Hourly History - Irish Civil War: A History from Beginning to End

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All civil wars are, by their very nature, divisive and often fought with great brutality and hatred. That was certainly true of the civil war which took place in Ireland between June 1922 and May 1923. During this bloody internecine conflict, murder, assassination and arbitrary execution became almost commonplace as two groups of Irish people who had fought together in the War of Independence fought against each other to establish the nature and identity of the modern state of ire.

The divisions which led to the civil war continued to influence Irish politics for much of the twentieth century and led indirectly to the violence which afflicted Northern Ireland during the same period. The Irish Civil War was never formally ended by a treaty or by the surrender of either side, and it left behind a legacy of bitterness and distrust. So deep were the wounds caused by the civil war that, although it was an important part of the struggle for Irish independence, this conflict is rarely spoken about or commemorated in Ireland, and until the 2000s, it was relatively rarely studied by Irish historians.

Until the civil war, the Catholic people of Ireland had been largely united in a fight against British rule. In the civil war, for the first time, they fought one another. This war was fought between former colleagues and frequently between different members of the same extended families. Therein lies the cause of much of the bitterness and resentment, but this also makes the Irish Civil War difficult for outsiders to understand. To make sense of what happened in those 11 months in the early 1920s, it is also necessary to put these events in the context of what had come before and what came after.

This is a confused and confusing story, but it is also crucial to understanding the background of the creation of an independent Ireland. This is the story of the Irish Civil War.

The island of Ireland lies just 50 miles from mainland Britain, across the Irish Sea, but the history of these two islands is very different. Ireland has its own heritage, culture, language, and religion, but for much of its recent history, it was an often-unwilling part of the British Empire.

The association between Ireland and England first began in 1172 when the pope appointed King Henry II of England the feudal lord of Ireland. This gave the English king the right to own land in Ireland and to impose English laws on the people of that country. It wasnt until 1542 that Henry VIII became the first English king to be inaugurated as the king of Ireland, but the reign of Henry VIII also saw England become separated from the Catholic Church of Rome as part of the English Reformation.

By the time that Henry VIIIs daughter Elizabeth became queen of England in 1558, England had become a Protestant country with the monarch as the head of the Church of England. The reformation did not spread to Ireland which remained mainly Catholic. This led to a situation where a Gaelic-speaking, largely Catholic majority were ruled by English-speaking Protestant incomers from England who also became the main landowners.

During the English Revolution of 1688, there were a number of battles between Catholics who supported King James II and Protestants who fought for William of Orange. Those who supported James II were finally defeated at the Battle of the Boyne, but the revolution led to many British politicians regarding Ireland as a potential source of rebellion. Draconian laws were enacted which meant that Catholics in Ireland were unable to vote or to join the British Army.

The success of the American colonists in the War of Independence in 1776 and the outbreak of the French Revolution in the late 1700s encouraged a rebellion in Ireland against British rule in 1798. This rebellion was successfully repressed during a bloody conflict which saw many arbitrary executions and massacres of civilians. As many as 30,000 people are thought to have died before the rebellion was finally suppressed. This led directly to the Act of Union in 1800 which removed the remaining vestiges of Irish independence and subsumed Ireland as a part of the United Kingdom, without a parliament of its own.

In the period 1845-1849, Ireland suffered a terrible famine caused by successive failures of the potato crop. Up to a quarter of the population emigrated or died as a direct result of starvation or disease. Most of those affected were poor Catholic families in the south and west, and this famine left a legacy of resentment against the British government which continued to export huge quantities of food from Ireland, failing to provide sufficient food to feed those affected by the famine.

The famine polarized differences in Ireland, between poor, Gaelic-speaking Catholics and more affluent English-speaking Protestant landowners across the country as well as between Ulster, the six counties in the north of Ireland which had a largely Protestant population, and the south and west which was mainly Catholic.

Emigrants from Ireland who had gone to America formed the Fenian Brotherhood which supplied arms that were used in an abortive rebellion against British rule in 1867. The failure of this rebellion led to the emergence of the Irish Home Rule Movement around 1870. This movement supported not a complete break with Britain, but instead the establishment of some form of self-government for Ireland while remaining within the United Kingdom. During the latter part of the nineteenth century, this movement pursued home rule through the British Parliament, and under the Liberal government of William Ewart Gladstone, it came close to achieving this.

However, the issue of independence for Ireland was complicated by the fact that the Protestant majority in the six counties of Ulster was vehemently opposed to separation from the United Kingdom and did not want to be part of a united, independent Ireland ruled from Dublin. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the situation in Ireland remained in a stalemate. The Catholic majority in the south and west wanted some form of self-rule. The Protestant majority in the increasingly industrialized counties of Ulster were committed to maintaining the union between Ireland and the United Kingdom. Both sides began to form groups of armed fighters to protect their interests.

During the early years of the twentieth century, the issue of home rule for Ireland was the subject of intense debate and political maneuvering within the British Parliament. In Ireland, there was sporadic though mainly small-scale violence as armed supporters of self-rule in the south clashed with Unionists in the north.

In Ulster, the Ulster Volunteers were formedarmed militia groups who vowed to resist, by force if necessary, any attempt by the British government to impose self-rule on the six counties. In 1913, these militias were consolidated into the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and received a clandestine shipment of 25,000 rifles.