Brian Hanley
speaker
1,140 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 16 Sep
Brian Hanley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
So the IRA's campaign in Britain was relatively limited, although it might have been intensified had the truce not occurred.
What the Republican lead leadership in Ireland were very conscious of, however, was the fact that middle class and conservative British opinion were concerned about what was happening in Ireland and were indeed very embarrassed by the reports of black and tan and auxiliary atrocities.
An organisation called the Peace with Ireland Council was formed during nineteen twenty.
And this Council asserted that the worst crime of it all is that the British Cabinet has deliberately set out to terrorise the whole people.
White people of three and a half millions, with a distinct infusion of British blood in their veins.
There was a contradiction here.
The Irish were often seen as outsiders in Britain.
There was considerable prejudice against them, but at the same time Ireland was part of the United Kingdom.
And in the war between 1914 and 1918, the Irish had been lauded for their sacrifice on the Western Front and elsewhere.
To turn around and now call them terrorists or a murder gang struck many people as strange.
It was also hugely embarrassing.
That Britain, which had condemned German atrocities in nineteen fourteen, now seemed to be endorsing similar atrocities in Ireland.
So the destruction of Cork City in december nineteen twenty was compared in Britain to the destruction of Louvain in Belgium by the Germans in nineteen fourteen.
A reflection of the fact that this was causing stresses and strains within the British establishment came when the Conservative MP Oswald Moseley became an open critic of government policy, denounced the black and tans, and left the Conservative Party in disgust at their Irish policy.
The Guardian editor C.
P.
Scott asserted that our criminal failure to govern a conquered white people stinks in the nostrils of the world.
So British government policy in Ireland was unpopular.
Many British people were embarrassed by the repression meted out to a people who, after all, were not that unlike them.
Similarly, many ordinary British people were unhappy with the fact that thousands of British soldiers were being sent to Ireland to fight.
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