What if the 1916 Rising never happened?
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21-03-2023 10:25pm#1
In 1916, Ireland was an integral part of one of the most free, democratic and wealthy countries in the world at that time. There had been no anti-Catholic legislation since 1829. Home Rule was on the statute books and although there were of course issues with Ulster the majority of the island at least would have had a devolved government. Irishmen from all faiths were fighting alongside each other in the trenches. Most Irish people were content with the constitutional position and did not want a completely independent republic.
A small group of extremists decided to throw a spanner in the works and launch a half-cocked rebellion which they knew was going to fail, going against the orders of their Chief of Staff. All this rebellion achieved in immediate terms was destruction of large parts the city centre and the deaths of hundreds of civillians. The average Irish person was disgusted and viewed the participants as treacherous rebels, which is not exactly untrue.
Of course the executions (and the conscription crisis) changed the opinions of many, and so we went down the road of the majority of the country coming to support violent republicanism during the 1919-21 chimp-out by the IRA.
Most Irish people view 1916 as something that had to happen to achieve independence. They think there was no alternative. Don't get me wrong, I am a nationalist, but there clearly were other ways that Ireland could have gained freedom without resorting to violence. As shown in Scotland, a democratic pathway to leaving the union is very much possible. I would much rather that the IRA never existed and that nobody died in the cause of independence. I would have preferred if we had got through the war, got Home Rule, perhaps negotiate a compromise with the Ulster unionists and maybe move towards dominion status post-WWII. At some point possibly before the end of the Cold War we could have had a referendum on becoming a republic, and Ireland in 2023 is a united 32-county sovereign state within both the EU and Commonwealth of Nations, with peaceful co-existence amongst all communities in Ulster and good neighbourly relations relations with Great Britain.
Instead we got partition, the northern Protestants eschewing any notion of Irishness due to the violence inflicted on their community by republicans, we are decades away from a border poll, both the northern and southern states have failed its people in many ways since 1921 and yet all of this could have been avoided if Pearse and Co had decided not to launch their suicide mission and if peaceful democracy was allowed to run its course.
My question is, how would Ireland be different if the Rising never happened? How would staying as a part of the United Kingdom for at least two decades more under a devolved government have affected the development of the country? Would our infrastructure be better? Would we have been a more secular and forward-looking society with no RC influence? Would we have Ulster Protestants come to embrace their Irishness in totality? Would we feel more comfortable aligning ourselves with the Anglosphere such as Canada or Australia instead of pretending that we are a 100% Gaelic society when in reality we haven't been since before the Normans arrived? Would the Irish language be in a better place today like Welsh is?
Mod Note: see post 12.
Post edited by Manach on2
Comments
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Shhhhhh! Don't be coming out with that sort of stuff! Our modern sense of statehood and self is built on the blood of Pearse et al.
But I agree, the 1916 Rising was a disaster when you look at it in the round. It led to the War of Independence, Civil War, Partition of Ireland, The Troubles and it's legacy carries through to today. And no small thing like the destruction of the civil records of the Irish people in the disastrous Four Courts debacle. It facilitated the almost Taliban stranglehold that the Catholic Church exerted for the next half century and more. It stabbed in the back the many thousands of Irishmen who had gone to fight in WW1, many in the belief that Home Rule would be delivered after the war. The preceding fifty years had been all about land reform and religious freedoms, progress was in the air.
What would have happened is one of those speculative counter factual arguments and kinda pointless as it was never to come to pass. Blood was spilt, opinions changed and hardened.
Personally if the 1916 rising has not taken place, I think Home Rule would have been achieved in some form post 1918. Change was in the air. It might not have been perfect and still placed Ireland in the idea of the Commonwealth etc. But it would have been built upon and in due course Ireland would have separated peacefully as a separate state. The big question is what would have happened with the Ulster Unionists, their allegation that Home Rule would be Rome Rule came to pass. Still I believe they could have been persuaded post WW1 and all the blood sacrifice both north & south, to have taken their place then in this new state with a position of influence. And that in time, we would all have evolved together into a separate state. We would have kept and maintained a United Ireland.
In short, the 1916 Rising was a disaster but sin é.
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The biggest disaster about it was that Home Rule was going to happen when the war was over.
