The latest 1916 revisionism

DarkyHughes wrote: »

Yeah I seen this in AH & made my feelings about the Blueshirt man felt there.

Not trying to hijack but rather than start another 1916 thread, does anyone know the number that was actually suppose to turn out for the rebellion instead 1200 men & women that did? Was it more than 15,000 or less?

Thomas_. wrote: »

Just out of interest, where did you get all the names of those regiments from?

I´ve some books that also deal with the Easter Rising but either I didn´t pay much Attention to the regimental names or they were simply not listed and just referred to as the British Army. I´d be interested about the source you have for that.

If you could tell me more about it (book, title or other source to have a look into) I´d appreciate that.

Thanks.

Deleted User wrote: »

Burton should be executed for outright treason against the Irish state he vowed to uphold as Taoiseach.

Azwaldo55 wrote: »

What I find more interesting is what did not happen rather than what did happen.

Without British entry into World War I, the Home Rule Bill would undoubtedly have been implemented.

It seems inevitable that the UVF would have rebelled but would have rapidly lost support and sympathy from Tories in England when the first RIC officer or British soldier was shot and when sectarian outrages would have broke out across the north east.

The overwhelming majority of Irishmen in the British regiments in Ireland and in the RIC were Roman Catholics who supported Home Rule and with field guns and machine guns and cavalry they would have crushed the UVF who were armed with a collection of antique arms, multiple varieties of modern rifles and a large quantity of ammunition but a poor logistic system. Also tens of thousands of Irish nationalists led by John Redmond would have backed the British Army and RIC against the UVF. Mainstream Unionist support for a fight might have rapidly melted away.

In the same way that De Valera who was hedging for a deal with Collins was shunted to one side by the military leadership of the IRA in the Irish Civil War 1922-1923, James Craig and Edward Carson would have rapidly lost control of the UVF to more militant leaders. In the face of a British Army campaign the UVF would have quickly lost control of the towns and cities of Ulster and some would have chosen to adopt guerrilla warfare. The Dublin government would probably have used the same policy of interning unionists and executing die-hard loyalists just as the Free State government interned thousands of republicans and executed 77 men during 1922-1923.

Socialists like James Connolly and republicans like Patrick Parse, Tom Clarke and Sean McDermott might have waited for the dust to settle rather than launch their own rebellion in Dublin. If they did rebel in Dublin they would not have earned public sympathy if they were fighting against a Dublin Home Rule government in the midst of a war with Unionist rebels. More likely they would have participated in the war against the unionists with their own plans for post-war Ireland.

The end result of a civil war would probably have been a Dublin parliament dominated by the Irish Parliamentary Party ruling a 32 county Ireland with the British Royal Navy holding on to our ports. The Unionists would have grudgingly entered parliament at a later date just like the Anti-Treaty side entered the Dáil in 1927.

The Home Rule Irish Parliamentary Party led by Redmond might have been decimated anyway in the 1918 general election leading to the rise of Sinn Féin. Since Sinn Féin was an umbrella for a wide spectrum of Irish national opinion it would not have been long before the movement splintered into opposing factions. The generational divide between the increasingly elderly IPP and the vigorous youthful middle class Sinn Féin movement would have still existed and impatience with old fogies representing the southern Protestant and well to do Catholic landed elite in office since the late 19th century might still have led to a republican populist triumph.

What the personalities we are familiar with from our timeline would have done is anyone's guess but if Michael Collins or Eamon De Valera had emerged as leaders they probably both would have supported a gradualism stepping stone strategy toward an Irish Republic and still have become political rivals. James Connally and Patrick Pearse had they lived would probably have been violently opposed to anything short of a complete separation from Britain. Connally would have tried to imitate Lenin if Russia had collapsed in Communist revolt. Reactionaries like Eoin O'Duffy would have been inspired by the possible triumph of the Germans in World War I to imitate their autocratic rule in Ireland. Churchmen like John Charles McQuaid would have sought to put a Catholic stamp on the Irish state and many Irish Catholics would have taken a hard line against Ulster Protestants much like Unionists discriminated against Catholics in our timeline.

Loyalist resistance to the Dublin government might have persisted for decades just as republicans resisted British rule in Northern Ireland. Betrayed by Britain who would have backed the most stable system of government in Ireland centered in Dublin, they would instead adopted the position of a Protestant State For A Protestant Ulster. A figure like Ian Paisley might have emerged as the political leader of Ulster Protestant separatists and the UVF might have been revived. After all Ulster Presbyterians were among those who fought in the ranks of the United Irishmen in 1798 against the Dublin parliament. Perhaps a Civil Rights Movement would have been set up and Protestants inspired by the overtly Christian black civil rights protestors in the United States in the 1960s would have adopted the hymn We Shall Overcome. If a group of Irish soldiers opened fire on an orange march in Portadown in July 1972 it might have led to an armed struggle with UVF bombs exploding in Dublin and AK-47s supplied to the UVF by a Colonel Qaddaffi in Libya....