Help: UK keeps Ireland- how?

I want someone that is FOR Home Rule, but against status of dominion for Ireland.
;)

well even if the Brits win the war they need to give something to the Irish or try to wipe them out, the second seems an unlikely choice for Brits, also Bonar Law will be died in 1923, so just enough time to finish the war, another election in 1923-24 brings the Liberals back to power David Lloyd George at its head brings the idea of Home Rule back as a peace plan

detailed war Questions maybe should go to MacCaulay, he's kind of the Site's expert in counter-insurgency
 
The Irish War of Independence was highly unlikely to succeed. Consider:


  • A substantial percentage of the population (Unionists) were violently opposed to Home Rule, let alone Nationalism, let alone a Republic.
  • The British Parliament had already passed a law granting Home Rule to Ireland, but it was suspended for the First World War.
  • Republicans were a small minority even within Irish nationalists.
  • Even amongst Republicans, 90% were affiliated with a group 'The National Volunteers' who supported the British war effort.
  • The remaining 10% 'The Irish Volunteers', who started the 1916 Easter Rising had very little military experience and were regarded as harmless fantasists by the British because of their lack of support.
  • One of the Irish Volunteer leaders tried to cancel the uprising, but was too late.
  • The British became aware of the plans for an uprising and were about to arrest the leaders, but moved too slowly.
  • The uprising itself was a fiasco and was put down in less than a week.
  • The insurgents were so unpopular that they were booed through the streets afterwards.
  • Eamon De Valera, political genius, was sentenced to death after the uprising but lucked out when his execution was commuted.
  • Then the Republicans started to fight the army that had just won the First World War, mostly using hand guns they nicked from police stations.
  • The Irish republicans had a leader (Michael Collins) who turned out to be a military genius. Equally luckily, De Valera, political genius but military incompetent, was in America and unable to interfere with the war.
  • The Catholic church, massively influential in Ireland, was opposed to the violence.
  • So were most of the population (to start with).
  • The campaign of violence was in the republicans own words: 'unable to drive the British out of anything bigger than a fairly good sized police barracks'.
  • When De Valera got back from the USA, he decided Collins' highly effective tactics were not to his liking and ordered the attack on the Dublin Customs House, which was another military disaster with 80 men captured.
  • By 1921, the IRA was running out of ammunition, and the number of attacks was falling. Michael Collins himself said that the British 'were mad' to agree to a ceasefire.
  • The British Conservative party only agreed to negotiations because they thought they would fail and hence justify martial law in Ireland.
  • The peace treaty was rejected by the Republican's own president and their parliament came within a handful of votes of rejecting it.
 
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I personally think maybe the world would be a better place if Ireland had stayed in the UK: provided that a solid majority of Irish, of all denominations, had decided it was in their rational interest to stay British subjects. In other words, I think a good question to ask is, how could British policy have defused the separatist tendency among the Irish, and the answer to that is clearly to address the grievances the Irish had and give them a positive stake in the kingdom.

It may well be that after WWI was far too late for that. But when you ask:


Well, let's say that Britain decided to apply extreme brutality to handle the rebellion.
What would be the borders of that brutality?
;)

And then in response to a perfectly reasonable outline of just how violent British repression would have to be to achieve the end, you say:

Well, let's not go too far.
Marshall law, giving army police powers, bringing additional number of police officers from GB, indefinate internment of captured terrorists/terrorist suspects/simpatisers in camps in Andaman Islands, shoot to kill policy...
And will to loose as many lives of soldiers/policemans as nescesarry to win the war.
;)

I really have to wonder if you think the British were capable of seeing the Irish as people like yourself, with as much right to consideration as they had. If not, why the heck should Britain continue to rule Ireland?

Frankly given the long legacy of bad blood between the nations, which from my American perspective looks a lot like centuries of British policymakers running roughshod over elementary human decency in their selfish interests, I think the current separation of the nations is probably the most decent solution possible. I actually think a more decent solution would have been for all of Ireland to separate as a Republic, and for the slim Protestant majority in Ulster to either accommodate themselves (the fate of the southern Protestants suggests they would not have done badly at all) or leave for Britain or other places if they just couldn't stomach living in a majority Catholic Irish nation. But among people of good will, peace is possible between the Irish and Britain and someone fishing for answers of how much repression would have been tolerable strikes me as one of the stumbling blocks to such peace.