But the biggest victims were all the Civil War victims. We lost so much of our most intelligent and pragmatic nationalists, this resulted in a handful of surviving gun men taking over the country. They hadn't a clue how to do it and when the Brits turned off the financial taps we were doomed. Dev panicked when he realised his notions of some sort a communist utopia, of cap wearing potato farmers dancing at the crossroads, were actually deluded fantasies. He ran to the church who had not seen so much power in 100's of years. Every revolution creates a power vacuum, that is when the trouble starts.
I think some sort of a domestic was was inevitable however, especially given the culture of armament that was prevalent throughout Europe at the time. Guns and bullets were everywhere once the was was over, I would blame the War of Independence on this as much as anything else. There was too much opportunity and social acceptance of weapon carrying, there was more guns than cars or other motorised vehicles.
War was a common theme, we were too used to violence at the time, it can become commonly accepted and I think we were victims of that in the first half of the last century.
The other victims of 1916 have to be the all the victims of the troubles in the north. The concept of blood sacrifice, which was martyred by Pearse, was certainly utilised by the Republican movement who must feel it achieves results. That argument remains in the air and would polarise the tone of any discussion. The reality is that it might not look pretty or fair, but it does get results.
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How it played out was how it played out, history is history and questioning it is hypothetical. If there hadn't been a civil war between treaty and anti-treaty there could well have been one between north and south, unionists were arming themselves and were prepared to march on Dublin.
The biggest argument against your assertion that we Irish were an integral part of the empire is that we weren't, we were treated as subjugates. NI is an example of how we would all have been continued to be treated.
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Was there a peaceful road to independence, which might have taken longer, but have been achieved without the awful human waste of life ? Perhaps. Would we have ended up with a unified 32 county independent state today. I’m not so sure. Remember, the British had their part to play too. After 1918, and an overwhelming democratic vote for independence on the island the British Government could have sat down with all parties and commenced sensible negotiations on the way forward They chose not to do so and opted for suppression instead, leading inevitably to more violence. They then ran off to play footsie with the Unionists, culminating in the high handed and one sided approach of the Government of Ireland Act. 1916 could have just been a small blip, but for the reaction of the British.
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We would have probably gotten home rule, but either partition or a civil war would have been a likely outcome. Have to wonder about the role of the British army in that case.
If Home Rule was enough for the population and we remained within the empire we surely couldn't have declared neutrality in WW2?
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It's a historical what-if to which no real answer is possible; all you can do is speculate.
But I think we need to be careful of running our what-if about the 1910s based on insights and values we hold in the 2020s. We make a sharp distinction between peaceful and violent ways of seeking change that simply was not made in the past. In Parnell's time there was considerable overlap between Irish Parliamentary Party and the IRB - one estimate suggests that half of the IPP MPs were or had been sworn members of the IRB. The Rising occurred in 1916 when pretty much the whole of Europe was fighting for one political cause or another, and the popular reaction to the treatment of the defeated rebels tells you all you need to know about the very different attitude which people had then towards political violence.
The notion that, if the Rising hadn't happened, we would have progressed peacefully to independence seems . . . unlikely. Well before the rising, even the rather modest home rule proposals of the British government threatened civil war and an army mutiny. And, even without the Rising, in the post-war years how likely is it that Ireland and the Irish question would have been unaffected by the general political turbulence, and ready recourse to violence, that characterised Europe generally?
History might well have played out differently without the Rising but, really, there's no great reason to think that it would have played out any more peacefully. The conditions which allowed it to turn savage would still all have been present.
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Ireland was not part of a democratic universal franchise state before WW1 started, only 1 out of every 8 persons had the right to vote in Westminster elections, property qualification values we still placed higher than many males could own & many did not own property, women didn't have the vote.
As for Home Rule the British had been putting that off since the Napoleonic Wars & would have continued to do so. Political violence had already started with Loyalists / Unionists refusing to compromise with Home Rule even though the bill was passed by the House of Commons, & then stopped by that bastion of a modern democratic state, the House of Lords.
RIC & British Army failed to act & threatened mutiny whilst loyalists imported massive amounts of guns & arms. When nationalist groups did the same they prevented most of those arms imports being landed. This all happened before the outbreak of the war. Without war there would have still been major political conflict in Ireland, the war prevented this for a few years, however the Home Rule & political conflict still managed to fester.
