An Léigear/The Siege 1922 Fastnet Films, TG4, 23 October 2013 Witnesses to war RTÉ1, 12 November 2013 TG4, it is fair to say, is now the home of the Irish documentary on TV. A couple of years ago we reviewed An Conradh/The Treaty (HI 20.2, March/April 2012), produced by Fastnet Films and directed by Andrew … Read more
The British government in Ireland, in their desperation to resolve ‘the Irish question’, ceded something they have yet to allow their own people—land reform; in the process, explains Fiona Fitzsimons, they created an institution whose records are an untapped resource for historians and genealogists. In 1881 the Irish Land Commission was founded to establish fair … Read more
Colonial counterinsurgency was generally practised at some distance from democratic oversight in London or Paris, usually against non-whites, and was serviced by compliant and self-censoring journalists. Yet such coercion against anti-colonialist resistance movements had proven consistently ineffective in halting British and French imperial decline. A British journalist once said that for some in the British … Read more
The British Army was historically a counterinsurgency army with a colonial policing mind-set oriented to supporting covert operations. Its deployment in Northern Ireland should be understood in this context. Arguably, decades of colonial policing left the British and French unprepared for conventional warfare in World War II. The British military was at the messiest interface … Read more
Recent developments have focused attention on the nature of British counterinsurgency as ‘dirty war’, not only in Northern Ireland but also in several other anti-colonial struggles after World War II. In 2012 the British high court found that British troops perpetrated the Batang Kali massacre in Malaya in 1948. In 2013 Britain’s foreign secretary, William … Read more