What did the Republic of Ireland do during The Troubles? | (1969-1998)

the troubles or Nat the name that are given to a conflict that is often misconstrued as being one between the Republic of isand and the United Kingdom whereas an actual fact it was largely between various communities within Northern Ireland that part of the island of Ireland that was retained by the United Kingdom and is retained by the United Kingdom to this day in contrast to what's sometimes referred to as southern Ireland or more correctly as Ireland or the Republic of Ireland which is an independent nation in its own right this idea is sometimes held that the Republic of Ireland was actively backing the IRA or the Irish Republican Army the main Republican paramilitary force that was fighting uh to remove British presence from Northern Ireland whereas this simply isn't the case I thought this was quite an interesting video to make about why this wasn't the case and perhaps more broadly what was the position of the Republic of Ireland during this tumult period in Northern Irish history well to answer that we have to go back to 1921 and the Anglo Irish treaty which was the first treaty to split apart the island of Ireland into Northern Ireland and an entity to the South now this came after several years of fighting between the IRA and British forces including police in the entire island of Ireland this had begun in 1916 when the publico was declared the Irish Republic during the Easter Rising when most fighting took place in Dublin for around a week it was soon however crushed but in 1918 during the general election in the Kingdom of of the United Kingdom and Ireland as it was then Shen Fain won an outright majority in Ireland they however refused to take their seats in the parliament in Westminster because they had claimed their loyalty to the Irish Republic and so instead they formed a kind of unofficial government that wasn't recognized by the British in Ireland called the do this was the government of the Irish Republic thean which didn't recognize the king of England as the head of state and claimed Independence for the entire island of Ireland as such they set up their own Law Courts their own police and armed forces in those areas of rural Ireland that they were able to control where the British had little impact its armed forces were the Irish Republican Army or the Orlan this of course being because it was the Armed Forces of the Irish Republic the first time that we see this term this state of affairs wasn't a peaceful one and it resulted in the Civil the Irish war of independence as it's often called from 1919 to 1921 when the leaders of the United Kingdom and of the Irish Republic sat around the table to work out a deal in what would become the Anglo Irish deal however not many people were particularly pleased with this deal in Ireland when it finally came because instead of promising an Irish Republic it instead promised an Irish free state the difference being that a republic does not recognize a monarch as its head whereas the Irish free state although it would gain a lot of autonomy and in fact really de facto Independence would still have to recognize the British monarch as the head of state as a Domin iion at the same time however the Irish would be able to have their own armed forces and police services but there was also a referendum to be held in the northern six counties which immediately rejected becoming a part of this new Irish free state and would remain part of the United Kingdom that's what would become Northern Ireland the free state would be a Dominion so much like countries as Australia and New Zealand which are de facto independent but still recognize the British monarch as their head of state but much worse for many of the members of the IRA and the Irish doy were that they would have to swear an oath of allegiance to the British King George V as someone they had fought against and as one of the stated aims of forming a republic swearing an oath to a monarch was the last thing that they wanted to do to make matters even worse several important Port Towns would be handed over to the Royal Navy which means that that British troops would be stationed in towns such as in and Bal unsurprisingly this split opinions of the Irish Republican government and the Irish Republican Army splitting it between those in favor of accepting the treaty and thinking that otherwise the British would really send in a lot more troops and that any hope of having a an independent Irish state would be dashed and those who are opposed who believe that it was either All or Nothing the whole island of Ireland had to be freed from British rule or none of it would go down they would do the honorable thing this would lead to an outright civil war between the formerly United Ira being split into Pro and anti-treaty Ira with those in favor accepting the treaty becoming the national Army of the Irish free state that was then backed by the British and the anti-treaty then becoming Rebels the anti-treaty would go on to lose the civil war with the Irish Republican Army then becoming really the name that was given to these Rebels as they were the ones who said they claimed that they were still continuing on the fight for an Irish Republic as opposed to an Irish free state now in 1923 the war ended and the Irish free state became the state in the uh most of the south of Ireland now in 1939 however the IRA would come back but this time it would be associated with just really Northern Ireland with the goal of incorporating Northern Ireland into the same political entity as the rest of Ireland in other words to remove the British presence from Northern Ireland entirely however during this time the Irish free state in 1937 had actually adapted its Constitution and in 1948 it had ceased to be one of the Dominion countries of the United Kingdom effectively throwing off any further connections with United Kingdom and really becoming a republic as they no longer recognized the Monarch in Britain as being their head of state so the Irish free state became the Republic of Ireland most people date the start of the troubles in Northern Ireland to 1969 when there was a harsh and violent Crackdown on the Catholic civil rights movement that then spiraled into full-on sectarian interc communal violence involving several communities in Northern Ireland and ultimately the British army too now I've made a video a little while ago about the possibility of a a Republic of Ireland invasion of Northern Ireland in support of the IRA and in that video I mentioned that there was a very very slim chance of this happening and that it really wasn't seriously considered at all there are several reasons for this and one of them is that relations by 1969 had really changed between the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom from what it had been of course in the war of independence dependence when the IRA had fought against the United Kingdom across the entire island of Ireland now the Republic of Ireland was less interested in the Republicans in Northern Ireland for several reasons one of which was of course that the anti-treaty IRA had then gone on to fight against the the government in in Ireland against the free state