the First World War began.
[00:03:57] The Home Rule Act was immediately suspended. John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, agreed to the delay, confident the war would be short and Home Rule would follow.
[00:04:12] It would be a decision with enormous consequences.
[00:04:16] For moderate Irish nationalists, this was of course frustrating.
[00:04:21] But for the more radical wing of the movement, those who had never believed Britain would willingly give Ireland meaningful self-government, it was confirmation of everything they had always argued.
[00:04:36] And they began to plan accordingly.
[00:04:40] Now, most Irish political leaders supported Irish participation in the First World War.
[00:04:47] Around two hundred thousand Irishmen eventually served, from both sides of the political and religious divide, in British uniform, fighting in France and Belgium.
[00:05:00] But a small group saw things differently. While their countrymen were dying in the trenches, they saw Britain's difficulty as Ireland's opportunity.
[00:05:14] And they began to move.
[00:05:17] The Irish Republican Brotherhood, the secret republican organisation we met in part two, which had always believed only force could win independence, they had been quietly preparing an uprising.
[00:05:31] Their intellectual leader was a man named Patrick Pearse, a schoolteacher and poet who believed, with an almost religious conviction, that Ireland required a blood sacrifice to be reborn as a nation. He knew from the beginning that it would probably fail militarily. He believed it only needed to inspire.
[00:05:54] Also at the centre of the planning was James Connolly, a trade union leader and socialist with a small private militia of his own. And Tom Clarke, a tobacconist in his late fifties, who had already spent fifteen years in British prisons for republican activities. He was the oldest of the conspirators, and regarded himself as the keeper of a tradition stretching back to the Fenians.
[00:06:23] The plan went wrong almost immediately.
[00:06:28] They had sought help from Germany, which was perfectly willing to oblige; as destabilising Ireland and tying down British troops served German interests quite well.
[00:06:39] The Germans agreed to send weapons, and one of the conspirators sent to manage the arrangement was Roger Casement. Now, he was a fascinating man; he was a former British diplomat who had been knighted for his work exposing human rights abuses in the Congo, and who had since turned to Irish nationalism.
[00:07:04] He returned to Ireland by German submarine, was arrested on the coast before the Rising could begin, and was later hanged in London.
[00:07:15] Then, a German ship carrying twenty thousand rifles was intercepted by the Royal Navy and sunk.
[00:07:24] Eoin MacNeill, the head of the Irish Volunteers, who had only been told of the plan at the last minute, issued a public order cancelling the planned mobilisation for Easter Sunday.
[00:07:37] The Military Council went ahead anyway.
[00:07:41] On Easter Monday, the twenty-fourth of April 1916, around 1,600 volunteers seized key positions across Dublin. The General Post Office on O'Connell Street, Dublin's main thoroughfare, became the headquarters of the rebellion. Patrick Pearse stood outside it and read aloud the Proclamation of the Irish Republic.
[00:08:08] "We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland," the proclamation said. It was signed by seven men — the members of the Military Council, who had planned the rising in secret and who knew, as they signed, that they were in all likelihood signing their own death warrants.
[00:08:30] The British response was swift. Around twelve thousand soldiers were deployed to Dublin within days. A gunboat on the River Liffey, the river running through the heart of the city, shelled the centre. Buildings burned.
[00:08:49] The fighting lasted six days. Around 450 people died, more than half of them civilians caught in the crossfire.
[00:08:59] The rebels surrendered on the twenty-ninth of April.
[00:09:04] And public reaction in Dublin was not sympathetic to the rebels' cause. Many Dubliners were angry. The city had been damaged. With so many Irish families having sons, brothers and husbands in France, the Rising felt, to many, like a betrayal. When the rebel leaders were marched through the streets after their surrender, some were jeered, shouted at by passers-by.
[00:09:34] Then the British government made a terrible miscalculation.
[00:09:40] Fourteen rebel leaders were executed in Dublin over ten days in May, one or two at a time, so that each execution arrived in the newspapers as a separate shock. A fifteenth, Thomas Kent, was executed in Cork. And a sixteenth, Roger Casement, was hanged in London in August.
[00:10:04] James Connolly had been so badly wounded during the fighting that he could not stand. He was tied to a chair and shot.
[00:10:14] This caused a shift in public opinion. The men who had been jeered as troublemakers became, one by one, as their executions were announced in the press, martyrs. The Rising, which had been a complete military failure, had become the founding myth of a revolution.
