How Ireland won independence, and what the IRA actually did

Of the six places on this site, Ireland is the only one that came out the other side. That is precisely why it is here — and it is also why the question people ask about the Ireland design is different from the others. Not what is happening there, but how did that end.

The short answer is that it took about six years, roughly 2,300 lives, a guerrilla campaign, a negotiated treaty most republicans hated, and then a civil war between the people who had just won. The longer answer is more useful, because the parts that get left out are the parts that actually explain it.

The constitutional route came first, and it failed

It is worth remembering that Ireland tried the parliamentary road for forty years and got nowhere in particular.

Home Rule — a devolved Irish parliament, well short of independence — passed at Westminster in 1914 after decades of campaigning. It was then suspended for the duration of the First World War. Before that, unionists in the north-east had armed themselves specifically to resist it, and a substantial body of British Army officers had made clear they would not march against them.

So the position by 1916 was that the moderate demand had been won on paper, shelved indefinitely, and openly threatened with armed resistance if it were ever implemented. That is the background against which a much smaller group decided the parliamentary route was a dead end.

Easter 1916 and the thing that changed opinion

The Easter Rising was a military failure and, at the time, an unpopular one. Around 1,600 rebels seized buildings in Dublin over Easter week 1916. British artillery reduced much of the city centre. Roughly 500 people died, the largest single group of them civilians. Dubliners jeered the prisoners as they were marched away — many had relatives serving in the British Army in France, and the rebels had wrecked their city.

What changed public opinion was not the Rising. It was the response to it.

Fifteen leaders were shot by firing squad in Dublin over ten days in May, several of them men most of the public had never heard of. James Connolly, too badly wounded to stand, was tied to a chair to be executed. Roger Casement was hanged in London in August. Martial law and mass internment followed.

The executions were intended as deterrence. They functioned as recruitment. This is a pattern worth noticing, because it recurs in most of the other conflicts on this site: the response to an insurgency very often does more to build the insurgency than the insurgents manage on their own.

1918: the mandate

In the general election of December 1918, Sinn Féin won 73 of Ireland's 105 seats. The old Home Rule party was reduced to six. Unionists took 26, almost all in the north-east.

The elected members refused to go to Westminster. On 21 January 1919 they assembled in Dublin as the First Dáil, declared an independent Irish Republic, and began building a parallel state — its own courts, its own local government, its own funding.

That last part matters and is routinely skipped. The most effective thing the independence movement did was not military. It was making British administration in Ireland irrelevant by simply running a better one alongside it. By 1920, people were bringing their land disputes to Dáil courts rather than Crown courts, because the Dáil courts were the ones whose rulings would still mean something next year.

The war, 1919–1921

On the same day the First Dáil met, IRA volunteers killed two policemen at Soloheadbeg in Tipperary. It was not authorised by anyone.

What followed was a guerrilla campaign, not a war in any conventional sense. The IRA could not face the British Army in the field and did not try. It attacked isolated police barracks, ambushed patrols, and — under Michael Collins — systematically destroyed British intelligence in Ireland by killing detectives and informers. Rural “flying columns” of a few dozen men fought and dispersed.

Britain responded by recruiting the Black and Tans and the Auxiliary Division, largely ex-servicemen, and by adopting reprisals as de facto policy. Creameries were burned. In December 1920 Auxiliaries burned much of the centre of Cork and then cut the fire hoses.

21 November 1920 is the day that shows the whole character of the conflict. That morning Collins's men killed fourteen people across Dublin, most of them suspected British intelligence officers. That afternoon Crown forces opened fire on the crowd at a Gaelic football match at Croke Park, killing fourteen civilians, among them three boys aged ten, eleven and fourteen. Both halves of that day are Bloody Sunday. Accounts that give you only one half are telling you something about themselves.

The historians Eunan O'Halpin and Daithí Ó Corráin catalogued every death of the revolutionary period: 2,346 people killed by political violence between 1917 and 1921, on top of roughly 500 in 1916. A large share were civilians. The IRA also killed suspected informers, some of whom were not, and the record of those killings is one of the more uncomfortable parts of the period.

