You will prepare and submit a term paper on Political Conditions of Modern Ireland. Your paper should be a minimum of 1250 words in length. The study of Smith (1997, 7) showed that “the history of British involvement in Irish affairs is seen in terms of Britain’s attempts to use its power systematically to drain Ireland of its human and material resources through underdevelopment, restricted markets, famine and emigration, and the imposition of alien institutions”. The above ‘strategy’ followed by Britain had as the main target the occupation of Ireland in order to use it for governmental plans in all industrial areas. However, it has been noticed that this behaviour of British troops led in fact to the opposite result, i.e. the improvement of relationships between these two countries that are sharing many common political and social structures.

On the other hand, the political conditions in Ireland were extremely unstable, a situation that could perhaps ‘favour’ the appearance of other political powers who want to establish their authority in Ireland. In this context, the republicanism that characterizes the country’s central political power, led gradually to the appearance and the development of a series of rebellions (referring in the past), the most significant of which seems to be the following ones: the revolts of the United Irishmen in 1798, the Young Irelanders in 1848, the Fenians in 1867 and, most importantly, the Easter rising of 1916 (Smith, 1997, 26). The above political ‘wave’ helped towards the independence of Ireland from England. For this issue, Wolfe Tone,” one of the figures in the rebellion of the United Irishmen in 1798 and hailed in the modern era as the founding father of the republican tradition, declared: ‘from my earliest youth I have regarded the connection between Ireland and England as the curse of the Irish nation.”

Furthermore, in order to understand the development of the rebellion of 1798 we should primarily refer to the major characteristics of this rebellion – at least at its primary stages.