by Neil Hegarty
* Several leading players in the rising escaped death, including Markiewicz (officially by reason of her gender). It is often supposed that de Valera, who was American by birth, was spared in order not to give offence to the United States government, now a crucial ally in the war with Germany; de Valera himself, however, claimed that he avoided execution only because his court-martial and sentence came very late in the day, after most of the other executions had already taken place. See Diarmaid Ferriter, Judging Dev: A Reassessment of the Life and Legacy of Éamon de Valera (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2007), 28–9.
* By 1939, most towns in the Free State had been connected to the national grid – at which point the outbreak of war slowed the process considerably. The last districts in rural Ireland, however, were not electrified until 1973; and some of the islands were connected later still.
* Joe Lee notes that ‘teaching infants through Irish provided one further bulwark for the existing social structure in that it inevitably discriminated against already deprived children, and ensured that when they were despatched from the country as emigrants they would be equipped to serve their new masters only as hewers of wood and drawers of water’ (in Ireland, 1912–1985: Politics and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 134.
* In the general election of 1933 Unionist candidates accounted for thirty-nine seats, nationalist candidates a third of that number.
* Londonderry – a descendant of Lord Castlereagh, who had been instrumental in the passing of the Act of Union – went on to follow his ancestor in carving out a political career at Westminster. His highly visible attempts in the 1930s to forge alliances with Germany would lead to his condemnation as a Nazi appeaser.
* See Lee, Ireland 1912–1985, 206. The constitution’s attitude to women too was founded in unreality. It was clear in its view that the correct position of women was within the home; and it envisaged a situation in which no woman would be obliged by economic necessity to go out to work. But no attempt was made either to pay the menfolk of Ireland enough to enable their women to stay at home, even if they so wished; or to ensure that the majority of the mothers of Ireland could raise their children in tolerable comfort; or to create the economic circumstances that would enable thousands of women to remain in Ireland and start a family, rather than board an emigrant boat to Britain or America. This gap between constitutional rhetoric and cold political reality was best exemplified in the aspiration to direct the energies and finances of the state towards the welfare and betterment of the people while at the same time explicitly ruling out recourse to the courts as a means of ensuring that these principles were actually applied.
* Louis MacNeice, ‘Neutrality’, in Selected Poems, ed. W. H. Auden (London: Faber, 1964), 77. In one excellent illustration of Irish cooperation with the Allies, the meteorological station at Belmullet in County Mayo fed the Allied naval authorities with weather reports that were crucial to the timing of the Normandy landings.
* The Northern Ireland Education Act of 1947 mirrored the provisions of the 1944 Education Act (the ‘Butler Act’) in Britain.
* Thirteen men had died on the day itself; a fourteenth died later from his injuries.
* The Provisional IRA emerged in 1969 from an ideological split with the ranks of the Irish Republican Army. The Provisional wing of the IRA embraced the use of force in the context of rising disorder in Northern Ireland; the ‘Official IRA’ embraced Marxist, class-based politics.
* This was the second hunger strike to take place at the Maze; the first had lasted from October to December 1980.
* A 1993 British television documentary alleged that the Dublin and Monaghan bombers had had the assistance of elements in the British security services. The subsequent Barron Report commissioned by the Irish government found that these allegations, though they could not be proven, were ‘neither fanciful nor absurd’, and drew attention to the lack of cooperation offered to investigators by the British government. A later report added that the actions of the Irish police after the bombings had ‘failed to meet an adequate and proper standard’.
* The legislation in question had been passed by the Westminster parliament in 1885, and had remained on the statute books following independence. The most notorious prosecution stemming from this law was of course that of an Irishman, Oscar Wilde, in 1895. Interestingly, two future presidents of Ireland – first Mary McAleese and then Mary Robinson – acted as legal advisers to the Campaign for Homosexual Law Reform established in Ireland in the 1970s.