01:33:21.680Whereas the book we just covered, Banned and Country, you get into the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, and it really gets into the downfall of the IRA.
01:33:29.460And the last book was about how, in my view, the IRA lost the mandate of the people.
01:33:35.520And the argument I was making there was that things really started to fall apart once they started taking the war to England.
01:33:43.640So in Ireland, it was a defensive war.
01:33:45.860They had the mandate of the people trying to get the English out.
01:33:49.900But then they started going, blowing up banks in England, blowing up the docks, and then they started hitting civilian casualties, which is one of the big stories that really sank them, especially the real IRA.
01:34:03.880And that's what really a lot of people turned against them.
01:38:31.980and this was real you were taught to hate the irish and so you react against that like who's
01:38:37.380making me hate the irish is this whole thing just made up so anyway um i guess where do you stand
01:38:45.300on that do you think this was real do you think there was any sort of i don't i mean look i don't
01:38:50.000know that much about it it seems to be broad enough and complex enough that a large amount of
01:38:55.200it must have been grassroots and authentic but at the same time if you ask you know quibono
01:39:02.720um did did the english government benefit to some extent by having this crisis yeah they did
01:39:09.840so i wouldn't be surprised like for example you have all kinds of cases in american history
01:39:15.420of the american state fighting the cia right so i wouldn't be surprised if there was some
01:39:22.420version of that where the the authentic american state genuinely honestly fighting the cia not
01:39:29.300realizing they're fighting the cia if there was something like that was going on i don't know but
01:39:34.600it wouldn't surprise me what i love most about this book was how it opened which is going through
01:39:40.300the history of antagonism between ireland and england and this is what made me think
01:39:45.680it wasn't an op because there's so much foundation there that I don't think you have in Quebec and
01:39:53.380you don't have in Canada and we kind of got this to the last episode by saying that the IRA had
01:40:00.280the mandate of the people how do you get that how do you get the people on your side there's so many
01:40:05.020people in Ireland that love the IRA or at least understood them or celebrated them that changed
01:40:10.200of course but was it a propaganda campaign not really it was just primed for that they just had
01:40:17.560a long history of hating this this occupation from england and i think you need centuries of that
01:40:27.160like the irish independence movement has its roots go far far back in time and i i think you
01:40:34.200do need many generations just exposed to that intellectual literary movement like you do need
01:40:41.380a cultural foundation for this before the people can really move in unison or at least accept it
01:40:47.540like that like you can't just show up one day as a radical in to a population that's not ready for
01:40:53.740that like they will spew you out they want nothing to do with that they're not ready for it so he
01:40:59.760says here, Ireland at the dawn of the 20th century was approaching 100 years of official
01:41:05.100political affiliation with Great Britain under the terms of the Act of Union in 1801.
01:41:10.080The Act created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, established a unified
01:41:14.800parliamentary system, cemented political, economic, and religious ties between the two,
01:41:19.620and thereby ensured complete English legal, political, economic, and religious domination
01:41:25.040of ireland prior to the act of union ireland had been governed for 500 years by an independent
01:41:31.260irish parliament that nonetheless met at the command of an english king before the irish
01:41:37.060parliament norman kings had dominated ireland for nearly two centuries prior to that north
01:41:41.800vikings had twice invaded the island which we covered many many episodes ago in the history
01:41:47.820of the vikings um he continues on the repression of the native irish and old english catholics
01:41:54.400was intensified during the subsequent English Civil War, an insurrection by Ulster Catholic
01:41:59.620landowners in 1641, which aimed to restore their former baron status. From 1641 to 1649,
01:42:07.020some 2,000 Protestant colonists were murdered, while tens of thousands were stripped of their
01:42:12.800possessions and driven from their settlements. While not quite the pogrom portrayed in exaggerated
01:42:17.980reports in London, it was brutal and almost every Catholic landowner in Ireland had participated
01:42:23.240to one degree or another so it's a we're talking long history of pogrom civil wars of a real
01:42:31.680animosity not only between states but between religions because it's the protestants versus
01:42:39.080the catholics and then it's the ethnic irish versus the ethnic english and on top of that
01:42:43.920there's the state domination aspect to it but you start to see how all of this was necessary
01:42:50.900to get something like the ira at that scale and have that many people involved and have that many
01:42:58.140people tolerate the ira operating there because remember we talked last time they had sniper
01:43:03.460warning signs set up like road signs like people in ireland were not you know used to bombings
01:43:10.920but they're kind of used to bombings right or they weren't treating it with like the hatred that you
01:43:17.260would get here in canada like the people as i said aren't ready for something like that
01:43:21.500um he says to leading english politicians of the 18th and 19th centuries ireland was an
01:43:29.400indispensable part of the empire because it formed a natural defensive barrier to the atlantic
01:43:34.680approach to england beyond that however ireland was an economic jewel in the royal crown and it
01:43:41.060assumed greater luster with the arrival of the industrial revolution and the expansion of the
01:43:46.180empire it afforded shipyards and culling stations all kinds of shit uh ulster textile mills and all
01:43:53.360sorts of other things for the empire now continues on the conspiracy of the united irishman party
01:44:02.380during the 1790s illustrates how effective britain's system of informers was and this is a big
01:44:09.100part of the story we're going to tell which is a war between separate intelligence apparatuses and
01:44:15.500Britain was always very effective, highly effective, of having informers and rats and spies all throughout Ireland.
