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Were ancient Ireland’s ‘incestuous elites’ just a myth? A tomb older than Stonehenge has new answers
In 2020, analysis of a skull fragment discovered at Newgrange, County Meath, led to sensational claims of royal incest within the region’s prehistoric ruling dynasties. But new research suggests that Neolithic Ireland may have been far more socially equal – and more complex – than originally assumed
In the Boyne Valley of eastern Ireland stands one of the world’s most fascinating prehistoric monuments: Newgrange. Centuries older than the Pyramids of Giza or Stonehenge, Newgrange is a large passage tomb, and a 5,000-year-old marvel of ancient engineering. It’s also one of the best windows that researchers have into the ancient society that constructed it: how it functioned, what it valued, and who held power. That final question has been the source of stunning theories with incredible implications. For years, many archaeologists and geneticists believed that a small, powerful elite ruled over Neolithic Ireland and commissioned monuments like Newgrange as a reflection of their social dominance. That theory gained momentum in 2020, when DNA analysis of a skull fragment discovered in the tomb revealed that the buried individual – referred to by researchers as NG10 – was the product of an incestuous union between two siblings, or a parent and child. Some experts interpreted this as compelling evidence of a dynastic elite that practised incest to preserve a sacred bloodline – not unlike royal traditions in ancient Egypt. This, in turn, painted a picture of Neolithic Ireland as a deeply hierarchical society ruled by a tightly knit, closely related few. So, did a sacred royal family, buried at Newgrange, really rule over Neolithic Ireland? Or might the evidence have been misinterpreted? That is the conclusion of new research led by scholars from the University of York and University College Dublin – ‘The ‘king’ of Newgrange? A critical analysis of a Neolithic petrous fragment from the passage tomb chamber’ – published in the journal Antiquity. Their findings cast serious doubt on these earlier assumptions and instead paint a very different picture of the society that built this monument. The cosmic history of Newgrange Newgrange is one of several monumental passage tombs built during the Neolithic period (c4000–2500 BC) across Ireland and western Britain. Located in County Meath, the monument consists of a circular mound around 85 metres in diameter, ringed with standing stones and containing a narrow interior passage that aligns precisely with the rising sun on the winter solstice. Each year, on or around the winter solstice, the rising sun illuminates the chamber at the heart of the tomb for a few minutes via a precision-engineered ‘roof-box’ above the entrance. It’s an astonishing feat of prehistoric engineering that reflects both a deep understanding of astronomy, and a symbolic reverence for cosmic cycles of light and dark. Read more | “Graves are like time capsules – little microcosms of prehistoric culture”: Alice Roberts on what bones and burials can tell us about early Britain And Newgrange isn’t alone. Across Neolithic Europe, other monuments reveal similar concerns: Bryn Celli Ddu in Wales aligns with the summer solstice sunrise; Maeshowe in Orkney aligns with the winter solstice sunset; and Stonehenge captures both summer and winter solstice points. For much of the 20th century, these Neolithic feats were seen as evidence of powerful and centralised leadership: they were thought to point to a social elite that wielded enough power to be capable of coordinating complex constructions and mustering vast amounts of labour. The theory of Newgrange’s incestuous elites In 2020, the NG10 DNA discovery appeared to add even more credence to that view. The rarity of such incestuous unions in ancient and modern populations led to comparisons with the Egyptian pharaohs and Inca royalty, both of whom famously practised incest as a tool to preserve divine bloodlines. NG10’s relationship to the other occupants of the tomb seemed to support the idea of a ruling family, possibly dynastic in nature, whose status was maintained through carefully guarded lineage. It was a powerful theory, selling Newgrange as a royal tomb that served as the resting place of Ireland’s earliest sacred elites. New research at Newgrange reaches different conclusions However, the new study challenges that interpretation, arguing that it dramatically stretches what the evidence can tell us. Can we really know that a powerful, incestuous elite ruled Ireland with an iron fist? “The evidence all points to a much more collective ethos,” says Professor Penny Bickle, from the University of York’s Department of Archaeology. “There are not wide disparities in diet, houses are relatively flimsy, and they are all similar to each other. There are no large settlement systems or trade mechanisms, and we also don’t see production of craft on the scale that we see in other ancient societies such as in ancient Egypt, where incest was thought to be practised by the ruling elite.” So, according to Bickle and her colleagues, the archaeological evidence around Newgrange tells a different story. Nearby homes were modest and uniform. There is no evidence of grand residences, no wealth concentration and no consistent pattern of close-relative burials across Neolithic Ireland. This all points to a much more equal social structure than previously assumed. And, Bickle adds, it’s not necessarily certain that NG10 had specific links to Newgrange. “It is by no means clear that the monument was the first burial site of NG10 and the tomb grew in stages, so tracing who this individual was is a very difficult task indeed,” Bickle explains. “As it stands, the incestuous origins of NG10 are a one-off compared to all of the DNA data we have for Neolithic Ireland.” In other words, NG10 could be a genetic anomaly, rather than evidence of an all-powerful ruling dynasty. Prehistoric Irish burial practices If NG10 wasn’t a king, then who did get buried in monuments like Newgrange? “People were definitely being selected for burial in passage tombs – the whole community does not end up in these monuments,” says Associate Professor Jessica Smyth, of University College Dublin. “However, we don’t know the reasons behind this selection, and why they were thought to be special.” What’s also clear is that burial practices in Neolithic Ireland differed sharply from those in modern times, so applying 21st-century expectations to the past can be misleading. “Unlike today, bodies don’t tend to be buried ‘whole’ or ‘intact’ in this time period,” Smyth adds. “Before they end up in megalithic monuments, bodies are broken down, sometimes cremated and even circulated around their communities.” WATCH | Prehistoric stone circles: Everything you wanted to know View Green Video on the source website This process of disarticulation and redistribution means that the people who placed the bones into tombs like Newgrange may not have known – or even cared – about the biological identity of the individuals involved. In NG10’s case, the community may have had no knowledge of their parentage at all. A new interpretation of Newgrange and Neolithic Ireland Rather than a symbol of elite power and dynastic control, Newgrange might instead reflect the ritual and cooperative culture of a Neolithic society bound by shared beliefs, agricultural rhythms and ancestral commemoration. Its solstice alignment still speaks to an extraordinary grasp of time and the cosmos, and its scale still demands coordination. But the latest research suggests these achievements were communal, rather than commanded. “There are still many questions to solve here,” says Bickle. “But building this picture means looking at the monument together with the society that was built up around it.”
When blight began devastating potato crops across Ireland in 1845, British officials immediately recognised the dangers. And yet, within six years, the Great Famine had caused the deaths of at least 1 million people. This is the story of how tangled Anglo-Irish relations and a profound devotion to market forces turned a crisis into a national catastrophe.
In late 1846, a magistrate called Nicholas Cummins visited Skibbereen, a small town in County Cork. The scenes he witnessed there, he would go on to write, “were such as no tongue or pen can convey the slightest idea of”. Cummins described “famished and ghastly skeletons”, nearly catatonic but shaking with fever, sheltered in unheated cottages. At the sound of footsteps, what seemed like hundreds of people emerged into the daylight, begging and screaming for food. The horrors that Cummins encountered that day were repeated with terrible regularity across the island of Ireland. From 1845–51, as potato crops failed again and again, at least 1 million people died, many in lonely, hideous and degrading conditions. At least 1.5 million more emigrated. The people of Ireland had endured periods of starvation before, but they had encountered nothing on the scale of what we remember today as the Great Famine. As the death toll soared, Ireland seemed remote, an isolated hell. And yet the Great Famine was a British, as well as an Irish, crisis. Ireland had, after all, been under sometimes notional English dominion since the Middle Ages. It had been conquered in the 17th century, invaded by Oliver Cromwell’s forces during the Civil Wars, and then, once more, by William III’s armies after the Glorious Revolution. During the 18th century, restrictions on trade subordinated Ireland’s economy to Britain’s. The Irish Catholic majority were dispossessed and barred from public life. After the rebellion of the United Irish against British rule in 1798, the 1800–01 Acts of Union combined Ireland and Britain into a new United Kingdom. Britain and Ireland were now more closely intertwined than ever. The union had one currency and an integrated economy. Ireland sent 100 MPs to Westminster. By 1845, nearly a third of the population of the UK lived in Ireland. But when famine struck, the gulf within the union seemed unbridgeable. John Russell, prime minister at the height of the crisis, implied that Ireland and Britain, though geographically close, were distant in time. Ireland, he told the House of Commons, suffered under “a famine of the 13th century acting upon the population of the 19th”. A nation without hope The Great Famine, however, was a modern famine, a political, ecological and economic disaster shaped by Ireland and Britain’s long history of suspicion and tense interdependence. Ireland was never a formal British colony, but its relationship to Britain was colonial. Britain extracted rent and agricultural products from Ireland. It sent Irish soldiers to fight for the empire abroad, while maintaining garrisons in Ireland to put down rebellion. ‘Paddy’, with his rundown home and dirty brood of children, his potatoes, pigs, lies and superstitions, was a stock figure in British popular culture. Many blamed the Irish for the catastrophe of the famine, drawing on these caricatures. Stone cottages, rooting pigs, potatoes stored in dirt pits, cold, acidic peatlands – the aesthetic of the Irish countryside was archaic and earthy, especially in comparison with Britain’s seething industrial cities. As Charles Trevelyan, the bureaucrat who organised famine relief, asked: “What hope is there for a nation which lives on potatoes?” The potato was not an ancient crop in Europe: it was introduced from the Americas by Iberian conquistadores in the 16th century. Yet there was a key distinction between Ireland and the rest of the continent in the way the crop was utilised. Across Europe, potatoes were embraced as a backstop against the failure of other crops. In Ireland, however, they quickly went from ‘famine food’ to staple. During the 18th century, Irish land was subdivided into smaller and smaller parcels. As rents increased, farmers who might have eaten some of their oats or other crops sold them all, and fell back on potatoes for subsistence. Between 1741 and 1779 the number of Irish acres planted with potatoes was reported to have increased twentyfold. By 1845, on the eve of the famine, Ireland exported roughly 250,000 head of cattle, 90 million eggs and enough grain to feed 2 million people in Britain each year. But the Irish poor almost never ate anything but potatoes. “They are just as much fed on flour as they are clad in jewels and embroidery,” The Times commented. Hyper-dependence on potatoes seemed to confirm British stereotypes about the Irish, as though Paddy had planted them to saunter and laze, to indulge in whiskey and blarney. But potatoes, although abundant in good years, are very vulnerable to disease. Some estimated that as much as one-fifth of the population lived on the edge of famine every season. The Irish poor relied on complex credit arrangements, borrowing against their potato crops or trading labour for land, a cycle some called ‘working for the dead horse’. The Irish economy responded to world markets. “I do not know which is worse for the poor farmer: the fall or the rise,” a Roscommon labourer wondered. “When the market tumbles, where is the rent? And when the price gets up in a hurry, where is the food?” Long before the famine, Ireland’s economy looked old but was perilously new; Ireland’s potatoes looked secure, but were precarious. And Britain was dazzled by what seemed to be the natural modernising power of the free market. The law of the market, described by the new discipline of political economy, seemed analogous to the natural laws of physics. Political economy, an Irish noble declared, was as certain as “the Newtonian philosophy”, rejected only by “the profoundly ignorant”. If economies had natural laws, it followed that the best policy was ‘laissez-faire’, to let the market “bring things as nearly as possible to this their natural state”, as an official wrote. Laissez-faire, however, was hard work. It took a lot of regulation to make markets behave ‘naturally’. And so, even before the famine, British officials hoped to apply the pressures of market forces to reform Ireland. They could not see that those very forces – the demands of the British market, shaped by conquest and colonial exploitation – were what had made Ireland vulnerable. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/05/PCL109199-986b91a.jpg" width="2539" height="1691" alt="An English labourer carries his “burden” – “the Irish old man of the mountain” – in a Punch cartoon from the mid-19th century. British stereotypes of lazy, freeloading Irishmen shaped the authorities’ reaction to the onset of famine (Image by TopFoto)" title="An English labourer carries his “burden” – “the Irish old man of the mountain” – in a Punch cartoon from the mid-19th century. British stereotypes of lazy, freeloading Irishmen shaped the authorities’ reaction to the onset of famine" /> Foul-smelling pulp By the summer of 1845, Phytophthora infestans had crossed the Atlantic, probably among a shipment of fertiliser or seed potatoes bound for Belgium. The organism, a fungus-like ‘water mould’, was native to central Mexico, where potatoes grow wild. The ‘late blight’ caused by P infestans spread unchecked from Sweden to Spain, killing potatoes in the ground and turning stored potatoes into foul-smelling pulp. In the Netherlands, potato yields for 1845 fell by 71 per cent compared to previous averages; in Belgium, 87 per cent. The London newspapers reported on food riots in the Baltic and Poland, and on emergency restrictions of grain exports in the Ottoman empire. British officials immediately recognised that the blight would be catastrophic in Ireland. But the idea that Ireland was backward, and that its backwardness was a consequence of an uncivilised indolence and comfort made possible by cheap potatoes, was too pervasive to overcome. It was crucial, by those lights, that all aid be conditional. Britain’s own Poor Law had a similar ethos. Recipients of relief in England were sent to workhouses, to deter all but the most desperate. In Ireland, this principle was stretched to absurd extremes. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/05/GettyImages-802465554cmyk-68c9c46.jpg" width="5090" height="3391" alt="A large group of people assemble outside a large workhouse" title="Starving people throng a workhouse during the Great Famine, in a c1900 illustration. The prevailing view among British political leaders was that relief should only be offered in exchange for money or labour" /> In 1845, Robert Peel’s government met the first wave of the blight by importing 44 million pounds of American maize, sold at cost by local Relief Committees. Irish labourers who were unable to find work could apply for jobs at public works projects to earn money with which to buy the ‘Indian corn’. Maize was alien to the Irish – that was why Peel preferred it. Buying maize, he reasoned, would not disrupt the trade in wheat and oats, and would head off any restriction on the export of Irish crops. Relief officers were warned never to give away food. As Trevelyan reminded his staff, “Our plan is not to give the meal away, but to sell it.” Officers were told to separate ‘normal’ hunger from hunger caused by the failure of the potato. Food riots and hunger-related disease increased. Ireland, however, had experienced potato failure before. Although 1845–46 was one of the worst subsistence crises in Ireland since the union, no one expected that the blight would return in 1846. However, by midsummer, potatoes larger than a marble could hardly be found in Irish fields. In 1846, fewer potatoes were planted, and a greater proportion were destroyed. During the winter of 1846–47 – ‘Black 47’ – Irish society all but collapsed. An estimated 400,000 people died – thousands of starvation, and hundreds of thousands of diseases associated with hunger, especially typhus. People ate seaweed, grass, roots, carrion, dirt and the eggs of wild birds. As much as 3 per cent of the Irish population emigrated. Some ship captains offered free passage for the poor, as living ballast, as they were “cheaper to ship and unship… than… lime or shingle”. Still Ireland continued to export food – a basic principle of the relief programme. According to estimates, in 1846–47, some 3.3 million acres were planted with grain, and Irish farms raised more than 2.5 million cattle, 2.2 million sheep and 600,000 pigs. Waterford alone exported more than 20,200 barrels of wheat and nearly 59,000 barrels of oats from May 1846 to February 1847. A moral hazard? Peel’s government fell in the summer of 1846. The new prime minister, the Whig nobleman Lord John Russell, continued to adhere to the principle that the moral hazard of giving relief without expecting labour or money in exchange was as insidious as starvation. Where Peel had emphasised importing food for sale, Russell emphasised offering jobs at public works to allow the Irish poor to earn wages. Although food imports did increase, even many who could find work struggled to find food to buy. Ireland – especially the countryside – had very little infrastructure for selling imported food. “The ordinary mercantile machinery,” Trevelyan worried, “even of the greatest trading nation in the world, is unequal to such a novel emergency.” Thousands of public works opened, most of them offering make-work jobs, paying wages set by law at twopence less than the average local wage (a provision meant to encourage private employment, enforced in districts that had virtually no such work on offer). To many, relief work was nothing more than “digging holes and filling them up again”. A plan premised on the natural laws of the market required nearly 12,000 clerks and officers to administer. By March 1847, more than 700,000 people had jobs on the works. Designed to save money, Russell’s public works cost more than £944,000 – about £102.4m today when adjusted for inflation. However, inflation is not always the most useful measure of the relative value of money over time. In 2022, a government project on a similar scale to the 1846–47 public works, in proportion to the gross domestic product of the present-day UK, would cost more than £3.83bn. The government’s tunnel vision, focused on checking ‘indolence’ and dependence among the desperate Irish, and on enforcing economy and austerity, proved expensive and wasteful. Meanwhile, widely reprinted reports from places like Skibbereen inspired sympathy around the world. In January 1847, Queen Victoria wrote a letter to the archbishop of Canterbury asking for a collection in aid of famine victims. The letter, printed in The Times, opened a campaign that attracted hundreds of thousands of pounds of donations. The charity was timely. Facing ballooning costs, and thrown off-balance in the spring of 1847 by a financial crisis, the Whig government quickly wound down the public works and sponsored a programme of local soup kitchens, financed directly by grants and donations. At their peak in the summer of 1847, the kitchens distributed daily rations to some 3 million people – all of whom were expected to prove that they had no other means of subsistence. The soup kept bellies full, but was not always nutritionally complete. Health officials recorded outbreaks of scurvy. “The feeding of dogs in a kennel was far more decent and orderly,” one observer wrote. The soup kitchen programme was only ever intended to be temporary. As kitchens closed in the autumn of 1847, the Russell government devolved responsibility for famine relief onto Ireland’s Poor Law Unions, which had the power to levy taxes in order to pay for the relief of the local poor. This principle, that “Irish property should support Irish poverty”, might have functioned better in normal economic conditions. However, after nearly three years of famine, many unions quickly ran out of money. To deter applications to the unions and their workhouses, relief could only be given to people occupying a quarter-acre of land or less. A month’s hard labour Evictions, always a threat in rural Ireland, increased in number. Bailiffs tore the roofs off cottages and threw the residents into the fields. Magistrates could imprison people found outside of their ‘home’ union for up to a month’s hard labour. Irish society, the commissioners of the new system declared, could only be protected from “a state of almost universal pauperisation” by these rigid rules. In the summer of 1848, a group of Irish nationalists, inspired by the revolutions sweeping continental Europe, attempted to overthrow British rule in Ireland. The ‘Young Ireland’ rebellion was swiftly crushed. Then, in autumn 1848, the blight returned. Following the rebellion, ‘laissez-faire’ turned vengeful. “The true thing to do,” Charles Wood, the chancellor of the Exchequer, told a colleague, is “to do nothing.” In the poorest Irish counties, the winter of 1848–49 was as bad or worse than 1846–47. In County Clare, for example, the death rate kept rising from 1847 until early in 1850. By July 1849, about 1 million people depended either on the workhouse or outdoor relief given by workhouse staff. Although this was one-third of the number who had relied on soup kitchens two years earlier, the demand for relief in 1849 was regional, concentrated in the poorest counties in Ireland along the western coast and in the countryside of the south-west. Across Ireland, the cost of relief increased from £1.7m in 1848 to £2.2m in 1849. Even in 1850, when the situation had stabilised, some unions were still supporting one-third or more of the population in their districts. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/05/AKG6345975cmyk-e5a0251.jpg" width="3651" height="2432" alt="An engraving shows food being handed out to victims of the famine. By the summer of 1847, soup kitchens were distributing rations to 3 million people across Ireland (Image by AKG)" title="An engraving shows food being handed out to victims of the famine. By the summer of 1847, soup kitchens were distributing rations to 3 million people across Ireland" /> By 1851, the ‘late blight’ that killed Irish potatoes had become endemic in Ireland. Irish potato crops remained susceptible to blight, but the disease spread less explosively. Meanwhile, mass death and mass emigration had – with brute force – somewhat reduced the pressure on Irish land. The Great Famine was the worst humanitarian crisis to afflict the United Kingdom in the 19th century. It is the most important event in the history of the Irish diaspora. But the Great Famine was neither the first, nor the last, cataclysmic food shortage in the Victorian British empire. The Agra famine of 1837–38 in present-day Uttar Pradesh killed 800,000 people. Unstable climactic conditions generated droughts and famines in 1876–79, 1889–91 and 1896–1902 that killed at least 15 million in British India. Crop failure was usually caused by natural phenomena – drought, heavy rains and population explosions of pests – but famine in the empire followed when imperial administrators placed their faith in the market to solve food shortages. There was almost always enough food. The obstacle was a stubborn insistence that private merchants deliver food to the hungry, and that the hungry pay for it, for their own good. The poverty of the imperial imagination made it impossible to imagine an alternative. Padraic X Scanlan is an associate professor at the University of Toronto. His latest book is Rot: A History of the Irish Famine (Robinson, March 2025) This article was first published in the May 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
The battle of the Boyne: what happened at the July 1690 clash and why is it commemorated on ‘the Twelfth’?
