Irish Question

The Irish Question

Cantarella Roberta

Russo Chiara

5C

AS 2023/2024

The Irish question

From the beginning of the 18th century, exactly in the year 1801 (the year in which the union was established), until the year 1912, the union between Ireland and Great Britain witnessed multiple periods of instability. These periods of instability and unsolved Irish problems led to the eventual quest for the independence which Ireland wanted from the United Kingdom of Great Britain, and this is often referred to as The Irish Question. The Irish Question, also known as the Irish Problem, is a complex problem that dates back to the 12th century and is still unresolved.

Cantarella Roberta e Russo Chiara VC

Irish Question

IRELAND IN ANCIENT TIMES

1300s

6000 BC

400 AD

1649/1650

the first settlement of Ireland took place by hunters and fishermen along the island’s eastern coast.

The island was organized into seven independent kingdoms. Their kings often allied their armies to raid neighboring Roman Britain and the Continent.

the English did NOT rule over the whole country: in fact they fought against the Irish constantly and after the Black Death of the late 1300s, English territory was reduced to the Greater Dublin area (The Pale).

Besides the tragic massacres carried out by Cromwell’s Ironsides, most of the country was handed over to Protestant settlers: thus Ireland became the first English colony.

1169

300 BC

1541

1690

After conquering England the Normans arrived in Ireland during the reign of Henry II (1154–1189): the conquest of Ireland and its Celtic inhabitants was begun

the Celts (Iron Age warriors) came to Ireland from mainland Europe and subdued the previous inhabitants.

The Irish Parliament declared Henry VIII (1509-1547) King of Ireland

James II was defeated in the battle of the Boyne by William III.

Irish Question

THE 18th AND 19th CENTURIES

1845/1852

1801

With the Act of Union, the Irish Parliament was abolished and Ireland came under direct British Rule, uniting Ireland politically with Britain.

It was a period of mass starvation, disease and emigration, caused by a potato disease known as potato blight. About one million people died and one million more emigrated from Ireland, mainly to North America, causing the island’s population to fall by between 20% and 25%.

1798

1829

A serious rebellion, known as the United Irishmen Rebellion, broke out, which lasted several months and was directed against British rule in Ireland. It was possibly the most concentrated outbreak of violence in Irish history, and resulted in thousands of deaths over the course of three months.

One of Ireland’s greatest leaders Daniel O’Connell, known as ‘the Great Liberator’ had the London parliament pass the Relief Act, by which the total ban on voting by Catholics was lifted and they could now also become Members of the Parliament in London. After this success O’Connell aimed to cancel the Act of Union and re-establish an Irish parliament.

Irish Question

THE 20th CENTURY

1918

1912

1905

The Liberal party agreed to introduce the Third Home Rule Bill, but when it was being discussed in Parliament, it received a lot of opposition from the Conservative Party whose majority was Unionist.

General Election to the British Parliament, republicans won 73 seats out of 105.

The Fenians founded a political party – the Sinn Fein (Ourselves Alone) and formed the rebel militia that became known as the Irish IRA.

1914

1909

The Liberal and the Conservative Parties both got the exact same amount of seats in the Parliament which resulted (Hung Parliament). For John Redmond, leader of the Home Rule Party was needed by both the Liberals and the Conservatives to form a government.

The Government of Ireland Act was passed by Parliament to provide home rule for Ireland within the UK. However, with the outbreak of the First World War, it was postponed for a minimum of 12 months: Britain couldn’t afford to go into war without the Irish to the point that, in March 1915, conscription became a serious threat. Because subsequent developments in Ireland, led to further postponements of the Act till it was finally repealed in 1920.

Irish Question

1916

Easter Rising took place

It was mounted by Irish republicans with the aims of ending British rule in Ireland as well as establishing the Irish Republic. Together they seized key locations in Dublin and proclaimed the Irish Republic independent of Britain. The Rising was suppressed after seven days of fighting, and its leaders were court-martialed and executed, but it succeeded in bringing republicanism back into Irish politics.

