19 - World War and Insurrection

Summary

Ireland's Experiences of War

Then came the Great War. Every institution, almost, in the world was strained. Great Empires have been overturned. The whole map of Europe has been changed. The position of countries has been violently altered. The modes of thought of men, the whole outlook on affairs, the grouping of parties, all have encountered violent and tremendous changes in the deluge of the world. But as the deluge subsides and the waters fall short we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again. The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that has been unaltered in the cataclysm which has swept the world.

Thus did Winston Churchill bitterly sum up the dreary parochial ‘sameness’ of the Irish Question in 1918. The bitterness at the persistence of the utterly parochial, the microcosmic dramas of the Irish was not merely a Churchillian attitude. The same must have struck many in the British establishment – that there still was an Irish Question in 1918 that required dealing with. No doubt there was an element of truth in what he said, but it is also extremely reductive. Ireland had been thoroughly reshaped by the experience of war. Only to the bored and frustrated did the steeples look similar. There are two strands of the story that particularly deserve attention. For convenience, we may label them as the national story and the international story. The former concerns what happened within the nation, the latter the playing out of war.