Monday. June 11, 1921. The truce between Ireland and the United Kingdom ends the Anglo Irish War.

The flag of Ireland.

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.

Cooking Tech. How things have changed in the kitchen over the past two. . . or maybe three, centuries.

We've been taking a look at cooking and stoves here recently, getting back to more of the roots of this blog and its purpose.  

Frankly, we'd been remiss in doing that.  It's one of those areas that we should have explored, and in fact we did a little, but we didn't know, what we didn't know.  Or at least we didn't know it very well.

Back on August 8, 2009 (yes, this blog has been around that long, and actually as there's a prior variant of it, even longer than that), I posted an item here entitled The Speed of Cooking.  I'm resetting it out here:

The Speed of Cooking

I received an unexpected and surprising of how much things have changed even in my own lifetime this week, and in the kitchen at that.

Last week I happened to have to go to Safeway to buy some odds and ends, one of which was breakfast cereal. I'm bad about buying the same kinds again and again, so I decided to add some variety. It's been fall like here, so I decided to go with hot cereals for a change.

But not only did I decide to go with hot cereals, but I bought Cream of the West and Irish Oatmeal. That is, I did not buy instant Cream of Wheat, instant Oatmeal or quick oats.

Cream of the West is like old fashioned Cream of Wheat, except its whole wheat. Frankly, the taste is identical to "regular" Cream of Wheat. Irish Oatmeal, however, is really porridge, and it has to be cooked. It actually has to be cooked and allowed to stand, so it isn't speedy.

Anyhow, my kids have never had "regular" Cream of Wheat. They like "instant" Cream of Wheat, which has an odd texture and taste in my view. Sort of wall paper paste like. Anyhow, my son cooked some Cream of the West the first day I did, with us both using the microwave instructions.

He hated it. He's so acclimated to the pasty instant kind, he finds the cooked kind really bad.

Both kids found the porridge appalling. They're only familiar with instant oatmeal, and they porridge was not met with favor at all. I really liked it. It's a lot more favorable than even cooked oatmeal.

Anyhow, the point of all of this is that all this quick instant stuff is really recent, but we're really used to it. During the school year my wife makes sure the kids have a good breakfast every day, which she gets up and cooks for them. But it never really sank in for me how much our everyday cooking has benefited from "instant" and pre made. Even a thing like pancakes provides an example. My whole life if a person wanted pancakes, they had the benefit of mixes out of a box. More recently, for camping, there's a pre measured deal in a plastic bottle that I use, as you need only add water. A century ago, I suppose, you made the pancakes truly from scratch, which I'll bet hardly anyone does now.

A revolution in the kitchen.

Early posts here, as you can see, tended to be short.

Now, since that time I've also posted a major thread here on the revolution in the home, that became a revolution in the workplace, in the form of the advance of domestic machery;  That thread, which Iv'e linked into numerous others, is here:

Women in the Workplace: It was Maytag that took Rosie the Riveter out of the domestic arena, not World War Two

Post have grown in length, as you can also see.

Anyhow, given all of this, the ways that cooking has changed over what really amounts to a relatively short time frame should have occured to me.  And it sort of did, as I noted in this "Maytag" entry:

Today we have gas and electric stoves everywhere. But up to at least 1920, most people had wood or coal burning stoves for cooking.  They didn't heat the same way.  Cooking with a wood stove is slow.  It takes hours to cook anything with a wood stove, and those who typically cooked with them didn't cook with the same variety, or methods, we do now.  Boiling, the fastest method of food preparation, was popular.  People boiled everything.  Where we'd now roast a roast in the oven, a cook of that era would just as frequently boil it.  People boiled vegetables into oblivion.  My mother, who had learned to cook from her mother, who had learned how to cook in this era, used the boiling into oblivion method of cooking. She hated potatoes for this reason (I love them) but she'd invariable boil them into unrecognizable starch lumps.

Wood burning stove in Denver.  Typical pre 1920 stove.  Heck, typical pre 1930 stove.  Heck, typical pre 1940 stove.

Turn of century advertisement for stove polish.  Cleaning a wood burning stove would be no treat.

Even something as mundane as toast required more effort than it does not.  Toasters are an electric appliance that most homes have now, but they actually replaced a simple device.

