Or a plumb job at a consultancy/TV Network

Hard to say, the British army treated the IRA/the population that supported them with quite a lot of restraint in comparison to later guerrilla campaigns. A much harsher approach I suspect would have broken the rebellion as in previous iterations.

Well, the British didn't fight the IRA with anything like the ferocity that (for instance) the Germans fought partisans, which is what Churchill was threatening. I have no doubt they would have done so, consequences be damned.

Well the pro Franco Irish unit were followers of Eoin O'Duffy, ex head of police, that's pretty widely documented. The pro-Republican side were a less homogeneous group, but people like Frank Ryan and so on from memory were anti Treaty.

And 1916 was a disaster militarily. When a lunatic like Churchill tells you he's going to destroy your country, you believe him. Collins knew better than anyone else that the IRA was destroyed as a fighting force, so irrespective of wishful thinking of the anti Treaty side, rejecting the Treaty was suicide.

Damn your flawless logic!

So how hard exactly would you punch your boss in his face if he repeatedly clipped the back of your head?

Actually the blueshirts who fought for Franco were largely pro treaty/ex security forces, while majority who fought for the Republic were from the anti-Treaty faction

Yup, that's what they wanted. But with no army, a million paranoid & armed unionists and Churchill promising Total War, I meant in the sense of how they proposed to achieve their aims.

Dammit, knew 15 didn't look right. And Casement was a highly respected Establishment figure for his work in the Congo. As I mentioned above, I still think there was more to the halting of the executions than public unrest

Yeah, the current system is not suited to the way the world is going, too parochial and short term. The county councils were designed to be toothless, as they were astonishingly corrupt under British rule. Plus ca change!

"Long live Ireland, the sword of Ireland, Michael Fassbender"?

Yeah, the lesbian kiss at the end got a lot of ridicule. Just a bit unnecessary.

I always wonder about that, I can't imagine the Irish lobby was that strong in 1916, the Irish were pretty unpopular in the US in the 19th century. And mass media/communications were not that developed at the time. Curious was there some other reason, the British cabinet were an unsentimental, unimaginative bunch in…

The initial difference between FF & FG stemmed from the Civil War, which was the armed escalation over accepting/rejecting the Treaty which ended the War of Independence. FF paid more lip service to the idea of a United Ireland, but in truth I'm not sure if anyone serious thought that was a realistic goal. Ireland is…

Collins was a pragmatist. He was Minster for War in the War of Independence, and knew the IRA was on it's last legs, out of ammunition and down to a couple of hundred active members when a truce was called. Never understood what the anti-treaty side thought was possible given what they were up against.

In context, during WWI, the British executed hundreds of their own soldiers for various reasons, many of them shell shocked teenagers. I always wondered why they stopped at 15 given the slaughter going on simultaneously on the Western Front, doubt Governments considered public opinion at the time.

You are precisely correct, but dramatically they didn't come across as real people, just one dimensional caricatures/symbols/cliches. And you are correct that the church had too much power at the time, but that was ceded to it by a bankrupt, overwhelmed state. The clergy had some monsters, but they also provided…

The points you made are pretty much why the series got a mixed reaction. No-one could understand why it kept cutting away from the actual Uprising to focus on the wife & mistress having uncomfortable cups of tea in a drawing room in Dalkey. And as for the jackass brother, hard to know what was going through the…

Given the way people thought about Nationalism & bloodshed at the turn of the 20th century, I don't think it was possible for events to not have escalated into some form of conflict. The number of fatalities of the 1916-1923 were relatively light, compared to a scenario wherein the Ulster Volunteers violently opposed…