Eire Forever!

The Maundy Monday Newsletter - This Week in History April 15 - 21.

Happy Monday, everyone. Over the weekend, we were celebrating a subscriber’s birthday and speaking with other friends we hadn’t seen in a while, and of course, the subject turned to me, which is my wheelhouse. I can talk about me all day. Anyway, when I’m talking about myself, it usually involves three things:

·        Okay History

·        Softball (this is seasonal)

·        Me becoming an Irish citizen

One of the friends wasn’t familiar with OKH, so we explained that Okay History is primarily a newsletter/blog about United States History.

But since I have recently become an Irish citizen and presumably an obnoxious new Irish citizen, there will now be occasional references to important Irish history.

We are good with this, right? Okay!

It’s well known that Ireland has been subjected to the same British Overlords that we were; only the Irish have experienced such overlords for centuries, being so close to them and all.

The Irish fought for their independence numerous times, but things picked up in the 20^th century.

During Easter 1916, Irish Volunteers, along with the Irish Citizen Army, declared their independence from Great Britain and, after a week of heavy armed conflict, were forced to surrender. However, the actions of the Easter Rising proved to be quite the motivation to carry on.

And carry on, the Irish did. Between 1919 and 1921, the War of Independence was fought. A treaty was signed in 1922, creating the Irish Free State, which had more autonomy but was still subjected to Britain.

Civil War broke out between the Irish who didn’t support the treaty and those who did. The pro-treaty forces won, and the Irish Free State, with its constitution, existed until 1937.

By then, the anti-treaty forces had figured out a better, more political way to change Ireland's status: through the government process. A new Constitution was drafted, which included the phrase We the people of Eire. I wonder where they got that from.

Over the next dozen years, the Irish slowly and steadily worked to make the republic official. They eventually did when the Republic of Ireland was born on April 18, 1949, with the passing of the Ireland Act 1949. Signed on the thirty-third anniversary of the Easter Rising, it maintains that the twenty-six southern counties are Ireland, and the six northern counties are Northern Ireland and a part of the United Kingdom. They also invented a new math formula, which says 26+6 = 1.

If you want to read more about Irish history from someone who knows what the heck they are talking about, please check out our friend and subscriber, Ruairi Nolan, and his Substack publication, Ireland and the Age of Revolution.

Okay, let's highlight what else happened this week. As a reminder, these events celebrate their anniversary, ending in 5 or 0. Here's what I got:

1. Charles Sanders Pierce died on April 19, 1914. The American philosopher, who was also into science and math, was considered the “Father of Pragmatism.” He described his approach as such: Consider the practical effects of the objects of your conception. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object. This is how I explain why our softball team is so good year after year.

2. The first free-fall parachute jump happened on April 19, 1919. Leslie Irvin, the Hollywood stuntman, not the serial killer, jumped out of a perfectly good airplane to test a parachute with a new device called the ripcord. Both Point Blank movies couldn’t have happened without this man, who broke his leg upon landing. Thank you for your service, Leslie.

3. 15 people died during the Columbine massacre on April 20, 1999. Two teenagers walked into a Colorado high school and cowardly murdered fifteen people and wounded twenty-four more. It would be the first mass murder shooting in our new modern media environment that continues to plague our country, and we simply can’t figure out a way to prevent these occurrences.    

Today is Tax Day. It’s also the first day of softball practice.

I hope you have all your taxes in order. Anonymous gets our tax information ready months before, so we don’t have to worry about anything when this day comes. I hope you have an Anonymous in your life to take care of this. Or maybe you are Anonymous. My contribution to the family is providing positive softball updates and changing the flag in front of our house.  

A final story about talking to subscribers: I had a wonderful conversation last week with another subscriber (a friend and former work colleague). She reached out about a work thing, and we got to talking about Okay History (again – of course). We talked about how fortunate I am to have subscribers in the first place, but I don’t focus much on growing my subscriber base (it is softball season again). She was happy to learn that she could share these posts with anyone!

I wanted to remind everyone to please feel free to share posts on your social media pages. I’m more than happy to welcome new readers.

I’m grateful to have you here. I’ll be back on Friday. I’m looking for questions to answer. Shoot me an email, or else I’ll come up with something on my own.

I hope you have a great week. I’ll see you on Friday. Thanks for reading.

Okay,

Chris

Blue likes to work on his fielding skills.

An earlier version stated that Northern Ireland would be a part of Great Britain. It has been corrected to reflect the United Kingdom, of which Great Britain is a member. This is why we left (both Ireland and the United States), so we didn’t have to keep track of this nonsense.