Well this is AH, and people in general (including Americans, and also the leftists I like) have a long history of expedient brutality and it is legitimate to ask how that could have gone.

But have you considered seriously how to get a peaceful, lawful, legitimate result on the lines you would like to see? Or is an "acceptable" level of brutality part of the project? What is this, a project to see how much like the Fascists the British could be?

I'm quite an Anglophile by inclination, and when I first heard of Irishmen referring to Britain as the "enemy of mankind" I thought they were just freely indulging Hibernian hyperbole. But then I looked at a map of the Empire at its peak and looked into the history of just how much violence was needed to draw those broad red borders. And I'd like to take refuge in the idea that at least the British tried to be decent sometimes, and here you are asking how much violence is acceptable?

1918 may well be too late for anything but as amicable a divorce as possible. Possibly if the British authorities had been more graceful even at that late date, they might have prevented some of Churchill's later WWII legitimate grievances about Eire denying the British military the use of Irish bases in combating the U-boat menace during the Battle of the Atlantic. Of course doing any such thing would have been tantamount to declaration of war on Germany, not that I think that would have been a bad thing for the Irish to choose--freely. Had the British been more accommodating sooner, Ireland at that point would still have been at least somewhat within the UK/Commonwealth/Empire framework and could have plausibly shrugged off limited British use of Irish soil for Empire defense as part of their obligation and argued their independence in other spheres. Actually I think the rigorous official adherence to neutrality during the second war was largely the result of Britain having made herself unnecessarily obnoxious to the Irish and had the separation been more amicable, voluntarily joining the Alliance might have been in the cards--at least with American good offices helping to broker the deal after the USA declared war itself. Churchill had reason to bemoan the Irish intransigence, but people like him were I think in large part the cause of it. OTL, despite the official government position of neutrality, large numbers of Irish Republic citizens volunteered to serve in the British forces as individuals, so I don't think the Irish had any actual sympathy for the Axis.

(Vice versa, if we have a reactionary Britain indulging in whatever level of bloodshed and terror might realistically have been needed to cow the Irish without any concession to their legitimate interests as equal subjects, that might have been a severe stumbling block for an Anglo-American alliance during WWII. I suppose that American interests might have overridden sympathy for Ireland, but a politician like FDR surely would have paid a lot of attention to Americans who took that matter very seriously. A proposal he might have made might have been, upon our entry into the war, for Americans to take over the task of "pacifying" Ireland and to do it by promising them an independent Republic upon the conclusion of the Allied victory--so all the bloodshed and terror ends in an independent and resentful Ireland anyway. Should Britain really refuse American aid at a juncture like that just to keep possession of an island that wants them gone? Or if Americans swallow the British crochet of hostile rule of Ireland at all costs, and somehow the Alliance wins anyway, it would remain a bone of contention between the allies. I'm not totally naive about Stalin but I recognize it was wise for the Western Allies to be on their guard (not to turn it into the crusade it became OTL to be sure!) against their erstwhile ally--should Britain face the Red Army across a devastated Europe alone, with a rebellious Ireland at her back? Surely OTL's solution is better than that! A loyal Ireland actively participating in the affairs of the UK strikes me as better yet--so why not?)

A positive inducement to sufficient numbers of Irish, and a scrupulous adherence to rule of law while firmly pursuing the remnant rebels and avoiding making martyrs of them by treating them correctly according to fair laws (the kind the British public would tolerate over themselves, not just specially imposed on the Irish others) might have swung Irish consent to remain in union. I don't know why you balk at Dominion status, which surely served Britain well in her hour of need when Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, and South Africans came to her aid--why not the Irish too? But I daresay a decent enough British policy might have even kept Ireland within the UK itself--had the Irish good reason to think that henceforth they would be treated as equal subjects of the Kingdom.

Frankly this might have taken a left-wing political victory in the context of the post-war, 1920s, and 30's periods. I can see decisive numbers of Irish forbearing to rebel to wait and see what a Labour government (which would have been largely beholden to Irish votes in Britain, and might have strategically won over a sufficient degree of support from the Irish, assuming they got equal votes in Parliament, which for me is a minimum condition of "equality") might do for them; this might buy time for things to cool off, especially if the Labourites actually delivered on substantial matters.

