The IRA did take the campaign to the streets of Glasgow. People were instead encouraged to subscribe to Collins’ “National Loan”, set up to raise funds for the young government and its army. Others, notably Arthur Griffith, preferred a campaign of civil disobedience rather than armed struggle. Trials by jury could not be held because jurors would not attend. Over the next two days (14–15 May), the IRA killed fifteen policemen. In the early morning, Collins’ IRA “Squad” attempted to wipe out the British Intelligence operatives in the capital. The subsequent negotiations led to the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which ended British rule in most of Ireland and established the Irish Free State.
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Most of the actions in the war were on a smaller scale than this, but the IRA did have other significant victories in ambushes, for example at Millstreet in Cork and at Scramogue in Roscommon, also in March 1921 and at Tourmakeady and Carowkennedy in Mayo in May and June. The only regret that we had following the ambush was that there were only two policemen in it, instead of the six we had expected.This is widely regarded as the beginning of the War of Independence, and the men acted on their own initiative to try to start a war. They encouraged newspaper editors, often forcefully, to do the same.
The Irish War of Independence was a guerrilla war, fought not on battlefields but in cities, towns and among civilian populations. Just two days later, on 21 March, the Kerry IRA attacked a train at the Headford junction near Killarney. Fringe organisations, such as Arthur Griffith’s Sinn Féin instead argued for some form of Irish independence, but they were in a small minority at this time.The demand for Home Rule was eventually granted by the British Government in 1912, immediately prompting a prolonged crisis within the United Kingdom as Ulster Unionists formed an armed organisation—the Ulster Volunteers — to resist this measure of devolution. It culminated in the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the formation of a free Irish state.2. The G division men were a relatively small political division active in subverting the republican movement, and were detested by the IRA as often they were used to identify volunteers who would have been unknown to British soldiers or the later Black and Tans. Much of the IRA’s popularity arose from the excessive reaction of the British forces to IRA activity.When Éamon de Valera returned from the United States, he demanded in the Dáil that the IRA desist from the ambushes and assassinations that were allowing the British to successfully portray it as a terrorist group, and to take on the British forces with conventional military methods. This treaty created the Irish Free State, a self-governing British dominion. These volunteer units were given three months’ training and attached to RIC stations around Ireland. The IRA was perceived by some members of Dáil Éireann to have a mandate to wage war on the British administration based at Dublin Castle.The years between the Easter Rising of 1916 and the beginning of the War of Independence in 1919 were not bloodless. Then on 11 March, Dáil Éireann President Éamon de Valera formally ‘accepted’ the existence of a “state of war with England”. The treaty caused a split in both Sinn Fein and the IRA and led to the Irish Civil War (1922-23).This website on Northern Ireland and the Troubles is created and maintained by Alpha History. This proved successful in demoralising the force as the war went on, as people turned their faces from a force increasingly compromised by association with British government repression. The first IRA volunteer to be executed was Kevin Barry, one of The Forgotten Ten who were buried in unmarked graves in unconsecrated ground inside Mountjoy Prison until 2001. Fears of informers after such failed ambushes often led to a spate of IRA shootings of informers, real and imagined.The biggest single loss for the IRA, however, came in Dublin.
The war is usually said to have run between 1919 and 1921, but violence both preceded these dates and continued afterwards.