Ten days after the burning of Cork New York City Council considered conferring the freedom of the city on the widow of the murdered Lord Mayor of Cork, Terence McSwiney, and it also adopted a resolution which read as follows:
To make the world safe for democracy and to establish the principle of self-determination for the people of all nations, eloquently proclaimed by the President of the United Sates on our entrance into the World War, were the purposes for which this government entered into that agonizing conflict.
The world has seen some startling exhibitions of hypocrisy’s masquerade in the guise of civilized government culminating in the destruction of the business section of Cork City by the black and tan military forces of a gunman administration, because the people of that city would not repudiate the principles for which McSwiney laid down his life and for which the colonists of North America struggled successfully in the Revolutionary War against a despotic power.
Neither the sinister influence of diplomatic intrigue, the enervations of refinement resulting from the bloated accumulations of blood-stained war wealth, the lie ‘agreed on’ by a prostituted portion of a ‘kept press’, nor the insolent propaganda of monarchical subjects, either here or abroad, will ever drive these sublime purposes from the minds and hearts of American citizens.
Although the fight for Irish independence began with a revolution in 1916, in a series of four general and local elections between 1918 and 1921, the people of Ireland repeatedly voted in favour of the republic that was first proclaimed by the Easter Rebels on the steps of the GPO in 1916. See the following links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_local_elections,_1920
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_elections,_1921
The British response throughout this period was to wage a war of terror on the Irish people using DORA, the Defence of the Realm Act (1914), and the Restoration of Order in Ireland Act (1920). Democratically elected public representatives went on the run, lord mayors and aldermen were imprisoned or killed, town halls were repeatedly burnt to the ground, municipal records were destroyed, town centres were sacked and looted, and the people and their property had no rights to safety or protection. The burning of Cork was not an isolated incidence where Crown forces ran amok:
The town of Fermoy was sacked twice by British troops from the local Victoria Barracks in September and again in November 1919. That was over a year before the burning of Cork and long before the Black and Tans or the Auxiliaries were ever even established and sent to Ireland. The town of Thurles was shot up in January and in March 1920. In the summer of 1920 the town halls of numerous Irish towns were burned down, e.g. Thurles, Tuam and Trim. All of the municipal records of Trim were lost. And these examples can be replicated over and over again in the Ireland of the period.
At the same time, while these events were going on in Irish towns and villages, the British prime minister Lloyd George acknowledged the fact that the Irish people had democratically chosen full independence. In a speech he gave in Porthmadog, Wales in June 1920 he said:
Two-thirds of the population of Ireland demand the setting up of an independent Republic in that island. At a recent election they re-affirmed that demand. Every effort I have made, publicly and otherwise, to secure a modification of that demand has failed. They have emphatically stated they will agree to nothing less. [Lloyd George, 25 June 1920]
A month later he invited De Valera, President of the Irish Republic, to negotiate terms and '
explore the possibility of a settlement'. Dev had already been arrested days earlier by the military but was released by the authorities in anticipation of this invitation.
Happy New Year everyone. May it be a healthy and prosperous one for all.