What and when was the battle of the Boyne? Find out more about the background to the clash and its continued significance today
What and when was the battle of the Boyne? The battle of the Boyne was fought on 1 July 1690, between forces of the deposed and exiled Catholic king, James VII of Scotland and II of England, and the Dutch Protestant new king, William II of Scotland and III of England (William of Orange). It was fought on the banks of the River Boyne near the town of Drogheda in modern day Republic of Ireland, approximately 30 miles north of Dublin. Why is it commemorated on ‘the Twelfth’? The battle is today commemorated by many Ulster Protestants on or close to 12 July (also referred to as ‘the Twelfth’, ‘the Glorious Twelfth’ or ‘Orangemen’s Day’). Due to the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in 1752, the calendar moved forward 11 days, and so the new anniversary of the battle of the Boyne was 11 July. The anniversary of another decisive battle of the Williamite Wars, the 1691 battle of Aughrim, falls on 12 July (its pre-Gregorian calendar anniversary was 22 July), and marks the date when Jacobite forces in Ireland loyal to James were destroyed. The dates of the two battles have been conflated since the 18th century, when loyalist groups began celebrating on 12 July. What was the background to the battle? In 1685, James VII of Scotland and II of England had succeeded to the thrones of England, Scotland, and Ireland. His elder brother, Charles II, had no legitimate children, so James became the next Stuart king. James was a Catholic, which made him a figure of suspicion to many Protestants, who held a deep-seated fear of Catholicism (‘popery’) and worried that the king might increase the power and influence of fellow Catholics in Stuart England and Scotland. However, it wasn’t until the birth of the king’s son, also named James, that the threat of a Catholic dynasty led a group of prominent Protestants – the so-called ‘Immortal Seven’ (three earls, a viscount, a bishop and two other noblemen) – to turn to Prince William of Orange. The Dutch prince was James’s nephew, and also married to James’s daughter Mary (who had been brought up Protestant). On 5 November 1688, William, along with 35,000 soldiers, landed in Torbay, Devon, and took power in the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 (so-called due to its bloodless nature, though some were injured or killed in anti-Catholic riots sparked by the invasion). The coup established the joint monarchy of William and Mary, while James was overthrown and fled to exile in France. However, allied with France and the French king Louis XIV (who was an enemy of William III), James believed that he could win back his throne. James attacked what he saw as William’s soft underbelly: Ireland. The Earl of Tyrconnell, the Catholic lord deputy of Ireland who was loyal to James, had mustered a force loyal to the exiled king (known as Jacobites). James landed at Kinsale in March 1689 to lead his supporters, sparking the series of battles later known as the Williamite Wars. What happened at the battle of the Boyne, how many died, and how long did it last? James II commanded around 29,000 troops, made up of Tyrconnell’s Irish Catholic forces and French soldiers from Louis XIV. Though he had been advised to abandon Dublin and retreat to a safer position to the south, the exiled king disregarded the advice and instead marched to a key strategic ford near Drogheda, north of Dublin, to meet William’s forces advancing from the north. By the time William III had landed in Carrickfergus in June 1690, his forces had swelled to 36,000, including some Irish Protestants, as well as Dutch, German and Scottish soldiers and many others. This was the largest invading force Ireland had ever seen. The battle took place on the banks of Boyne in the early hours of 1 July. William’s forces possessed superior numbers and weapons, as well as greater experience – many of his soldiers were already seasoned through war with France. Though William III himself had a near miss – a bullet grazed his arm during the fray – he remained at the battle site and his forces retained their experienced military commander. After around four hours of fighting, James ordered a retreat and William claimed victory. Though the battle is often regarded as a bloody and one-sided clash, it was far from a decisive military victory. Around 1,500 soldiers were lost out of around 60,000. Military historian Padraig Lenihan told The Irish Story that losses numbered approximately 1,000 on the Jacobite side, and 500 from Williamite forces. “Those are relatively small casualties,” said Lenihan. “It’s less of one big encounter battle than five or six counter-skirmishes – fairly short sharp clashes over wide swathes of countryside … It’s not a classic encounter battle, when all or most of one army clashes with all or most of another.” Most of the soldiers on either side did not see action, Lenihan explains. Who won the battle of the Boyne and what happened next? The forces of William III ultimately proved victorious. After the battle, the remainder of James’s forces dropped back to Dublin, and James himself retreated to France. Though a setback to the hopes of his Irish Catholic base, the retreat was not enough to end support for the former king in Ireland. Over further battles, William also captured the cities of Dublin and Cork, and the battle of Aughrim in 1691 proved a hammer blow for the cause; the nationalists who had supported James saw their hopes for freedom from English rule crushed. As a consequence, William’s hold on the crown was assured. James and his descendants were excluded; for years Jacobite plots would attempt to restore them. Read more about James VII and II’s years in exile The defeat also had long echoes into the next century, as the Jacobite cause rallied around his grandson Charles Edward Stuart – now best known as Bonnie Prince Charlie. He returned to Britain in 1745 in an attempt to overthrow George II. However, the ‘Young Pretender’ and his forces were ultimately defeated at the battle of Culloden in Scotland in 1746, and Charles fled into exile. Why do some loyalists in Northern Ireland and Scotland still celebrate the battle of the Boyne? The Orange Order, a Protestant ‘fraternal’ organisation founded in 1795, still celebrates the victory. The first such commemorations occurred in the late 18th century, and each year on or around 12 July, ‘Orangemen’ march in some communities in Northern Ireland and Scotland in commemoration of ‘King Billy’s’ victory. The events are characterised by marchers wearing bowler hats and sashes, and accompanied by tin whistles and drums. Historically, some of the commemorations have been marred by violence, and critics have called the celebration sectarian and supremacist. They remain contentious, particularly when planned to progress through Catholic neighbourhoods. To some, William III is still celebrated as a champion of his faith and the man who secured the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland. To others, he is remembered as an oppressor of the Irish and the brutal tyrant who crushed his enemies mercilessly at the battle of the Boyne. WATCH on BBC iPlayer: The Twelfth Revisited | Helen Mark presents a look back through the archives with some of the historians and commentators who have helped explain The Twelfth, its traditions and spectacle down the years
Ireland's tangled relationship with empire
Historian Jane Ohlmeyer reflects on Ireland's difficult relationship with imperialism in the early modern period
Often described as England's first colony, Ireland has a long – and deeply complicated – relationship with empire. Rhiannon Davies speaks to historian Jane Ohlmeyer to learn more about this complex picture, from how Ireland was a 'laboratory of empire' to how imperialism influenced the clothing people wore. View Green Video on the source website
A brief history of the Good Friday Agreement
On 10 April 1998, a deal was reached to bring an end to Northern Ireland's Troubles, in what became known as the Good Friday Agreement. Here, historian Alan MacLeod investigates the long road of the peace process which sought to reconcile two different traditions in Ireland – and considers the legacy of the Agreement...
The Good Friday Agreement, reached on 10 April 1998, was a careful balancing act, reflecting the competing demands and aspirations of the different parties to the talks. Yet, despite the widespread euphoria that greeted the deal, this was only a beginning. Implementing the Agreement has been a difficult process, depending on the willingness of the political representatives of Northern Ireland’s two communities to work together. That willingness has frequently been missing... The Good Friday Agreement: the background The partition of Ireland in 1921 followed more than a century of unrest between Britain and Ireland. Under the Act of Union of 1800 Ireland lost its parliament in Dublin and became governed directly from Westminster. For much of the 19th and into the 20th century, varying states of tension and conflict developed as unionists campaigned for Ireland to remain part of the UK, while nationalists campaigned for either home rule or an independent Irish state. The issue of Irish home rule dominated domestic British politics from 1885 to the start of the First World War. In April 1916, the Easter Rising shook Dublin, as a group of Irish nationalists proclaimed the establishment of an Irish Republic and clashed with British troops in the capital. The rising, which resulted in the loss of 450 lives and destroyed much of the centre of Dublin, was ended by the British within a week. However, the public mood shifted decisively when the 15 leaders of the rising were executed by the British authorities in May 1916. The executions and imposition of martial law fuelled public resentment of the British. The next five tumultuous years, including the Irish War of Independence (1919–21), resulted in the end of British rule across most of Ireland. Read more | The Easter Rising: when Ireland went to war Read more | Bullets and ballot boxes: a history of Anglo-Irish relations since the Easter Rising The Government of Ireland Act, which became law in May 1921, split Ireland. Northern Ireland was formed from the six predominantly unionist counties in the north-east of the island. The remaining 26 predominantly nationalist counties formed the 'south', becoming the independent Irish Free State in 1922. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/04/GettyImages-521059042-1711e68.jpg" width="4961" height="3508" alt="H22 Ruins of the Coliseum Theatre, Henry Street 1916 This theatre was opened in April 1915 and destroyed in the 1916 Easter Rising. (Part of the Independent Newspapers Ireland/NLI collection.). (Photo by Independent News And Media/Getty Images)" title="Coliseum Theatre, Henry Street 1916" /> The Good Friday Agreement and the Troubles For 30 years in the late 20th century, Northern Ireland was wracked by a bloody ethno-nationalist conflict known as ‘the Troubles’, which has left over 3,700 people dead and thousands more injured. At the heart of the Troubles is the division in Northern Irish society. The majority population in Northern Ireland – the unionist community – identify as British and want Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom. The minority community – the nationalists – want Northern Ireland to be reunited with the rest of Ireland, in an independent Irish Republic. As the nationalist community is predominantly Roman Catholic and the unionist predominantly Protestant, the conflict has often been portrayed as a sectarian one. Certainly, sectarian attacks occurred throughout the Troubles. However, the conflict was a consequence of the competing national identities and aspirations of the two communities occupying Northern Ireland. Read more | The history of Ireland: 11 milestone moments As a result, Northern Ireland’s politics did not develop on class lines, as in the rest of the UK. Instead, Northern Ireland’s politics centred on the constitutional question. Following the partition of Ireland, the unionist community generally voted for the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), which remained in permanent control of Northern Ireland’s devolved government from 1921 until its abolition in 1972. Discrimination against the minority, particularly in housing and employment, led to the growth of a civil rights movement in the 1960s, demanding ‘British rights’ for the nationalist population. However, the civil rights movement was met by a loyalist backlash and violence flared. Finally, in August 1969, the British government was forced to step in and deploy troops in Northern Ireland. They were to remain there until 2007. Out of the violence, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) re-emerged, and the focus of the conflict shifted from civil rights to the constitutional position of Northern Ireland. The IRA dated to back to the Easter Rising and had launched sporadic campaigns since partition directed at trying to achieve Irish unity. Its recent ‘Border Campaign’ (1956–62) had ended in failure and over the course of the 1960s the IRA came to focus more on extreme leftist united front politics rather than militant republicanism. This caused a split in the republican movement in December 1969, from which the Provisional IRA was born. While most nationalists supported the newly formed Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), who sought to achieve Irish unity by political means, there were those in the minority community who supported the IRA’s ‘armed struggle’, attempting to gain Irish unity by force. Unionists fiercely resisted any moves towards a united Ireland. Loyalist paramilitary groups also formed and contributed to the developing violence. The Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) emerged from 1966, and the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and its proxy Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF) from the early 1970s. Read more | The big question: Has terrorism ever achieved its aims? As the conflict deepened, the death toll rose rapidly. Events like Bloody Sunday, 30 January 1972 – in which British troops killed 13 unarmed civilians and injured several more (one of whom later died from his injuries) while taking part in a protest march – acted as a catalyst to the increasingly bitter conflict. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/04/GettyImages-522516460-140f433.jpg" width="4746" height="3756" alt="The remains of the 13 people who were shot dead by the British Army in Derry on Bloody Sunday,30/01/1972 at the removal of their remains to the church in Derry on 02/02/1971. (Part of the Independent Newspapers Ireland/NLI Collection). (Photo by Independent News and Media/Getty Images)" title="Bloody Sunday" /> The prelude to the peace process Over the course of the Troubles, British governments attempted to develop political initiatives that sought to end the conflict. Edward Heath’s government (1970–74) developed an ambitious programme, resulting in the Sunningdale Agreement of December 1973. This combined a devolved assembly for Northern Ireland, involving power-sharing between unionist and nationalist parties, with the creation of a Council of Ireland to institutionalise links between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. However, this was brought down by a two-week general strike in May 1974, as the unionist population rejected the involvement of the Irish government under the cry that “Dublin is just a Sunningdale away”. Margaret Thatcher’s government (1979–90) was more modest in ambition, with Mrs Thatcher’s focus on securing cooperation from the Irish government in tackling the IRA. In exchange the Irish government was given the right to put forward its views on Northern Ireland’s affairs. This again infuriated the unionists, who sought to bring the Agreement down. However, as the 1980s progressed, some significant developments began to reshape the approaches of the participants in the conflict. Read more | How should history remember Margaret Thatcher? Republicans increasingly saw the benefits of combining a political strategy with the armed struggle. Sinn Féin, the IRA’s political counterpart, began contesting elections, and regularly polled between 10 and 15 per cent of the vote. This caused deep concern in both the British and Irish governments and influenced the negotiations leading to the Anglo-Irish Agreement. The ‘bullet and ballot box’ strategy caused tensions within the republican movement that had to be carefully managed by Gerry Adams, who became Sinn Féin president in 1983. Experience of the drift to far left politics in the 1960s and the ingrained abstentionism – the refusal to accept the legitimacy of, or to take seats in, political institutions in the Republic, Northern Ireland, or Westminster – in the republican movement made many suspicious of political engagement. The IRA had not been defeated and a flow of weapons was reaching Ireland from Libya. Significant IRA attacks continued, such as the attempt to assassinate Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet in the 1984 Brighton Bombing. However, Sinn Féin could achieve electoral legitimacy by contesting elections, for example through Adams’s election as a Westminster MP in 1983. In addition, in 1988 Adams began a series of talks with John Hume, leader of the constitutional nationalist SDLP. While the Hume-Adams talks had no immediate successes, they were influential in steering the British and Irish governments towards the Downing Street Declaration, which would come in 1993. There was also some movement from the British government. Influenced by Hume, the Northern Ireland Secretary, Peter Brooke, delivered a speech in November 1990 in which he declared that the British government had “no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland”. Instead it was for the people of Northern Ireland to decide its constitutional future. Coupled with this change in mood music, Brooke also approved the opening of a secret communication channel between MI5 and the republicans. Brooke also sought to get Northern Ireland’s constitutional parties talking to each other. He proposed that inter-party talks should cover three strands: the first dealing with relationships within Northern Ireland; the second dealing with relations between the two parts of Ireland; and the third dealing with links between the British and Irish governments. The talks began in April 1991, but quickly became bogged down in procedural disagreements. But the three-strand format was to be at the heart of the Good Friday Agreement. The Downing Street Declaration and IRA ceasefire The peace process picked up momentum in 1993. The British prime minister, John Major, worked closely with the Irish Taoiseach [prime minister], Albert Reynolds, on a joint declaration that was hoped would form the basis of a peace initiative. This resulted in the Downing Street Declaration of 15 December 1993. The declaration recognised the two different traditions in Ireland and stated that peace could only come through reconciling the differences between them. The two governments committed themselves to building that process of reconciliation and creating appropriate political structures to facilitate it. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/01/GettyImages-51426636-1-5c60888.jpg" width="1015" height="699" alt="British prime minister John Major (left) and Irish prime minister Albert Reynolds address a press conference in London prior to issuing a joint declaration to bring peace to Northern Ireland, 15 December 1994. (Photo by Gerry Penny/AFP/Getty Images)" title="British prime minister John Major (left) and Irish prime minister Albert Reynolds address a press conference in London prior to issuing a joint declaration to bring peace to Northern Ireland, 15 December 1994. (Photo by Gerry Penny/AFP/Getty Images)" /> In parallel to the Downing Street Declaration, Reynolds worked to persuade the IRA to declare a ceasefire. Both Reynolds and Hume were convinced that tying Sinn Féin into a cross-nationalist coalition would show them the benefits of using purely political means. This would involve nationalists in Northern Ireland, the Irish government, and Irish America, and would provide the republicans with access to the highest political levels in Washington. To show Sinn Féin the benefits of constitutional politics, Reynolds lobbied the US president Bill Clinton to grant Gerry Adams a visa to visit the United States. Clinton agreed, and Adams was granted a 48-hour visa to visit America in February 1994, despite most of Clinton’s senior advisors being against the move, and much to the fury of John Major. The visa was important as part of the wider choreography of peace making. But it did not lead to an immediate IRA ceasefire. Indeed, a month later the IRA demonstrated its continued reach by attacking Heathrow Airport. However, the visit was important as part of the process of debate within the republican movement, and finally, on 31 August 1994, the IRA announced its ceasefire. The ceasefire was followed in October 1994 by a ceasefire called by the loyalist paramilitaries. However, the ceasefires did not lead directly to all-party talks. Instead, the peace process quickly became bogged down over the question of arms decommissioning – the hand-over, or verified disposal, of weapons. The IRA would not consider anything that could be perceived to be surrender and Sinn Féin argued that decommissioning should be negotiated as part of a process of ‘demilitarisation’. But neither unionist politicians nor the British government would countenance talks with Sinn Féin until decommissioning had taken place. Unionists had been disconcerted by republican celebrations following the announcement of the IRA ceasefire; they were not willing to take Sinn Féin at their word. In an attempt to break the impasse, the British and Irish governments created an international decommissioning body, chaired by former US Senator George Mitchell. This was part of a ‘twin-track’ approach, with decommissioning to accompany political talks rather than precede them. Mitchell delivered his report in January 1996, setting out six principles that should be endorsed by all parties to the talks. This included a commitment to exclusively peaceful means. Mitchell recommended that all parties should sign up to these principles and that some decommissioning could take place during the talks. However, this was not enough to prevent the slide back to violence. On 9 February 1996, the IRA released a statement announcing the end of its ceasefire. An hour later a massive explosion rocked Canary Wharf, killing two people. What was the Good Friday Agreement? The election of Tony Blair’s Labour government, on 1 May 1997, was transformational. Blair was as committed to the peace process as Major had been, but had the advantage of being able to approach Northern Ireland without the baggage that Major had accumulated over seven years of talks. The IRA renewed its ceasefire on 20 July 1997, opening the way for Sinn Féin to be included in the inter-party talks that had begun under Mitchell’s chairmanship. The question of decommissioning remained though, and the British and Irish governments sought to fudge the issue rather than allow it to derail the process again. This led to Ian Paisley’s hard-line Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) walking out of the talks, never to return. The DUP rejected the notion of making any concessions on the constitutional position of Northern Ireland or negotiating with Sinn Féin, whom they considered terrorists. While deeply unhappy, the more moderate UUP remained in the talks. Given the DUP’s declared desire to break the talks, Mitchell wrote later in his memoirs that their decision to walk out actually helped the process of reaching an agreement. However, it was to have a lasting impact on the politics of Northern Ireland, as the DUP’s opposition to the Good Friday Agreement severely hindered its implementation. Sinn Féin entered the all-party talks on 15 September 1997, having signed-up to the Mitchell Principles. After marathon negotiations, agreement was finally reached on 10 April 1998. The Good Friday Agreement was a complex balancing act, reflecting the three strands approach. Within Northern Ireland, it created a new devolved assembly for Northern Ireland, with a requirement that executive power had to be shared by parties representing the two communities. In addition, a new North-South Ministerial Council was to be established, institutionalising the link between the two parts of Ireland. The Irish government also committed to amending Articles 2 and 3 of the Republic’s Constitution, which laid claim to Northern Ireland, to instead reflect an aspiration to Irish unity, through purely democratic means, while recognising the diversity of identities and traditions in Ireland. Finally, a Council of the Isles was to be created, recognising the ‘totality of relationships’ within the British Isles, including representatives of the two governments, and the devolved institutions in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Referendums were held in both Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland on 22 May 1998. In Northern Ireland 71 per cent of voters backed the Agreement, with 29 per cent voting against. While this was a significant endorsement, an exit poll for the Sunday Times found that 96 per cent of nationalists in Northern Ireland backed the Agreement, compared to just 55 per cent of unionists. What is the legacy of the Good Friday Agreement? The Good Friday Agreement was hard won. But it has faced considerable challenges over the 20 years since its signing. On 15 August 1998, 29 people were killed when dissident republicans exploded a car bomb in Omagh. This represented the largest loss of life in any incident in Northern Ireland since the start of the Troubles. While the Omagh bombing was committed by republicans opposed to the Agreement, it returned the spotlight to the question of decommissioning paramilitary weapons, which the Good Friday Agreement had stated should happen within two years. Unionist anger at the refusal of the IRA to give up its weapons was combined with frustration at the refusal of Sinn Féin to accept the reformed Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI). <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/04/GettyImages-942610284-5ccaf93.jpg" width="1537" height="2040" alt="David Trimble, Chief Minister for the Northern Ireland Assembly, surveys the damage at the bomb site, 17 August in the northern Irish town of Omagh after a car bomb explosion killed 28 and injured hundreds 15 August. / AFP PHOTO / PAUL VICENTE (Photo credit should read PAUL VICENTE/AFP/Getty Images)" title="NIRELAND-BOMB-TRIMBLE" /> Under these circumstances, power-sharing proved impossible to sustain. Meanwhile, voters in each community started to turn away from the moderate parties, and instead support for Sinn Féin and the DUP increased, displacing the SDLP and UUP in the process. For a significant part of the decade following the Good Friday Agreement, devolution was suspended because of the inability of the largest parties from each community to reach agreement on power-sharing. Progress was made on decommissioning, which was confirmed to have been carried out in September 2005, but political agreement remained elusive. Eventually, the British and Irish governments hosted crunch talks at St Andrews in October 2006. There, Sinn Féin finally agreed to accept the PSNI, while the DUP agreed to share power with Sinn Féin. In May 2007, an Executive comprised of the DUP, Sinn Féin, UUP and SDLP was finally able to take office. This time, the institutions created under the Good Friday Agreement were to remain in being until the current political crisis led to the collapse of the Executive in January 2017. Despite the fragility of the institutions created and the continuing bitterness between politicians representing the two communities, the Good Friday Agreement remains an important landmark in Northern Ireland’s history. The Good Friday Agreement was able to bring to an end 30 years of violence, and allows Northern Ireland’s two communities to pursue their contrasting aspirations by purely political means. Dr Alan MacLeod is a historian of modern Britain and Ireland and Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Leeds. He is the author of International Politics and the Northern Ireland Conflict: The USA, Diplomacy and the Troubles (IB Tauris, 2016). This article was first published by HistoryExtra in April 2018
