ABSTRACT
The history of Ireland is marked by many rebellions. On many occasions these have taken the form of a strategic surprise to the British government; certainly the current rebellion, or insurgency, in Northern Ireland took Whitehall unawares in 1969. The ‘Troubles’, as this re-emergence of the Irish Question in military and paramilitary form was soon (once more) described, appeared avatar-like, in dramatic reproof to apathetic British stewardship of the six counties of Northern Ireland which comprise the remnants of its first overseas colony. In their destruction of an illusion – that Northern Ireland apparently quiet was Northern Ireland apparently at peace – the final stanza of the early nineteenth-century Irish poet James Clarence Mangan's Vision of Connacht in the Thirteenth Century is well-recalled: … behold – a change from light to darkness, from joy to woe! King, nobles, all, Looked aghast and strange; The minstrel group sale in dumbest show! Had some great crime Wrought this dread amaze, This terror? None seemed to understand … I again walked forth; But lo! the sky showed fleckt with blood, and an alien sun Glared from the North, And there stood on high, Amid his shorn beams, a skeleton! 1