[00:10:35] The British government had handed its opponents exactly what they needed.
[00:10:42] In the two years that followed, Irish politics was transformed.
[00:10:47] Sinn Féin, a small nationalist party that had existed since 1905, and which the British press had wrongly blamed for the Uprising, it grew rapidly to become the dominant voice of Irish nationalism. The old Irish Parliamentary Party, which was associated with the failed policy of waiting for Home Rule, well, it collapsed.
[00:11:12] And in December 1918, the United Kingdom held a general election.
[00:11:19] Sinn Féin won seventy-three of Ireland's hundred and five Westminster seats.
[00:11:26] But they had no intention of going to Westminster. They had campaigned on a policy of abstentionism: refusing to sit in the British Parliament even if elected.
[00:11:39] Instead, on the twenty-first of January 1919, the elected members assembled in Dublin as the First Dáil Éireann, meaning the Assembly of Ireland, and declared themselves the parliament of an independent Irish Republic.
[00:11:55] On that same day, in County Tipperary, two members of the Royal Irish Constabulary, the British-controlled police force in Ireland, were ambushed and shot dead.
[00:12:08] The War of Independence had begun.
[00:12:12] Now, the War of Independence was not a conventional conflict. There were no front lines, no pitched battles. It was a guerrilla campaign, with the Irish Republican Army, as the Irish Volunteers had now become, carrying out ambushes and assassinations, and then melting back into the civilian population.
[00:12:36] In towns and villages across Ireland, police barracks were attacked, patrols were ambushed on country roads, and local officials seen as agents of British rule were targeted. The British responded with raids, arrests, burnings, and reprisals against civilian communities. It was a dirty, intimate war, fought street by street in some places and hedge by hedge in others.
[00:13:08] And no single person shaped that campaign more than Michael Collins.
[00:13:13] Collins was from West Cork, in the south of the country. He had worked in London as a young man, returned to Ireland for the Easter Rising, and was interned in Wales afterwards with hundreds of other rebels. He was twenty-five years old at the time.
[00:13:33] The months in the internment camp gave Collins time, contacts, and a very clear idea of what the movement needed to do differently. He had seen a rising fail. He was not going to repeat it.
[00:13:49] His role in the War of Independence was not that of a battlefield commander. He was an organiser, a spymaster, and a strategist, which made him, in some ways, even more dangerous.
[00:14:04] He built an intelligence network inside the British administration in Dublin. He had sources in the post office, in the police, among domestic staff in the homes of senior British officials. He knew, often within hours, what the British were planning. He used that intelligence to systematically dismantle the British intelligence operation in Ireland, targeting the detectives and officers gathering information on the IRA.
[00:14:35] Meanwhile, Collins moved around Dublin openly, on a bicycle, going to meetings and social events, known by sight to half the city. For three years, the British authorities who desperately wanted to capture him could not find him.
[00:14:54] And by 1920, the Royal Irish Constabulary was demoralised and barely functional in many areas. The British government responded by recruiting thousands of former First World War soldiers as temporary constables. There were not enough proper uniforms, so they were issued a mix of dark police uniforms and khaki army clothes.
[00:15:20] The combination gave them their nickname: the Black and Tans.
[00:15:26] A second force, the Auxiliaries, were former officers; they were better paid but considerably less disciplined.
[00:15:35] Neither improved the situation. Both became notorious for reprisals against civilian communities: villages burned, homes destroyed and people shot.
[00:15:49] The most concentrated single day of violence came on the twenty-first of November 1920: Bloody Sunday.
[00:15:58] In the early morning, Collins's men moved across Dublin and killed fourteen British intelligence officers in their homes and lodgings.
[00:16:09] That afternoon, a group of Auxiliaries drove to Croke Park, the main Gaelic football stadium in Dublin, where a crowd of thousands had gathered for a match. They opened fire on the pitch and the crowd. Fourteen people died, including a player on the field.
[00:16:30] Bloody Sunday did not end the war. But for Britain, it made the conflict impossible to ignore. The public was beginning to ask what exactly its government was doing in Ireland.
[00:16:44] And a truce was called on the eleventh of July 1921.
[00:16:50] Neither side had got what it wanted. Britain had not crushed the independence movement, but the IRA had not driven Britain out of Ireland either. So both sides now turned to negotiation.
