Week 12: The European Union

Wednesday 13th April

Mr. Niall Douglas

Schedule for Today

9.30am-11am: Last full TOEIC exam

11.20am-12pm: Reading and vocab check

12pm-12.40am: Niall’s History of the History of the Irish Revolution part 2 of 3

12.40pm-1.20pm: More English Language Cementing

The Irish Revolution So back to the Irish Revolution, the first

modern information war which was successful, defeating the world’s greatest power of that time ...

Yesterday we covered powers of forty (“Dirac’s Large Number Hypothesis”) and events leading up to the 1916 Easter Rising

Got one more bit before we get into that ...

After the famine During the Potato Famine (1845-1852), the

British decided to deliberately NOT help one of its dominions and let the people starve In fact, they increased food exports from Ireland

Around the same time there was also famine in Scotland (1846-1857). Instead of helping, they drove the starving Scots off their land (called “The Highland Clearances”). Most died or went to the USA

After the famine Why let millions starve?

The British had come to believe (due to a philosopher called Rev. Malthus) that populations incapable of looking after themselves needed “stiff medicine” for their own good

If you saved people from famine, they simply had more babies and created worse famine later

The British decided that only an educated property owning middle class could “civilise” a population so it could look after itself

After the famine So instead of food, after the famine they enabled

Irish Catholics to go to school, buy and sell land, practice their religion, form businesses, set up finance (banks), and vote BUT only to send politicians to London

So you get catholic universities set up all over Ireland as well as banks, companies etc. University Colleges Cork, Dublin, Galway etc were founded

in 1848 and permitted Catholics to enter Allied Irish Bank was founded in 1864 1870s onwards there were a series of Land Acts freeing up

land for Catholic ownership

After the famine

So to summarise, after the famine: Irish Catholics were enabled and encouraged

to become middle-class i.e. Educated and land-owning

There were lots of resources freed up by halving the population and by putting a lot of derelict land into more productive use, so average incomes more than doubled

The British thought this would create a population able to look after itself, and one loyal to the British Empire

The Boer War Something usually left out of considering the Irish

Revolution is the Boer War in South Africa (1899-1902)

This war was militarily successful – a group of rag-tag Dutch ex-pats under General Jan Christiaan Smuts beat the entire might of the British Army

Unfortunately, the British commander realised that by simply rounding up their women and children and putting them into concentration camps (a British, NOT Nazi invention) and starving 20,000 of them to death, you could win

The Boer War

The Boers weren’t anti-British, they just wanted self-governance and no taxation without representation

In fact, after they lost the Boer War, the same British commander which defeated them became their greatest advocate. They got their self-governance and became very loyal British subjects

The Boer War Most importantly for Ireland, General Smuts was

brought into the British Army as Field Marshall Smuts where he was considered a genius among geniuses, not just militarily but also as a thinker

Albert Einstein said of Smuts when reading Smuts’ book Holism and Evolution (1926) that Smuts was one of three people in the world he knew of who fully understood general relativity.

He also said that his theory – general relativity – and Smuts’ holism would be the two most important theories for mankind in the next two hundred years (and he was right!)

The Boer War Smuts went on to fight in both the first AND

second world wars, becoming even more of a legend as he did so. He was a close friend of King George in Britain, as well of Lloyd George the British Prime Minister He was the only person to sign BOTH peace treaties of

the first and second world wars!

This matters, because Field Marshall Smuts decided to help the Irish, and history doesn’t mention this often (Smuts also invented apartheid, so he’s been deleted from the record)

The 1916 rising By 1916 Irishness had become defined as one of

character not where one was born

So, now the Irish population considering themselves Irish were maybe 20 million strong. Moreover, the US Irish were increasingly wealthy

A man called Eamon De Valera was born in New York in 1882, the child of an Irish mother and Spanish/Cuban father. Being born in the USA, he therefore had a US passport ...