What the guerrillas actually achieved

The IRA did not defeat the British Army. It was never close to doing so, and its leadership knew it — by mid-1921 the organisation was short of weapons and badly pressed.

What it achieved was narrower and sufficient: it made Ireland ungovernable by ordinary policing, and it made the cost of continuing visible to a British public that had just finished one war. Reprisals were reported. Questions were asked in the Commons and in the American press. Continuing meant either a full military occupation of a neighbouring country or a negotiation.

A truce came on 11 July 1921. The Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed on 6 December.

The Treaty, and the war that followed it

The Treaty did not deliver a republic. It delivered dominion status within the Empire — an Irish Free State with its own government and army, a governor-general, an oath acknowledging the King, and continued British use of certain ports.

It also confirmed partition. The six north-eastern counties had already been separated by the Government of Ireland Act 1920, effective May 1921, and they opted out immediately.

The Dáil ratified it on 7 January 1922 by 64 votes to 57. Michael Collins, who had signed it, called it not the freedom Ireland wanted but “the freedom to achieve it.”

Those seven votes became a civil war. Between June 1922 and May 1923, the same men who had fought the British fought each other. Research at University College Cork identifies 1,426 violent deaths in the Free State: 648 pro-Treaty, 438 anti-Treaty, 336 civilians. Collins was among the dead, killed in an ambush in his own county. The Free State executed 77 anti-Treaty prisoners — more than the British had executed during the war of independence.

The anti-Treaty side lost. The state that survived was the one Collins had argued for.

The rest was done by politicians

Here is the part that the romantic version tends to leave out.

The remaining constraints of the Treaty were dismantled without a shot: a new constitution in 1937 removing the King from Irish affairs, and the Republic of Ireland Act 1948, which took effect on 18 April 1949 — Easter Monday, chosen deliberately to echo 1916. Ireland left the Commonwealth.

Éamon de Valera, who had opposed the Treaty and lost the civil war over it, achieved most of what he had wanted by winning elections and rewriting the constitution.

So the honest summary is this: armed struggle produced a state, on worse terms than its advocates wanted, at a cost that included a civil war among the victors. Ordinary politics then delivered nearly everything else. Both halves are true, and each is incomplete on its own.

One thing that must not be blurred

The IRA that fought from 1919 to 1921 and the Provisional IRA of the Troubles are not the same organisation, and the second was not fighting for Irish independence. Independence had existed for nearly fifty years. The Troubles were about the constitutional position of Northern Ireland and the treatment of its Catholic minority.

The figures deserve to be stated plainly rather than gestured at. The Sutton index at Ulster University records 3,532 deaths in the conflict between 1969 and 2001. The Provisional IRA was responsible for 1,706 of them — about 48%, the largest share of any single actor. Of those, roughly 1,100 were members of the security forces and around 510 were civilians, a figure other researchers put closer to 640. Loyalist paramilitaries and state forces account for most of the remainder, and loyalist groups killed civilians in far higher proportion.

It ended by agreement, not by victory. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 established power-sharing and the principle that Northern Ireland's status changes only with the consent of its people. The IRA ordered an end to its armed campaign on 28 July 2005 and decommissioned its weapons that September under independent verification.

Nothing about the earlier period licenses the later one, and this site is not going to pretend otherwise. A shirt that says tiocfaidh ár lá carries a phrase most closely associated with the Troubles, and anyone wearing it should know that as well as they know 1916.

Why Ireland is on this list

Not because what happened there is comparable in scale to Gaza or Darfur today. It is not, and the Stand With page says so directly.

It is here because it is the template — centuries of plantation, dispossession, famine and partition, carried out by a neighbouring state that told itself it was governing rather than occupying. And it is here because of what Ireland does now that it is out the other side. Irish solidarity with Palestine is among the most consistent in Europe. That is not sentiment. It is recognition.

Sources

Back to blog