 World War Two era propaganda photograph, trying to depict an inattentive woman letting toast burn, and therefore wasting resources.  Note how complicated this electric toaster is.

You'll still occasionally see old fashioned toasters in sheep and cattle camps, and probably elsewhere. They just hold the bread so that the toast can be toasted over a burner.  Pretty simple, and not much of a labor saving device, right? Well, consider the totality of it.  To toast you had to watch the toast, rather than just slip the bread down into the toaster.

For that matter, everything was relatively labor intensive save for boiling and roasting, which is probably why things tended to be boiled or roasted.

 Man cooking in a cow camp for cowboys.  He's using two cast iron dutch ovens (I still use one routinely) to cook over a fire.  This photo first appeared on this blog in 2009 in a very early entry on cooking changes.

Indeed, if you think of all the electric devices in your kitchen today, it's stunning.  Electric or gas stoves, electric blenders and mixers, microwaves, refrigerators.  Go back just a century and none of this would be in the average home.  And with the exception of canned goods, which dated back well into the 19th Century, nothing came in the form of prepared food either.  For that matter, even packaging was different at that time.  If you wanted steak for five, you went to the butcher, probably that day, and got steak for five.  If you wanted ground beef, you went to the butcher and got the quantity you wanted, and so on.

But nonetheless, it didn't really occur to me that the cast iron stoves of early 20th Century, and late 19th, were an innovation in and of themselves, nor did I really think much about what cooking was like before that.

The recent A Hundred Years Ago thread on igniting a coal stove caused me to ponder this and take a look at what that was somewhat like.

Somebody already has, of course, and in this very interesting Internet article:

Foodways in 1910

I just linked this in recently to another post here.  One of the things that's interesting to me about it, in an odd sort of way, is that its on a website that's sponsored by a woodburning cookstove manufacturer.  Frankly, looking into this pretty much convinces me that I want nothing to do with wood, or coal, burning stoves, but anyway.

It did not occur to me, as part of that cast iron stoves of all types are really a byproduct of the Industrial Revolution.  But of course, they'd have to be.  It's not like average people are going to cast their own stoves.  So how far back do they really go. Well, that article gives us a pretty good look at that, noting:.

Most American homes did not have stoves until well into the 19th century, so cooking was done in an open hearth, using heavy iron pots and pans suspended from iron hooks and bars or placed on three-legged trivets to lift them above the fires. Pots and pans were made mostly of heavy cast iron. Along with long-handled spatulas and spoons, most kitchens featured long-handled gridirons to broil meat and toasting forks to hold slices of bread.

Though some women used Dutch ovens and some had clay ovens built outside, until after the Civil War when stoves with ovens became more common, people ate pancakes more often than bread. Because bread was hard to bake at home, most towns had bakeries. Bread was often the only prepared food that could be bought in town

That's a different type of cooking entirely.

And a different style of eating, for that matter.

Or, for those who use a cast iron frying pan alot, maybe not.

Well, anyhow. . .

Because it isn't all that long ago, it's one that we know a fair amount about, historically, even if we don't think about it much.   And due to reenactors of one kind or another, and historical sites that are accurate, we also can observe ir or even experience it if we wish to.  And thanks to the excellent Townsends series of vlogs about the late 1700s in North America, we can view the topic if we wish to.  Indeed, they've done a comparison and contrast edition of Colonial v. Modern kitchens, which is well worth looking at:

The part of this that's the real shocker, in my view, is the heath.  I.e., fires on bricks right in a house.

It's another one of those things I never would have thought of.

The video mentions smoke, which must have been a constant feature of life before modern stoves.  I've already mentioned the smoke from wood and coal burning stoves, but smoke from a hearth would be right in the house.    Life must have been. . . smokey.

And more than a little dangerous.

Before we move on, on that, we'll have to note cast iron here.  I love cast iron and indeed one of the additional "pages" on this blog is devoted to it.

Cast iron has been around for a long time, of course, but I frankly don't really know how long.  I can find references to it in Asia going way, way back.  At least 2,000 years.  It shows up for the first time in English in 679, but that use didn't refer to a cooking vessel, but a vessel of another type.  By 1170, however, it was showing up in references to cooking vessels.  The Dutch Oven was actually patented in 1708, later than I would have thought, however. At any rate, they've been around for awhile, and in their modern form are highly associated with sand casting, something that was coming in during the 17th Century.

