The Shaping of Northern Ireland
Cód:
491_9780995928022
The riots that erupted in Northern Ireland in 1969 and thirty years of ensuing violence ensured worldwide interest in Britain’s Irish province. That interest drove a sustained quest into Ulster’s past, shared by artists, historians and the media. It provoked questions: why had Northern Ireland been excluded, and Ireland thereby partitioned, when the Irish Free State attained Dominion status in 1922? In what did Northern distinctiveness consist: was it economic, religious or national? Instant histories in 1969-72 and scholarly writing since sought answers; this book has a similar purpose. It identifies the myths that distort understanding of history, explores the centuries from the Plantation of Ulster to partition, the settlement of English and Scots, their shared siege mentality and capacity for survival, their security under the Union of 1801 that both had initially opposed, and their creation of a major industrial complex centred on Belfast that formed a triangle with the Mersey and the Clyde. It analyses, too, Ulster Unionist opposition from 1886 to Home Rule, and in great depth the crisis of 1912–14, determined by both Ulster’s Covenant and Volunteer Force, directed by Sir Edward Carson, and dramatized in both the Government’s failed attempt to coerce the Ulstermen, and the Army’s ‘Mutiny’ at the Curragh. The pulsating decade from 1914 is thoroughly explored: the impact of Easter Rising and Somme in 1916, Lloyd George’s persistent attempts to find a settlement for both North and South, the Anglo-Irish War and subsequent Treaty, the creation of Northern Ireland and the opening of its Parliament by King George V in 1921, and the interaction between the two states of Ireland, culminating in the amicable agreement over their boundaries in 1925. The part played by the King, General Smuts, and Winston Churchill in shaping both Irish states, much undervalued by historians generally, is a feature of the
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