Fake news and Nazis: Richard J Evans on the spectre of conspiracies
From the ‘stab in the back’ to Hitler’s escape from the bunker, conspiracy theories swirl around the Nazis. But how far do they really help us understand the Third Reich? | By Richard J Evans
Listen to this article: The idea that nothing happens by chance in history is as old as history itself. For a significant number of people, nothing is quite what it seems to be at first sight; everything that occurs is the result of the secret machinations of malign groups of people manipulating events from behind the scenes. Conspiracy theories seem to be growing more popular and more widespread in the 21st century: powered by the rise of the internet and then social media; enabled by the declining influence of traditional gatekeepers of opinion such as newspaper editors and book publishers; and encouraged by the spread of the uncertainty about truth and falsehood encapsulated in the perverse concept of ‘alternative facts’. Go on to social media and you will quickly realise how widespread conspiracy theories about key events in history have become. They have even found their way into television programmes, not just in fictional form, but in presentations that claim to pursue the ‘real’ truth that has up to now been suppressed by ‘official’ historians, or in other words, those who teach and research the past as a profession at universities and historical institutes. Few topics in history have attracted more conspiracy theories than Nazism. Conspiracists have focused on events such as the Reichstag fire in 1933, the flight of Rudolf Hess to Britain in 1941, and the death of Hitler in Berlin in 1945. And it is often claimed that the Nazis themselves were influenced by conspiracy theories such as the ‘stab-in-the-back’ theory of Germany’s defeat in World War I, or the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But, broadly speaking, the Nazis were not particularly obsessed with conspiracy theories themselves. Compared with Stalin, who saw plots and cabals everywhere and manufactured fake conspiracies supposedly hatched by some of his closest ‘Old Bolshevik’ comrades so that he could rid himself of potential rivals, Hitler was relatively disinclined to believe in conspiracies. He was, in 1944, forced to admit that Colonel von Stauffenberg’s unsuccessful attempt to blow him up on 20 July 1944 was part of a wider conspiracy, but this was something of a unique occasion. While Stalin had many rivals in the Communist party before he took supreme power, Hitler was unchallenged within the Nazi party from the outset. He enjoyed the unconditional allegiance of the second rank of Nazis, including Hermann Göring and Joseph Goebbels. True, the stormtrooper leader Ernst Röhm did aim to push on for a “second revolution” against Hitler’s wishes after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, but far from being a conspirator, Röhm was quite open about his intentions. This was why Hitler could dispose of him so easily in the infamous Night of the Long Knives in 1934 by having him arrested and shot. However, Hitler did, of course, subscribe to one major conspiracy theory: the conviction that Jews, everywhere, were intent on destroying Germany and indeed the ‘Aryan race’. Students of conspiratorial thinking have termed this kind of belief a systemic conspiracy theory, in which a single secret organisation carries out a wide variety of activities with the aim of taking control of a country, a region or even the world. Conspiracy theories of this type are often hatched over a long period of time – sometimes centuries. The systematic conspiracy theory found its classic expression in the notorious forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This text emerged in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century and was widely translated and reproduced in the explosion of anti-Semitic propaganda that followed the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the defeat of Germany in the First World War. The Protocols have been accorded an extraordinarily powerful, demonic influence in the 20th century. They have been described, as in the title of the classic study by Norman Cohn, as a Warrant for Genocide, inspiring Hitler to launch the extermination of Europe’s Jews. Yet anyone who takes the trouble to read them will quickly realise how intellectually and rhetorically feeble they are. The Protocols purported to be the minutes of a meeting held by a secret cabal of Jews to plot the takeover of the world through ideologies such as liberalism and socialism, anarchism and Freemasonry, and the destruction of the social order. They contain neither the tropes of traditional anti-Semitism, such as the supposed ritual murder of Christian boys or the desecration of the Host (the wafer that Catholics believe contains the body of Christ), nor the racist clichés of modern anti-Semitism, with its hate-filled diatribes against racial mixing. They were exposed in 1921 by the Constantinople correspondent of The Times, Philip Graves, as a clumsy plagiarism of a 19th-century French satire and other sources. None of this mattered very much to hard-core anti-Semites, though. Hitler dismissed the question of the genuineness or otherwise of the Protocols as irrelevant. Rather than confront the evidence head-on, he declared the fact that the “Jewish press” (by which he meant, rather strangely, The Times; for Hitler, all liberal newspapers were ‘Jewish’, since liberalism itself was ‘Jewish’) had tried to discredit them proved they must be genuine. And even if they were forged, they all the same revealed a deeper truth about the Jews. “What matters,” he announced, “is that they uncover, with really horrifying reliability, the nature and activity of the Jewish people, and expose them in their inner logic and their final aims. But reality provides the best commentary.” The key fact was that they purported to be the minutes of a secret meeting of Jewish elders in 1897, and so emanated from what anti-Semites understood to be the Jewish community itself. This enabled anti-Semites to cite them as “proof” of the Jews’ subversive intent. Few people probably bothered to read the actual “protocols”; insofar as they were relevant to modern anti-Semitic beliefs at all, it was because of the chapter headings, commentaries and explanatory notes added by later editors. From the point of view of their actual content, as officials in the ministry of propaganda advised their boss, Goebbels, they were “not suitable as propaganda on the issues of the day”. The Protocols were too closely tied to the state of politics and the economy in early 20th-century Russia, too rambling and incoherent, and too far removed from Nazi ideology. Goebbels concluded: “One can’t speak of a conspiracy of the Jewish race in any straightforward meaning of the term; this conspiracy is more a characteristic of the race than a case of intellectual intentions. The Jews will always act as their Jewish instinct tells them.” In the end, therefore, the impact of the Protocols would seem to have been seriously exaggerated by historians. Nor, contrary to what one might have expected, was another, somewhat more focused and coherent conspiracy theory – the stab-in-the-back myth championed by the ultra-right – particularly central to Nazi ideology. According to the nationalist ultra-right in Germany, their country had been defeated in the First World War because of the subversive actions of socialists and revolutionaries. These groups had apparently undermined the German army’s will to fight and destroyed their chances of victory by overthrowing Kaiser Wilhelm II in the German Revolution of November 1918. It was of no matter that the army was militarily defeated weeks before the revolution; or that it lacked the supplies and munitions needed to fight on; or that Germany had lost its key allies, Bulgaria and Austria-Hungary. For military leaders such as General Erich Ludendorff, it was an easy way of shifting the blame for the defeat away from themselves and on to the democrats and socialists they so bitterly hated – the people who had brought the democratic Weimar Republic into being. In the most extreme version of this myth, the socialists had been working to defeat Germany because they were themselves part of the purported global Jewish conspiracy that the Protocols were supposed to have uncovered. But, contrary to what one might have expected, Hitler consistently failed to make significant use of this version of the stab-in-the-back legend – or indeed any other iteration. There was no doubt, of course, about the visceral anti-Semitism of the Nazi party, and of Hitler himself, from the very beginning. But neither Hitler in his speeches, nor the Nazi press in its propaganda, made more than very occasional mentions of the supposed stab in the back. They preferred to concentrate their fire instead on the ‘November criminals’, the men who had (in their view) cravenly accepted the armistice terms and therefore betrayed the German race in the peace settlement. It was the weak will of the kaiser and his regime that had lost the war. In their early propaganda and in the official Party Programme promulgated in 1920, the Nazis focused on what they portrayed as the economic criminality of Jewish “war profiteers”. But even this propaganda line faded, as the Nazis came closer to power in the early 1930s. Rather than continuing to attack the old imperial elites for their supposed lack of willpower in 1918 – a line that would have alienated them at a time when he needed their support – Hitler preferred to instead pull them along with him in the drive towards war and conquest. The stab-in-the-back myth represented a step along the road from a systemic to a more genuine type of conspiracy theory: the event conspiracy theory. Germany’s defeat in the First World War was more a bundle of events than a single occurrence. On the night of 27–28 February 1933, however, something happened that immediately became the object of two diametrically opposed conspiracy theories: the German national parliament building, the Reichstag, in Berlin, burned down. Hitler had only been Reich chancellor for a few weeks, as head of a coalition government in which conservatives held the majority of posts. He saw this as the opportunity to seize quasi-dictatorial powers and, declaring that the arson attack marked the beginning of a communist coup, persuaded Reich President Paul von Hindenburg to promulgate a decree suspending civil liberties. Nazi stormtroopers subsequently rampaged across Germany suppressing opposition, often with extreme violence and brutality. Communists across Europe had repeatedly tried to seize power by force, from Russia in 1917 to Hungary and southern Germany in 1918–19. During the time of the Weimar Republic they had been remarkably successful in winning votes, increasing their representation in the Reichstag in November 1932 to 100 seats. The Nazis, conversely, in the grip of a deep political and financial crisis, lost heavily in this, the last free election of the Weimar Republic, although they did remain the largest party. It was not wholly implausible to suggest that the communists were launching a bid for dictatorial power in Germany in February 1933. But in reality, the Communist party of Germany, well-organised and supported though it was, expected the Weimar Republic to collapse of its own accord, as the capitalist system, in the middle of the Depression, proved unable to reproduce itself. In the autumn of 1933, the Nazi leadership arrested several leading communists for the destruction of the Reichstag building and put them on trial along with one non-communist: a young Dutchman, Marinus van der Lubbe, who was caught at the scene. In a humiliating defeat for the Nazis, the Reich Supreme Court, which had not yet been fully Nazified, was forced to acquit them for lack of evidence: only van der Lubbe, against whom alone the evidence was overwhelming, was convicted and executed. In the meantime, the communists developed a rival conspiracy theory, alleging that the fire had in fact been started by the Nazis themselves in order to provide an excuse for seizing dictatorial power. The communist propagandist Willi Münzenberg staged a counter-trial in London, at which, not surprisingly, the Nazis were found guilty of the crime. For decades, this view was widely shared, including among historians. But in 1959 a German civil servant, Fritz Tobias, published research, which subsequently appeared as a formidably lengthy and deeply researched book, arguing that van der Lubbe had burned down the Reichstag on his own. The young Dutchman was an ultra-left anarcho-syndicalist who had already tried, and failed, to burn down other public buildings in Berlin in protest against what he regarded as the shameful treatment of the unemployed by the German government. But with the Reichstag building he got lucky: breaking in through a window just after nine in the evening of 27 February, he rushed through the corridors with a blazing torch and fire-lighting equipment. Curtains and wooden furniture caught fire, and updraft spread the flames into the dome above the debating chamber. Soon, the building was in ruins. For more than 60 years, communists and their sympathisers have tried to shake the evidence presented by Tobias and discredit him as an old Nazi. In fact, he was a lifelong Social Democrat who blamed his own and his father’s dismissals from their jobs on the measures introduced by the Nazis after the fire. Many of the communists’ arguments are characteristic of conspiracy theories in general: key documents have disappeared or have been destroyed; key witnesses have been murdered; minor discrepancies in the actual evidence prove it was falsified; critics of the conspiracy theory are politically motivated or perpetuating ‘official’ lies. Above all, their central belief – that whoever benefits from an event must have caused it – is also one of the central beliefs in conspiracy theories of many kinds. Similar allegations can be found in the burgeoning literature concerning another celebrated incident in the history of Nazi Germany: the unexpected flight of the Nazi party’s deputy leader Rudolf Hess from Germany to Scotland in the middle of the war, on 10 May 1941, armed with a “peace offer” for Churchill’s government. The offer was rejected – it would have amounted