01:44:25.060Inspired by the French Revolution, Ulsterman Theobald Wolftone was convinced that the United Non-sectarian Separatist movement could succeed in overthrowing the English rule,
01:44:35.820and he led a conspiracy of nationalists drawn from all economic classes and religious creeds.
01:44:42.200British informers penetrated all levels of Irish society, and these spies promptly alerted authorities to every subsequent conspiracy.
01:44:50.680Building on the animosity, we must discuss the Great Famine.
01:44:55.020As J.C. Beckett notes, the Great Famine is the watershed event in modern Irish history.
01:45:01.200Although as early as 1845, the Peel government recognized the potato blight as a looming major catastrophe and made a sincere attempt to meet the crisis,
01:45:10.660Local relief administrators botched the effort.
01:45:14.120The expenditure of famine relief funds from the executor was delayed by indignant opposition party members who believed the new economic principle of laissez-faire and who expected the Anglo-Irish gentry to solve the problem themselves.
01:45:28.620Millions of peasants starved to death and millions more were displaced from their cottages and compelled to emigrate.
01:45:34.660during this debacle imported american grain rotted in the holds of ships anchored in english
01:45:40.620ports awaiting customs clearance as required by english protectionist grain tariffs so
01:45:46.200when you're talking irish independence you have the great famine blamed on england sitting high
01:45:54.620as you know how many millions of people innocent people peasants died because of england that's the
01:46:01.060sort of thing you need to inform this sort of movement i think that's like a visceral memory
01:46:07.000it's a haunting memory whereas so many revolutions in my view especially the failed ones are all
01:46:15.260ideological and that's why i think the leftist ones fail it's because you have to teach people
01:46:21.020these new terms you need to kind of get them feel to feel solidarity with a foreigner who doesn't
01:46:26.580even speak your language but say you're brothers in the fight against this thing called capitalism
01:46:32.280compare that to here is you hate the british because they let millions of peasants starve
01:46:36.860you're never that doesn't require propaganda and then sorry after the famine the scattered
01:46:45.200survivors of 1848 regrouped to form the fenian or irish republican brotherhood in new york in 1858
01:46:52.540The Fenians plotted to liberate Ireland by force and attempted to foster revolt in Irishman-British Army regiments in 1866.
01:47:00.660They launched additional plots the following year, including an abortive rising in Ireland and an ill-advised, somewhat comical invasion of English Canada launched from upstate New York.
01:47:13.520Fenian revolutionary activities continued with funding and moral support from New York, Boston, and Chicago.
01:47:18.240So this is all to say that leading up to the IRA, there were precursors to the IRA.
01:47:24.980There were a lot of different revolutionary movements.
01:47:27.340There was a lot of different, you know, formations that were effectively trying to do the exact same thing.
01:47:32.900And it was just rebranding with different people as it became more advanced.
01:54:55.400The IRB rose from the ashes of Easter week to become the vanguard and driving force of a renewed physical struggle as the volunteers reorganized during 1917.
01:55:04.960With recently released Irish parolees now making their way back to Ireland, British authorities had made a critical mistake in assuming that the IRB was a broken organization and in releasing such desperate physical force separatists such as Cathal Brugia, Thomas Ashe and a bunch of others.
01:55:23.400And Iman de Valera, who becomes important in a second, they also miscalculated in their release of one particularly clever officer named Collins, who would turn the tables on them, making them the prey and not the hunters.