The Easter Rising was an attempt at independence from the United Kingdom that lasted six days and occurred during WWI. The Irish rebels were thwarted on several fronts and failed to gain the freedom from British rule that they sought.
This audiobook offers a fair view of both sides, where neither was willing to concede. If you are interested in the history of Ireland and its fight for independence, this is a good place to start.
In late June 1922, growing animosity between Pro and Anti-Treaty factions erupted into armed conflict in the center of Dublin. For the next ten months, the Irish Free State was wracked by a bitter, bloody, and brutal civil war between those who sought to protect the new government and those who wished to destroy it. This is the story of the Irish Civil War, its origins, and its consequences.
In the years after the Easter Rising of 1916 in Ireland, a new independence movement had emerged, and in 1918-19 the political party Sinn Féin and its paramilitary partner, the Irish Republican Army, began a political struggle and an armed uprising against British rule. By 1922 the United Kingdom had lost a very substantial portion of its territory, as the Irish Free State came into being amid a brutal civil war. At the same time Ireland was partitioned and a new, unionist government was established in what was now Northern Ireland.
The Irish Revolution at the beginning of the twentieth century spawned the creation of the modern Irish state. This is a comprehensive framework of that revolution in its totality, taking into account the broad range of social, economic and political developments as well as the IRA's campaign of guerrilla warfare and the British response to it.
Drawing on such previously unpublished sources as the Irish Department of Defense's Military History Bureau, we paint a broad picture of the people and the key events in the Irish struggle for independence. We present much of the behind the scenes debate within the British Government in the prosecution of its policies in response to the revolt in Ireland. British official frustration provoked by the acceptance of the Anglo-Irish treaty by the majority of the Irish people and the independent institutions it sought to set in place is also explicitly chronicled.
New light is shed on the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations as well as on the divisions within Irish nationalism before and indeed afterwards which culminated in the Irish Civil War. The role of external forces including public opinion in the United States and British competing obligations at home and abroad are also covered. Considerable attention is given to the development of democratic government in the fledgling Irish Free State in the midst of domestic upheaval, and to the broader effort at nation building which followed after the Civil War.