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Irish Question

THE 20th CENTURY

1937

1940-1945

The Irish Free State came to an end when the citizens voted by referendum to replace the 1922 constitution. It was succeeded by the modern state of Ireland, an entirely sovereign state with a new constitution.

In World War II, the Irish Free State remained neutral while Northern Ireland took part in the fighting.

1921

1949

The Anglo-Irish Treaty ended British rule in most of Ireland; he established the Irish Free State, a self-governing dominion of the 26 Catholic southern counties of Ireland (which replaced the Irish Republic), while the six northern counties (Ulster), predominantly Protestant, became an integral part of the United Kingdom as Northern Ireland.

1960

The last formal link with the United Kingdom was severed when the Oireachtas (national parliament) passed the Republic of Ireland Act (EIRE).

Northern Ireland’s Catholic minority was frustrated by unequal access to housing and jobs; that discontent led to a civil rights movement, which the mostly Protestant police violently suppressed.

Irish Question

20th CENTURY

1969/1998

Catholics identified as pro-Irish and nationalist; they wanted Northern Ireland to unite with the Republic of Ireland. Protestants called themselves pro-British and unionist; they opposed leaving the United Kingdom. Extreme factions of both communities bombed city centers and assassinated members of rival groups. Paramilitaries— military groups but aren’t formally part of a country’s armed forces—were responsible of the violence during those years. For three decades, explosions, shootings, and terror plagued Northern Ireland and spilled into the Republic of Ireland and England. Since the boundaries between the North and the South had been drawn, the Protestants of the North began to feel that the Catholic minority of Ulster was on the wrong side and should get out. A policy of discrimination was begun:the Catholic working class persecuted in favor of the Protestant working class was deprived of social and political justice.

The Troubles began, a period in which nationalist/republican and loyalist/unionist groups clashed. British troops were sent to Ireland permanently and over 3000 people were killed by paramilitary groups on opposing sides of the conflict.

Irish Question

20th CENTURY

1972

The tragedy of “Bloody Sunday'' took place during a Civil Rights demonstration in Londonderry, when 13 Catholics were killed and 17 wounded by British troops. Also, the British Government suspended Northern Ireland’s Parliament (the Stormont) and assumed direct control of Northern Irish affairs.

1987

1981

The Remembrance Day bombing took place in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland. 11 people were killed when a Provisional IRA bomb exploded at the town’s war memorial (cenotaph) during a Remembrance Sunday ceremony, held to commemorate the contribution of British and Commonwealth military and civilian servicemen and women in the two World Wars and later conflicts.

Bobby Sands, an Irish volunteer of the Provisional Irish Republican Army and member of the British Parliament, died on hunger strike while imprisoned in HM Prison Maze. Following his example republican prisoners joined the strike at staggered intervals to maximize publicity.

1973

Ireland joined the E.U. (European Union, then called EEC, European Economic Community).

Irish Question

20th CENTURY

1991/1993

1996

1998

1994

The Peace Agreement was signed in Belfast by the Irish and the British governments: it created the blueprint for Northern Ireland to set up its own government with authority over certain issues such as health and education and required power-sharing between pro-British and pro-Irish parties. The deal also included plans for the disarmament of Northern Ireland’s paramilitary groups, which counted tens of thousands of members

the IRA (provisional Irish Republican Army) proclaimed a ceasefire (the Good Friday Peace Agreement was signed) and the Irish Peace Process was set in motion with “talks” between the British Prime Minister John Major and the Irish Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams.

The IRA called off its ceasefire and one hour later set off a bomb at South Quay which injured 100 people and caused millions of pounds’ worth of damage…

Important steps have been taken over the years to try and create conditions of compromise between the IRA, fighting to unite Ulster’s six British-ruled countries with the Republic of Ireland, and the Protestant paramilitary, determined to keep the province British. Negotiations were held in 1991,1992 and 1993 for a possible political settlement of the Ulster problems.

