Some believe that the Anglo-Irish War has its roots in the Norman invasion of 1169, which resulted in the kings of England becoming the titular rulers of Ireland. Although there may be some merit in this argument it is too much of a sweeping generalization. In reality, the conflict of 1913-22 had its roots in the failures of the 1798 United Irishmen rebellion, in constitutional Nationalism, the agrarian disasters of the 1840s and the rise of militant Hiberno-American Republicanism.

Anglo-Norman and later Anglo-Scots colonists undoubtedly enmeshed Ireland in mainland British politics, but it did not take long for them to become ‘hiberniores hibernis ipsos’ (more Irish than the Irish), much as the Danes and Gaels had done before them. So long as the country’s nobility paid lipservice to the King’s Writ they were left more or less to their own devices, whilst the Crown only tended to pay attention when there was a threat to its authority or when foreign invasion loomed. In the final analysis it was not the Normans that fragmented Irish society and sowed the seeds for the sectarian divisions that have plagued modern Irish history – that dubious honour goes to the Reformation. The Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation of the 16th and 17th centuries not only divided Ireland, but also plunged Europe into a cultural civil war that intertwined religion and politics to the extent that non-conformity to the State religion, whatever it might be, was tantamount to treason.

In 1541, Henry VIII of England had himself declared King of Ireland in Dublin. He was determined to break the power of both the Anglo-Irish barons and the Gaelic-Irish chieftains, and began a process of strengthening Ireland’s central government that his successors happily continued. A feature of this was the confiscation of rebel lands and its redistribution to settlers who established plantations. These new planters were inevitably Protestant, although the system was developed under the Catholic Queen Mary and proved to be the template for the future colonization of Protestant North America. Whilst many of Ireland’s Anglo-Irish lords embraced Protestantism, others remained faithful to the old religion. Unfortunately this made scores of them, along with their Scots and English co-religionists, susceptible to exploitation by Catholic France and Spain. In an age when, to many Scots, Englishmen and even some Irishmen, Catholicism not only represented theological degeneracy but also disloyalty to the Crown, it was relatively easy for English-speaking Britons, whether they be Scots, Irish, Welsh or English, to view the Catholic Gaelic-Irish as an alien, dangerous and subversive influence. Ultimately, the Reformation and the plantations created a socio-economic underclass of the Gaelic-Irish Catholic majority who were governed and looked down on by an Anglo-Irish Protestant minority.

Ironically, in a reversal of modern perspectives of Ireland, Dublin was the centre of British influence whilst Ulster was the centre of resistance to Ireland’s central government. In 1607 the rebel earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell went into exile and the British sought to fill the resultant vacuum through plantations. Most of the planters in north-eastern Ireland were Scots Presbyterians, and thus as Dissenters excluded from power, but still the process of transforming Ulster into the Crown’s most loyal, if not peaceful province, had begun.

In 1641, dispossessed Ulster Catholics rose up to reclaim their property. This rebellion was the final spark that lit the fuse that culminated in the English Civil War. These Irish rebels never disputed the English king Charles I’s right to be King of Ireland, unlike his English Parliamentarian enemies who defeated, deposed and executed him. Much has been written of Cromwell’s ruthless suppression of the Catholic Confederacy to the extent that he has entered Irish mythology as a xenophobic bogeyman. This view usually ignores the British context of his campaign where Cromwell ruthlessly suppressed any resistance – English, Scottish, Irish or Welsh – to his new Commonwealth. Ultimately, the destruction of the English Royalist garrison of Drogheda, and of Royalist privateers in Wexford, pales into insignificance next to the excesses of the Thirty Years’ War.

Before 1798, none of the rebellions were about breaking the link between the Irish and English Crowns; in fact, between 1689 and 1691 thousands of Irishmen fought to restore James II to his English throne. It is true that the Williamite victories on the Boyne and Aughrim, still celebrated by Northern Irish Unionists to this day, may have guaranteed Protestant Ascendancy even if this campaign was only a minor sideshow in a larger European war. For a hundred years after these victories, anti-Catholic Penal Laws discriminated against the Catholic majority; however, their repeal in 1778-82 allowed Catholic families to be listed once more amongst landowning classes.

A distinctive feature of rural Irish society was the proliferation of ‘secret’ societies that, under cover of darkness, imposed their own version of social justice. The punishment beatings by Catholic Defenders or Whiteboys and Protestant Peep O’Day Boys were as much about economic grievances as sectarian ones. The United Irishmen rebellion of 1798 may well have been intended as a Jacobin secular revolt, but because of ingrained sectarianism in many areas it degenerated into massacre and counter-massacre by Catholic and Protestant mobs.

The rebellion of 1798 had not begun as an excuse for discontent Catholic peasants to massacre their Protestant landlords and run amok; its inspiration was the secular French Revolution that destroyed the Ancien Régime in 1789. Its leaders sought to create a non-sectarian Irish Republic of Protestants, Catholics and Dissenters as United Irishmen, breaking the link between Ireland and England. Revolutionary France, which had been at war with England since 1793, was more than happy to supply arms and troops to attack her vulnerable Irish flank.

Unfortunately, the revolt was badly organized, poorly led and French help arrived too late to make any difference. Although ‘The ’98′ as it became known was consigned by government troops to the pantheon of heroic failures that pepper Irish history, it remains significant for one reason – it was the symbolic birth of the Irish Republican Movement.

