Hannah Carey, a 48 year old waitress in Killarney, was killed by a shot fired from a Royal Irish Constabulary truck. She was likely not a victim of murder, but of an accident, as the RIC was reacting to an IRA attack upon a British Army unit just minutes prior.
She was the last causality of the Anglo Irish War.
On this day in 1921 the Anglo Irish War came to an end under an agreement between the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and the President of the putative Irish Republic. The agreement had not only included an agreement to end the fighting, but also to engage in talks that would obviously outline the formalities, and there were indeed many to work out, of the existence between the two countries. The Irish delegation would leave for London on July 12, the following day.
The history of the English presence in Ireland is a complicated and not really subject to easy summation. England was a more powerful nation, comparatively, to Ireland dating back to the early days of the English kingdoms and as England's rule began to consolidate in a single king, that king often made claims of authority over Ireland even though they really were incapable of being enforced.
In 1169 the Normans, who were then into a century of their rule over England, having conquered the English thrown in 1066, invaded Ireland. The invasion started in the form of an Anglo Norman mercenary intervention on behalf of one of the Irish kings but grew in scale until the English crown intervened against both the Irish kings and the Anglo Norman mercenaries. The Crown then preceded over a period of years to consolidate its power in Ireland.
It is therefore commonly claimed that the Anglo Norman Invasion brought about "800 years of English rule" but it is not really true. Even after the invasion, direct English rule was somewhat weak and grew weaker. The Anglo Normans assimilated surprisingly rapidly and by the 15th Century English rule was mostly titular with Ireland ruled by its own parliament and the Crown largely ignored.
The Reformation, however, rapidly changes this and in 1542 King Henry VIII, not content with all of the other destructive things he was doing, proclaimed himself the King of Ireland. This was backed up by English military might and the contest took on a religious aspect given the English separation from Rome. Indeed, the British effectively chose to fight out some of their contests for power on Irish ground. Real British rule in Ireland, therefore, really dates to 1542.
In 1801 Parliament consolidate the rule with an Act of Union, making Ireland part of the United Kingdom. This was a political development that had been ongoing in Great Britain and had already brought about the union between Scotland and Wales that still exists. This union was more problematic in Ireland, however, given that Ireland's population was overwhelmingly Catholic and Catholics were repressed in the United Kingdom. The union was never really accepted by the Irish and a series of moves towards regaining independence occurred in following years.
Prior to World War One a strong move towards "home rule", which would have essentially granted Ireland regained independence in association with the Crown, leaving the British Parliament with authority on foreign policy, gained grown. These moves were strongly supported and strongly opposed. They were gaining enough strength prior to the Great War that, had the war not broken out, Ireland would have obtained home rule prior to 1920, and the following Irish history would likely have developed differently.
As it was, moves towards an open civil war were already afoot prior to World War One and indeed they caused an infamous mutiny within the ranks of the British Army in Ireland which looked as if it would oppose any sort of Irish political freedom. The British were still dealing with the aftermath of this mutiny when the Great War broke out, and the war quickly set all of these issues aside.
As we've been dealing here, the one group that didn't put them aside were Irish republicans, which struck during the late stages of the war itself in open rebellion. This move was very unpopular inside of Ireland whose sons were fighting in France, but it did gain international attention. At the same time, the republicans took the wise course of action of forming their own putative representative government, setting up rival institutions to the official British ones where they could, and declaring themselves to be the legitimate government of the nation.
Following the Great War the British government was wise enough to see the handwriting on the wall, even though surrendering one of the major portions of the United Kingdom was a gigantic concession. To some degree, much of recent UK history has stemmed from this, as the UK has slowly devolved rule to the other nations that remain in the United Kingdom.
This was of interest, to say the least, to the Irish American community in the United States. An article on how this was reported on can be read here:
American reporting of truce in Ireland, July 1921
Former President and current Supreme Court Justice William Howards Taft was sworn in as the Chief Justice.
On the same day, President Harding signed a new Naval Appropriations bill that reduced spending for the Navy by $80,000,000 for the upcoming year.
In fairness, the US was still winding down from World War One and now had a gigantic surplus of ships. The American people, for their part, were growing into disillusionment about their recent role in the Great War and the thesis that it was all a big plot by industrialist was starting to gain steam.
Perhaps related, or not, the Young People's Society of Christian Endeavor concluded a meeting with a call for global disarmament by 1923.
The Bogd Khan was restored to titular head of Mongolia by Mongolian revolutionaries.
He was a Buddhist monk whose claim to power, or perhaps burden of it, was similar to that of the Dali Lama's and in fact he'd been born in Tibet and proclaimed the Bogd Khan in the presence of the Dali Lama and the Panchen Lama. He had ruled the country as its theocratic head since the onset of the Chinese revolution in 1911, but his powers were limited due to his religious position. During his first reign he'd been the subject of a propaganda campaign lead by the Chinese who wished to remove him and install a communist government.
In 1919 he was removed by the Chinese government as the crisis on the border with the infant Soviet Union developed. Showing his position in the country's people, he was reinstalled, ironically, by the communist revolutionaries on this day in 1921 and would retain his position, being the last to occupy it, until his death in 1924.
