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Irish War of Independence - New General Megathread for the 20th and 21st of January 2024
(hexbear.net)
The Irish War of Independence was a guerrilla conflict between the British state and its forces in Ireland and Irish republican guerrillas in the Irish Volunteers or Irish Republican Army. The war is usually said to have run between 1919 and 1921, but violence both preceded these dates and continued afterwards.
Parallel with the military campaign was the political confrontation between the separatist Sinn Fein party, who after winning the General Election of 1918, declared an Irish Republic, and the British administration based in Dublin Castle.
A third strand of the conflict lay in the northern province of Ulster, which was majority unionist or pro-British and which opposed Sinn Fein. This led to violence between the majority Protestant unionists and the mainly Catholic Irish nationalist minority in the north.
Home Rule versus Republic
In 1912, as a result of a political deal between the Irish Parliamentary party and the Liberal Party at Westminster, the British government introduced a Bill for Home Rule, or limited autonomy for Ireland within the United Kingdom as Irish nationalists had been demanding since the 1880s.
However, this was opposed by Ulster Unionists, who formed their own militia, the Ulster Volunteers to oppose Irish self-government. Irish nationalists in response formed a rival militia, the Irish Volunteers to ensure Home Rule was passed. Tensions between the two sides were eased by the outbreak of the First World War, when both sides agreed to support the British war effort.
However, in 1916, a more radical Irish nationalist element in the Irish Volunteers launched an insurrection known as the Easter Rising in Dublin, proclaiming an Irish Republic. The rebellion was put down within a week with about 500 deaths, but the British reaction, executing the leaders and arresting 3,000 nationalist activists antagonized Irish public opinion.
In 1916-17, in a bid to restart negotiations on Home Rule, all of the prisoners from the Easter Rising were released. Many of them joined the Sinn Fein party. From this point on there were riots and confrontations between Sinn Fein and Irish Volunteer activists and the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and British Army.
In December 1918, Sinn Fein decisively won the Irish vote in the General Election taking 73 seats out 105 (being a majority everywhere except Ulster) and declared an Irish Republic. The first republican parliament or Dáil, met in January 1919, though more than half the Sinn Fein members of parliament were imprisoned at the time.
War begins
Throughout 1919, the IRA went about capturing weapons and freeing republican prisoners while the Dáil began building up a state. In September, the British government outlawed the Dáil and Sinn Féin, and the conflict intensified.
Alongside the limited armed campaign there was significant passive resistance including hunger strikes by prisoners (many of whom were released in March 1920) and a boycott by railway workers on carrying British troops. There were also significant disturbances in rural areas as small farmers attempted to seize parts of large ‘ranches’.
Violence intensified in early 1920. Much of the Sinn Fein political leadership had been arrested. Eamon de Valera, the President of the Republic, had gone to America to raise funds. The two leaders of the IRA, Collins and Richard Mulcahy, ordered Volunteer units around the country to raid RIC barracks for arms. Though the Dáil eventually endorsed the IRA’s campaign in 1921, some Sinn Fein figures such as Arthur Griffith disliked the use of violence.
To put down this insurgency, the British government under Lloyd George proposed autonomous governments in Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland and also deployed new corps of paramilitary police from Britain, the Black and Tans and Auxiliary Division, made up largely of war veterans from the First World War.
This triggered a grave escalation of the conflict as the new forces carried out reprisals on the civilian population for IRA attacks – in the summer of 1920 burning extensive parts of the towns of Balbriggan and Tuam for example. By the end of 1920 some 500 people had been killed. There were attempts to call a truce in December but this was prevented by the British government.
Martial or military law was declared in the province of Munster. The regular British Army was deployed in greater numbers, mounting, ‘sweeps’ across the countryside and the British authorities began ‘official reprisals’ including house burnings and executions, in response to IRA attacks. The IRA retaliated by stepping up shootings of informers (real and alleged), eventually extending attacks to off-duty British personnel and burning the property of loyalists. When the British began executing prisoners the IRA also began shooting captured British soldiers and police.
The fighting was brought to an end however, on July 11, 1921, when a truce was negotiated between British and Irish Republican forces so that talks on a political settlement could begin.
Truce and Treaty
The truce allowed the IRA to regroup, recruit and train openly. Many of their activists believed at first that it was just a temporary end to hostilities.
However, in December 1921, an Irish delegation led by Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith, signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which disestablished the Irish Republic of 1919 but created the Irish Free State, an entity comprising 26 of Ireland’s 32 counties which had much more independence than the Home Rule Act of 1912 would have granted.
