Product Description

The Anglo-Irish War has often been referred to as the war 'the English have struggled to forget and the Irish cannot help but remember'. Before 1919, the issue of Irish Home Rule lurked beneath the surface of Anglo-Irish relations for many years, but after the Great War, tensions rose up and boiled over. Irish Nationalists in the shape of Sinn Fein and the IRA took political power in 1919 with a manifesto to claim Ireland back from an English 'foreign' government by whatever means necessary. This book explores the conflict and the years that preceded it, examining such historic events as the Easter Rising and the infamous Bloody Sunday.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #114273 in Books
• Published on: 2006-03-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 96 pages

Customer Reviews

A Good Primer
I was pleasantly surprised by this book. I had not expected that a book of less than 100 pages with many photos was going to do much more than skim over the subject and rehash conventional wisdom. Actually the author does a good job, especially in placing the war in the context of the other issues with which the British Government was grappling over the period. It is understandable that, to many Irish observers and authors, this struggle was central but quite clearly it had only the fitful attention of the British, whether that was the army, government or public. The author gives short shrift to many republican cause celebres and demonstrates that as in many guerilla wars the IRA was well ahead of contemporary opinion and was not the nationwide threat that it claimed to be. It was much assisted by the ad hoc and generally inept conduct of affairs from the British side, both political and military. The British may never been in any serious danger of being thrown out by force of arms but they clearly lost the propaganda war and the battle for the hearts and minds of the populace. In the end the political price of continued repression became too high and Lloys George, true to his instincts, cut a deal. That may have solved the problem temporarily but its consequences unfolded over the years to come beginning with the essentially pointless civil war that crippled Ireland's early development as a quasi indepependent entity.

The author, as a serving British officer, is clearly writing from a British perspective but as that is comparatively rare it is to be welcomed. I have some niggling criticsms. The Osprey format for this series tries to be too ambitious and by chopping up the text into sunject areas the chronology is disrupted leading to repetition and for anyone without much other knowledge of the subject I imagine a degree of confusion. I also think some of the photo captions are wrong or certainly misleading and there are a few mistakes in the text. That said the book reads well and makes a good introduction to the subject.