And I could give thousands more, without ever coming to VM.
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This is an absolute cracker.
My point is that that the actions of the British afterwards, and not the Pearse & co, led to the WOI and independence. All the boys in the GPO achieved was derisionâŚâŚuntil the British changed the publicâs mind for them.
If the boys hadnât taken the first step the British would have had nothing to react to surely. Itâs a fairly silly point you are trying to make.
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Rubbish. JJ Lee disproved that canard a long time ago. Brian Murphy, the same. I would also refer you to seminal work by Conor Gearty on the difference between Home Rule and the actual Treaty that ensued.
Are you John Bruton?
One thing that I always wondered was why the Brits didnât come in and blow us away.
We were among the first of the Kingâs countries to make a clean break for it - partially.
When you say âblow us awayâ, you mean bring down the entire might of the British army?
Whatever it took to quell the uprising.
In 1916?
They had other engagements
He may be more Nottingham than we thought
No - in the War of Independence.
I find it strange that Collins, Griffith etc could negotiate full independence with representatives of the British Empire at the time.
American opinion would have been a big factor.
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Britain had no appetite for another war. They lost a generation of young men in the First World War. It had a huge negative on the country and informed things like appeasement and so on.
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Post WW1 - empires started to break up and there was emergence of small independent states and an acknowledgement of peoples right to self determination. We partly rode that wave.
The quality of life in England is shit. Imagine how bad a colony would have it. Scotland and wales are dumps
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They were flat broke after the first great financial redistribution/the great war.
We are right beside them though, I would have thought that would be the last colony they would give up for security reasons at least.
Unsurprising to see the Big House mentality from some of the Limerick lads. They have the forelock tugged off themselves.
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Blow what away exactly? There werenât facing an enemy dug into a trench in Kildare.
Sometimes the independence of nation states can only be secured by people who are willing to sacrifice their own lives, who even want to sacrifice their own lives, who want to provoke a reaction that moves opinion within the territory they want to become independent and/or moves international opinion.
The KLA in Kosovo did this. They wanted to provoke a genocidal reaction from the Serbs that would lead to international opinion moving heavily against the Serbs and ultimately provoke international military action against the Serbs which would rout them and would lead to an independent Kosovo.
It was a calculated and in many ways grossly irresponsible gamble, but it worked, and on such things history turns.
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