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Homerule:
In 1800, after yet another Irish rebellion, British
Prime Minister William Pitt decided that the solution to the Irish
problem lay in abolishing the Irish Parliament completely and
incorporating Ireland into a United Kingdom of Great Britain and
Ireland. He also wanted full rights for Catholics but opposition within
England was too great. It took until 1829 before the Catholic
Emancipation Act passed through parliament, reversing hundreds of years
of restrictions on Catholic rights. But reversing the effects of those
restrictions was even more difficult than reversing the laws.
With Irishmen in the British Parliament, the "Irish
Question" became a current issue. The Irish Catholics were at a
severe disadvantage in their own land. English and Scottish Protestants
lorded over Irish tenants.
In mid-century, the main source of food in Ireland
was destroyed. Years of potato blight from 1845-49 led to the Great
Potato Famine. A million people starved, a million and a half emigrated,
most of them to the U.S. The population of Ireland dropped by a third.
The only advantage to Ireland to come out of this most terrible natural
disaster was that emigrated Irish formed the Fenian Movement (from
Fianna Eireann, mythic Irish Warriors) and worked for Irish independence
from afar.
There was a small victory in 1869 when the British prime minister,
William Gladstone, ended the official status of the Protestant Church of
Ireland, and during the 1870s the drive for Irish "Home Rule"
picked up steam. In the north of the country, in the counties of the
province of Ulster, Protestants became nervous.
Finally, in 1914, Home Rule was enacted (though Ulster
was to be excepted for six years), just in time for World War I to cause
it to be suspended. Civil war seemed a possibility. In Ulster the
Protestants formed a militia. In the rest of the country the Catholics
did the same.
In 1916, with The Great War still raging, the Irish
Republican Brotherhood staged a rebellion against Britain on Easter
Monday. Though the uprising was limited to Dublin and ultimately failed,
the leaders were executed, giving the event an emotional value of
enormous proportion and in 1918 the Irish nationalist Sinn Fein party
won an overwhelming victory in parliamentary elections. Instead of
reporting to parliament in England they declared an Irish Republic. The
British outlawed them. The Irish Republican Army was formed, grew
increasingly violent. The British sent troops, the Black and Tans,
to curtail the violence.
In 1920 a new Home Rule bill tried again to reach a
compromise: separate parliaments, one for Protestant Ulster, one for the
rest of Ireland. In January, 1922, after much protest from Catholic
Ireland, the Irish Free State, minus six of the nine counties of Ulster,
became a Dominion within the British Empire with its capital in Dublin.
In 1937, under the nationalist (and survivor of the
Easter Rising) Eamon de Valera, Ireland ended Great Britain's
sovereignty and in 1949 left the Commonwealth completely, fruitlessly
demanding the return of the Ulster counties. The partition question, the
re-unification question, has never been settled but today is well on the
road to fulfill the Sinn Fein/IRA plan for complete surrender of
the six counties.
As we enter the early 2000's, we are witnessing the
greatest ever manipulation of democracy by murderers and terrorists who
are intent on stamping out Protestantism in Ireland. With the Labour
Government intent on handing over the reins to the terrorist Sinn
Fein/IRA, we see the Protestant majority being denied
peaceful, historical and 'non-triumphalist' parades on the roads of
Ulster.
SF/IRA propaganda has led the world to accept,
that the loss of civil liberty and rights of the majority of people in
Northern Ireland, is the only way to peace in Ulster!
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