what caused the irish war of independence

Free State troops man the new Irish border in 1925. [77], Arthur Griffith estimated that in the first 18 months of the conflict, British forces carried out 38,720 raids on private homes, arrested 4,982 suspects, committed 1,604 armed assaults, carried out 102 indiscriminate shootings and burnings in towns and villages, and killed 77 people including women and children. The insurgents issued the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, proclaiming Ireland's independence as a republic. [130] On 17 July 1920, a British Colonel Gerald Smyth was assassinated by the IRA in the County Club in Cork city in response to a speech that was made to police officers of Listowel who had refused orders to move into the more urban areas, in which he stated "you may make mistakes occasionally, and innocent persons may be shot, but that cannot be helped. [123] Those on the Catholic/nationalist side were mostly Hibernians, rather than the IRA. The Irish Free State awarded 62,868 medals for service during the War of Independence, of which 15,224 were issued to IRA fighters of the flying columns. The fight did not end with the Easter Rising. They had formed the Ulster Volunteers in 1912 to oppose Irish home rule. The violence in Ireland was The Irish War of Independence was a guerrilla war, fought not on battlefields but in cities, towns and among civilian populations. The war was started when a group of IRA members in Tipperary ambushed and killed two unarmed members of the Royal Irish Constabulary. Its fighting caused more than 2000 deaths, as well as extensive destruction and damage to infrastructure and private property. The Irish War of Independence unfolded as a brutal internecine war. [165] The Irish Free State's Damage To Property (Compensation) Act, 1923 provided that only the Shaw Commission, and not the Criminal Injury Acts, could be used to claim compensation. An even larger amount, totalling over $5 million, was raised in the United States by Irish Americans and sent to Ireland to finance the Republic. The tactics of the Republican movement between 1919 & 1921 were: [117] The republican negotiators understood that the commission would redraw the border according to local nationalist or unionist majorities. This was a very tumultuous time on the island of Ireland which resulted in war and many casualties. There they declared the formation of an independent Ireland and proclaiming themselves the Dail Eireann (‘Assembly of Ireland’). Between December 1921 and February of the next year, there were 80 recorded attacks by the IRA on the soon to be disbanded RIC, leaving 12 dead. [156], On 21 November 1921 the British army held a memorial service for its dead, of all ranks, of which it counted 162 up to the 1921 Truce and 18 killed afterwards. Many consider this violence the starting point of the Irish War of Independence. In response to and retaliation for IRA actions, in the summer of 1920, the Tans burned and sacked numerous small towns throughout Ireland, including Balbriggan,[83] Trim,[84] Templemore[85] and others. [135], While the fighting in the south was largely ended by the Truce on 11 July 1921, in the north killings continued and actually escalated until the summer of 1922. During the Anglo-Irish War (Irish War of Independence, 1919–21) the IRA, under the leadership of Michael Collins, employed guerrilla tactics—including ambushes, raids, and sabotage—to force the British government to negotiate. 39–40. [18], The plan for revolt was realised in the Easter Rising of 1916, in which the Volunteers launched an insurrection whose aim was to end British rule. In 1917 the IRB was renamed the IRA and in 1919, the fighting started. Much of the IRA's popularity arose from the excessive reaction of the British forces to IRA activity. Northern Ireland remained within the United Kingdom. [116], The subsequent Irish Civil War lasted until mid-1923 and cost the lives of many of the leaders of the independence movement, notably the head of the Provisional Government Michael Collins, ex-minister Cathal Brugha, and anti-treaty republicans Harry Boland, Rory O'Connor, Liam Mellows, Liam Lynch and many others: total casualties have never been determined but were perhaps higher than those in the earlier fighting against the British. Historian of the period Alan Parkinson has suggested that the term 'pogrom' is 'unhelpful and misleading in explaining the events of the period' as the violence was not state directed or one sided. [147] The outbreak of the civil war in the South ended the violence in the North, as the war demoralised the IRA in the north east and distracted the attention of the rest of the organisation from the question of partition. [33] Of the 17,000 policemen in Ireland, 513 were killed by the IRA