An Treaty 1921

[Denn Forever]

Thank god for iplayer.  On Wednesday on TG4 at 9.30. 

Set against the backdrop of the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in early December 1921, An Treaty, follows the key players over a seventy-two hour period as they contemplated and agonised over the signing of the agreement that would change Irish history for ever

[thejuice]

Why not "An Conradh"?

[orangeman]

90th anniversary on the day of the budget, one of the most austere if not the most austere in history.

Ironic.

[Tonto]

Thank god for iplayer.  On Wednesday on TG4 at 9.30. 

Set against the backdrop of the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in early December 1921, An Treaty, follows the key players over a seventy-two hour period as they contemplated and agonised over the signing of the agreement that would change Irish history for ever

This might be a daft question, but forgive me, I'm not a regular viewer of TG4... do you know if the programme is in Irish with English subtitles or English with Irish subtitles?  Or just Irish language?

[trileacman]

Thank god for iplayer.  On Wednesday on TG4 at 9.30. 

Set against the backdrop of the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in early December 1921, An Treaty, follows the key players over a seventy-two hour period as they contemplated and agonised over the signing of the agreement that would change Irish history for ever

This might be a daft question, but forgive me, I'm not a regular viewer of TG4... do you know if the programme is in Irish with English subtitles or English with Irish subtitles?  Or just Irish language?

Irish with subtitles usually.

[Tonto]

Thank god for iplayer.  On Wednesday on TG4 at 9.30. 

Set against the backdrop of the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in early December 1921, An Treaty, follows the key players over a seventy-two hour period as they contemplated and agonised over the signing of the agreement that would change Irish history for ever

This might be a daft question, but forgive me, I'm not a regular viewer of TG4... do you know if the programme is in Irish with English subtitles or English with Irish subtitles?  Or just Irish language?

Irish with subtitles usually.

Thanks. I guessed so from the title and the synopsis on Sky.  Will have a wee nosey.

[Main Street]

I still haven't made my mind up on the treaty. Dev's role was perplexing.

Considering that partition was already an agreed plan and dominion status pretty much accepted by Llyod George, what did the war of independence achieve in the terms of the Treaty, more than could have been achieved by 3 years of tea and parley?

[Evil Genius]

Some things never change, it seems:

"Historian Leland Lyons wrote a series of essays on the treaty to mark the 50th anniversary. With the Troubles in Northern Ireland as a backdrop, Lyons challenged 'republican apologists' who claimed public opinion was 'manufactured' in favour of the treaty in 1922, when candidates who supported the treaty received 78 per cent of first preference votes in that year's general election."
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2011/1203/1224308521806.html

[Main Street]

Dev did well off a sticky wicket in 1932 and got the new constitution approved by a small majority in 1937.
15 years is just a mere flicker in the movement of time in history.

[magpie seanie]

I still haven't made my mind up on the treaty. Dev's role was perplexing.

Considering that partition was already an agreed plan and dominion status pretty much accepted by Llyod George, what did the war of independence achieve in the terms of the Treaty, more than could have been achieved by 3 years of tea and parley?

I don't accept things were as cut and dried as that but in any case the British had made many promises in the past and not followed them through. Why did they fight back if they were going to give that to us anyway?

[Main Street]

I still haven't made my mind up on the treaty. Dev's role was perplexing.

Considering that partition was already an agreed plan and dominion status pretty much accepted by Llyod George, what did the war of independence achieve in the terms of the Treaty, more than could have been achieved by 3 years of tea and parley?

I don't accept things were as cut and dried as that but in any case the British had made many promises in the past and not followed them through. Why did they fight back if they were going to give that to us anyway?

What I wrote was a question not a statement that I believe in.
And it's a question that is applied to the recent republican insurgency from 1970- 1995 - what did it achieve that could not have been achieved by tea and parley?
My own position is that posing such a question implies an oversimplified analysis, a "cut and dried" overview.

I was reading through the Dail debates on the treaty
http://www.ucc.ie/celt/published/E900003-001/index.html
and De Valera's document 2
http://sarasmichaelcollinssite.com/mcdocumentno2.htm

But I have yet to determine where the core differences lay between the treaty and Dev's alternative document.
And also the connection from Dev's document 2 to the position of the anti-treaty Army command and rank & file.
And were the differences remotely enough to justify a split of such proportions that led to a brutal civil war?
I have yet to comprehend why both sides preferred to cement the split by a vote on ratification of the terms as existed  and hold elections, rather than chose a more unified approach of rejecting the terms and send the delegation back to renegotiate.
I see in the treaty debates, Dev accepted the requirement of the oath of allegiance, to roughly paraphrase -  that if he was leader he would regard it taking it as a means to get in, to enact the necessary changes that would serve the republican ideal.
Then we get to DeValera's role and why such a wily constitutionally astute character was not part of the Treaty negotiations? - considering he was already aware of what Lloyd George was prepared to put on the table.

