Ireland has been under constant
attack almost from the beginning of its history. But with each new round of
invaders, the country was given a richer cultural heritage. First by Britain,
France and Spain, then Celts, Vikings and Christianity, and finally a lengthily
attack by a formally established England beginning in 1154.
In the beginning, it was just a group of small feudal kingdoms, headed by the
High King, who ruled all. Government remained like this until the country was
divided into provinces by the Celts.
Ireland, which had been a Catholic country since St. Patrick arrived in 432,
some 300 years after the Celts arrived, was declared by the Pope in to be property
of the English king. Although King Henry II was content to leave Ireland to
itself, a new feudal lord, Strongbow, came into power, and Henry sent English
ships, which took over Waterford and declared that it was an English city. Over
the next several hundred years, Irish and English all over the country settled
land. Many intermarried. Most English took on Irish customs, and blended some
of them with their own. Instead of crushing Ireland and its culture, those who
settled there enhanced it, and English control was confined to Dublin.
Four centuries later, Henry
VIII and Mary I began to take action to make sure that all of Ireland was surrendered
to England. Over the next several hundred years, Ireland was brought more and
more under the control of England, and eventually England again took steps to
crush Irish culture-particularly Catholicism, because of Henry VIII's split
with the Catholic Church.
Because of this persecution,
talk of a rebellion that would free Ireland from English control began as early
as 1796, but was not seen through until 1949, when Ireland left the British
Commonwealth. This rebellion was plagued by internal fighting (Protestants versus
Catholics) and by nature itself in the Potato Famine of the late 1840s.
The fight to free Ireland
really began to heat up in 1916, with the Easter Rebellion, whose chief objectives
were political freedom and establishment of an Irish republic, with a government
run similar to that of Canada. Although the Easter Rebellion was crushed, it
sparked a bigger rebellion in 1919.
In January of that year, members
of a political group called Sinn Féin proclaimed the independence of
Ireland, and formed a government with Eamon De Valera as president. This was
followed by guerilla attacks by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) on English forces.
The British proposed a treaty. England granted all of Ireland except for the
6 provinces that made up Northern Ireland dominion status equal to that of Canada
in 1922.
De Valera, who had been expecting for the British to completely free all of
Ireland except for Northern Ireland, had sent Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith
to finalize the deal. Collins and Griffith signed the treaty, much to their
dismay and to de Valera's. William Thomas Cosgrave became the leader of the
Irish Free Commonwealth. Anti-treaty forces began speaking up, and civil war
broke out for almost a year. De Valera disassociated himself from the treaty,
and there was a split in the IRA. De Valera started a party called the Fianna
Fail, and in the 1932 elections overtook the commonwealth from Cosgrave.
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