which had now become the Republic but another was that the majority of people in Northern Ireland were Protestants and a majority of people did not want to become a part of the Republic of Ireland and there were several paramilitary groups that had formed to uh stop this from happening so it would appear that instead of having British soldiers on the streets in Northern Ireland fighting against Republican paramilitaries like the IRA then instead if the Republic of Ireland would take hold of Northern Ireland it would be Irish soldiers from the Republic on the streets of places like Belfast that would then be having to fight against a loyalist paramilitary Insurrection which of course would probably have had the support of the majority of the population this of course was something that the Republic of Ireland didn't really want to become bugged down in especially as the violence continued to spiral in Northern Ireland and so their official position was that they would support a referendum on the status of Northern Ireland and if a majority would vote to become a part of the Republic of Ireland then they would respect those wishes but otherwise they would not become involved the situation was complicated however and the IRA the Irish Republican Army the official Ira actually signed a ceasefire with the British government in 1972 however many of the IRA felt that their actual objectives had not been met and that the ceasefire wasn't valid and so there was a split in the ira with the provisional Ira going and taking on the fight once more okay so quick Interruption from editing hood here the the provisional Ira didn't actually break off from the official Ira because of the ceasefire the split actually happened in 1969 and this was because the official Ira at the time wanted to go into a broader Coalition called the National Liberation Liberation Front with several other more radical leftwing groups and they wanted to actually get involved in the parliaments of the uh Irish Republic of uh Britain and of Northern Island so to take part in the political process the provisional Ira didn't want to do this because they felt that they couldn't get anywhere with politics and so to continue the armed struggle they also then opposed the fact that in 1972 so 3 years after the split that the official Ira signed the ceasefire and it's from that point on that the provisional Ira started to become the dominant branch of the IRA but it's slightly different to how I explained it although in essence it it follows the right track but yeah just a quick clarification there they often become known as the provos and so this became the larger faction of the IRA during this time now it's important to realize that the Republic of Ireland became very important for the provisional Ira because it meant that they could sneak over the border and British troops and police wouldn't be able to pursue them and arrest them there they used this for setting up several training camps as well as for importing weapons explosives and money as well as having safe houses for operatives who were wanted on the other side of the Border a New York Times article from September of 197 9 commented that in past years the IRA got a lot of its explosives from the Irish Republic often in donations from sympathetic Builders or Quarry operators but as increased security dried up that Source the provos have apparently begun manufacturing their own explosives from commercially available fertilizers this report also notes that the IRA had varying levels of support across the border from Irishmen inside the Irish Republic however the government of the Republic was Keen to work with the United Kingdom and didn't want the violence to spill over the border into the Republic itself and so they banned officially Ira Associated individuals from appearing on the Irish television or the Irish radio for what it's worth the IRA also wanted to avoid having any direct conflict inside the Republic of Ireland because they relied on the Republic for safe houses for donations and indeed for the Irish Security Forces sometimes turning a blind eye to their activities across the border so they stipulated volunteers are strictly forbidden to take any military action against 26 County forces that's the name of the uh Ira for the Republic of Ireland under any circumstances whatsoever the importance of this order in present circumstances especially in the Border areas cannot be overemphasized not withstanding there were several casualties among the Irish Garda the Irish police uh and indeed the Irish Army in veral incidents that occurred one of the most famous Ira attacks was in 1979 in an attack that killed a member of the British royal family Lord mount Batton on his uh yacht at amul Moore which of course was over the Border inside the Republic of Ireland this attack actually garnered a lot of backlash from many previously uh supportive of the IRA the Irish T actually condemned the action as well and their support suffered in the Republic of Ireland this is interesting because this t-sh was from the political party Fina fall this being one of the parties that was actually made up of the Irish government that had been against signing the treaty just showing how much these lines of Republican and Free State supporting had actually shifted through the decades and that the support that perhaps once they thought they could have relied on in Ireland was no longer the same thing this would continue up until 1998 the war in the last decades became particularly bloody with many Terror attacks occurring many more civilians being killed and much more fracturing of the official Ira into several different groups this meant that they would eventually lose a lot of the support that they had first had in the late 60s and early' 70s and in 1998 the Irish government was also involved in the COA or as it's known more often in English the Good Friday agreement or the Belfast agreement in which it and the United Kingdom government along with a broad spectrum of political and paramilitary groups within Northern Ireland sat down and agreed upon a peace treaty that broadly has been kept to this day part of this peace treaty agreed that Northern Ireland at a time that was right would have a referendum on how people thought about either remaining part of the United Kingdom or joining the Republic of Ireland and that whatever the results the majority decision would be respected this is now interesting because demographically it looks like for the first time there will be more Catholics in Northern Ireland than Protestants and while those in favor of joining the Republic of Ireland and those in favor of joining the United Kingdom cannot simply be divided into Catholics and Protestants broadly this is correct and for the first time the first minister in in Northern Ireland is a Catholic so it may be the case that things in the near future will once again change but when that happens you can be sure there'll be another history with Hilbert video about that and its historical context

Channel: History With Hilbert

Views: 54,604

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Id: HoEseYerpVQ

Length: 15min 13sec (913 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 29 2024