Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The Irish Republican Army (IRA) was born in April 1916 when rebels in Dublin declared an Irish Republic, but its roots date from much earlier. Some of the 1916 rebels had been Fenians in the 1860s–1880s and some Fenians had been Young Irelanders in the 1840s. The IRA's ideology dates from eighteenth-century republican philosophy and the United Irishmen of the 1790s, who, in the words of Theobald Wolfe Tone sought “to break the connection with England, the never-failing source of our political ills … and to substitute the common name of Irishmen in place of the denomination of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter.”The 1916 Easter Rising failed, its leaders were executed, and its soldiers were arrested and interned. Most Irish people had not supported the rebellion, but by the time internees were released in late 1916 the brutal British overreaction to the Rising had laid a fertile ground for the reorganization of the IRA and an associated political party, Sinn Féin. Sinn Féin won the majority of Irish seats in the 1918 election to the British parliament. Instead of taking their seats in London, Sinn Féin's representatives formed a revolutionary government in Dublin, Dáil Éireann.On the day Dáil Éireann convened, January 21, 1919, an IRA group in County Tipperary started the Irish War for Independence (also known as the Black and Tan War or the Anglo-Irish War). IRA fighters went on ... log in or subscribe to read full text