There was obviously cooking in vessels before cast iron, but as this isn't the complete history of cooking from antiquity until the present day.  For the history we're concerned with, cast iron was undoubtedly the default cookware.  Indeed, it's well worth noting that Dutch Ovens were one of the most popular trade items with Indian tribes.  People think of guns, but cast iron was really valuable and rapidly became the Indian cookware of choice once it was available.

Anyhow, the important thing here is up until the Industrial Revolution really took hold, people cooked with fire in ovens and on hearths.  The fuel source was, according to the Townsends, whom I trust to get it right, wood or sometimes charcoal.  That would impact the type of cooking you'd do, of course, but perhaps not quite as much as I imagined as cooking over wood or charcoal does leave you a lot of options.

Cast iron stoves seem to have come in during the 1830s, as industry began to really change the average American's daily life.  It would be a mistake to think, however, that everyone had them overnight. They were expensive and, frankly, wouldn't have fit the way the average person's house had been built at the time.  Still, they may have come in pretty rapidly.  Just imagine what a revolution in cooking and simply life they meant.  No more building fires on the floor, for one thing, and that's a pretty big thing.  A fire that was more reliable, contained, and safe is another.

By 1900 coal was the main fuel for stoves and every family had one.  That was a big change over a period of time of less than a century.  By 1930, however, gas was replacing coal as the fuel for stoves, and no wonder.  It was cleaner and it didn't involve the constant endless cleaning that a coal stove did.  And for the first time some sort of heavy smoke didn't have to be contended with.

It's really gas stoves that brought in modern cooking.  Gas sped up cooking, for one thing, and it sped up the decision making process for meals as well.  Without  having to bank the stove and build the fire, and all of that, cooking, which had been an all day process was reduced down to one that was much less time consuming.  Electric stoves, which started to come in about the same time, accomplished the same thing.  Still, during the 1940s 1/3 of Americans still cooked with coal or wood, probably a partial effect of the Great Depression which slowed the introduction of new technology.  

Now, of course, hardly anyone does.

July 25, 1920. Saladin, nous voici

Syrian volunteers uniformed and equipped in the fashion of the former Ottoman Army, 1920

On this day in 1920 the French, largely using native troops drawn from North Africa, officially entered Damascus and put an end to the Emir Feisal's independent Syrian government.  The French commander, Mariano Goybet, made the unfortunate reference to the Crusades on the occasion at the Umayyad Mosque when he declared, "Saladin, nous voici", which translates (at bit roughly), to "Saladin, we're back", or "Saladin, we're here."

Probably more fortunately most of the people in Damascus didn't speak French, but nonetheless the sentiment expressed the really aggressive and arrogant position taken by France in regard to Syria, which had only lately been freed from Ottoman rule by the Arab Army and the British Commonwealth during World War One.  The Arab Army's late war goal had been the occupation of Damascus.

Syria was then, as it is now, a multicultural nation which featured a variety of ethnicities and which retained a significant Christian population.  The reference to Saladin recalled the defeat of Christian forces at the hands of Saladin at the end of the Crusader era in the 1170s through 1190s.  France had at that time been heavily invested in the region and, in spite of the passage of centuries, that had not been forgotten by the French who regarded Syria as a special charge even if the Syrians did not want them back.

Feisal would flea to British protection and was given Iraq as a consolation prize, a kingdom that ultimately cost him his life.

Syria would remain a French mandate until 1946, with French rule being unpopular.  A long running revolt broke out in 1926 which ultimately lead to an effort to create an independent state by the French in 1936, but the French government did not ratify it.  The British supported Syrian independence following World War Two and a Syrian government formed during the mandate period took it into independence.   

Following Syrian governments have proven themselves to be unstable since that time, with coups taking place within a few years of independence.  The Ba'ath Party, an Arab nationalist fascist party, has been in power since 1961, but obviously its rule is far from unchallenged.

Syrian soldier in 2012.

What would have occurred had the French simply acquiesced to a Hashamite kingdom in 1920 remains a great historical, "what if".

