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The Curragh Incident of 20 March 1914, also known as the Curragh Mutiny, occurred in the Curragh, County Kildare, Ireland. The Curragh Camp was then the main base for the British Army in Ireland, which at the time formed part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Ireland was about to receive a measure of devolved government, which included Ulster. With Irish Home Rule due to become law in 1914, the British Cabinet contemplated some kind of military action against the Ulster Volunteers who threatened to rebel against it. Many officers, especially those with Irish Protestant connections, of whom the most prominent was Hubert Gough, threatened to resign rather than obey, privately encouraged from London by senior officers including Henry Wilson. Although the Cabinet issued a document claiming that the issue had been a misunderstanding, the Secretary of State for War J.E.B. Seely and the CIGS (professional head of the Army) Sir John French were forced to resign after amending it to promise that the British Army would not be used against the Ulster loyalists. The event contributed both to unionist confidence, and to the growing Irish separatist movement, convincing Irish nationalists that they could not expect support from the British army in Ireland. In turn, this increased renewed nationalist support for paramilitary forces. The Home Rule Bill was passed but postponed, and the growing fear of civil war in Ireland led on to the British government considering some form of partition of Ireland instead, which eventually took place. The event is also notable in being one of the few incidents since the English Civil Wars in which elements of the British military openly intervened, as it turned out successfully, in politics. ==Background== In early 1912, the Liberal British government of H. H. Asquith had introduced the Third Home Rule Bill for Ireland, which proposed the creation of an autonomous Irish Parliament in Dublin. Unionists had objected to being under the jurisdiction of the proposed Dublin Parliament and Ulster Unionists founded the Ulster Volunteers (UVF) paramilitary group in 1912, aided by a number of senior retired British officers, to fight if necessary against the British government and/or against a future Irish Home Rule government proposed by the Bill. In September 1913 the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) John French had expressed his concerns to the government and to the King (who had also asked Prime Minister Asquith for his views) that the British Army, if ordered to act against the UVF, might split, with some serving officers even siding with the Ulster Unionists, given that many shared the same view of preserving and defending a Protestant British Empire and believed Home Rule for mainly Catholic Ireland would threaten it.〔Holmes 2004, p168〕 Major-General Henry Hughes Wilson, Director of Military Operations, was in regular contact with Opposition leaders (including Andrew Bonar Law) and with retired officers who supported the Volunteers.〔Holmes 2004, p169〕〔ATQ Stewart ''The Ulster Crisis'' (Faber & Faber, London 1967) passim〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Curragh incident」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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