Irish Question

21th CENTURY

Violence continued, though on a sporadic basis: - the Ealing bombing (2001); - Police were attacked with blast and petrol bombs in an area of Belfast (2005); - The Dublin riots: a unionist demonstration was to take place down O’Connell Street but counter-demonstrators blocked the route of the proposed (2006); - Car bomb attacks organized by the RIRA (2009/ 2010); - The Northern Ireland riots took place: scores of youths attacked police over an Orange Order parade in north Belfast, throwing stones, golf balls, gasoline bombs and fireworks at police (2011); - A bomb exploded outside the home of a serving police officer in Londonderry (2017); - A bomb placed inside a van exploded in the center of Londonderry on a Saturday night. The attack seems to have been carried out by the New IRA (2019).

Irish Question

2016

- The centenary of the Easter Rising was celebrated: many events were organized by the Irish government to mark the occasion, and included the circulation of Ireland’s first ever commemorative €2 coin. The ceremony which took place on Easter Sunday, 27th March, was the culmination of the commemorations: hundreds of thousands of people lined the streets of Dublin to take part in the largest military parade ever staged in the Republic of Ireland.

- With the referendum of this year, United Kingdom decided to leave the European Union, the most complicated problem was the Irish border, which held up Brexit for over three years: the Republic of Ireland had no intention of leaving the EU, but it shares a border with Northern Ireland, which is part of Brexit

Irish Question

2020

Northern Ireland would be outside the EU while the Republic of Ireland would remain inside. The situation today is as follows:

- People born in Northern Ireland have the right to Irish as well as British citizenship. Those who exercise that right will retain their EU citizenship, instead to people elsewhere in the UK who may have only British citizenship; - People with Irish passports keep their right to freedom of movement within the EU: they can live, work and study in an EU country without a visa and with no time limit. These rights extend to their spouses and dependent children - As regards students and studying abroad the UK will no longer be participating in Erasmus, the EU student exchange scheme. However, students at Northern Ireland’s universities will still be able to take part in Erasmus due to funding and administrative assistance from the Irish government; - New rules regarding trade were set out in the an agreement between the EU and the UK called the Northern Ireland Protocol, which came into force on 1 January 2021. Thus certain goods, such as meat, milk, fish and eggs, need to be checked when they enter Northern Ireland from Great Britain but they can move across the border into the Republic of Ireland.

The Irish Revival Movement or Gaelic Revival

Gaelic revival, resurgence of interest in Irish language, literature, history, and folklore inspired by the growing Irish nationalism of the early 19th century.

Revival in Irish Fine Arts

Despite this growing theme of nationalism in Irish fine art, the most notable result of the Revival movement in the visual arts of Ireland, was the establishment of the Hugh Lane Gallery of Modern Art (1908), which greatly assisted the creation of a school of Irish painting. In the 20th century, the Revival took a different turn. Fine art became less political, and like their counterparts in Europe, Irish artists started to focus more on the medium than the message. That said, Jack B Yeats was one of several painters who continued to evoke the real atmosphere and surroundings of Ireland in his paintings. Irish sculpture was simpler and more obviously nationalistic, after all there was no lack of native Irish heroes to commemorate.

Even before the nineteenth century, Irish artists like James Barry featured scenes from Irish history in their paintings to foster a sense of Irish identity. The same was done by artists like George Petrie and Frederick William Burton.The subsequent Young Ireland movement also tried to use contemporary Irish art to further its political agenda. For example, its newspaper, the Nation, listed a number of recommended historical subjects for Irish artists to incorporate into their canvases.

The Irish Literature Revival

Celtic Revival in Applied Arts

The Irish Literary Revival, also known as the ‘Irish Literary Renaissance’ or ‘The Celtic Twilight’, describes a movement of increased literary and intellectual engagement in Ireland starting in the 1890s and occurring into the early twentieth century. As a literary movement, it was interested in Ireland’s Gaelic heritage as well as the growth of Irish nationalism during the 19th century. Indeed, the Irish Literary Revival was only a part of a more general national movement called the ‘Gaelic Revival’, which engaged in Irish heritage on the intellectual, athletic, linguistic, and political levels. For instance, the Literary Revival coincided with the formation of the Gaelic League in 1893, which sought to revive interest in Irish language and culture more broadly. The Irish Literary Revival is also sometimes referred to as the Anglo-Irish Literary Revival because it revitalized Irish literature in English, and many of its leading members also were part of the Anglo-Irish Protestant class.

