ABSTRACT
The 1916 Rising in Dublin, when Britain and her allies were in the throes of the First World War, was speedily and ruthlessly – too ruthlessly, as it turned out – suppressed. Within six years, there was a new government in Dublin, and the Irish Free State, still technically under the Crown but with a freedom to manoeuvre it was not slow to exploit, began the complex task of nationbuilding even as it turned its guns on its own countrymen in a brief but vicious civil war.