Much of the IRA was unhappy with the settlement though and this eventually led to civil war among nationalists in 1922-23, before the new Irish Free State government was established.
Megathreads and spaces to hang out:
- 📀 Come listen to music and Watch movies with your fellow Hexbears nerd, in Cy.tube
- 💖 Come talk in the New Weekly Queer thread
- 🔥 Read and talk about a current topics in the News Megathread
- 🐱👤 Come talk in the New Weekly PoC thread
reminders:
- 💚 You nerds can join specific comms to see posts about all sorts of topics
- 💙 Hexbear’s algorithm prioritizes comments over upbears
- 💜 Sorting by new you nerd
- 🌈 If you ever want to make your own megathread, you can reserve a spot here nerd
- 🐶 Join the unofficial Hexbear-adjacent Mastodon instance toots.matapacos.dog
Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):
Aid:
Theory:
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That's according to Oxfam which also claims that the two richest Irish billionaires possess more wealth than the bottom half of the State’s population.
What's the marginal utility function of taking away their wealth? 
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(Paris, 1908-1986) French thinker and novelist, representative of the atheist existentialist movement and an important figure in the vindication of women's rights. Originally from a bourgeois family, she stood out from an early age as a brilliant student. She studied at the Sorbonne and in 1929 she met Jean-Paul Sartre, who became her companion for the rest of her life.
He graduated in philosophy and until 1943 he devoted himself to teaching at the lycées of Marseilles, Rouen and Paris. His first work was the novel The Guest (1943), followed by The Blood of Others (1944) and the essay Pyrrhus and Cineas (1944). She participated intensely in the ideological debates of the time, harshly attacked the French right wing and assumed the role of a committed intellectual. In her literary texts she revised the concepts of history and character and incorporated, from an existentialist point of view, the themes of "freedom", "situation" and "commitment".
Together with Sartre, Albert Camus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, among others, she founded the magazine Tiempos Modernos, whose first issue was published on October 15, 1945 and became a political and cultural reference of French thought in the mid-twentieth century. Subsequently, he published the novel All Men Are Mortal (1946), and the essays For a Morality of Ambiguity (1947) and America a Day (1948).
Her book The Second Sex (1949) was a theoretical starting point for various feminist groups, and became a classic work of contemporary thought. In it she elaborated a history of the social condition of women and analyzed the different characteristics of male oppression. She asserted that by being excluded from the processes of production and confined to the home and reproductive functions, women lost all social ties and with them the possibility of being free. She analyzed the gender situation from the point of view of biology, psychoanalysis and Marxism; she destroyed feminine myths, and urged the search for authentic liberation. She argued that the struggle for the emancipation of women was distinct from and parallel to the class struggle, and that the main problem to be faced by the "weaker sex" was not ideological but economic.
Simone de Beauvoir founded with some feminists the League of Women's Rights, which set out to react firmly to any sexist discrimination, and prepared a special issue of Modern Times devoted to the discussion of the subject. She won the Prix Goncourt with The Mandarins (1954), in which she dealt with the difficulties of post-war intellectuals in assuming their social responsibility. In 1966 she participated in the Russell Tribunal, in May 1968 she showed solidarity with the students led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, in 1972 she presided over the Choisir association, in charge of defending free contraception, and until her last days she was a tireless fighter for human rights.
Her abundant testimonial and autobiographical titles include Memoirs of a Formal Young Woman (1958), The Fullness of Life (1960), The Force of Things (1963), A Very Sweet Death (1964), Old Age (1968), The End of Accounts (1972) and The Farewell Ceremony (1981).
Megathreads and spaces to hang out:
- ❤️ Come listen to music and Watch movies with your fellow Hexbears nerd, in Cy.tube
- 💖 Come talk in the New Weekly Queer thread
- 💛 Read and talk about a current topics in the News Megathread
Come talk in the New Weekly PoC thread- ⭐️ September Movie Nominations ⭐️
reminders:
- 💚 You nerds can join specific comms to see posts about all sorts of topics
- 💙 Hexbear’s algorithm prioritizes comments over upbears
- 💜 Sorting by new you nerd
- 🌈 If you ever want to make your own megathread, you can reserve a spot here nerd
- 🐶 Join the unofficial Hexbear-adjacent Mastodon instance toots.matapacos.dog
Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):
Aid:
Theory:
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Here’s how the government is doing everything it can to attack workers and trade unions
(leftfootforward.org)
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European trade union demonstration: International class solidarity is the only answer!
(internationalviewpoint.org)
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