Ireland in the Great War: The Irish Insurrection of 1916 Set in Its Context of the World War Book

The establishment of a sovereign state in Ireland occurred as a direct consequence of Irish participation in Britain's war on Germany which was launched in August 1914. Nationalist Ireland was in 1914 in process of being secured as a region of the United Kingdom and the Empire under the form of Home Rule. The Nationalist leaders joined with the Unionists in giving unquestioning support to Britain's war against Germany, Austria and Turkey. The alliance of Britain, France and Russia failed to achieve the rapid victory which its great superiority of men and numbers had caused it to anticipate. The prolongation of the war and the unprecedented scale of the casualties created the conditions in which nationalists opposed to the British war effort, many of them in sympathy with Germany, organized the Insurrection of 1916, which caused a fundamental change in the dynamic of Irish affairs. Despite this intimate connection between the Great War and the Easter Rising, no history of the War from an Irish viewpoint has been published for half a century - not since Charles James O'Donnell's "The Irish Future and The Lordship Of The World" in the 1920s. O'Donnell, born in Donegal and educated in Galway, served for thirty years in the Indian Civil Service before retiring to contest the 1906 Election on an old-fashioned Liberal platform opposed both to Curzon's Tory Imperialism and Asquith's Liberal Imperialism. Some chapters from his history of the Great War are reproduced here. In an introductory chapter Brendan Clifford shows how, in the course of the Home Rule conflict (1912-14) the Home Rule movement was drawn into the web of Asquith's Liberal Imperialism, and how in August 1914 Home Rule journalists, such as T.M. Kettle, T.P. O'Connor and Robert Lynd, supplied Asquith with the frenzied war propaganda which he needed. And he shows how Roger Casement and James Connolly did not act out of narrow nationalist considerations. They saw Britain's declaration of war on Germany as a barbaric attempt by a world empire in decline to destroy a civilised and progressive European state, and acted accordingly. This book is intended to dispel the deadening West-British influence of recent decades and to restore the European orientation which characterised Irish thought in earlier centuries, but which has been lost in recent limes.Read More