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Accounting for the emergence of violent activism among Irish revolutionaries, 1916–21

Why certain Irishmen came to use violence to obtain their political objectives during the Anglo-Irish War of 1919–21 has proved a difficult question. A number of local studies of the experience of volunteers, following the example of David Fitzpatrick, have provided insights into the process of radicalisation but have not dealt with this aspect of the subject explicitly. A more systematic approach has been taken in the attempt to explain the strong variations in the intensity of activity throughout the country. What caused these variations has indeed been a matter of contention ever since the Anglo-Irish War itself. Michael Collins often voiced complaints about ‘slack’ areas in language that left little to the imagination. Since the publication of Erhard Rumpf’s Nationalismus und Sozialismus in Irland in 1959 historians have sought to explain the unequal distribution of violence by comparing the level of I.R.A. activity in a particular county with certain geographically distributed social and economic variables. Hitherto these attempts have been unable to produce a full explanation for regional variations.