Twentieth Century
By the start of the 20th century, the IRB was a stagnating organisation, concerned more with Dublin municipal politics than the establishment of a republic according to F. S. L. Lyons. A younger generation of Ulster republicans aimed to change this, and in 1905 Denis McCullough and Bulmer Hobson founded the Dungannon Clubs. Inspired by the Volunteers of 1782, the purpose of these clubs was to discourage enlistment into the British Army, and encourage enlistment into the IRB, with the overall goal of complete independence from Britain in the form of an Irish Republic. They were joined by Sean MacDermott, and in 1908 he and Hobson relocated to Dublin, where they teamed up with veteran Fenian Tom Clarke. Clarke had been released from Portland Prison in October 1898 after serving fifteen and a half years, and had recently returned to Ireland after living in the United States. Sent by John Devoy and the Clan na Gael to reorganise the IRB, Clarke set about to do just that. In 1909 the young Michael Collins was introduced to the brotherhood by Sam Maguire. By 1914 the Supreme Council was largely purged of its older, tired leadership, and was dominated by enthusiastic men such as Hobson, McCullough, Patrick McCartan, John MacBride, Sean MacDermott, and Tom Clarke. The latter two were to be the primary instigators of the Easter Rising in 1916.
Read more about this topic: Irish Republican Brotherhood
Famous quotes related to twentieth century:
“... the nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not. Not.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“In the middle of the next century, when the literary establishment will reflect the multicultural makeup of this country and not be dominated by assimiliationists with similar tastes, from similar backgrounds, and of similar pretensions, Langston Hughes will be to the twentieth century what Walt Whitman was to the nineteenth.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“War is bestowed like electroshock on the depressive nation; thousands of volts jolting the system, an artificial galvanizing, one effect of which is loss of memory. War comes at the end of the twentieth century as absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to ‘feel good’ about themselves, their country, is a measure of that failure.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“A writer is in danger of allowing his talent to dull who lets more than a year go past without finding himself in his rightful place of composition, the small single unluxurious ‘retreat’ of the twentieth century, the hotel bedroom.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“The phenomenon of nature is more splendid than the daily events of nature, certainly, so then the twentieth century is splendid.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)