Edward
Carson: "If you tell your empire in India, in Egypt, and all over the
world that you have not got the men, the money, the pluck, the inclination, and
the backing to restore law and order in a country within 20 miles of your own
shore, you may as well begin to abandon the attempt to make British rule
prevail throughout the empire at all."
From
the corporate memory of the British army to the folk memory of the IRA, the
Irish independence struggle has traditionally been seen through the lens of a
military conflict; a guerrilla insurgency that dislodged an occupying power
from more than four-fifths of the territory of Ireland.
Edward
Carson's reaction to the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921 was
prescient of a century of decolonisation which ended with the lowering of the
Union Jack in Hong Kong in 1997. Back in December 1921, a dejected Carson told
the House of Lords that: "[T]he reason why they [the government] had to
pass these terms of treaty, and the reason why they could not put down crime in
Ireland was because they had neither the men nor the money, nor the backing, let
me say that is an awful confession to make to the British Empire. If you tell
your empire in India, in Egypt, and all over the world that you have not got
the men, the money, the pluck, the inclination, and the backing to restore law
and order in a country within 20 miles of your own shore, you may as well begin
to abandon the attempt to make British rule prevail throughout the empire at
all."
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