Ok right so more info on Ireland- I dunno if I am making any sense I never studied Irish history in school except the !916 Rising and that was when I was 13- I have not done History since that year when i dropped it and im now 17 lol- everything else I have searched about and learnt myself so I am trying my best lol!!!
The Irish were to be given partial sovereignty over their own affairs, and a Home Rule Bill was passed. But then the First World War began. Home Rule was postponed until victory over the Germans should have been achieved.
The Irish Republican Brotherhood or IRB. The IRB had been formed in 1858. It was a secret society which probably never numbered more than 2,000 including those Irishmen who belonged to it and who lived in England, America or elsewhere. Their aims were political rather than economic. They were patriots, dedicated to the ideal of national independence, and were prepared to use all means-including force to achieve this end. They provided, as it were, the general staff of the mass movement for Irish freedom from British rule, and their fortnightly publication, Irish Freedom (founded in 1910), advocated complete republican government for the whole of Ireland. It is significant that all the men who signed the proclamation of an Irish Republic on Easter Monday were members of the IRB.
What the proclomation was:
POBLACHT NA H EIREANN.
THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT
OF THE
IRISH REPUBLIC
TO THE PEOPLE OF IRELAND
IRISHMEN AND IRISHWOMEN: In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom.
Having organised and trained her manhood through her secret revolutionary organisation, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and through her open military organisations, the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army, having patiently perfected her discipline, having resolutely waited for the right moment to reveal itself, she now seizes that moment, and, supported by her exiled children in America and by gallant allies in Europe, but relying in the first on her own strength, she strikes in full confidence of victory.
We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible. The long usurpation of that right by a foreign people and government has not extinguished the right, nor can it ever be extinguished except by the destruction of the Irish people. In every generation the Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty; six times during the last three hundred years they have asserted it to arms. Standing on that fundamental right and again asserting it in arms in the face of the world, we hereby proclaim the Irish Republic as a Sovereign Independent State, and we pledge our lives and the lives of our comrades-in-arms to the cause of its freedom, of its welfare, and of its exaltation among the nations.
The Irish Republic is entitled to, and hereby claims, the allegiance of every Irishman and Irishwoman. The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and all of its parts, cherishing all of the children of the nation equally and oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past.
Until our arms have brought the opportune moment for the establishment of a permanent National, representative of the whole people of Ireland and elected by the suffrages of all her men and women, the Provisional Government, hereby constituted, will administer the civil and military affairs of the Republic in trust for the people.
We place the cause of the Irish Republic under the protection of the Most High God. Whose blessing we invoke upon our arms, and we pray that no one who serves that cause will dishonour it by cowardice, in humanity, or rapine. In this supreme hour the Irish nation must, by its valour and discipline and by the readiness of its children to sacrifice themselves for the common good, prove itself worthy of the august destiny to which it is called.
Signed on Behalf of the Provisional Government.
Thomas J. Clarke,
Sean Mac Diarmada, Thomas MacDonagh,
P. H. Pearse, Eamonn Ceannt,
James Connolly, Joseph Plunkett
When the First World War began, John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Nationalist Party and Parnell's heir, immediately proclaimed his acceptance of the postponement of Home Rule, both for himself and for his followers. These included the Irish Volunteers but the IRB had other ideas. At a meeting of theirs as early as August 1914, the decision was taken that there must be an Irish rebellion before the end of Britain's war with Germany. Until Easter Week 1916 the active members of the IRB were fully occupied in mounting this revolution.
The IRB were certain they could defeat Johns party they were fighting for the British in France. However, some of those who remained in Ireland and were armed and trained could be relied upon. Their Chief-of-Staff was the historian Eoin MacNeill, and their commandant a schoolmaster named Patrick Pearse.
The other para-military force was James Connolly's Irish Citizen Army. Connolly was a socialist who in 1896 had founded the Socialist Republican Party.
Supporting these was the women's organisation. Countess Markiewicz was one of the most prominent. She fought as an officer of the Citizen Army throughout the Easter Rising.