[muppet]

The single greatest weapon we had and indeed still have, is the Famine.

In little over 5 years the richest Empire in history starved 13.5% of the citizens of it centre, the self-styled 'Great' Britain, to either death or emigration. This figure includes the 1 million Irish dead, the 1 million Irish forced to emigrate and the 1.5 million Scottish forced to emigrate because of famine. If you increase the time scale that figure rises even further. The starvation was caused by a combination of the Penal Laws, The Act of Union and most of all the Landlord system whereby the locals lost their land and had to pay their only income to high society in London.

There is and was no defending the British against their culpability for the famine. The British should have been humiliated out of the island.

Unfortunately fighting the British has been little more than the fish in the barrel making faces at the men with the guns. Militarily we never had a hope and the same applies today. If they came back they would crush us, militarily if not spiritually. Engaging them in war is, and always was, idiotic and only brought more misery on the ordinary Irish. It even allowed Unionists to claim the high moral ground despite their own shameful history on this island. The Palestinians make the same mistake today and I reckon Israel is quite happy to see them firing rockets every now and then.

While some of Israel's leaders are fall into the old 'military is the only way' trap, the rest of them have succeeded in making 'The Holocaust' the world greatest trump card. This still applies nearly 7 decades later. This is quite an achievement and couldn't have happened without a powerful lobby in the States. We are the only comparably powerful lobby in the States. Why have we failed to use the Famine to the same extent, even 15 decades later?

[Fear ón Srath Bán]

The single greatest weapon we had and indeed still have, is the Famine.

In little over 5 years the richest Empire in history starved 13.5% of the citizens of it centre, the self-styled 'Great' Britain, to either death or emigration. ...

The 'Great(er)' in Great Britain is a geographical distinction (with 'Lesser' Britain having been Brittany), and not an epithet of magnificence; not even they were so insufferably and imperially conceited, at least at that time they weren't. That's not to say, however, that 99.9% of the British population don't believe it to be the latter interpretation today.

[Main Street]

Engaging them in war is, and always was, idiotic and only brought more misery on the ordinary Irish.

Are you relating that to every insurgency including the War of Independence?
Can you offer some realistic method by which a people could rebel against imperialism?
Perhaps you have gained some opinions gained from Mohandas Gandhi school of propaganda, which fail to describe accurately just how much of a hypocrite that man was, both in his personal and social life. And not a mention of just how much the military insurgency in India led by Subash Chandra Bose made life impossible for the British Army occupation in India.

How do you imagine that we could have used the famine as weapon against occupation, like permanent victims?
In all imperialist occupation, the main tool used was to strip the natives of dignity, impose inferiority complex and a big player in that were the religious institutions.
The famine was a weapon that was used against the Irish. Not just the famine itself but the aftermath. In a single stroke, religious fundamentalism tightened its grip onto the Irish by imposition of an inferiority complex, that it was our fault because we were so thick. And in a stroke the Irish language was crushed because it was associated with that ignorance. And that association of gaelic language with ignorance  was so rooted into the psyche of irish people that it still persists in so called modern Ireland.
The roots of chronic inferiority were well settled by the Famine.
You had a situation in the mid 19c where the national school system was established and children were not allowed to speak gaelic.
The parents cooperated with this post famine, because education was seen as a way out of ignorance. They allowed their children to be beaten because being Irish was being thick and being thick was a problem.

[lawnseed]

Engaging them in war is, and always was, idiotic and only brought more misery on the ordinary Irish.

Are you relating that to every insurgency including the War of Independence?
Can you offer some realistic method by which a people could rebel against imperialism?
Perhaps you have gained some opinions gained from Mohandas Gandhi school of propaganda, which fail to describe accurately just how much of a hypocrite that man was, both in his personal and social life. And not a mention of just how much the military insurgency in India led by Subash Chandra Bose made life impossible for the British Army occupation in India.

How do you imagine that we could have used the famine as weapon against occupation, like permanent victims?
In all imperialist occupation, the main tool used was to strip the natives of dignity, impose inferiority complex and a big player in that were the religious institutions.
The famine was a weapon that was used against the Irish. Not just the famine itself but the aftermath. In a single stroke, religious fundamentalism tightened its grip onto the Irish by imposition of an inferiority complex, that it was our fault because we were so thick. And in a stroke the Irish language was crushed because it was associated with that ignorance. And that association of gaelic language with ignorance  was so rooted into the psyche of irish people that it still persists in so called modern Ireland.
The roots of chronic inferiority were well settled by the Famine.
You had a situation in the mid 19c where the national school system was established and children were not allowed to speak gaelic.
The parents cooperated with this post famine, because education was seen as a way out of ignorance. They allowed their children to be beaten because being Irish was being thick and being thick IS a problem.