nce.
             Those 49 years witnessed the most intense period of Irelands call for independence. Waged through electoral politics and campaigns for land reform in Ireland, and by the Irish Party in the debating chamber in the British House of Commons, this struggle saw the majority of the Irish people express their desire for independence from Britain. But legislation for Home Rule - limited self-government within the British Empire and was defeated in the British parliament in 1886 and 1893.
             While at this time there was little organized support for armed insurrection by nationalists, the Unionists and Conservative organized the imports of arms illegally and pledged to resist Home Rule by force. The Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) was established in 1913. To their dismay nationalists saw members of the Conservative Party and the British aristocracy openly threatening armed rebellion against what was supposedly their own democratically elected British government. This was being done to prevent even the limited legislative independence for which nationalists had been campaigning for several decades. This was the background to the establishment of the organization which was to become the Irish Republican Army.
             By 1916, the demands of World War I had drained the British military. The Irish Republican Brotherhood which was chief group advocating armed revolt during the campaign for Ireland's independence from the United Kingdom, the Irish Volunteers which was a paramilitary organization established by Irish Nationalists in 1913, to secure and maintain the rights and liberties common to the whole people of Ireland, and to enforce the imminent Home Rule Act were the two main rebel movements of the time. The Irish Volunteer along with the Irish Citizens Army, which was a small band of trained members for the defense of worker's rights that rose out of the great strike of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union in 1913, had resolved on ...