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:
“In the twentieth century one of the most personal relationships to have developed is that of the person and the state.... It’s become a fact of life that governments have become very intimate with people, most always to their detriment.”
—E.L. (Edgar Lawrence)
“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)
“Predatory capitalism created a complex industrial system and an advanced technology; it permitted a considerable extension of democratic practice and fostered certain liberal values, but within limits that are now being pressed and must be overcome. It is not a fit system for the mid- twentieth century.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)
“The nineteenth century planted the words which the twentieth ripened into the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler. There is hardly an atrocity committed in the twentieth century that was not foreshadowed or even advocated by some noble man of words in the nineteenth.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)