to a virtual capitulation in the long term – and Hess was arrested, tried at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal after Germany’s final defeat, and sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in Spandau prison in August 1987, at the age of 93. It was obvious to most people in 1941 that Hess had acted on his own. He had lost power in the Nazi leadership and planned his harebrained flight in order to restore it. Hitler was horrified when he learned of Hess’s actions, as were all the other leading Nazis. Soon enough, however, the conspiracy theories began to multiply, and in recent years they have been propagated with increasing frequency. Hess was sent by Hitler; he was invited over by a secret ‘peace party’ in Britain; he was lured over by the British security services; he was collaborating with Himmler, or Heydrich, in a bid to oust the Nazi dictator; even, most bizarrely of all, the man who landed in Scotland was not Hess at all, but a double – but why anybody would have agreed to spend decades in prison without revealing he was not the real Hess has never been explained. Yet again, there are allegations that evidence has been suppressed or destroyed, and key witnesses murdered. As with the Reichstag fire conspiracy theories, documents have been presented that are clearly forgeries, designed to substitute for the real thing. None of this is at all persuasive. The fantasies of the Hess conspiracy theorists seem almost conventional, however, in comparison to the most widespread event conspiracy theory about the Nazis today. Namely, the idea that Hitler, his wife, Eva Braun, and in some versions Blondi the dog, did not die in the Berlin bunker at the end of April 1945 but escaped to Argentina, where they lived peacefully in retirement after the war. Newspaper and magazine articles, a growing number of books, and even a three-season television series (Hunting Hitler, broadcast on the History Channel) have presented this thesis – though without a shred of genuine evidence. Instead, all the ‘evidence’ presented is second-hand, hearsay, or, most commonly, supposition (Hitler ‘could have’ been here; he ‘might have’ been seen there). The fact is, of course, that Hitler was too ill in April 1945 to have undertaken a daring escape from Berlin, even had it been possible, and many eyewitnesses testified to his suicide in the bunker and the destruction of his corpse at the time. Common to many such theories is a counter-factual suggestion amounting, in the minds of at least some of those who purvey them, to a degree of wishful thinking: if only the Jews had not been conspiring, then, according to conservative anti-Semites, the modern evils of liberalism, equality, free-thinking and secularisation would not be with us. If only the German army had not been stabbed in the back, according to German nationalists, it would have won the First World War. If only the Reichstag had not been burned down by the Nazis, according to the communists, then Weimar democracy would have survived, and the Holocaust would not have happened. If only Hess’s peace mission had succeeded, according to British nationalists and nostalgic imperialists, then the Second World War would have been brought to an end, millions saved and the British empire preserved. If only the world had realised Hitler had escaped from the bunker, then, according to his admirers, we would know how great a genius he was – or alternatively, for his detractors, we would have been able to bring him to justice for his crimes. Conspiracists’ claims about discovering unrecognised truths are often accompanied by assertions of having realised unconsidered possibilities. Conspiracy theories present to their consumers a world of black and white: of individual heroes, usually outsiders, who strive against overwhelming odds to uncover the truth; and of collective villains, usually in positions of power, who do everything to conceal it. Against the moral ambiguities of real life, they paint a picture of moral absolutes, of good and evil – a picture that is both easier to understand and, because of this, more interesting and exciting to portray than the grey complexity of documented reality. The reader, television consumer or moviegoer can gain satisfaction from identifying with the intrepid hero as he or, less commonly she, penetrates the veil of secrecy drawn by officialdom to unmask the plotters and conspirators who are manipulating events to their own advantage. The current proliferation, and, in some cases, revival of conspiracy theories involving Hitler is part of a much wider trend, in which different influences have come together to blur the boundaries between truth and fiction; or rather, perhaps, to present alternative ‘truths’, each of which claims to correspond to reality and presents its own panoply of evidential support to back up its claims. But there cannot be different and opposing true statements about something; there can only be one truth, even if it can sometimes be very hard to ascertain. Discovering what really happened in history is difficult. It requires a great deal of hard work, it demands direct examination of the evidence, it presupposes a willingness to change one’s mind, and it involves the suspension of one’s prejudices and preconceptions. But it can be done. This article was first published in the November 2020 edition of BBC History Magazine
What is the history behind the Celtic festival of Samhain and what does it have to do with Halloween?
Historian Mark Williams explores the history of Samhain, from its Celtic heritage to its association with modern Halloween…
There seems to be a primal need in human beings to gather and celebrate at the beginning of winter, as the nights draw in and cold and darkness take over. Contemporary British culture offers both Halloween on 31 October and Bonfire Night on the 5 November; the latter is a celebration of the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, but the urge to make merry in the face of winter is much older. In Ireland and Gaelic Scotland, it generated the festival of Samhain. What is Samhain and why is it celebrated? In the modern Irish language, Samhain is simply the word for the month of November; it is pronounced like the English word ‘sound’ without the final D. But in earlier times it referred to one of the four great festivals of the traditional Gaelic year, celebrated on 1 November (though festivities spanned a few days either side) and so corresponding closely in date to our Halloween. It marked the beginning of the winter season, and in the landlocked midlands of Ireland it would often have coincided with the first frosts. We do not know exactly how it was celebrated, but gatherings of tribal groups, feasting, and the lighting of bonfires almost certainly played a part. Read more | What is the history of Halloween? What are the origins of Samhain? The Irish intelligentsia of the Middle Ages understood the word to derive from sam-fhuinn, ‘summer’s end’, and it was a rich time, when food was abundant. Early Ireland was a pastoral society, and at Samhain the harvest had been gathered in and grazing animals could be brought down from the uplands for shelter over winter. Pigs would be slaughtered and the meat salted to last over the months of darkness. In one of medieval Ireland’s most beautiful sagas, The Wooing of Emer (perhaps from around AD 800), Samhain is described as the time “when summer goes to its rest” and that at this time the people of Ulster used to hold a great assembly. The celebration would last for the three nights before Samhain, then the night of Samhain itself, and then the three nights after. This is not necessarily what early medieval Irish did themselves – the author is imagining the Ireland of centuries before – but it must have struck the audience of the tale as plausible. The celebration of Samhain therefore likely goes back to the Iron Age. Was Samhain the Celtic New Year? It is often said that Samhain was the ‘Celtic New Year’, and this has become one of many recycled ‘facts’ about Celtic culture which turn out to have shaky foundations. Certainly there is no evidence from any early Irish text that Samhain was considered the beginning of the year. In one place Julius Caesar does remark that the Celtic Gauls – not the Irish, of whom he knew nothing – believe themselves to be descended from the god of the underworld, and so reckon time by nights rather than by days. This seems to have generated the generalised idea that the Celtic year, like the Celtic day, should begin in darkness. What’s the link between Samhain and Halloween? Is there any real connection between the end of summer festival of the ancient Irish and our Halloween? There are suggestive points of contact, but tracing a direct link is difficult. The most obvious quality of our Halloween is its spookiness: it is strongly associated with witches and the dead. In early Irish literature Samhain does seem to have been the major point in the year at which supernatural events occur, and this is in striking contrast to Welsh tradition, in which the classic time for supernatural happenings to take place is May Day, at the beginning of summer. Examples are very numerous, but it seems that the otherworld was felt to be particularly close and accessible at Samhain. The otherworld is a distinctive feature of Celtic literature: a realm adjacent to or somehow inside our own, where time often seems to pass differently and which is inhabited by people much like ourselves but immortal. One medieval Irish text tells us that ‘common people’ made offerings at Samhain to a fairy-woman named Mongfhind, whose name means ‘Fair Hair’. Survivals of a pre-Christian religious customs in medieval Ireland are much less common than people often suppose, but this is a likely candidate. One early saga stands out for its uncanny atmosphere and what it suggests about Samhain. In The Adventure of Nera (perhaps composed around AD 800), the hero Nera encounters a kind of zombie at Samhain, an animated corpse hanging on the gallows. He finds his way twice into the otherworld, and learns its denizens are planning to destroy his community in our world. He brings back springtime flowers and herbs from the otherworld to his people, convincing them that he really has been ‘out of time’ and beyond the ordinary world, and so that the supernatural threat is real. Supernatural stories: 9 unusual British folktales How has Christianity influenced Samhain? Strikingly, there is no evidence in early Irish tradition that Samhain was associated with the dead. That seems to come from the Christian liturgical calendar, when from the ninth century AD All Saints’ Day, the feast associated with the saints and martyrs, was fixed on 1 November, having previously been May. As a result the next day, 2 November, came to be associated with the souls of the ordinary faithful departed, so that All Souls’ Day followed All Saints’ Day. This development was nothing to do with Samhain, Ireland, or the Celts; but certainly in Ireland it came to influence the folklore of Samhain, which was handed down to modernity. The Christian feast and the traditional Gaelic one blended inextricably, with traditions such as hollowing out turnips and putting lights in them emerging from the 19th century. Disguises were worn, and masked ‘guisers’ went from house to house. With massive Irish emigration to the United States in response to the Irish famine, these customs infiltrated American culture. Exported back to Europe, they helped to shape the festival of Halloween as we now know it. Mark Williams is Associate Professor of Global Medieval Literature at the University of Oxford, specialising in Celtic languages and the medieval literature of Ireland and Wales. He is the author of The Celtic Myths That Shape The Way We Think (Thames & Hudson, 2021)
Why we should remember the battle of the Bogside
Historian Niall Ó Dochartaigh considers the importance of the riots in Derry that marked the start of 30 years of violent conflict
More than 50 years ago, in August 1969, the Northern Irish Troubles began in earnest with the battle of the Bogside. For three days, from 12–14 August, large crowds armed with stones and petrol bombs, loosely coordinated by the Derry Citizens’ Defence Association, battled successfully to keep the Royal Ulster Constabulary out of the Bogside area of the city after violence broke out during the annual loyalist Apprentice Boys march. The civil rights campaign had begun with a great sense of optimism a year earlier, but from October 1968, when police baton-charged a march in Derry’s Duke Street, civil rights protests had been surrounded by increasing tension. Derry – or Londonderry, as it is officially known – was the North’s second largest city. It was a chiefly nationalist city, but gerrymandering and discrimination had long ensured that the unionist party maintained control of local government in the city with only a third of the vote. The battle of the Bogside only ended when British troops marched into Waterloo Place in the city centre and stretched out concertina barbed wire and barricades across the roads and replaced the exhausted RUC at the front lines. Army commanders agreed not to try to enter the Bogside, and ‘Free Derry’, as it was dubbed, was administered for the following two months by a broad-based local defence association. The British government now forced the unionist government at Stormont to implement reforms aimed at conciliating the Catholic and nationalist minority that made up one-third of the North’s population, including disarming the police force. For many on the left, Free Derry represented a great victory of popular mobilisation over the forces of repression, and it received large-scale and sympathetic media coverage across Europe and North America. But the rioting in the Bogside had also triggered a dangerous escalation. No one had died in Derry, but in Belfast there was widespread sectarian rioting and battles with the police. Shooting broke out and seven people were shot dead on 14 and 15 August. A day after the soldiers were deployed to Derry, they were sent on to the streets of Belfast. They would remain there for more than three decades. Read more Why we should remember…? Why we should remember the translation of Anne Frank’s diary Why we should remember Target Zero Day Why we should remember the Amnesty Act of 1872 <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/05/GettyImages-515185532cmyk-63dcf68-e1690361399495.jpg" width="620" height="412" alt="A group of formerly enslaved African-Americans around the time of the US Civil War" title="A group of formerly enslaved African-Americans around the time of the US Civil War. The Amnesty Act removed prohibitions on political roles for many Southern rebels after the war. (Image by Getty Images)" /> The battle of the Bogside was an important catalyst for change, triggering a determined British government intervention that ended the unionist monopoly on power. But it also marked the beginning of 30 years of violent conflict that would claim the lives of more than 3,600 people and bring untold suffering. It was only finally brought to an end by the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, a delicate compromise between unionists and nationalists and the British and Irish governments. It is a measure of the potential for renewed political tensions in Northern Ireland that this agreement is now at the centre of debate on the future relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union. Niall Ó Dochartaigh is a professor of political science and sociology at the National University of Ireland Galway This article was first published in the August 2019 issue of BBC History Magazine