I really don't know enough of the detailed politics of Britain in that period; I'm sure many here would dismiss the bare possibility of a Labour victory that early and predict very grim consequences if it by some miracle did happen. I notice that the Tories held power throughout the Depression and suppose that must be because they were able to deliver enough consideration of the hardest needs of the working poor that they didn't alienate them completely at the polls; why couldn't they have the same consideration for the Irish? 1918 might be far too late for them to persuade the Irish to wait another few years after waiting in vain for centuries for favorable consideration from the British conservatives! But deeds might have let centuries of abuse fall into shadow if they were were fair and bright enough.

So have you considered what good deeds the sorts of British regimes you might favor in your timelines might have done to earn Irish loyalty?

With much earlier PODs I've seen it done in alternate history; Stirling and Gibson's Difference Engine have the Radical Lords acting with dispatch to mitigate the Famine and winning deep and long-lasting loyalty from the Irish with that; similarly Thande in Look To the West has the otherwise quite reactionary figure of his early Churchill (a sort of alternate grand-uncle of OTLs, more than a century early) reacting to an earlier version of the Potato Famine with similar humanity and with good results, as one might expect. 1918 may be too late but I doubt 1900 has to be; with decent policy in place before the War the Irish might be far less restive during it and if good policy continues after, cemented into the UK at last for good.

Provided they are respected as people.

Is that a strange idea?:confused:
 

abc123

Banned
I personally think maybe the world would be a better place if Ireland had stayed in the UK: provided that a solid majority of Irish, of all denominations, had decided it was in their rational interest to stay British subjects. In other words, I think a good question to ask is, how could British policy have defused the separatist tendency among the Irish, and the answer to that is clearly to address the grievances the Irish had and give them a positive stake in the kingdom.

It may well be that after WWI was far too late for that. But when you ask:




And then in response to a perfectly reasonable outline of just how violent British repression would have to be to achieve the end, you say:



I really have to wonder if you think the British were capable of seeing the Irish as people like yourself, with as much right to consideration as they had. If not, why the heck should Britain continue to rule Ireland?

Frankly given the long legacy of bad blood between the nations, which from my American perspective looks a lot like centuries of British policymakers running roughshod over elementary human decency in their selfish interests, I think the current separation of the nations is probably the most decent solution possible. I actually think a more decent solution would have been for all of Ireland to separate as a Republic, and for the slim Protestant majority in Ulster to either accommodate themselves (the fate of the southern Protestants suggests they would not have done badly at all) or leave for Britain or other places if they just couldn't stomach living in a majority Catholic Irish nation. But among people of good will, peace is possible between the Irish and Britain and someone fishing for answers of how much repression would have been tolerable strikes me as one of the stumbling blocks to such peace.

Well this is AH, and people in general (including Americans, and also the leftists I like) have a long history of expedient brutality and it is legitimate to ask how that could have gone.

But have you considered seriously how to get a peaceful, lawful, legitimate result on the lines you would like to see? Or is an "acceptable" level of brutality part of the project? What is this, a project to see how much like the Fascists the British could be?

I'm quite an Anglophile by inclination, and when I first heard of Irishmen referring to Britain as the "enemy of mankind" I thought they were just freely indulging Hibernian hyperbole. But then I looked at a map of the Empire at its peak and looked into the history of just how much violence was needed to draw those broad red borders. And I'd like to take refuge in the idea that at least the British tried to be decent sometimes, and here you are asking how much violence is acceptable?

