collins et al forced the british to compromise, by making the status quo cost too much, so did pira in the 80s/90's. cease fire presented as victory.
just my 2 ps worth but you seem to have taken aboard the official Irish self justification for various status quos .
In reality what Collins got was essentially partitioned home rule , which far from being a british compromise was what they had intended all along , and what they had attempted to introduce repeatedly but republicans rejected and abstained from years prior to the treaty talks .( the immediate purpose of the 1916 uprising was to ensure Home rule would never be implemented or accepted) .
Britian knew the westminster status quo could not be maintained well prior to 1916 , much less 1922 , and partioned home rule was on the cards for as soon as the war was over . However the massive rise in radical and seperatist politics post 1916 was a momentum partioned home rule they and their nationalist and unionist allies had great difficulty in containing . Not least because within a year or 2 Redmonds massive electoral majority had been wiped out along with most of his party . Britian had no safe pair of nationalist hands to hand over to anymore . So they simply had to find another one to implement what theyd already agreed .
What Collins had supposedly acheived could have been achieved without firing a shot .
Fast forward to the 1990s and we see a very similar scenario .
Since the early 1970s Britians military bods had told their government there couldnt be a solely military solution . That the restoration of law and order, restoration of devolved government and an end to insurgency could only come about through a political formula alongside a security policy with that aim at its core . That determined their objectives as Ulsterisation , normalisation and criminalisation of resistance . Various attempts at powersharing were a waste of time as the republicans couldnt and wouldnt be brought into that process . The attempts to criminalise republicans foundered in the H Blocks , specifically built to facilitate the political process .
Adams, Mcguiness et al however agree in secret to be co-opted into such a process , eventually signing up to the Hume Adams agreement - something their own supporters are still not allowed read to this day despite it being immediately presented to the British and Irish governments.
Culminating in a return to power sharing at Stormont , British rule ,Diplock courts , jails , legislation and security forces being accepted as legitmate , any republican political challenge to the legitmacy of British rule and partition jettisoned , along with the legitmacy of their own republican position - precisely what 10 hungerstrikers had died for in an attempt to uphold .
What Adams got wasnt a compromise but what the British side had been offering since sunningdale at least ..in fact a bit less than that . Again it could all have been achieved without firing a shot and it was what Britian had always wanted all along . Yet again thanks to republican leaders with strangely charmed lives, like collins, somewhere along the line British objectives suddenly turned into supposedly republican ones . As they did in 1922 .
i've seen more than a few comparisons between the deaths of the hunger strikers and the leaders of the rising. regardless of the facts, that makes a good take to tell.
well I think in a strictly political sense there are very strong comparisons . In both instances the political stand they took was to ensure that forms of devolved British rule which envisaged that rule being administered by constituional nationalists , and therefore Britian claiming that its rule in Ireland was non contested and therefore fully legitmate, could not be implemented . Even if that stand was at the almost certain cost oftheir lives .
In both instances they were holding up and defending the position that Irish nationhood and Irish sovereignty , full seperation from colonial rule , was the legitimate position and British rule in any form an occupation and wholly illegitimate . Polarising the politics in Ireland and radicalising them, as opposed to nationalist leaders arriving at an implementation of non contested foreign rule.
However sinn fein today would have you believe they starved themselves to death to get Sinn Fein votes , and even kick start the "peace process" as more than a few of their bright sparks have suggested . A more banal exercise in outright revisionism Ive never heard in my life . However just like the I Ran Away graffitti its been accepted as political fact and loads of people readily believe it.