The Anglo-Irish Treaty, signed in 1921, brought to an end the Irish War of Independence and set a provision for the establishment of the Irish Free State. But rather than quelling violence, the treaty ushered in a period of fresh uncertainty. A chaotic civil war followed between those who accepted the treaty and those who opposed it. As we mark a century since the Irish Civil War began, Charles Townshend explains the key tensions and milestones of the conflict…
For “four glorious years” (as the republican publicity chief Frank Gallagher called his memoir of the period) of resistance to Britain between 1918–21, the Sinn Féin movement held together in pursuit of Irish independence. But immediately after the Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed on 6 December 1921, sharp divisions appeared. The Irish representatives had been divided from the start of the treaty negotiations on issues of sovereignty and unity. The sides were broadly marked by those who were determined to uphold the sovereign republic declared in January 1919, and those who accepted that Britain’s refusal to give ground on the central issues of crown and empire meant that any agreement must involve modifying that independence. Arthur Griffith, who founded Sinn Féin in 1905 and was the leader of the Irish delegation to London to sign the Anglo-Irish Treaty, was one of the latter. More surprisingly, Michael Collins – who as president of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (a role regarded by some as virtual president of the republic) was widely presumed to be a diehard republican – also became one as the negotiations went on. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/07/GettyImages-3349413-d18fa3c.png" width="620" height="413" alt="A photo of Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith arriving at 10 Downing Street" title="Michael Collins (right) and Arthur Griffith (left) arriving at 10 Downing Street, London for the treaty negotiations between representatives of Sinn Fein and the British government in December 1921. (Photo by Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" /> The treaty set aside the title ‘republic’ in favour of a ‘free state’ (a literal translation of the term ‘Saorstát’, officially used by the Irish parliament Dáil Eireann since 1919), with powers equivalent to the self-governing Dominions of the Empire. Before the Irish Civil War | 5 key moments on the path to partition January 1922: Sinn Féin splits In reaction to the signing of the treaty, Eamon de Valera, president of the Dáil, moved to sack the signatories from his cabinet. One of his ministers, William T Cosgrave, instead persuaded him to hold a cabinet meeting and take a vote on the treaty. The cabinet approved it by a single vote, and a long and bitter debate began in the Dáil. Accusations that the signatories, led by Arthur Griffith, had failed to refer the treaty back to Dublin before signing it, helped to poison the political atmosphere. But the issues at stake were more serious. Many Irish republicans believed that the republic, which had been declared at the first meeting of the Dáil in January 1919, was not a negotiating ploy but a real state, which could not be signed away without national dishonour. The concepts of honour and betrayal (of those who had died in the name of the republic) stalked the treaty debate. The final vote was won by those who accepted that the treaty – as Michael Collins put it – did not deliver “freedom” in the sense of outright independence, but the freedom to achieve it. Crucially, the treaty was all that could be wrung out of Britain at that point; idealism must be tempered with pragmatism, it was felt. But the margin of victory was narrow – 64 to 57 – and that was further reduced when de Valera stood for re-election as president, losing to Griffith by just two votes. In response, de Valera and his supporters walked out of the Dáil. February 1922: anti- and pro-treaty tensions build Two governments were now in existence: the Dáil cabinet now headed by Griffith, and the Provisional Government set up under the treaty and headed by Collins. Both pushed for an early general election. De Valera and the Irish Republican Army (IRA) opposed such an election, fearing that it would be influenced by the same British pressure which they believed had forced the delegates to sign the treaty. Sinn Féin tried to preserve a semblance of unity at its special Ard-fheis (party conference) in February 1922, resolving to delay the election until the new constitution had been drawn up. Hopes now rested on the ‘army of the republic’, the IRA, to hold together and find a way forward. Collins thought that his position as president of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) would make this happen, but though the IRB Supreme Council supported the treaty, it proved unable to persuade a large part of the army to follow suit. Powerful impulses against open division persisted, and the ‘Neutral IRA’, which aimed to keep the army together [and were against taking a pro- or anti-treaty stance], became the largest grouping in the army. But its efforts failed. When a proposed Army Convention in February was banned by Richard Mulcahy, the Free State government’s minister for defence, the convention went ahead anyway. Mulcahy described this as the IRA mutinying against the Dáil, and the situation began to look irretrievable. As the British army abandoned its garrison points across the country in line with the Anglo-Irish Treaty provisions, the barracks were occupied by whichever IRA group was locally strongest. April 1922: the IRA seizes garrisons In the strategically key city of Limerick, a direct clash between the pro- and anti-treaty forces in February was headed off with great difficulty. In mid-April the anti-treaty IRA raised the stakes by occupying buildings in Dublin, most notably the Four Courts – a formidable building with a substantial garrison commanded by Irish republican Rory O’Connor. Britain became increasingly anxious that by tolerating this occupation, the Provisional Government risked sliding gradually into accepting the republican position. It subsequently pressured the Provisional Government to resolve the situation by force if necessary. An ‘electoral pact’ agreed by Collins and de Valera on 20 May, ensuring that the general election would reproduce the balance of pro- and anti-treaty members as in the treaty vote, further alarmed Britain. But the eventual election in mid-June saw pro-treaty candidates win a substantial majority; no anti-treaty candidates headed the poll in any constituency. June 1922: a political assassination sparks open conflict On 22 June 1922, two IRA gunmen assassinated British Army Field-marshal Sir Henry Wilson in London because they believed that as security adviser to the Northern Ireland government, he was responsible for anti-Catholic violence in Belfast. Though the gunmen – Reginald Dunne and Joseph O’Sullivan, who were both Londoners – seem to have acted independently, the British government believed that the attack was ordered by Rory O’Connor and delivered an ultimatum to Collins to eject O’Connor from the Four Courts. Within a few days a military assault was launched, using artillery borrowed from the British army. The fighting in Dublin in early July 1922 foreshadowed the war that followed. The anti-treaty IRA had no coherent strategy. Its attempt to bring in forces from the south-west to the capital stalled just outside Dublin; the republican force dispersed and reverted to guerrilla tactics. This was a heavy blow to the anti-treaty IRA’s hopes of disputing control of the country with the new National Army. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/07/GettyImages-3165898-753cbae.png" width="621" height="413" alt="Irish Republican Army officers, including General Rory O'Connor, lined up in front of the Tricolour Flag" title="Irish Republican Army officers, including General Rory O'Connor, lined up in front of the Tricolour Flag. (Photo by Walshe/Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)" /> Elsewhere, the IRA – however experienced in guerrilla methods – proved unable to defend fixed positions against National Army forces armed with artillery (usually just a single field gun). Only eight National Army soldiers were killed when the republicans were driven out of Limerick later that month. August 1922: decisive action from pro-treaty groups In August 1922, the Free State government approach changed significantly. Griffith and Collins both died – the former of a reported heart attack and the latter killed in an ambush by anti-treaty forces. The so-called ‘civilian’ ministers – primarily William Cosgrave and Kevin O’Higgins, who had long called for more decisive action against the anti-treaty IRA – took control of strategy. The National Army was expanded, and offensives were launched across the country. Liam Lynch, the republican chief of staff, together with Liam Deasy, commander of the IRA’s 1st Southern Division, hoped to set up a defensive line running from Limerick to Waterford. Though Deasy fought a long and skilful battle around Kilmallock, most republican defenders failed to stand against the Free State forces. These were often no more competently led than their opponents, but they had a few commanders – like John T Prout in the southwest and Emmet Dalton in Dublin – who, with their experience of commanding regular units in the First World War, successfully organised a series of seaborne landings to seize southwestern ports. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/07/GettyImages-2628189-03dec78.png" width="619" height="414" alt="Free State soldiers camped outside the Four Courts Hotel in Dublin" title="Pro-treaty Free State soldiers use British artillery to attack the anti-Treaty Republican army who established their headquarters in the Four Courts in Dublin during the Irish Civil War. (Photo by Walshe/Getty Images)" /> Meanwhile, no credible republican government was set up; de Valera remained a marginal figure with no influence over the IRA, despite his huge prestige. The Free State government exploited the June election to insist that it represented the legitimate national will against what it labelled an anti-democratic militarist, or merely criminal, insurrection. The press was instructed never to call republican forces ‘IRA troops’, but ‘irregulars’, ‘bands’ or ‘bodies of men’. December 1922–March 1923: key republicans executed – without trial In early December 1922, Seán Hales, a leading pro-treaty TD [Teachta Dála, member of the Dáil], was assassinated by two anti-treaty gunmen in early December 1922. The killing was used as pretext for the execution of Rory O’Connor and three other Four Courts leaders by firing squad on 8 December – without trial. This effectively terrorist policy extended to local level, where Free State troops outdid the ‘Black and Tans’ (British reinforcements for the Royal Irish Constabulary recruited in 1920) in vicious violence. The massacre of 23 republican prisoners at Ballyseedy by Free State forces in Kerry in March 1923 (five others were also judicially executed) was perhaps the worst, but it was hardly an isolated instance. April–May 1923: a final blow leads to the conclusion of fighting Meanwhile, Free State leaders Cosgrave and O’Higgins wanted a decisive victory rather than a negotiated settlement, and their demand that the IRA should surrender and decommission its weapons ensured that there was no negotiation. The war went on partly because republican leaders remained optimistic, despite the steady deterioration of their position, that the nation would recognise the rightness of their cause. But when Liam Lynch, IRA chief of staff, was killed in action on 10 April 1923, those pressing for abandonment of the fight took over. The order to dump arms was finally issued on 24 May 1923. What is the legacy of the Irish Civil War? Civil wars inevitably leave a bitter legacy, and Ireland’s was no exception. But Ireland was unusual in the speed and success with which constitutional politics were restored in the later 1920s. After de Valera returned to the Dáil in 1927 (taking the very oath which had sparked the civil war), his party, Fianna Fáil, and the Treaty party, Cumann na Gael (which in 1933 became Fine Gael) dominated Irish politics for the rest of the 20th century. Against expectations, proportional representation – as imposed by Britain – produced largely majority governments. Ireland had many problems, but stability was not one of them. Read more | The history of Ireland: 11 milestone moments Charles Townshend is Professor Emeritus of International History at Keele University. His latest book is The Partition: Ireland Divided, 1885–1925 (Allen Lane, 2021)
A brief history of the partition of Ireland
The partition of Ireland in 1921 was a seismic moment in the island’s history; it divided Ireland and led to the creation of Northern Ireland. But what events led to Ireland being divided? Professor Heather Jones explains the causes and aftermath...