If 1916 hadn't happened there would have been a later rebellion, possibly towards the end of the war or afterwards with hundreds of thousands Irishmen with military training suddenly demobbed who had gone to war to achieve Home Rule as promised by John Redmond & the Irish Nationalist Party & some scheming British politicians.
The counties & people of the eventual Irish Free State / Eire would then have been subjected to the same fate of the Nationalist community in Northern Ireland, during the post WW2 period up until the GFA, the British would have just stood by & let the loyalists have a free hand.
As for Scotland achieving independence through democratic means I still have my doubts that will happen, I can see a minority using political violence to secure the union, aided by factions in British politics, establishment & military.
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Although I have said that an alternative history is necessarily speculative, in this particular case we do have a real-world example we can look to. In 1922 Ireland was partitioned, with the Free State becoming independent outside the UK and Northern Ireland getting devolved government within the UK. So we can compare the development of two.
Northern Ireland was, I think we can all agree, conspicuously badly governed in the several decades after 1922. To answer some of the questions raised by the OP, nothing we see in the experience of NI suggests that Ireland-within-the-UK would have had better infrastructure, or that the position of the Catholic church would have been challenged by the state, or that the Irish language would be in a healthier state today.
To be clear, had 1916 never happened and had the 1914 home rule legislation been implemented as enacted, we wouldn't have had a single devolved government for all Ireland; we'd still have had partition, and two devolved governments. There's no reason to think that the NI devolved government would have done anything different from what it actually did in the real world, and, to be honest, I don't see much reason to think that the 26 counties of "Southern Ireland" would have evolved into a multicultural secular society any faster than, in the real world, it has. It's clear from the evidence of Northern Ireland that simply being a part of the UK doesn't magically produce this effect.
Taking the long view, independence for the 26 counties has clearly worked out much better for us than devolution for the 6 counties has worked out for them. In 1920 Nothern Ireland was, by a long measure, the most prosperous part of Ireland; now — huge transfer payments from GB notwithstanding — it is the least prosperous. After an admittedly very rocky start, the south became a functional and even successful multi-party democracy; the north never did. None of this can be seen as an advertisement for the economic or political benefits of remaining within the UK
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Some interesting questions you raise there.
Would our infrastructure be better?
It was world class in the early part of the 20th Century, for an island of its size. It had trams, more railways than today, ports trading with all parts of the world, canals, and some fine architecture. Indeed some would say the nicest buildings in Dublin were all constructed before independence. Many fine buildings / houses in the countryside were burnt out.
If it had not been for 2016 and the guerilla "war" of independence, I would expect that Ireland would have got its independence by the mid 20th century, same as many colonies around the world did peacefully then. This despite the fact we were a home country, not a colony.
Our infrastructure only really improved when we joined the EEC / EU. Before it left the EU, the UK were the second biggest contributor to EEC / EU funds over the decades.
Would we have been a more secular and forward-looking society with no RC influence?
Almost definitely yes, scandals like the Tuam babies and much of the abuse etc would probably not have happened. As recent as the eighties, I remember whole classloads of our young people emigrating to Britain: most went for economic reasons but some went because Ireland then was not as tolerant of gay people or minorities etc.
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Another question is what would the health service look like if we had remained in the UK for longer?
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Mod Note: Based on posters' feedback, please take time to review History forum's charter. Counter-factual discussion is a valid exercise both academically and on Boards, so long as it it is conducted in a non-trolling manner that avoids attacks on the various Historical traditional communities from this point on.
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Well, let's think this through.
If there's no 1916 rising, there's no replacement of the Irish Party by Sinn Fein as the dominant political nationalist party.
So, when the war ends and home rule is implemented in accordance with the 1914 legislation, the Irish Party dominates in Southern Ireland in much the same way as the Unionist Party dominates in Northern Ireland.
Since an Irish republic isn't a live issue at this particular point in time, there's no split, no civil war. So no immediate end to the dominance of the Irish Party.
In this scenario, opposition to the Irish Party in the politics of Southern Ireland comes from (a) a unionist party, which may be formally affiliated with (or even the same party as) the Unionist Party in NI, and (b) the left, in the form of the Labour Party. I don't know which of them would be the larger party, in parliamentary terms — I suspect the unionists, at least initially — but I don't think either of them, or even both of them together (as unlikely as that coalition seems) would be able to displace the Irish Party from government. So for the foreseeable future, Southern Ireland is effectively a one-party statelet, much like NI. The only way this changes is if the Irish Party splits at some point, and there's no knowing when that might have happened.