The 1916 rising He was sent home to Ireland to study to

become a priest, but decided instead to free Ireland from British Rule

So in concert with others he staged an insurrection in 1916, taking over several key buildings

The British brought in artillery and used naval vessels to shell those buildings. After several days, they had to surrender

Michael Collins There was a young man aged 26 in the revolutionaries

called Michael Collins who was from Cork

Collins was part of the land owning Irish middle class. Aged 16 he took employment in London working for the Royal Mail in their finance department

At age 20 he went to work for an eminent firm of stockbrokers in London

At age 25 he went to work for Guaranty Trust Company of New York (better known today as J.P. Morgan). One year later he went home to join the 1916 rising.

Michael Collins That experience of finance turned out to be

very, very important ...

After the 1916 rising, all the leaders except for De Valera (because of his US passport and World War I) were executed via hanging or firing squad

The rest were put into prison until 1918. While there, Collins read lots about the Boer War and Field Marshall Smuts in particular. He began to think of a way to win without fighting ...

Michael Collins

From 1918 Collins began to set up a network of spies throughout the British Empire

He also set up a war bond i.e. A financial instrument used for raising money using his banking connections

In 1919 all the leaders of revolutionaries were arrested by the British ...

Michael Collins

Which left Collins in charge. He broke De Valera out of prison a few months later and sent him to the US to raise money from the Irish emigrants using his financial instrument

In total, he raised US$5m in the USA and £380,000 in Ireland, a tremendous sum

In today’s money that’s about US$300 million!

Michael Collins Best of all, he routed this money through

London because in those days the government had no idea it was possible, and even if they did they had no power then to stop it! In fact they had so much spare money they lent

some of it to the Russians to finance one side of their civil war (using the Russian Crown Jewels as collateral!)

Now Collins starts to bribe lots and lots of people to get information about the British

Michael Collins

He had people sift the rubbish of all the British employees and government ministries

He had cleaners in British government buildings send him any papers thrown into waste baskets instead of being destroyed

He had telephone operators in London listen into calls and send him what was said

Michael Collins He knew all the troop movements, arms shipments,

naval vessel movements and internal dialogues going on in the British government

He also brought on board the Protestants (Anglican, not Presbyterian) in Ireland to launder money to finance the war and to provide safe houses

Best of all, he did all this from an office on O’ Connell street (one of the main streets) in Dublin. He cycled there every day in a business suit and despite being the most wanted man in Ireland with a £10,000 bounty, the British never realised who he was!

Michael Collins

Starting from late 1919, Collins started to decapitate the British in Ireland Anyone working to aid the British were

assassinated, sometimes including their families. The biggest was on 21 November 1920 when they decapitated 14 of the most important civil servants and policemen

Railways, tax offices, law courts and police stations were blown up

Michael Collins The civil, police and legal service in Ireland

crumbled. Collins set up replacements run by him instead of the British

Because he knew about all British internal dialogue through his spies, he knew where everyone lived and if they were helping the British

Meanwhile the British didn’t even know what he looked like!

All these tactics were copied straight from the Boer War with full credit given to Smuts!

Michael Collins The British reacted through sending the “Black

and Tans” in 1920, a paramilitary group These guys blew up civilians, used machine guns on

blocks of flats, burned down houses and businesses, even drove tanks into a pitch in a football game in 1921 and fired machine guns into the crowd

There were 1,604 armed assaults, 102 mass reprisals of burnings and shootings and 38,720 raids on private houses

A “death penalty without trial” law was established, and used by the British to execute anyone they wanted. The problem was, they often murdered the wrong person!

Michael Collins The result of Smuts’ asymmetric war

techniques: Ireland effectively began ungovernable by the

British. Anytime they tried to do something Collins knew about it before they did and destroyed their efforts before they began. AND without a “proper” war!

Ireland also became very expensive. No taxes were being raised, and tens of thousands of extra troops sitting around cost a lot of money. The British simply didn’t know how to fight without fighting!

Michael Collins

Field Marshall Smuts had been watching with great admiration, and had been in communication with Collins about how to win.

He convinced the British King George that peace was achievable if it was done right ...

But more on that tomorrow!