1918 may well be too late for anything but as amicable a divorce as possible. Possibly if the British authorities had been more graceful even at that late date, they might have prevented some of Churchill's later WWII legitimate grievances about Eire denying the British military the use of Irish bases in combating the U-boat menace during the Battle of the Atlantic. Of course doing any such thing would have been tantamount to declaration of war on Germany, not that I think that would have been a bad thing for the Irish to choose--freely. Had the British been more accommodating sooner, Ireland at that point would still have been at least somewhat within the UK/Commonwealth/Empire framework and could have plausibly shrugged off limited British use of Irish soil for Empire defense as part of their obligation and argued their independence in other spheres. Actually I think the rigorous official adherence to neutrality during the second war was largely the result of Britain having made herself unnecessarily obnoxious to the Irish and had the separation been more amicable, voluntarily joining the Alliance might have been in the cards--at least with American good offices helping to broker the deal after the USA declared war itself. Churchill had reason to bemoan the Irish intransigence, but people like him were I think in large part the cause of it. OTL, despite the official government position of neutrality, large numbers of Irish Republic citizens volunteered to serve in the British forces as individuals, so I don't think the Irish had any actual sympathy for the Axis.

(Vice versa, if we have a reactionary Britain indulging in whatever level of bloodshed and terror might realistically have been needed to cow the Irish without any concession to their legitimate interests as equal subjects, that might have been a severe stumbling block for an Anglo-American alliance during WWII. I suppose that American interests might have overridden sympathy for Ireland, but a politician like FDR surely would have paid a lot of attention to Americans who took that matter very seriously. A proposal he might have made might have been, upon our entry into the war, for Americans to take over the task of "pacifying" Ireland and to do it by promising them an independent Republic upon the conclusion of the Allied victory--so all the bloodshed and terror ends in an independent and resentful Ireland anyway. Should Britain really refuse American aid at a juncture like that just to keep possession of an island that wants them gone? Or if Americans swallow the British crochet of hostile rule of Ireland at all costs, and somehow the Alliance wins anyway, it would remain a bone of contention between the allies. I'm not totally naive about Stalin but I recognize it was wise for the Western Allies to be on their guard (not to turn it into the crusade it became OTL to be sure!) against their erstwhile ally--should Britain face the Red Army across a devastated Europe alone, with a rebellious Ireland at her back? Surely OTL's solution is better than that! A loyal Ireland actively participating in the affairs of the UK strikes me as better yet--so why not?)

A positive inducement to sufficient numbers of Irish, and a scrupulous adherence to rule of law while firmly pursuing the remnant rebels and avoiding making martyrs of them by treating them correctly according to fair laws (the kind the British public would tolerate over themselves, not just specially imposed on the Irish others) might have swung Irish consent to remain in union. I don't know why you balk at Dominion status, which surely served Britain well in her hour of need when Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, and South Africans came to her aid--why not the Irish too? But I daresay a decent enough British policy might have even kept Ireland within the UK itself--had the Irish good reason to think that henceforth they would be treated as equal subjects of the Kingdom.

Frankly this might have taken a left-wing political victory in the context of the post-war, 1920s, and 30's periods. I can see decisive numbers of Irish forbearing to rebel to wait and see what a Labour government (which would have been largely beholden to Irish votes in Britain, and might have strategically won over a sufficient degree of support from the Irish, assuming they got equal votes in Parliament, which for me is a minimum condition of "equality") might do for them; this might buy time for things to cool off, especially if the Labourites actually delivered on substantial matters.

I really don't know enough of the detailed politics of Britain in that period; I'm sure many here would dismiss the bare possibility of a Labour victory that early and predict very grim consequences if it by some miracle did happen. I notice that the Tories held power throughout the Depression and suppose that must be because they were able to deliver enough consideration of the hardest needs of the working poor that they didn't alienate them completely at the polls; why couldn't they have the same consideration for the Irish? 1918 might be far too late for them to persuade the Irish to wait another few years after waiting in vain for centuries for favorable consideration from the British conservatives! But deeds might have let centuries of abuse fall into shadow if they were were fair and bright enough.

So have you considered what good deeds the sorts of British regimes you might favor in your timelines might have done to earn Irish loyalty?

With much earlier PODs I've seen it done in alternate history; Stirling and Gibson's Difference Engine have the Radical Lords acting with dispatch to mitigate the Famine and winning deep and long-lasting loyalty from the Irish with that; similarly Thande in Look To the West has the otherwise quite reactionary figure of his early Churchill (a sort of alternate grand-uncle of OTLs, more than a century early) reacting to an earlier version of the Potato Famine with similar humanity and with good results, as one might expect. 1918 may be too late but I doubt 1900 has to be; with decent policy in place before the War the Irish might be far less restive during it and if good policy continues after, cemented into the UK at last for good.