(There would continue to be a republican nationalist movement, in the form of the IRB, but without the events of 1916-21 having occurred, I think would be as marginal in the 1920s as it had been before the war.)
It looks to me as if this sets up Southern Ireland to be the Catholic, nationalist analogue of Protestant, unionist Northern Ireland (which of course was the whole idea behind partition). So the prospects of this being a favourable environment for the development of a "secular, forward-looking society" are, frankly, not high.
What is the significance of Ireland still being a part of the UK? In the UK, during the 1920s and 1930s, the Liberal Party was effectively displaced in the two-party duopoly by the Labour Party. Would that have influenced the politics of Southern Ireland, leading perhaps to the Irish Labour party becoming a viable alternative government and, in due course, an actual government?
I'm sceptical. Irish electoral and party politics was disconnected from Great Britain even without home rule being in place, and the rise of Labour in Great Britain did little for the left in NI, despite NI being part of the UK.
As for infrastructure, the notion that Ireland had "world class" infrastructure in the early twentieth century is not one that I think many economic historians will endorse. Yes, we had trams, but so did many cities in the world, including quite poor cities. And, yes, we had more railways than today, but the same is true of pretty well every country in Europe (including both NI and GB). Irish railways at the time were not "world class"; they were slow, inefficient, provided a poor service and in many cases were not financially viable. And Irish ports didn't "trade with all parts of the world" to any great extent; in fact the nationalist complaint at the time was that traffic was routed through British ports at the expense of Irish ports.
Until a decade or two before independence, being part of the UK was a net financial loss to Ireland - tax revenue collected in Ireland exceeded government expenditure in Ireland. Far from GB subsidising Ireland, then, the subsidy flowed the other way. This changed in the first decade of the twentieth century, not because of government expenditure on infrastructure, but because of land purchase - large sums flowed from Westminster to finance the land purchase scheme. But, of course, this was a one-off — once the land had been purchased and given to tenants, it would not be purchased a second time. Plus, these sums were of course paid to landowners, who didn't exactly invest them in infrastructure and, mostly, didn't invest them in Ireland at all. While the redistribution of land to those who farmed it was beneficial in various ways, the purchase money that financed it mostly flowed into Ireland and then out again.
Of course, the financial situation might have changed as the twentieth century progressed. The postwar Labour government in the UK rolled out the welfare state which did lead to significant financial transfers to Northern Ireland, which continue to this day. Presumably Southern Ireland, if still in the UK at that point, would likewise have benefitted. But others in the thread have speculated that Ireland would have become independent in mid-century; if so, we would have missed out on those transfers anyway.
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The Op's premise seems to be that if we remained as part of the UK kingdom for a little longer a benevolent Westminster would eventually allow us independence.
Does he mean in the same way they are allowing Scotland have independence?
Or am I missing something?
In the early part of the twentieth century there were considerable numbers of people in Ireland who contemplated the use of violence, whether to defend the Empire or fight for freedom. People all over Europe were resorting to violence to achieve their aims. It would be extraordinary if there was not an insurrection in Ireland around that time. The question was whether it was premature to start the insurrection in 1916 or wait until after the great war was over.
Equally, the British establishment were quite happy to turn to violence and terrorism to oppose any bid for freedom. It is what the great powers did at the time.
While the scenario of a peaceful political path to independence sounds attractive, there is very little evidence that a UK government would accede to such political demands. In mid 40s Churchill believed absolutely that Ireland was not an independent country. His ally, Roosevelt had promised him to put any idea the Irish had about independence to an end once the WW2 was ended. Nothing about the UK or our friends in the US would suggest that a peaceful path to independence existed.
Rather than end up in 2023, as OP suggests, as a member of the Commonwealth and the EU , we would have our membership of the EU decided in Westminster and would now be enjoying the benefits of Brexit.
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Probably two things - they are ignoring the failed Scottish home rule bill that passed parliament and was shelved and of course that all other world events still happened as they did including the feared civil spreading through the Nit happening. Once you enter the world of make believe everything and nothing is possible, it’s your world.
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"Was there a peaceful road to independence, which might have taken longer, but have been achieved without the awful human waste of life ? Perhaps."
