Diploma in Modern Ireland (The Irish Revolution) -September 2021

The course will investigate and interrogate the decade (1913-23) in which the foundations were laid for Irish independence and in which the establishment of the Irish Free State was achieved. We will examine the unionist drive to forestall Home Rule which would lead, ironically, to a form of devolution.

We will trace the rise of Sinn Féin as it, somewhat fortuitously, came to epitomise the struggle for separatism. How did the Irish Volunteers of 1913 split into two numerically unequal forces? How did Ireland respond to the exigencies of the First World War? What, if any, role did organised labour play in state formation? How did the Volunteers of 1916 become the Irish Republican Army of 1919-21?

How a form of legislative independence was achieved, and how the beginnings of decolonisation were postponed to accommodate an internecine conflict, as the unity of Sinn Féin and the IRA unravelled after the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1922.