The Revivalist Movement had a more noticeable effect on applied art, which included many Celtic design motifs including: geometric designs, interlaced birds, animals, whorls, knots and bosses, as well as emblems like the shamrock, the harp, and the round tower. Among schools and artists affected by Celtic Revivalism was the Glasgow School of Painting (1880-1915). Celtic-style jewelers and metalworkers in particular began imitating ancient pieces, for example the Tara Brooch

The preeminent writer—and the architect—of the Irish literary renaissance was William Butler Yeats, whose remarkable career encompassed both this revival and the development of European literary Modernism in the 1920s and ’30s. In both movements Yeats was a key participant. While the renaissance gave new life—and new texts—to Irish nationalism in the late 19th century, Yeats aimed to produce a new kind of modern Irish literature in the English language. Yeats’s career falls roughly into three phases:An early romantic period produced work saturated by folklore, occultism, and Celtic mythology. The latter stirred particular religious controversy among Roman Catholics. Yeats’s counter version of that play was Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902), which became the central literary moment of the renaissance. In that play—set in 1798, the year of the Irish Rebellion—an old woman persuades a young man to forgo marriage and fight for his country instead; upon leaving the man at the end of the play, she is reported to have been transformed into a young queen, thereby allegorizing the rejuvenation of Ireland by heroic male sacrifice.

William Butler Yeats

A mature middle period saw Yeats’s continued preoccupation with the matter of Ireland, particularly during the revolutionary years 1916–23. In 1904 Yeats—with playwright and folklorist Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory—founded in Dublin the Abbey Theatre, one of Europe’s earliest national theaters.Yeats’s vision grew increasingly apocalyptic as he aged. The executions of the leaders of the Easter Rising led to some of his most powerful work, notably the poem “Easter 1916” (1921), in which he marks the transformation of political activists into martyrs and the alteration in his own opinion of them. Yeats created a body of work in which both the nation-changing events Ireland experienced in these years and his own journey toward old age and death were filtered through an elaborate personal belief system. In 1923 Yeats became the first Irish writer to receive a Nobel Prize for Literature.

Joyce and the Irish Revival

He was fundamentally an Irish man, not an English man (Dublin and its nation, Ireland, still builds nowadays a very important cultural moment for those who are born there), who lived in a typically Catholic Irish culture, but little by little abandoned it and became a more cosmopolitan artist.Irish revival was born in Ireland: a very important movement in Ireland that Joyce considered very negative, since it meant that authors were trying to build an Irish national conscience around a sort of fantastic past: authors, poets and novelists were trying to reevaluate myths, legends and fairy-tales about the past, the kind of Celtic heritage that fed the typical Irish legends and fairy-tales. They wanted to build a cultural identity of the nation. It was instead a fundamental principle for Joyce to detach from cultural trends: the Irish revival was not helping Irish people to build a real national conscience about the real political problems of Ireland. In the very beginning, Joyce was not a rebel, but he became this against institutions in order to stop the development of Irish individuality because people were asleep looking at the past

James jOyce

James Joyce, an Irish novelist and poet, grew up near Dublin. James Joyce is one of the most influential novelists of the 20th century. In each of his prose works he used symbols to experience what he called an “epiphany”, the revelation of certain revealing qualities about himself. His early writings reveal individual moods and characters and the plight of Ireland and the Irish artist in the 1900’s. Later works reveal a man in all his complexity as an artist and in family aspects. Joyce is known for his style of writing called “stream of consciousness”. Using this technique, he ignored ordinary sentence structure and attempted to reproduce the rambling’s of the human mind. Many of his works were influenced by his life in Ireland as an artist.