Provided they are respected as people.

Is that a strange idea?:confused:

Look my friend, I'm not a Irish nor a Briton. As you maybe noticed, English isn't even my native language. So I don't have ANY reason whatsoever to hate or to love Ireland or UK.
It's a all the same for me weather Ireland will be a Republic, dominion, part of UK or whatever suits them...

I don't have any interest about that- except purely academic.

And I agree with you that Britain did treat Ireland wrong allmost all of her history. And I agree that Britain should introduce Home Rule much more early than OTL.

And my question about level of violence that Britain can apply in Ireland isn't some bloodthirsty hate against of Irish, it's actually a question how much violence can modern liberal democratic country use against of it's own citisens ( not colonial subjects ) and remain more-less liberal democracy?

And I asked about violence because I agree with your judgement that after 1918. any ( only ) political solution is not enough to keep Ireland in UK.
Military/police force will be needed to accomplish that. Obviously in a greater level than OTL. Or to be more persistent.

Just a discussion about that- nothing more. No need for anger.;)
 
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I'm sorry, but Irish politics is a very complex business, way more complex than you imagine. There are not now, and never were, any simple solutions.

A few points:

  • Nationalists and protestants were not synonymous. Historically, many nationalist leaders were protestants.
  • Unionists were very far from restricted to Ulster, although clearly there were a lot of unionists in the Belfast and Dublin areas and very few in Cork.
  • The idea that unionists were going to 'accommodate themselves' to an Irish republic is about as likely as Israelis 'accommodating themselves' to becoming part of Palestine.
  • Similarly the idea that a quarter of the population of Ireland could just leave is ridiculous.
  • There were atrocities on both sides (not that I condone any of them).
  • A lot of the atrocity stories are propaganda (on both sides).
  • As I pointed out, physical force republicanism as represented by the Irish Volunteers was a tiny minority of the population. IMO Home rule would have killed republicanism stone dead.
  • The Irish Free State was a dominion. The 1936 constitution removed many of the king's powers, but the British king was still responsible for external relations. The Republic of Eire constitution that finally transferred this role to the Irish president came into force in 1949.
  • The Americans made multiple offers to De Valera to try and tempt Ireland into WW2, some of them similar to the ones you suggest.
  • Churchill twice offered Northern Ireland to De Valera in return for joining in WW2. He was rebuffed both times.
And just to say, I've lived in Britain and Ireland, and discussed these events with passionate but, frankly, ill-informed people from both sides many times, and atrocity stories seem to be a favourite of both sides.

Personally I just hope this conflict is finally behind us.
 
Might be easier to do with an earlier changepoint. (By the way, is that what a POD/POB is?) I'd go back a few decades and let the Prince of Wales be regent-in-residence or governor-general or somesuch during Queen Victoria's reign. Post - WWI, don't know, beyond treating the Irish people with more decency, guaranteeing human rights & home rule, and quietly arresting certain political leaders before they can riot and revolt.

Good luck.
 

abc123

Banned
Might be easier to do with an earlier changepoint. (By the way, is that what a POD/POB is?) I'd go back a few decades and let the Prince of Wales be regent-in-residence or governor-general or somesuch during Queen Victoria's reign. Post - WWI, don't know, beyond treating the Irish people with more decency, guaranteeing human rights & home rule, and quietly arresting certain political leaders before they can riot and revolt.

Good luck.

I know that it would be easier with POD in 1880s or so, but that's not the point.
Anyone can make alt-hist with POD in 1840s or 1880s...
I want way to defeat Irish rebellion and implement "Fourth Home Rule Act" with POD no later than 1918.;)
 

Thande

Donor
Either this or a really fast victory, saving a lot of moderates and pro British lifes would help. But I think is a bit difficult by then ...

EDIT: But a fast end of the war without its horrors guarantee another war even faster than OTL IMHO

No. The intervention of WW1 stopped Irish Home Rule OTL. It's almost inevitable to go through sometime in the years 1914-18 without the war. By 1914 it was obvious to nearly everyone that the status quo could not continue; the only question was by what means Ireland would be given Home Rule, whether Ulster would be included or separate, what the definition of 'Ulster' was, etc.
 
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