The fact is that this country supported the actions of the IRA, as confirmed in the 1919 election.This country exists because of their actions.
This is the false narrative. The myth.
The SF vote was won on the SF manifesto. It implied an end to British rule "by all means necessary" but violent action was never explicit, nor was it ever subsequently endorsed by the Dáil.
Arthur Griffith, founder of SF and vice-President at the time was a monarchist.
His means for an independent Ireland was by civil disobedience and abstentionism, not violent insurrection.
It was the policies of abstentionism, ostracisation of RIC members, non-cooperation with tax collection, collapse of the court system, striking workers, transport workers refusing to carry British military personnel and equipment - these were the effective, peaceful, strategies that let the British know Ireland was lost.
The IRA, numbering somewhere between 10-15,000, a pitiful fraction of the Irish Volunteers 170,000 a few years earlier, were vehemently opposed by Catholic Church and most media. Their war was neither sanctioned nor sought by the Irish people. It was British heavy-handed responses to IRA attacks that sustained life and support in the guerrilla campaign. Something that would repeat itself after Derry and Ballymurphy in 1970's.
It wasn't until January 1921 that the Dáil actually debated a motion to formally declare a state of war against Britain.
The motion was
defeated.
The parliament of the people, in control of a massive SF majority, couldn't even bring itself to give formal support for the IRA. How pathetic is that?
The IRA was broadly a law unto itself, whose actions expedited Britains withdrawal. But it was by no means an army of the people, or an army that held widespread majority public support. It did not.
Those members born in the UK were foreign combatants.
All the members of IRB and GOIRA in WoI were born in UK.
In my opinion post independence we had to construct a version of Irishness that never really existed as we were culturally dominated by England and then Britain for 800 years. So we created a Celtic Ireland in which a kind of Celtic Catholicism and Nationalism were intertwined and ethnically cleansed most of our Protestant population.
Should we remember that the Unionists in Northern Ireland are as Irish as we are but their version of Irishness is different to ours? Yes, on both counts,
Wait a second, PIRA members born in UK are foreigners, but Unionists born in UK are as Irish as we are?
I'm sorry, but these narratives are simply cherry-picking whatever bits taste nice, depending on what day of week it is, but completely avoiding the bits that are hard to swallow.
I'm asking why those who are quick to condemn PIRA (and perhaps I'm being misunderstood, I'm not standing up for PIRA) get their moral justification to commemorate private armies with no mandate who took it upon themselves to engage in slaughter. The claim that
is someone all part of the fight for my 'freedom', it is not. They have as much a neck to claim it was for my freedom as PIRA do with the Enniskillen massacre.
I don't recall reading about the IRA running protection rackets or licencing drug dealers or covering up child rape or all of the other grubby nasty ways the PIRA ran their criminal gang and enriched their leaders.
You may not have read about it but the kangaroo courts set up by the Dáil and administered mostly by IRA volunteers was mostly a charade of justice depending on who knew who, and how much influence they could wield. Depending on which part of the country you were in, at which particular time, the administration of 'justice' in one part of the country was at total odds in another part. It was gombeenism for the most part.
Considering the ends to the two events tells it all.
It is a peculiarty that the ends of conflicts must match to have any comparison.
But to make the comparison anyway, the Government of Ireland Act, received Royal assent on Dec 1920, bringing into being partition of the country and the creation of NI.
The most violent intense period of WoI happened between Nov 1920 tíl the truce in July1921. Some 1,000 people lost their lives, civilians and combatants. And for what?
A treaty that the British government had already legislated for 8 months previously?
Obviously the time differential between Sunningdale and IRA ceasefire is obvious. But the outcome is similar, a treaty agreement that had already been in place meaning the lives of so many were lost for no good reason.
It is only by the grace of God, or King George, that Britain had a PM prepared to come to a negotiating table with those he considered as terrorists, rather than stringing out a long low-level covert war to the point of inevitable deadlock.