What led to Ireland being divided? Professor Heather Jones explains... A worsening devolution crisis Before partition, all of Ireland was part of the United Kingdom and governed by the British government in London. However, by the First World War, Irish nationalists, who were predominantly Roman Catholic, had succeeded in getting legislation passed for Home Rule – devolved government for Ireland within the UK. But Home Rule’s imminent implementation was suspended when the First World War broke out in 1914. Home Rule was vehemently opposed by Ireland’s unionists, mainly Protestants, mostly based in the north, who wanted no change to Ireland’s direct governance by Westminster. Religious differences mattered greatly in Ireland and many unionists feared that ‘Home Rule’ would be ‘Rome Rule’, leaving them as a religious minority under a Dublin parliament dominated by Catholicism. The situation dramatically radicalised when, at Easter 1916, an Irish republican uprising broke out in Dublin. Its leaders believed devolution – Home Rule – did not go far enough. They wanted a complete end to British rule in Ireland and an all-Ireland republic outside of the UK. The rising was quickly suppressed, but the British execution of its leaders led Irish nationalists to abandon Home Rule in favour of seeking full independence: in 1918, nationalists voted overwhelmingly for a pro-republic political party, Sinn Féin. In 1919, supporters of the rising mobilised an Irish Republican Army (IRA) and launched a war for an independent Irish republic. This brutal guerrilla conflict of ambush and reprisals saw Britain lose control of nationalist areas, while sectarian violence also broke out, particularly in the northern city of Belfast. Read more about the Easter Rising There were unionists all across Ireland, but they were weak in numbers in the south and west. By contrast, in Ireland’s northern province of Ulster, unionism was politically very well-organised and had powerful supporters in London and a large population base. From 1912, Ulster Unionism became the most important strand of the island’s unionist movement. Yet those supporting Irish independence never developed a coherent policy towards Ulster Unionism, underestimating its strength and rejecting unionists’ British identity. Republican leader Éamon de Valera’s proposed solution was as follows: “The so-called Ulster difficulty is purely artificial as far as Ireland itself is concerned. It is an accident arising out of the British connection, and will disappear with it.” The Government of Ireland Act and the creation of Northern Ireland Desperate to end the war in Ireland, which was damaging Britain’s international reputation, the British government proposed a solution: two home rule parliaments, one in Dublin and one in Belfast. The details were outlined in the Government of Ireland Act in late 1920. Fearful of the violent campaign for an independent Irish republic, many Ulster unionists, who had been adamantly against any change to direct British rule, accepted this idea. It would create a border between the territory governed by the devolved northern home rule parliament and the southern one, but both areas were to remain within the United Kingdom. The border was also designed so that only a part of the historic province of Ulster – six counties chosen because they represented the Protestant Ulster heartlands which had a clear unionist majority – would be governed by the northern parliament, ensuring unionists would dominate it. In May 1921, this new Northern Ireland officially came into being. Sir James Craig, Northern Ireland’s new prime minister, stated: “I’m going to sit on Ulster like a rock, we are content with what we have got.” Home Rule’s greatest opponents in Ireland – Ulster unionists – had become its most fervent supporters. The northern parliament took root, helped by heavy spending on security forces to support it from London. By contrast, its southern equivalent was a failure, proving impossible to start up as nationalists boycotted it. When the British government tried to open its new Dublin Home Rule parliament after holding elections in 1921, only four elected representatives of its House of Commons – all southern unionists – showed up. The rest of those elected took seats in the Dáil instead, a rival clandestine parliament that Irish republicans had established in January 1919 as part of their planned republic, and which, by 1921, despite being illegal, had usurped many state powers and was thriving. Former British prime minister Herbert Asquith quipped that the Government of Ireland Act gave “to Ulster a Parliament which it did not want, and to the remaining three-quarters of Ireland a Parliament which it would not have”. Unable to get politicians willing to sit in it, the operation of the southern parliament was effectively suspended. The Government of Ireland Act thus proved impossible to implement in the south. A history of Irish-Anglo relations since the Easter Rising Meanwhile, the new northern regime faced the problem of ongoing violence. The IRA waged a campaign against it, while sectarian violence, which had worsened from when the plans for the Government of Ireland Act first emerged, continued to rip apart northern society. Between 1920 and 1922, an estimated 550 people died in the six counties – approximately 300 Catholics, 170 Protestants and 80 members of the security forces. Unionists believed this period to be one of existential threat to their survival on the island. Little wonder that when King George V, opening the new Northern Ireland parliament in June 1921, before a unionist audience, called for peace and reconciliation, some of the women present wept. The epicentre of the violence was Belfast where, in July 1921, there were gun battles in the city between the IRA and pro-partition loyalist paramilitaries. Belfast’s Catholics made up only a quarter of the city’s population and were particularly vulnerable; thousands were expelled from their shipyard jobs and as many as 23,000 from their homes. Unable to implement the southern home rule parliament, the British government changed policy. In December 1921, an Anglo-Irish Treaty was agreed. It ended British rule in the 26 counties that had been meant to be under the southern devolved Home Rule parliament. This area now became an independent Irish Free State and, unlike Northern Ireland, left the UK. What had been intended to be an internal border within the UK now became an international one. However, the Free State was not a republic but an independent dominion within the British empire, and the British monarch remained the Head of State; the British government had only agreed to accepting Irish independence on these terms. This outcome split Irish nationalism, leading to a civil war, which lasted until 1923 and weakened the IRA’s campaign to destabilise Northern Ireland, allowing the new northern regime to consolidate. Resolving the 'Irish Question': 5 key moments on the path to partition The aftermath of partition The first year of partition was a bloody one. Sectarian atrocities continued into 1922, including Catholic children killed in Weaver street in Belfast by a bomb thrown at them and an IRA massacre of Protestant villagers at Altnaveigh. As the Guardian newspaper noted in June 1922: “We cannot now pretend that this partition idea has worked: the whole world would burst into laughter at the suggestion.” Partition created two new fearful minorities – southern unionists and northern nationalists. Tens of thousands chose or were forced to move; refugees arrived in Britain, Belfast and Dublin. Ulster unionists felt guilt at the fate of those unionists left as a minority in the rest of Ireland, who had to integrate into the new Irish Free State as best they could; some emigrated to Britain or Northern Ireland, while others slowly assimilated. The Good Friday Agreement explained Yet it was Ireland’s other new minority – northern Catholic nationalists left within the UK – that proved the most vulnerable. Safeguards put in place for them at the time of partition, such as proportional representation in elections to the northern parliament, were swiftly removed; they had virtually no protection from rampant discrimination and sectarian violence. Successive governments in Dublin also pursued a policy of non-recognition of Northern Ireland and demanded northern nationalists boycott it, heightening the minority’s difficulties. The British government hoped that the border would only be temporary: both the Government of Ireland Act and the Anglo-Irish Treaty were designed to facilitate future reunification of the island if this ever became possible. Nationalists believed Northern Ireland was too small to economically survive; after all, designed to fit religious demographics, the border made little economic sense and cut several key towns in the north off from their market hinterlands. In 1925, a Boundary Commission, established to fix the border’s permanent geographic location, effectively approved it as it stood. It ran through lakes, farms, and even houses. Its idiosyncrasies matched those of the implementation of partition itself. Most infrastructure split in two – railways, education, the postal service – and entirely new police forces were founded in the north and the south. But a range of civic organisations, including the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches, the Irish Dental Association, the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Ireland, the Royal Irish Academy and Irish rugby continued to operate on an all-Ireland basis. Such connections became precious conduits of social communication between the two Irelands as the relationship between northern and southern governments proved glacial. By the time the Irish Free State unilaterally declared itself a republic in 1949, the border – a source of bitterness for nationalists – had become an integral aspect of northern unionist identity which viewed Northern Ireland’s survival as interwoven with unionism’s own. Heather Jones is professor of modern and contemporary history at University College London