DAVE MANS6LL expressed so vaguely as to be indecipherable. The rising !asted for a week and then the rebels surrendered. In a mood of exasperation with the Irish when the war effort was going so badly the British political leaders allowed a "military solution" of the insurrection which meant execution of the leaders after summary trials and internment of hundreds of their supporters. The executions caused a revulsion against the British, and turned the rebels into martyrs. This turn of feeling sank the Irish parliamentary party as the vehicle of nationalism in the South, and curiously threw up Sinn Fein as an alternative to it; curiously because Arthur Griffith had left the I.R.B. before the uprising, and because the proclamation of the Republic had contained nothing even approximating to his economic programme. The main reason for the rise of Sinn Fein was because uninformed journalists had linked the name of Griffith' s party to the rising due to erroneous British government handouts. Needless to say, all the separatist politicians now flowed into the Sinn Fein Party especially when it started winning parliamentary by-elections against the Irish parliamentary party. THE TROUBLES From the time of the Rising until the end of the world war Ireland was generally quiet. The rising itself and the fact that prominent Irish unionists like Carson had participated in the coalition war cabinet had ensured that part at least of Ulster would be excluded from a Home Rule Ireland: the main problems for the English politicians were how this could be done peacefully, and for the Ulster politicians which parts of the province would have to be "sacrificed" to make the province a viable unit, since in its present condition there was only a small overall Protestant majority. The English politicians still imagined that the leaders of the Irish parliamentary party were still representative of opinion in the Catholic south, and continued to negotiate with them until they were swept out of power in the first post-war British general election. The majority of the M.P.s (outside Ulster where Unionists and Nationalists were still the two major parties) elected to Irish seats went under the title of Sinn Fein, and under the leadership of E. De Valera (the only surviving leader of the 1916 rising he had been saved from execution because of his American citizenship and the need 50
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