The Turkish Spin and a proposal that will be ignored.

According to Turkey, it's invading northern Syria in order to allow 2,500,000 Syrian refugees to return home.

Saladin, the Kurd who conquered the Middle East (and who spent more time fighting fellow Muslims than he did Christians, although he certainly fought Christians too).  He lived in the last era in which things were on the downside for the Kurds, 800 years ago.

Hmmm . . . all for humanitarian reasons you see.

The endless spins that the current situation in Northern Syria creates are mind boggling.  We armed a Syrian rebel group composed of Kurdish militias to take on the Syrian government under the quixotic belief that disparate light infantry bands could take on a modern armored army back by the Russians without direct U.S. involvement.  That was naive in the extreme, and no less of military expert (and I mean that sincerely) as John McCain lobbied for it. 

We should have know that was absurd from the onset. 

Toppling the Syrian Baathist regime was always going to require direct western military involvement to be followed by at least a decade, if not more, of western occupation of the country.

No matter, we ended up committing some troops and, beyond that, we gave moral and material support to the one entity in the war that wasn't either comprised of Islamic extremist or incompetents, the Kurds.

The Kurds can't be blamed for rising up in rebellion on their own ground.  They now have a quasi state in Iraq and they've been where they are on the ground in Syria for eons.  They'd have their own country now if Woodrow Wilson's alterations of the map of Turkey that ended up in the Treaty of Sevres had come into full fruition.  That would have required more American involvement in diplomacy in 1919-20, more military backbone for an already tired France and Britain at the same time (heck, they were both already bogged down in Russia and the British were fighting a war in part of its own "united" kingdom, who can blame them for not getting tied down in Turkey), less greed and blood lust on the part of Greece, and less bizarre territory avarice on the part of Italy.

That would have been asking for a lot.

So, the Ottoman's fell and the Allies carved up the Ottoman Empire as they saw fit, splitting the Ottoman Kurdistan into three separate state administered by three different sovereigns, to which we might add that a World War One neutral, Persia, already was another entity they had to deal with.

And so now, one of our NATO allies is invading a region occupied by one of our Syrian rebellion allies, which we armed, with the invading army using military equipment designed by us and our ally, Germany (most Turkish weapons, but not all, are produced in Turkey) because our President decided to stand aside after we'd already made all the inconsistent commitments. Added to this, this means that Turkey is now effectively the military ally of the Syrian government which will come in and occupy northern Syria as soon as the Turks have subdued the Kurds.

What can be done about this now?

Well, maybe not much. 

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, one of Trumps most solid supporters, is outwardly outraged and has sponsored a bill to sanction Turkey.  It'll pass. Wyoming's Congressman Liz Cheney, who has been more independent regarding Trump than we might suppose, is also supporting it.

But what will sanctions do now?  It won't force Turkey out of Syria and it won't stop their invasion.  Shoot, by the time any sanctions come into effect, the Turks will be out and the Syrians back in.

Just how successful have our sanctions in the region been anyway?  Iran hasn't collapsed.  Syria's government is going to win its civil war.

No, what the sanctions will likely do is to drive Turkey into the arms of the arch conspirator Vladimir Putin.  And we don't need that.  It'll be a marriage of convenience, but Putin will be just fine with that.

A better proposal, now that we have blood on our hands and have allowed this mess to occur, would be to require the Turks to remain where they are supervised by a United Nations peacekeeping force. That would be a direct UN intervention in the Syrian civil war and it might be hard to bring about. Absent that, as Turkey remains a NATO ally, the next best proposal would be for a joint NATO force to occupy the region until a real peace settlement can be reached. Failing that, we should see about occupying it in place of the Turks, which the Turks probably wouldn't be too keen on now. And failing all of that, the Turks should just stay there in a supervised fashion until Syria joins the 21st Century with it being made clear that should they screw up, they'll have no friends in the west at all.

But none of this will occur.

The Start of The Troubles. October 5, 1968

Or at least it is by some accounts.  A precise start to the violence of the 1960s and 1970s that characterized Northern Ireland in the minds of many, indeed even characterized, unfairly, Ireland itself in this period, is hard to define.