[00:17:07] And the negotiations that followed were among the most consequential in modern Irish history.
[00:17:14] The Irish delegation was led by Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Féin, and Michael Collins. Collins did not want to go to London. He understood the position he would be in: any agreement short of a full republic would be opposed by a significant part of the movement.
[00:17:35] He told a friend, as he left for London, that he was probably signing his death warrant. He did not mean it metaphorically.
[00:17:44] David Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, and his negotiating team understood how to apply pressure. At the end of the talks, Lloyd George presented the Irish delegation with an ultimatum: sign the treaty as it stood, or face "immediate and terrible war."
[00:18:05] Griffith and Collins signed, in the early hours of the sixth of December 1921.
[00:18:13] The Anglo-Irish Treaty created the Irish Free State: self-governing, but within the British Empire, with the same constitutional position as Canada or Australia. Ireland would have its own government and parliament. But it would not be a republic. Members of the new parliament would have to swear an oath of allegiance to the British Crown.
[00:18:39] And Northern Ireland, the six counties in the north-east, was already a separate jurisdiction. A British Act of Parliament in 1920 had created it as a distinct region, with its own parliament in Belfast. The treaty gave it the right to opt out of the new Free State, which it did, remaining in the United Kingdom.
[00:19:05] Collins's defence of the treaty was pragmatic. It was not the republic. He knew that. But it was, he said, "the freedom to achieve freedom." A stepping stone. You fight from where you are, not from where you wish you were.
[00:19:23] The Dáil voted sixty-four to fifty-seven to approve it. A margin of seven votes.
[00:19:32] The narrow vote split the independence movement in two. The anti-Treaty side, which included a significant portion of the IRA's fighting men, refused to accept the result and kept their weapons. Collins's new Provisional Government had to build an army while its opponents remained armed. For several months, both sides tried to avoid the worst.
[00:20:00] But, they could not.
[00:20:03] This led, in June 1922, to the Irish Civil War.
[00:20:09] Anti-Treaty forces occupied the Four Courts, the main courts complex in Dublin, as a statement of defiance against the new Provisional Government. Collins, who was now leading that government, gave the order to attack. Free State forces bombarded the building with artillery borrowed from the British Army.
[00:20:33] The irony was not lost on anyone.
[00:20:37] The war that followed was smaller in scale than the War of Independence but more poisonous. These men had fought alongside each other. Some were friends. Some were brothers. Around 1,500 people were killed, including Collins.
[00:20:57] In the end, the government won. Anti-Treaty forces laid down their arms in May 1923. But the bitterness lasted for generations.
[00:21:10] And yet, in a strange way, Collins's argument, that the treaty was a stepping stone, was eventually proved right.
[00:21:20] The anti-Treaty leader, Éamon de Valera, founded a new political party and won the 1932 election. He then spent the next fifteen years dismantling the treaty piece by piece: abolishing the oath of allegiance to the Crown, reducing the role of the British monarchy, and passing a new constitution in 1937 that effectively created a republic in all but name.
[00:21:49] And on Easter Monday 1949, the thirty-third anniversary of the Rising, the Irish Free State formally became the Republic of Ireland. The choice of date was not an accident.
[00:22:05] So what does it all amount to?
[00:22:08] Nine centuries of history, from the Norman landing of 1169 to the Civil War ceasefire of 1923.
[00:22:18] In part one, we watched Ireland absorbed by its more powerful neighbour, step by step.
[00:22:24] In part two, we saw how Ireland spent the nineteenth century trying to escape that legacy.
[00:22:31] And in this episode, we followed the final act: a small group of rebels who turned a military failure into a revolution, a guerrilla war that forced Britain to the negotiating table, and an independence that came at an enormous cost, and with a wound built into it from the start.
[00:22:53] The decades that followed saw continued violence, especially in Northern Ireland, a conflict known as the Troubles, which lasted from the late 1960s until the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 and claimed more than 3,500 lives.
[00:23:12] If you haven't listened to our episode on that, it's episode number 507.
[00:23:18] As for the relationship between Ireland and Britain today, it is no longer the relationship this series began with.
[00:23:26] Ireland is now an independent, wealthy European state. Britain is no longer an imperial power. And yet the two countries remain bound together by geography, trade, history, and people.