The net result was that an Act of Union removed Ireland’s legal independence in 1801 and the Irish Government became an administrative department of the British Government, headed initially by the Lord Lieutenant but later by his Chief Secretary. Its location in Dublin Castle gave it its nickname – the Castle. It was apparent that opposition to the Crown was the one thing that prevented political change in Ireland, as an independent Irish Republic was utterly unacceptable to the British. Despite economic decline and famine during the early 19th century and the failure of Irish MPs to break the Union, the lot of Ireland’s Catholics steadily improved. Catholic emancipation and hard-won land reform ensured that Irish Catholics began to share in the country’s prosperity, and by 1921 over 400,000 of the country’s 470,000 smallholdings were owned by Catholic occupiers.

Although abortive rebellions continued, 19th-century mainstream Nationalism followed constitutional lines with the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) MPs disrupting and frustrating Parliament’s business to publicize Irish issues. The IPP, formed in 1882, originated from the Home Government Association, which favoured limited self-government for Ireland; it became powerful under Charles Parnell in the latter part of the 19th century. Home Rule and Land Reform became the twin threads of their agenda, and despite several failures they finally got a Home Rule Bill passed in 1914. Home Rule fell far short of the Ireland envisaged by the United Irishmen, and only conceded a limited form of devolved government, similar to that in Scotland and Wales today. Of course, not everyone in Ireland was content with Home Rule, and Protestants in north-east Ulster vehemently opposed it.

Once the heartland of Irish Republicanism, the Union had brought economic prosperity to Ulster. It was the only part of Ireland to benefit from the Industrial Revolution, and shipbuilding and linen turned Belfast into a major imperial city on a par with mainland cities like Glasgow. Concerns about Catholic-dominated, Dublin-based government and the perceived threat to their prosperity played on sectarian fears, and gave rise to a revival of secret Loyalist societies, defence associations and ultimately the creation of the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) in 1913 to oppose Home Rule by force. To Ulster’s Protestants, Home Rule was nothing less than Rome Rule.

Not surprisingly, most Britons viewed Ireland as an integral part of the UK even if they did not understand its politics – the majority of Britain’s political parties, especially the Conservatives, supported Ireland’s Unionists. It was a significant recruiting ground for the army, and a disproportionately high percentage of the British Army’s senior officers, from Wellington to Sir Henry Wilson, were Irishmen by birth, albeit Protestants. So much so that Protestant Irishmen, and especially Ulster Protestants, formed what Robin Neillands once referred to as the nearest thing to a Junker class that the British have ever known. Unsurprisingly this meant that Unionist sympathies were common amongst British Army officers.

Despite the steady improvements in Ireland’s lot, ‘physical force’ Nationalism did not end with the failures of 1798, and secret Republican societies endured. Invariably they failed, through bad planning or betrayal by ubiquitous police informers; however, they did produce a steady crop of martyrs, heroic failures and stirring patriotic ballads. In addition, appalling land management practices combined with famines killed or displaced millions of people willing to believe in the Nationalist folk-myth of some idyllic pre-British past. Significantly the waves of emigration that these events caused created large Irish communities outside of the UK with bitter memories of the British.

The most significant Irish emigres, both then and now, were those who crossed the Atlantic to Britain’s first lost colony, the USA. Many Irish-Americans hoped for the day when they could return and throw off the ‘yoke of Saxon tyranny’ that, in their eyes, was responsible for all of Ireland’s ills. So it was that in 1858 and 1859 two revolutionary secret societies, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and the Fenian Brotherhood were formed. In 1866 the Fenians unsuccessfully raided Canada and ultimately their only significance was that the rebels called themselves the ‘Irish Republican Army’ or IRA for the first time. Their aspirations came to naught in 1867 when yet another poorly organized coup failed to liberate Ireland.

The Irish diaspora in Australia also retained an interest in the events unfolding in the ‘old country’. Dr Daniel Mannix, an Irishman by birth, an old friend of De Valera and the Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, spoke in support of Irish Independence in New York in July 1920. When he attempted to visit Ireland in August 1920 a British warship intercepted his ship and prevented him from setting foot in the country. In December 1920 another Australian, the Archbishop of Perth, acted as an intermediary between the Irish Under Secretary, Sir John Anderson and Arthur Griffiths. For a brief moment it looked like peace negotiations would begin until the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, insisted that no rapprochement could be made with the rebels until the IRA surrendered its arms.

The Fenians did not intend to fight pitched battles with the army, and so 1798 was the last time that these took place. In fact, subsequent insurrections tended to be dealt with by the police, and as a reward for their efforts in frustrating the 1867 uprising the Irish Constabulary became the Royal Irish Constabulary. This shift in emphasis subtly changed the would-be rebel from a soldier fighting for his nation into a common criminal. After 1867, the IRB began to play a more significant role, and after a period of stasis it began to infiltrate the spectrum of Nationalist organizations, the Civil Service and even the police.

By 1913 Ireland may have appeared a relatively stable and prosperous province of the United Kingdom; however, beneath the surface it was a troubled island riddled with sectarian and political divisions. The pro- and anti-Home Rule factions threatened civil war through the UVF and National Volunteers, whilst the issue was made worse by several senior army officers who threatened to resign if they were ordered to suppress Unionist opposition to Home Rule. To compound the issue, the Irish Socialist Republican Party (ISRP) formed its own militia, the Irish Citizen Army (ICA), raising in the eyes of the Castle fears of some sort of Bolshevik uprising. It would seem that as long as every Irish political party had its own paramilitary organization, any form of political change was faced with the threat of violence. Meanwhile, the IRB continued their systematic infiltration of Nationalist societies and cultural organizations, biding their time. Ultimately the Home Rule crisis was overshadowed by the outbreak of war in 1914. In the end it proved to be nothing more than a stay of execution.