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The important thing is that everything fits the theme

Joyce's voluntary exiled

By leaving Dublin, he was rebelling against a series of institutions and situations:- He rebelled against the Irish Catholic Church: according to him, it operated a specific limitation of any individual's intellectual freedom. In fact, it had built a superstructure of duties and values that didn't make the individual free to express himself. - He rebelled against Irish politics: according to him, the Irish politicians were trying to support national and provincial nationalism, since Ireland was not a real nation. His ideal was instead to be a free European man, someone who could choose a free life from a political point of view. - He was against the English government on Irish home rule: he could not stand the suffocating English rule. - He was rebelling against Irish culture, narrow and confining for him, since its only representation was Irish revival.

Joyce’s feelings toward Ireland are very strong. He voluntarily exiled himself from Ireland and forced himself to forget about it all together.Joyce’s lifelong literary engagement with Ireland was conducted, geographically speaking, elsewhere. His major works were written in exile—Zürich, Paris, Trieste—and were initially published with difficulty, often serially in small magazines and pamphlets. He had a very small knowledge of life in Dublin, but what he did have he used to his full extent. He was not affected by the intense Irish nationalism that he felt most Irish people had. In his novel, The Dead, he uses the character Gabriel to get his feelings on this across. He says this, “to live successfully in a land where the unhappy past is always felt and the presence of shades and spirits is compelling and obtrusive one must vigorously affirm the life of fact and enlightened action.” Joyce feels that Ireland is filled with past events that now haunt its future and nothing good can happen while there are still bad feelings. He also says “I’m sick of my country, I’m sick of it.” Joyce is sick of his country and has intense feelings of hatred for it.

The Irish Paralysis

The cultural, political, religious, institutional, therefore moral paralysis that the town of Dublin represented, was the center of this city: it was very difficult to rebel against this paralysis because everything paralyzed the individual in the past. Any Dubliner individual has in himself a sort of burden, made upon past events and experiences, that is so heavy in his present dimension that it makes it impossible for the individual himself to develop a future individuality. ‘Dubliners’ is a collection of fifteen stories written by James Joyce. All the stories together create a depiction of Irish people living in Dublin, set at the beginning of the 20th century. These tales stand in sharp contrast to the idealized versions of Irishness that coloured much writing of the renaissance; they are filled with the sense of paralysis that Joyce perceived as constricting the Catholic Dublin society of which he wrote. The characters in the stories are either emotionally, physically, or sexually paralyzed. Nevertheless, Joyce provides them with life-changing moments, and with moments of self-understanding, which enable the characters to escape from the tediousness of their lives.

He expresses these feelings for Ireland the most in The Dead. The Dead may have been Joyce’s picture of himself if he had not left Ireland when he did. Joyce left Ireland after college; he shows through Gabriel how he feels that Ireland is an evil place. Joyce states in his critical writings that “the economic conditions that prevail in my own country do not permit the development of individuality.” He felt very constricted as an artist in Ireland. He also states that, “the soul of the country is weakened by centuries of useless struggle and broken treaties, and individual initiative is paralyzed by the influence and admonitions of the church, while its body is manacled by the police, the tax office, and the garrison. No one who has any self respect stays in Ireland, but flees afar as though from a country that has undergone the visitation from an angry Jove.” Ireland to him is the place where censorship and pain over old struggles that should be forgotten prevail over new ideas. He believes that his artistic abilities are being stifled and that the bureaucracy of life in Ireland is too great for him to overcome.

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The important thing is that everything fits the theme

In most cases, they were paralyzed by the tediousness of their lives, their family, indecisiveness, failing to express their feelings, or mainly by their inability to move forward.These self-understandings work as means of escaping, and it is up to the characters to decide whether they break away from their own paralysis or continue living their lives without any change.According to Joyce, as is stated in his essay ‘Ireland - Island of Saints and Sages’, the Dubliners were not able to move forward because they were kept from making any progress. The point therefore was to show the people that if they did not change anything they would be paralyzed forever and there would be no future for them. In a letter to Richards, Joyce states that his intention was not to write just a novel about his country, but a satire which will help to liberate Ireland (Delany, 257).