[00:23:42] Brexit was a reminder that the old questions never disappeared completely. The issue of the Irish border, which many had come to take for granted, suddenly returned to the centre of British and Irish politics. But for the most part, the relationship now is not one of domination or rebellion. It is one of two neighbours living with a history that neither can escape.
[00:24:08] What runs through all of it, perhaps, is a simple and enduring fact. You can suppress a people’s sense of identity. You can take their land, outlaw their language, ban their religion, and plant strangers on their soil.
[00:24:24] But you cannot make them forget who they are.
[00:24:28] OK, then, that is it for the third and final part of this mini-series.
[00:24:33] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:24:36] As always, I'd love to know what you thought of this episode. Have you been to Ireland? Are there parallels between the history of Ireland and the history of your country?
[00:24:46] I would love to know, so let's get this discussion started. You can head right into our community forum which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:24:58] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:25:03] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] I'm Alastair Budge, and this is the third and final part of our series on Ireland: the nine centuries of struggle between an island and its powerful neighbour.
[00:00:23] In part one, we followed Ireland from the Norman arrival of 1169 to the Cromwellian settlement: how what began as a temporary military favour became a permanent occupation that stripped the Catholic majority of their land.
[00:00:40] In part two, we moved through the nineteenth century: the Act of Union, the Great Famine that killed a million people, and the brilliant, doomed career of Parnell, who came closer than anyone before him to winning Home Rule — and was brought down before he could get there.
[00:00:58] In this episode, we follow Ireland from 1912 to independence in 1922. It is a story of rebellion, guerrilla warfare, negotiation, partition, and civil war. And at the centre of it is one of the most remarkable figures in modern Irish history.
[00:01:19] Just in case you haven't listened to parts one and two yet, I will be picking things up from there, so if you haven't listened to those, now is the time to press pause and go and do that.
[00:01:31] OK then, let's not waste a minute, and get right into it.
[00:01:36] So, let us pick up where we left off.
[00:01:40] The Home Rule Act became law in September 1914. It would create an Irish parliament for domestic affairs while Ireland remained part of the United Kingdom.
[00:01:54] For most Irish nationalists, it was less than they wanted. But it was progress.
[00:02:02] Ulster Protestants did not see it that way.
[00:02:06] You'll remember that Ulster, the northernmost of Ireland's four provinces, had been home to Protestant settlers since the early 1600s, following the Plantation of Ulster.
[00:02:19] Three centuries on, this community was British in identity, Protestant in faith, and deeply opposed to any arrangement that would put them under the rule of a Catholic majority.
[00:02:34] "Home Rule is Rome Rule" was their slogan.
[00:02:40] In September 1912, nearly half a million Ulster Protestants signed something called the Ulster Covenant, pledging to resist Home Rule by all means necessary. And not only this. The Ulster Volunteer Force was formed: an armed militia of around a hundred thousand men, led by Edward Carson, a Dublin-born barrister who had become the most prominent voice of Irish unionism, the belief that Ireland, or at least Ulster, should remain part of the United Kingdom.
[00:03:17] In April 1914, the UVF had brought ashore twenty-five thousand rifles at Larne in County Antrim, in the dead of night, without a single arrest, showing you quite how institutionally tolerated this movement was.
[00:03:35] In response, Irish Nationalists had formed their own armed organisation, the Irish Volunteers.
[00:03:44] Ireland now had two large private militias on opposite sides.
[00:03:51] And then, in August 1914, the First World War began.
[00:03:57] The Home Rule Act was immediately suspended. John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, agreed to the delay, confident the war would be short and Home Rule would follow.
[00:04:12] It would be a decision with enormous consequences.
[00:04:16] For moderate Irish nationalists, this was of course frustrating.
[00:04:21] But for the more radical wing of the movement, those who had never believed Britain would willingly give Ireland meaningful self-government, it was confirmation of everything they had always argued.
[00:04:36] And they began to plan accordingly.
[00:04:40] Now, most Irish political leaders supported Irish participation in the First World War.
[00:04:47] Around two hundred thousand Irishmen eventually served, from both sides of the political and religious divide, in British uniform, fighting in France and Belgium.
[00:05:00] But a small group saw things differently. While their countrymen were dying in the trenches, they saw Britain's difficulty as Ireland's opportunity.
[00:05:14] And they began to move.
