Word: dubliner
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Fiery Words. By 1700, Irish Catholics owned only one-seventh of the land. The Penal Laws?enacted by a Protestant Parliament in Dublin ?turned the warrior race into virtual slaves. Catholics were excluded from political life, forbidden to have their own schools and could not buy back land from Protestants, some of whom were sympathetic to their plight. In 1791, Wolfe Tone, a Dublin Protestant, formed a Society of United Irishmen, whose members swore "never to desist in our efforts until we have subverted the authority of England over our country and asserted our independence." His movement failed...
...political party called the Sinn Fein (Ourselves Alone). Eight years later, some of its members helped form the rebel militia that eventually became known as the Irish Republican Army. On Easter Monday, 1916, the poet Padraic Pearse, one of the founding heroes of the I.R.A., stood in front of Dublin's General Post Office and read out a proclamation declaring Ireland a republic. The Easter Rebellion was easily crushed. The British executed 15 of its leaders, including Pearse; about 3,500 men and 79 women were placed under arrest...
...following year, as the attacks increased, the Tans retaliated. On Nov. 1, 1920, Kevin Barry, an 18-year-old medical student and I.R.A. volunteer, was hanged for his role in a Dublin raid. The Tans burned Catholic homes and even fired into a crowd at a football game, killing twelve and wounding 60. Nothing deterred the gunmen, who pulled off their most spectacular raid on May 25, 1921. The I.R.A.'s Dublin Brigade burned down the custom house, the seat of nine British administrative departments and the local government board...
...fact, it nearly was. When remnants of the army gathered at Bodenstown in 1949 for their annual ceremonies honoring Wolfe Tone, the Dublin Brigade, supposedly the strongest unit in Ireland, had barely 40 men on its roster. Political events of 1949 gave the I.R.A. a new life. In that year, the government in Dublin proclaimed the old Irish Free State a republic and took it out of the Commonwealth. Britain's Parliament promptly passed the Ireland Act, which has ever since been the mainstay of Protestant determination to maintain the ties with London. Under the act, Ulster remains a British...
...Provos do not expect to win the war in conventional military terms. Their strategy is to make the crisis so costly that the British government will be forced into direct rule, thus bringing about a London-Dublin confrontation over Ulster. Army officials believe that terrorism has shocked the British into rethinking their attitudes and that this has brought unification nearer. If this is so, the gamble on the gun may well succeed...