For the British to keep strong in Ireland they kept in close contact with the RIB (royal irish constabulary) They were almost all Irishmen, knew their districts thoroughly, and were in 1916, with a very few exceptions, entirely loyal to the Crown.
Cutting a long story short- IRB needed guns and a man Roger Casement agreed to send them over- the English knew a rising was planned when the guns came to Ireland so they took the guns & arrest Casement. bla bla bla Those involved in The Rising knew they were going to lose w/out guns.
The essence of the Irish plan was to seize certain key points in the city, and hold these for as long as possible, thus disrupting British control of the capital. It was then hoped that one of three things might happen:
- the country might rise in sympathy
- British might realise the ultimate impossibility of controlling Ireland and pull out
- Germans might somehow come to the rescue of the rebels
The Rising
Monday- This was a Bank Holiday, there were crowds in the streets, and these witnessed the small bodies of Volunteers and of the Citizen Army marching, armed, through the city to seize their various strongpoints. It went, on the whole, remarkably smoothly. Five major buildings or groups of buildings were seized north of the River Liffey, nine south of it, and some of the railway stations were occupied. Headquarters were established in the massive General Post Office.With him in the Post Office were Connolly as military commander, Joseph Plunkett (a very sick man), The O'Rahilly, Tom Clark, Sean MacDermott and other leaders. There, too, was a young man named Michael Collins. The rebels immediately set about preparing the Post Office against the attack which they expected almost at once
The British had been taken by surprise and were now almost completely in the dark and appealed to London for reinforcements But if the British in Dublin were in the dark, so were the rebels. They had no wireless links either between the strongpoints they had seized or with the outside world. Communication by runner became difficult and eventually impossible when the fighting reached its peak.
Tuesday- The British were closing in cautiously. Their strategy was to throw a cordon around that area of Dublin where the rebels' strongpoints were, then cut that area in two, and finally mop up. They moved artillery and troops into Trinity College, a natural fortress which the rebels had failed to seize, though they had planned to do so. The reason was the small number of fighting men available. Looting by the crowds began. Martial law was declared.
Wednesday-The British now began to attack in earnest. Their first major action was to destroy Liberty Hall, the headquarters of the Labour Party and of the trade unions, by shellfire from the gunboat Helga. As it happened, the rebels had anticipated this, and the building was empty. The British gunfire was inaccurate and many other buildings were hit and many civilians killed. The army also was using artillery: a 9 -pounder gun was fired against a single sniper. Dublin began to burn, and the Dubliners to starve, for there was no food coming into the city. This was no longer a police action but full-scale war in which no attempt was made to spare the civilians. Meanwhile, British reinforcements marching in from Kingstown were ambushed by de Valera's men and suffered heavy casualties, but by dint of numbers forced their way through. St Stephen's Green had been cleared of rebels, who retreated into the Royal College of Surgeons, and established a strongpoint there.
Thurs: new British commander in-chief arrived. Since Ireland was under martial law, he held full powers there. He had been ordered by the British Prime Minister, Asquith, to put down the rebellion with all possible speed. And this he did regardless of political consequences. Thurs no rebel strongpoint had been taken over
Friday: Connolly ordered the women who had fought so bravely to leave the General Post Office building, which was now cut off and burning. Later that day he and Pearse and the remaining rebels escaped from a building that was by now almost red-hot and about to collapse. They found temporary refuge nearby, while the British continued to shell the empty building. All knew that the end was near. A last battle was fought for King's Street, near the Four Courts. It took some 5,000 British soldiers, equipped with armoured cars and artillery, 28 hours to advance about 150 yards against some 200 rebels. It was then that the troops of the South Staffordshire Regiment bayoneted and shot civilians hiding in cellars. And now all was over. On Saturday morning Pearse and Connolly surrendered unconditionally.
