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The Anglo-Irish Century

The Anglo-Irish Century: Episode 3: The Irish Exodus

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Episode 3

Episode 3: The Irish Exodus

The Irish Exodus

BBC Radio 4 - The Anglo-Irish Century, The Irish Exodus

Historian Diarmaid Ferriter explores the post-war period and the outbreak of the Troubles.

Historian Diarmaid Ferriter moves the Anglo-Irish story from the mass immigration of the post-war period to the outbreak of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

Although the ambitions and progress of politicians and diplomats has been vital to the developing story of Anglo-Irish relations over the last century, in his third programme in the series covering the last hundred years, Diarmaid Ferriter turns his focus to the ordinary Irishmen and women who forged often unbreakable links with Britain by the simple expedient of moving there. The scale of Irish immigration, the lives those immigrants lead and the wealth they sent back to the now independent Republic are central to the post war period.
It was also an era that saw a changing of the guard in Ireland as de Valera gave way to the very different leadership of the Taoiseach Sean Lemass. Lemass also changed the language of his Republican colleagues, referring to Northern Ireland for the first time and, in the 1960s forging links with the Northern Ireland Prime Minister Terence O'Neill. 
The impact of that shift, the restlessness of the Catholic population in the north over civil rights and of the Loyalists over what they perceived as a threat to the status quo saw the situation deteriorate rapidly.
Diarmaid debates the impact of the 50th anniversary celebrations of the Easter Rising on all sides in what was to become a violent sectarian conflict.
Roy Hattersley, the man who called the troops in to keep the peace in 1969, Martin McGuinness and Lord Trimble describe the inexorable slide into conflict and the breakdown of trust between Dublin and Westminster which reached a peak with the events of Bloody Sunday and the fallout thereafter as the then Taoiseach Jack Lynch and Prime Minister Edward Heath argued on the phone and the British Embassy in Dublin was set aflame.

Producer: Tom Alban.

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Historian Diarmaid Ferriter looks back at a century of Anglo-Irish relations.

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