[00:05:17] The Irish Republican Brotherhood, the secret republican organisation we met in part two, which had always believed only force could win independence, they had been quietly preparing an uprising.
[00:05:31] Their intellectual leader was a man named Patrick Pearse, a schoolteacher and poet who believed, with an almost religious conviction, that Ireland required a blood sacrifice to be reborn as a nation. He knew from the beginning that it would probably fail militarily. He believed it only needed to inspire.
[00:05:54] Also at the centre of the planning was James Connolly, a trade union leader and socialist with a small private militia of his own. And Tom Clarke, a tobacconist in his late fifties, who had already spent fifteen years in British prisons for republican activities. He was the oldest of the conspirators, and regarded himself as the keeper of a tradition stretching back to the Fenians.
[00:06:23] The plan went wrong almost immediately.
[00:06:28] They had sought help from Germany, which was perfectly willing to oblige; as destabilising Ireland and tying down British troops served German interests quite well.
[00:06:39] The Germans agreed to send weapons, and one of the conspirators sent to manage the arrangement was Roger Casement. Now, he was a fascinating man; he was a former British diplomat who had been knighted for his work exposing human rights abuses in the Congo, and who had since turned to Irish nationalism.
[00:07:04] He returned to Ireland by German submarine, was arrested on the coast before the Rising could begin, and was later hanged in London.
[00:07:15] Then, a German ship carrying twenty thousand rifles was intercepted by the Royal Navy and sunk.
[00:07:24] Eoin MacNeill, the head of the Irish Volunteers, who had only been told of the plan at the last minute, issued a public order cancelling the planned mobilisation for Easter Sunday.
[00:07:37] The Military Council went ahead anyway.
[00:07:41] On Easter Monday, the twenty-fourth of April 1916, around 1,600 volunteers seized key positions across Dublin. The General Post Office on O'Connell Street, Dublin's main thoroughfare, became the headquarters of the rebellion. Patrick Pearse stood outside it and read aloud the Proclamation of the Irish Republic.
[00:08:08] "We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland," the proclamation said. It was signed by seven men — the members of the Military Council, who had planned the rising in secret and who knew, as they signed, that they were in all likelihood signing their own death warrants.
[00:08:30] The British response was swift. Around twelve thousand soldiers were deployed to Dublin within days. A gunboat on the River Liffey, the river running through the heart of the city, shelled the centre. Buildings burned.
[00:08:49] The fighting lasted six days. Around 450 people died, more than half of them civilians caught in the crossfire.
[00:08:59] The rebels surrendered on the twenty-ninth of April.
[00:09:04] And public reaction in Dublin was not sympathetic to the rebels' cause. Many Dubliners were angry. The city had been damaged. With so many Irish families having sons, brothers and husbands in France, the Rising felt, to many, like a betrayal. When the rebel leaders were marched through the streets after their surrender, some were jeered, shouted at by passers-by.
[00:09:34] Then the British government made a terrible miscalculation.
[00:09:40] Fourteen rebel leaders were executed in Dublin over ten days in May, one or two at a time, so that each execution arrived in the newspapers as a separate shock. A fifteenth, Thomas Kent, was executed in Cork. And a sixteenth, Roger Casement, was hanged in London in August.
[00:10:04] James Connolly had been so badly wounded during the fighting that he could not stand. He was tied to a chair and shot.
[00:10:14] This caused a shift in public opinion. The men who had been jeered as troublemakers became, one by one, as their executions were announced in the press, martyrs. The Rising, which had been a complete military failure, had become the founding myth of a revolution.
[00:10:35] The British government had handed its opponents exactly what they needed.
[00:10:42] In the two years that followed, Irish politics was transformed.
[00:10:47] Sinn Féin, a small nationalist party that had existed since 1905, and which the British press had wrongly blamed for the Uprising, it grew rapidly to become the dominant voice of Irish nationalism. The old Irish Parliamentary Party, which was associated with the failed policy of waiting for Home Rule, well, it collapsed.
[00:11:12] And in December 1918, the United Kingdom held a general election.
[00:11:19] Sinn Féin won seventy-three of Ireland's hundred and five Westminster seats.
[00:11:26] But they had no intention of going to Westminster. They had campaigned on a policy of abstentionism: refusing to sit in the British Parliament even if elected.
