Early Years of Home Rule
Northern Ireland having received self-government within the United Kingdom, under the Government of Ireland Act was in some respects left to its own devices.
The first years of the new autonomous region were marked by bitter violence, particularly in Belfast. The IRA was determined to oppose the partition of Ireland and the authorities created the (mainly ex-UVF) Ulster Special Constabulary to aid the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and introduced emergency powers to put down the IRA. Many died in political violence from 1920, which petered out after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1922 and through 1923.
The continuing violence created a climate of fear in the new region, and there was migration across the new border. As well as movement of Protestants from the Free State into Northern Ireland, some Catholics fled south, leaving some of those who remained feeling isolated. Despite the mixed religious affiliation of the old Royal Irish Constabulary and the transfer of many Catholic RIC police officers to the newly formed Royal Ulster Constabulary (1922), northern Catholics did not join the new force in great numbers. Many nationalists then came to view the new police force as sectarian, adding to their sense of alienation from the state.
Read more about this topic: History Of Northern Ireland
Famous quotes containing the words home rule, early, years, home and/or rule:
“Gladstone in Great Britain and Parnell in Ireland, under the watchword, “Home Rule for Ireland,” are fighting the battle of self-government for all mankind.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“We do not preach great things but we live them.”
—Marcus Minucius Felix (late 2nd or early 3rd ce, Roman Christian apologist. Octavius, 38. 6, trans. by G.H. Rendell.
“[F]rom Saratoga [N.Y.] till we got back to Northampton [Mass.], was then mostly desert. Now it is what 34. years of free and good government have made it. It shews how soon the labor of man would make a paradise of the whole earth, were it not for misgovernment, and a diversion of all his energies from their proper object, the happiness of man, to the selfish interests of kings, nobles and priests.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“In 1869 he started his work for temperance instigated by three drunken men who came to his home with a paper signed by a saloonkeeper and his patrons on which was written “For God’s sake organize a temperance society.””
—Federal Writers’ Project Of The Wor, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“The earliest instinct of the child, and the ripest experience of age, unite in affirming simplicity to be the truest and profoundest part for man. Likewise this simplicity is so universal and all-containing as a rule for human life, that the subtlest bad man, and the purest good man, as well as the profoundest wise man, do all alike present it on that side which they socially turn to the inquisitive and unscrupulous world.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)