Joyce also highlights the importance of believing in oneself in order to become aware of the paralytic state. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce wrote a Modernist bildungsroman in which the young, developing scholar-artist Stephen Dedalus emerges from the restrictive religious and linguistic conventions within which he has been raised, able, as he says, “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”

Joyce and the Church

The reason why Joyce felt that the church was one of the sources of paralysis in Irish society was that religion represented an important part of the country in those days. In fact, the connection that existed between Ireland and the Church impeded the chance of being free from the British.

This may be backed up by a statement in Joyce's essay ' 'The soul of the country is weakened by centuries of useless struggle and broken treaties, and individual initiative is paralyzed by the influence and admonitions of the church' ('Ireland'). He often writes about how he would like to see the strict church open up its mind to new ideas. He says this in Araby also, ” In time, perhaps there will be a gradual reawakening of the Irish conscience, and perhaps four or five centuries after the Diet of Worms, we will see an Irish Monk throw away his frock, run off with some nun, and proclaim in a loud voice the end of coherent absurdity that was Catholicism and the beginnings of the incoherent absurdity that is Protestantism.” Joyce felt that the restraints placed on thinking were absurd and that people should think on their own, without the church telling you how to think. According to Joyce, being shackled by the rules and influence of the Church, the Irish people could not fulfill their potential.

Something about music...

Sunday Bloody Sunday

"Sunday Bloody Sunday" is a song written by John Lennon and Yoko Ono that was first released on their 1972 Plastic Ono Band album with Elephant's Memory, Some Time in New York City. The song addresses the Bloody Sunday massacre of 1972 and is one of two on the album that addresses the contemporary Northern Ireland conflict, "The Luck of the Irish" being the other.

“Bloody Sunday” was a term given to an incident, which took place on 30th January 1972 in Derry, Northern Ireland where British Soldiers shot 28 unarmed civilians who were peacefully protesting for called for respect for civil rights in Northern Ireland and an end to discriminatory practices by local authorities against Catholics on a political, social and economic level. Out of all the people who lost their life that day; Thirteen were killed outright, while another man lost his life four months later due to injuries. Many of the victims who were feeling the scene were shot at point blank range, while some who were helping the injured were shot. Other protesters were injured by rubber bullets or batons, and two were run down by army vehicles. This massacre is reported to have the highest number of people killed in a single shooting incident during the conflict. The first person to have addressed these events musically was John Lennon who composed “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and released it on his third Solo album “Sometime In New York City”. His version of the song directly expresses his anger towards the massacre, which also shows his political viewpoints in the complexity of the longstanding problems that exist between the Irish & British.

Although U2’s version of the song arrives as a single precisely 11 years, 1 month, 21 days since the incident, the catalyst that inspired the band to pay tribute to the fallen with this song came because of a confrontation with IRA (Irish Republican Army) supporters in New York City. U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday” version of the song is designed to transport the listener into 1970’s war-torn Ireland where your present watching the horror unfold as an observer. Their version of accounts are instead inspired by their passive-aggressive approach to the situation with verses like “How long must we sing this song?”, which signifies their anger towards the authorities approach to the situation. However, that verse is immediately followed by ’Cause tonight, we can be as one, Tonight”, which signifies that the door is still open for a peace treaty. They also draw inspiration from the world famous picture of Edward Daly being spotted protecting a group of survivors attending to an injured boy by waving a blood stained handkerchief in peace

Lyrics

The lyrics of the song both reference either Bloody Sunday event that took place in 1920 & 1970 respectively but focus more on the observer who is horrified by the cycle of violence and is inspired to act. This change in approach is a drastic change from an early version of the song, which contained lyrics like “Don’t talk to me about the rights of the IRA, UDA.” Instead the band decided to change the lyrics to showcase the atrocities of war without taking sides. Instead they chose an opening line, which would resonate highly with young people who would know nothing about these troubles. There is one biblical verse, which is put forward in the lyrics, which is Matthew 10:35 (“mother’s children; brothers, sisters torn apart”) and bring a twist to 1 Corinthians 15:32 (“we eat and drink while tomorrow they die”, instead of “let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die”). Finally the song finishes by declaring to the Irish that they need to stop fighting each other and just claim the victory “Jesus won…on [a] Sunday bloody Sunday.”