[00:11:39] Instead, on the twenty-first of January 1919, the elected members assembled in Dublin as the First Dáil Éireann, meaning the Assembly of Ireland, and declared themselves the parliament of an independent Irish Republic.
[00:11:55] On that same day, in County Tipperary, two members of the Royal Irish Constabulary, the British-controlled police force in Ireland, were ambushed and shot dead.
[00:12:08] The War of Independence had begun.
[00:12:12] Now, the War of Independence was not a conventional conflict. There were no front lines, no pitched battles. It was a guerrilla campaign, with the Irish Republican Army, as the Irish Volunteers had now become, carrying out ambushes and assassinations, and then melting back into the civilian population.
[00:12:36] In towns and villages across Ireland, police barracks were attacked, patrols were ambushed on country roads, and local officials seen as agents of British rule were targeted. The British responded with raids, arrests, burnings, and reprisals against civilian communities. It was a dirty, intimate war, fought street by street in some places and hedge by hedge in others.
[00:13:08] And no single person shaped that campaign more than Michael Collins.
[00:13:13] Collins was from West Cork, in the south of the country. He had worked in London as a young man, returned to Ireland for the Easter Rising, and was interned in Wales afterwards with hundreds of other rebels. He was twenty-five years old at the time.
[00:13:33] The months in the internment camp gave Collins time, contacts, and a very clear idea of what the movement needed to do differently. He had seen a rising fail. He was not going to repeat it.
[00:13:49] His role in the War of Independence was not that of a battlefield commander. He was an organiser, a spymaster, and a strategist, which made him, in some ways, even more dangerous.
[00:14:04] He built an intelligence network inside the British administration in Dublin. He had sources in the post office, in the police, among domestic staff in the homes of senior British officials. He knew, often within hours, what the British were planning. He used that intelligence to systematically dismantle the British intelligence operation in Ireland, targeting the detectives and officers gathering information on the IRA.
[00:14:35] Meanwhile, Collins moved around Dublin openly, on a bicycle, going to meetings and social events, known by sight to half the city. For three years, the British authorities who desperately wanted to capture him could not find him.
[00:14:54] And by 1920, the Royal Irish Constabulary was demoralised and barely functional in many areas. The British government responded by recruiting thousands of former First World War soldiers as temporary constables. There were not enough proper uniforms, so they were issued a mix of dark police uniforms and khaki army clothes.
[00:15:20] The combination gave them their nickname: the Black and Tans.
[00:15:26] A second force, the Auxiliaries, were former officers; they were better paid but considerably less disciplined.
[00:15:35] Neither improved the situation. Both became notorious for reprisals against civilian communities: villages burned, homes destroyed and people shot.
[00:15:49] The most concentrated single day of violence came on the twenty-first of November 1920: Bloody Sunday.
[00:15:58] In the early morning, Collins's men moved across Dublin and killed fourteen British intelligence officers in their homes and lodgings.
[00:16:09] That afternoon, a group of Auxiliaries drove to Croke Park, the main Gaelic football stadium in Dublin, where a crowd of thousands had gathered for a match. They opened fire on the pitch and the crowd. Fourteen people died, including a player on the field.
[00:16:30] Bloody Sunday did not end the war. But for Britain, it made the conflict impossible to ignore. The public was beginning to ask what exactly its government was doing in Ireland.
[00:16:44] And a truce was called on the eleventh of July 1921.
[00:16:50] Neither side had got what it wanted. Britain had not crushed the independence movement, but the IRA had not driven Britain out of Ireland either. So both sides now turned to negotiation.
[00:17:07] And the negotiations that followed were among the most consequential in modern Irish history.
[00:17:14] The Irish delegation was led by Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Féin, and Michael Collins. Collins did not want to go to London. He understood the position he would be in: any agreement short of a full republic would be opposed by a significant part of the movement.
[00:17:35] He told a friend, as he left for London, that he was probably signing his death warrant. He did not mean it metaphorically.
[00:17:44] David Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, and his negotiating team understood how to apply pressure. At the end of the talks, Lloyd George presented the Irish delegation with an ultimatum: sign the treaty as it stood, or face "immediate and terrible war."
[00:18:05] Griffith and Collins signed, in the early hours of the sixth of December 1921.
