History or Politics?

The decade that is now upon us – 2012 to 2022 – is a historically significant one for Ireland. It ushers in a host of centenaries: the Home Rule bill of 1912, the foundation of civilian armies in 1913, the experience of World War I, the 1916 Rising, the spiritual birth, as it were, of the republic, the meeting of the Irish Dáil for the first time in 1919, the Government of Ireland Act in 1920, the Anglo–Irish Treaty in 1921 and the outbreak of the Civil War in 1922. Two centuries ago, such possibilities were unimagined. It is thus a particularly good time to take stock. Perhaps the most outstanding feature of the period 1800–1922 is what could well be called its outright sensationalism. The magnitude of the Great Famine alone and the exodus of millions in subsequent decades would be enough in itself to substantiate such a claim. Furthermore, there was an endemic level of violence in society which ran the gamut from spontaneous rural outburst to organised insurrection. Not only did large dramas play themselves out in small places but international crises also bore down at key moments and complicated matters – in the 1790s when Britain feared that revolutionary France would use Ireland as a base from which to launch an attack on the mainland, for example, and much later in World War I when British intelligence monitored Irish radicals who were flirting with the Germans in the hope of building some sort of anti-British alliance.