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The Irish Question

Cantarella Roberta

Russo Chiara

5C

AS 2023/2024

The Omagh bombing also took place: the paramilitary car bomb attack was carried out by the Real Irish Republican Army (RIRA), a splinter group of former Provisional Irish Republican Army members opposed to the Belfast Agreement. Described as Northern Ireland’s worst single terrorist atrocity, it made victims among both Protestants and Catholics.

His interference in religious matters proved a mistake and resulted in problems for both countries: Irish lands, especially in the north, were confiscated and colonized with Protestant English and Scottish, who, because of religious differences, were never assimilated into the native population and began to fight against the Irish. Eventually, in 1601, the army of Elizabeth I defeated the last of Ulster’s Celtic earls.

1922/1923: A division of opinion immediately led to the Irish Civil War between pro and anti treaty forces, that was won by the former and its consequences can be seen to this day since the two largest political parties in Ireland have their roots in the opposing sides of the time: Fine Gael (pro-treaty), Fianna Fáil (anti-treaty).

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During the two years in which the bill was being debated, an armed clash almost started multiple times between the Nationalists and the Unionists, and a civil war was on the verge of starting when World War I happened. The Third Home Rule Bill was postponed until after the war and Irishmen from both the Nationalists and the Unionists joined Britain in the war against Germany.

They forged the culture and the language of Ireland: the country’s name, Éire, derives from a Celtic goddess, Ériu.

The Rising began on Easter Monday 1916 and it was an unexpected event that caught almost everyone not directly involved by surprise: the insurgents proclaimed an independent Irish Republic and held out for six days before surrendering in the face of the British Army’s superior firepower; fifteen of the Rising’s leading figures were subsequently executed and this left an enduring mark on the Irish public which rallied behind the memory of the departed leaders and the goals for which they had sacrificed themselves. Yeats was also caught off guard and the Rising deeply affected him. By then, Yeats was already at work on ‘Easter 1916’. With his focus as ever on the fate of the Irish literary movement he had pioneered, he was concerned that ‘all the work of years’ had been overturned, ‘all the bringing together of classes, all the freeing of literature and criticism from politics.' ‘Easter 1916’ is the first great poem of Yeats’s full maturity. Moreover, it is something of a model for his great later poems. It begins in a conversational tone; winds itself up into a description of the Rising’s leaders; embarks on a meditation about ‘hearts with one purpose alone’. This poem reads like an agenda for the future analysis of that fateful time in Irish history, insisting that it had changed everything.

The hatred between colonized and colonizers was increased by the difference in their religions. The Irish were persecuted not only because they were the natives, but also because they were Catholics. From that time on, religion and politics became the two inseparable aspects of the Anglo-Irish conflict.

Though they had been promised fair treatment after the defeat, the Irish were actually oppressed by humiliating restrictions. The “Penal Laws”, passed by a Protestant Parliament in Dublin in 1695, turned them into virtual slaves: they were excluded from political life, prohibited from having their own schools, and could not own more than a limited amount of land. Ireland’s economy began to decline and the oppressed people were reduced to the most squalid misery and obliged to leave their country and emigrate.

1922/1923: A division of opinion immediately led to the Irish Civil War between pro and anti treaty forces, that was won by the former and its consequences can be seen to this day since the two largest political parties in Ireland have their roots in the opposing sides of the time: Fine Gael (pro-treaty), Fianna Fáil (anti-treaty).

In January 1919, the elected members of who were not still in prison at the time, including survivors of the Rising, convened the First Dáil, a unicameral, revolutionary parliament which refused to recognise the Parliament of the United Kingdom, and established the Irish Republic. The British Government in turn refused to accept the legitimacy of the newly declared nation, precipitating the Anglo – Irish War (also known as the Irish War of Independence): both sides agreed to a truce in July 1921, but violence continued in the northeast (mostly between republicans and loyalists).