[00:18:13] The Anglo-Irish Treaty created the Irish Free State: self-governing, but within the British Empire, with the same constitutional position as Canada or Australia. Ireland would have its own government and parliament. But it would not be a republic. Members of the new parliament would have to swear an oath of allegiance to the British Crown.
[00:18:39] And Northern Ireland, the six counties in the north-east, was already a separate jurisdiction. A British Act of Parliament in 1920 had created it as a distinct region, with its own parliament in Belfast. The treaty gave it the right to opt out of the new Free State, which it did, remaining in the United Kingdom.
[00:19:05] Collins's defence of the treaty was pragmatic. It was not the republic. He knew that. But it was, he said, "the freedom to achieve freedom." A stepping stone. You fight from where you are, not from where you wish you were.
[00:19:23] The Dáil voted sixty-four to fifty-seven to approve it. A margin of seven votes.
[00:19:32] The narrow vote split the independence movement in two. The anti-Treaty side, which included a significant portion of the IRA's fighting men, refused to accept the result and kept their weapons. Collins's new Provisional Government had to build an army while its opponents remained armed. For several months, both sides tried to avoid the worst.
[00:20:00] But, they could not.
[00:20:03] This led, in June 1922, to the Irish Civil War.
[00:20:09] Anti-Treaty forces occupied the Four Courts, the main courts complex in Dublin, as a statement of defiance against the new Provisional Government. Collins, who was now leading that government, gave the order to attack. Free State forces bombarded the building with artillery borrowed from the British Army.
[00:20:33] The irony was not lost on anyone.
[00:20:37] The war that followed was smaller in scale than the War of Independence but more poisonous. These men had fought alongside each other. Some were friends. Some were brothers. Around 1,500 people were killed, including Collins.
[00:20:57] In the end, the government won. Anti-Treaty forces laid down their arms in May 1923. But the bitterness lasted for generations.
[00:21:10] And yet, in a strange way, Collins's argument, that the treaty was a stepping stone, was eventually proved right.
[00:21:20] The anti-Treaty leader, Éamon de Valera, founded a new political party and won the 1932 election. He then spent the next fifteen years dismantling the treaty piece by piece: abolishing the oath of allegiance to the Crown, reducing the role of the British monarchy, and passing a new constitution in 1937 that effectively created a republic in all but name.
[00:21:49] And on Easter Monday 1949, the thirty-third anniversary of the Rising, the Irish Free State formally became the Republic of Ireland. The choice of date was not an accident.
[00:22:05] So what does it all amount to?
[00:22:08] Nine centuries of history, from the Norman landing of 1169 to the Civil War ceasefire of 1923.
[00:22:18] In part one, we watched Ireland absorbed by its more powerful neighbour, step by step.
[00:22:24] In part two, we saw how Ireland spent the nineteenth century trying to escape that legacy.
[00:22:31] And in this episode, we followed the final act: a small group of rebels who turned a military failure into a revolution, a guerrilla war that forced Britain to the negotiating table, and an independence that came at an enormous cost, and with a wound built into it from the start.
[00:22:53] The decades that followed saw continued violence, especially in Northern Ireland, a conflict known as the Troubles, which lasted from the late 1960s until the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 and claimed more than 3,500 lives.
[00:23:12] If you haven't listened to our episode on that, it's episode number 507.
[00:23:18] As for the relationship between Ireland and Britain today, it is no longer the relationship this series began with.
[00:23:26] Ireland is now an independent, wealthy European state. Britain is no longer an imperial power. And yet the two countries remain bound together by geography, trade, history, and people.
[00:23:42] Brexit was a reminder that the old questions never disappeared completely. The issue of the Irish border, which many had come to take for granted, suddenly returned to the centre of British and Irish politics. But for the most part, the relationship now is not one of domination or rebellion. It is one of two neighbours living with a history that neither can escape.
[00:24:08] What runs through all of it, perhaps, is a simple and enduring fact. You can suppress a people’s sense of identity. You can take their land, outlaw their language, ban their religion, and plant strangers on their soil.
[00:24:24] But you cannot make them forget who they are.
[00:24:28] OK, then, that is it for the third and final part of this mini-series.
[00:24:33] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:24:36] As always, I'd love to know what you thought of this episode. Have you been to Ireland? Are there parallels between the history of Ireland and the history of your country?
[00:24:46] I would love to know, so let's get this discussion started. You can head right into our community forum which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:24:58] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:25:03] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