One point to keep in mind, if we had not been independent by 1939, then we would have been dragged into WW2. That would mean hundreds of thousands of Irish men would have been forcibly conscripted and would have died in the war.
Also Dublin, Cork etc. would likely have been bombed just like Belfast was by the Germans. 50,000 homes were destroyed in Belfast and over 1,000 people died.
It is likely more people would have died in the above then the War of Independence and Civil war combined, even in the unlikely scenario that they could have been avoided.
As an aside, Churchill initially wanted to introduce conscription to Northern Ireland in 1941, but decided against it due to protests from the Dail. Likewise the germans stopped bombing Belfast after complaints from the Irish government and the Germans worried that angering Irish Americans could draw the US into the war at that time.
So Ireland not being part of the UK during the war likely saved many lives, even up North!
Yes, I'm aware many brave souls volunteered to join the war, but this is the beauty of having independence, self rule and true democracy, you can choose for yourself to get involved in a war or not.
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The question also presumes that Ireland was unusual in having to secure its independence by force; that if we had just waited a little while — another generation or so — we could have transitioned to independence peaceably, as became “normal”.
This is a mistake. Peaceable transitions to independence, while not unknown, were not normal or standard.
The British exit from India was barely more than a collapse, but it was a collapse in the face of an incipient war of independence. Plus, while the British did not in the end attempt to retain control by force, millions died in the implementation of their exit strategy; it was not peaceable. In other places the British did attempt to retain control by force, and wars of independence ensued - Malaysia, East Africa, Cyprus, Palestine. Generally if the British considered that they had a strategic interest in some territory, they did not go quietly. And they would certainly have considered they had a strategic interest in Ireland.
Ireland is a special case, since it is the only part of the UK itself to have won independence (so far). Had it remained part of the UK, it wouldn’t have benefited from the gradual transition to independence of the white dominions (which was peaceful) because, although white, it wouldn't have been a dominion. If it took the war of independence to secure dominion status in 1922, there’s no reason to think that the status would have been handed to Ireland on a plate in, say, 1947. Indeed, if Ireland had been used as a location for air bases, submarine bases, decentralised/evacuated facilities etc during the Second World War, it’s certain that in the years after the war the UK would have thought it had a very strong strategic interest in Ireland.
Post edited by Peregrinus on4 -
Its just ridiculous to blame 1916 for partition, the war of 1919-21, civil war & the troubles.
First in June 1914 a amendment was made to the home rule bill to exclude Ulster, so the country was already split, and even if there wasn';t the UVF & UUP likely would have done what SF did in the south & set-up their own rival government.
As for 1919 - 21 there was revolutions & wars of liberation all over the world in the wake of WW1. Even in Britain there was strikes & working class actions that rattled the ruling class so much they withdrew their offer of exile to the Russian Tsar. Irish workers would have had it even worse and 1913 would still be fresh in many minds so there would still be a good chance of some type of conflict taking place. The setting up of workers councils and land seizures had little if any connection to 1916 and both pro and anti treaty forces were opposed to militant labour actions.
I'm guessing people who think 1916 is to blame for the troubles never learned what happened in the years of 1641, 1690 or 1798, the sectarian riots and murders in the second half of the 19th century, or have never heard of the word "gerrymandering" before.
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I think that we are forgetting here that the return of the Treaty Ports to this jurisdiction in 1938 was a huge factor in keeping us neutral in WW2. Germany would have a legimitate reason to bomb these ports in the event of their use by the Royal Navy. How would the Govt have respondedto a bombing of Castletownbere or Cobh? As regards the influence of the Church on Ireland, you could talk about the pillarisation in the Netherlands that ocurred up until the mid 1960s to show that we were not the only country that had some sort of religious divide.
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True, lots of countries have religious divides, but Ireland's divide happened because of external factors not internal ones. The Protestant colonial settlers from Scotland & north England were given power over a majority Catholic country, which almost guaranteed there would be sectarian blood letting.
I think a lot more Irish Catholics would have converted to Protestantism, but because they linked Protestantism & identified it with British imperialism and linked Catholicism to having a Irish identity it never happened. But, having said that, since post-1798 the conflicts have thankfully been minor, there was nothing on the scale of Yugoslavia, Lebanon, India/Pakistan or Israel/Palestine.
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It's more who owns what than who believes what these days.
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