European war’s temporary freeze on trouble in Ireland

A revisionist view of the 1916 Rising in the South during the northern Troubles has given way to a more even tempered position, but will this remain, asks Gabriel Doherty

At its most intense, the crisis created by the introduction into the House of Commons at Westminster on 11 April 1912 of a new (the third) Home Rule Bill for Ireland was one of the most serious experienced by the British body politic for decades.

And the sense of crisis evident over the following two-and-a-half years was exacerbated by the fact that the same system was simultaneously trying to cope with the long-running - and increasingly bitter - debate over female suffrage, and the challenge presented by the growth of industrial and political labour.