between 1919 and 1921 while 682 were wounded. The King asked him to draft his ideas on paper. Although it was crushed after a week of fighting, the Rising and the British response led to greater popular support for Irish independence. It was not an easy task: the IRA and its antecedent bodies had always acted independently and were not amenable to political control. On 24 June 1921, the British Coalition Government's Cabinet decided to propose talks with the leader of Sinn Féin. As a result, they retaliated against the northern Catholic community as a whole. [126] The British Army was deployed and the Ulster Special Constabulary (USC) was formed to help the police. [124] There was rioting, gun battles and bombings. The Irish War of Independence came to a halt on July 11, 1921 when a ceasefire was agreed upon by both sides. [30] By July 1921 there were 50,000 British troops based in Ireland; by contrast there were 14,000 soldiers in metropolitan Britain. The Unionists wanted to stay under control of the British Government. ON THIS day in 1922, history was made, for better or worse. In 1925, a boundary commission that had been expected to cede large parts of Northern Ireland to the Irish … The last survivor of the conflict, Dan Keating (of the IRA), died in October 2007 at the age of 105. [173] It is estimated that there were between 3,000 and 9,000 members of Cumann na mBan during the war, and in 1921 there were 800 branches throughout the island. Previously a fringe group with unclear aims, Sinn Fein emerged from the Easter Rising and the anti-conscription campaign as a political party committed an independent Irish republic. [109] Seizing the momentum, Lloyd George wrote to Éamon de Valera as "the chosen leader of the great majority in Southern Ireland" on 24 June, suggesting a conference. It culminated in the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the formation of a free Irish state. It created many heroes and spawned two of the most hated forces that a British government had ever inflicted on Ireland: the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries. [16] The majority of nationalists followed their IPP leaders and John Redmond's call to support Britain and the Allied war effort in Irish regiments of the New British Army, the intention being to ensure the commencement of Home Rule after the war. Killings on the loyalist side were largely carried out by the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), allegedly with the aid of the RIC and especially the auxiliary police force, the Ulster Special Constabulary or "B-Specials". In Irish Republican Army. Given significant authority, but lacking a firm command structure, the Black and Tans often acted independently and employed methods not sanctioned by the British government. In this way, 20 people died in street fighting and assassinations in north and west Belfast over 29 August to 1 September 1921 and another 30 from 21 to 25 November. In 1919 they renamed themselves the Irish Republican Army (IRA) which really signalled the start of a new phase in their history. [27] This parliament, known as the First Dáil, and its ministry, called the Aireacht, consisting only of Sinn Féin members, met at the Mansion House on 21 January 1919. The years between the Easter Rising of 1916 and the beginning of the War of Independence in 1919 were not bloodless. Because of this, plans were drawn up to "bring the war to England". Fresh talks, after the Prime Minister had come under pressure from H. H. Asquith and the Liberal opposition, the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress, resumed in the spring and resulted in the Truce. These events marked the complete failure of the British Coalition Government's Irish policy—both the failure to enforce a settlement without negotiating with Sinn Féin and a failure to defeat the IRA. But the success of Sinn Féin's propaganda campaign reduced the option of the British government to deepen the conflict; it worried in particular about the effect on British relations with the US, where groups like the American Committee for Relief in Ireland had so many eminent members. It played a major role in the country finally achieving its status as an independent republic. All of these actions provoked retaliatory killings in Belfast. The Irish Civil War (June 28th 1922 –May 24th 1923) was a conflict that followed the Irish War of Independence and accompanied the establishment of the Irish Free State, an […] The Special Constabulary (set up in September 1920), was largely recruited from Ulster Volunteer Force and Orange Lodges and, in the words of historian Michael Hopkinson, "amounted to an officially approved UVF". Independence, the Inland Revenue ceased to operate in most of them.! 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