When, on Sunday, the arrested rebels were marched across Dublin from one prison compound to another, they were at times jeered at and booed by the crowds, and particularly in the slum areas. The mass of public opinion had been against the rebels before the Rising and remained so until the reprisals began.
On the direct orders of the cabinet in London, punishment was swift, secret and brutal. The leaders were tried by court martial and shot: only when they were dead were their sentences announced. Among those thus killed were Willie Pearse, who was no leader and who, it was generally believed in Ireland, was killed because he had followed his famous brother, the invalid Plunkett, and, most disgusting of all to Irish minds, Connolly, who was dying and who had to be propped up in bed for the court martial in his hospital room. He was shot in a chair, since he could not stand. A wave of disgust crossed all Ireland. That wave did not subside when Asquith defended these measures in the Commons. Nor did it subside when he realised that a mistake had been made.
When London at last understood that its methods were uniting all Ireland against Britain, there was yet another change of British policy. Many of the 3,000-odd men arrested after the Rising were released from British gaols. They returned to Ireland and began immediately to reorganise a new and more powerful IRA, now with the backing of the people. There was a gesture of appeasement by Lloyd George, the new Prime Minister, who called an Irish Convention intended to solve 'the Irish problem'. Since the Sinn Fein boy boycotted the Convention, it was a complete failure. Again British policy was thrown into reverse, and the leaders of the new independence movement were arrested in the spring of 1918. Michael Collins, how ever, escaped arrest, though there was a price on his head, dead or alive, which eventually reached the sum of ?ire10,000. He was to be the great guerrilla leader in the next round of the struggle. The Irish leaders, with much backing from the United States, both emotional and financial, set about creating a viable alternative government which could and did take over when the British should have at last seen that they could not win. The Sinn Fein triumphed, and won most of the Irish seats in the 1918 election. The elected members, however, formed their own 'parliament', Dail Eireann, rather than sit in Westminster. Collins drew up a strategy of resistance, first passive, then obstructive and finally active, which has since been pursued elsewhere against British imperialism, and indeed against the imperialism of other nations. And in January of 1919 the first shots of the new rebellion were fired in County Tipperary.
In 1921, Ireland was partitioned by the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which gave dominion status to Ireland with the exception of six of the counties of Ulster (Northern Ireland), whose Protestant majority wished to preserve the union and which remained part of the United Kingdom. Northern Ireland, which comprises six of the counties of Ulster, was established as a self-governing province in 1920, having refused to be part of the Irish Free State which was established the following year. Northern Ireland has always been dominated by Unionist parties, which represent the Protestant majority. Many members of the Roman Catholic minority favour union with the Republic of Ireland. Discrimination against Catholics in local government, employment, and housing led to violent conflicts and (from 1969) the presence of British army units in an attempt to keep the peace. Terrorism and sectarian violence by the Provisional IRA and other paramilitary groups, both Republican and Loyalist, resulted in the imposition of direct rule from Westminster in 1972. A power-sharing Northern Ireland Executive (1973-4) was unsuccessful. Closer cooperation developed between Britain and the Republic of Ireland over Northern Irish affairs, especially through the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 and the 'Downing Street Declaration' of 1993. In 1994 the IRA declared a cease-fire which lasted eighteen months; it was reinstated in July 1997. Multi-party talks were set up in 1996; Sinn Fein, having accepted the principles of democracy and non-violence, joined the talks in September 1997.
We now have our own government assembly here in N.ireland but i dunno if its doing much good and we have had lots of help from Bill Clinton & Tony Blair- i dont know much about this all v.confusing but basically
Protestants in Ulster- Want to remain part of Britain & stay under British rule
Catholics- want to be part of united Ireland again
Some ppl are indifferent- i have my views on what id like northern ireland to be & have my reasons but cant voice them here at home because thats y ppl are being shot so thats y its so dangeous here
13 civilians were shot dead and 13 were injured by the British soldiers during a civil rights march . I think its also bout other troubles here in Norn Ireland. i never think we will have peace here we are still fighting today!!!! 