Ireland had never accommodated itself to English rule at any point, but dating back to the Middle Ages various English kingdoms and then the Kingdom of England itself had claimed sovereignty over parts or all of Ireland.  For many decades, even centuries, the claim was fairly tenuous as a rule, but starting with the Norman conquest of England in 1066 it became inevitable that the conquering spirit of the barely Francoized Norsemen would lead them on to Ireland.  That path had already been partially laid by the Saxons already and the Normans were on a global path of expansion that would lead them on to install themselves over Sicily.  In that context, Ireland couldn't be avoided.

The Normans landed in Ireland as early as 1169, or perhaps we should say as late as that, given that this was a century after their conquest of England.  This was followed by landings in 1170 and 1171, which ultimately lead to the English King Henry landing that year in an effort to establish his own Anglo Norman sovereignty but also to put a lid on Norman freebooters.  He came and went but came back and in 1175 was self declared the overlord of Ireland, a position that was intended to put himself in loose control of the various Irish kingdoms but to leave them Irish.  This soon failed and in 1177 he declared his son John Lackland the Lord of Ireland and simply co-opted the ongoing Norman invasion.  This would bring to an end the era of independent Irish kingdoms.  The fact that there were, of course, multiple Irish kingdoms doomed the Irish in and of itself, but frankly Norman military capabilities were so advanced at the time that there was really no hope for Irish resistance.

This isn't intended to be a history of Ireland, so we'll simply leap forward and note that the United Kingdom ruled Ireland, over Irish objection, until 1922.  The Irish rebelled from time to time, particularly after the English crown separated the Church from Rome and then took it into Protestantism.  This became particularly pronounced after Cromwell became the English Lord Protector and English law became increasingly hostile to Catholicism.  The Irish became impoverished serfs in their own land and constantly sought to free themselves from England.  By the 19th Century, as the English began to reform their views, slowly at first, and then rapidly later on, things were perhaps so fixed in attitude that efforts towards Home Rule were insufficient to keep a significant minority of Irish from seeking an armed separation from the United Kingdom which came in the form of the Anglo Irish War.

The dates for the Anglo Irish War itself are debated, but a person can realistically date it to the Easter Rebellion of 1916.  The rebellion was a failure and indeed rejected by the Irish, but the English overreaction to it was sufficiently harsh that a follow up, more thought out, guerrilla, and indeed terroristic, war that started in 1919 had somewhat broader support.

Still, the mixed views on England were strong enough that the compromise reached with the United Kingdom not only left Ireland as a dominion of the United Kingdom, a status that at the time meant that the United Kingdom retained foreign policy decisions to some degree over a separated Ireland, but it also allowed Northern Ireland to opt out of the Irish Free State, a position bitterly opposed by Irish Republicans and which lead to the Irish Civil War.  Northern Ireland had been a problem in the context of Irish independence for many years as its population was majority Scots and Presbyterian.  Predictably, Northern Ireland voted to opt out of the Irish Free State.

This lead to the Irish Civil War, as noted, and following that lead to a bizarre situation in which the Irish Republic basically did not recognize Ulster as legitimately separate from it but, at the same time, really did nothing about it.  Ethnic Irish in Ulster stewed about the situation but by and large accommodated themselves to it.

In 1960s a non violent civil rights movement seeking to improve the position of minority Catholics in Ulster commenced.  It was not well received in all quarters.  Irish nationalist reacted with protests nad parades in 1966 and actually dynamited an English monument in that year in spite of being quite weak. This was responded to by the formation of Ulster unionist movements that saw the republican challenge as being stronger than it really was.  An organization formed calling itself the Ulster Volunteer Force, recalling similar paramilitary forces from the pre World War One Ulster and soon Ulster unionist terrorist attacked the homes of Catholic residents.

This lead to civil rights protests that occurred into 1968.  These were met with Unionist violence.  

On this day in 1968, once such event occurred.  The Northern Irish government banned an anticipated civil rights protest but it occurred anyhow.  The government sent the Royal Irish Constabulary to confront the marchers and the RUC policemen met them with violence.  The entire thing was filmed and shown on television, sparking Catholic disgust and outrage.  Two days of rioting ensued pitting Irish nationalist against the Royal Ulster Constabulary.

Thirty years of violence and the rise of the Provisional Irish Republican Army would follow.