The Challenge of Freedom: an Irish V2 AAR

Both of you seem keen on the idea of Ireland taking on the boys in red! While ambitious, I think I'll leave that for later in the game All I need to develop in the meantime is industry, a colonial empire and a massive army. No problem...

Sorry guys but due to RL work pressures I will have to put this one off for a few days. Which might give me a little time to get some practice in before I tackle Ireland properly. As I said - stay tuned.

@Greg: sounds like a plan

Sorry about the delay. RL ain't no fun. I was playing out a test game of Ireland which I started the day I got V2, and was going to start Ireland again for this AAR, but I decided to stick with my test game as it was going quite well. Unfortunately as a result I don't have any screenshots in this post and thus the next couple of posts will be a narrative recap of events up until the late 1850s.

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Chapter One: From Backwater Isle to Secondary Power (1836-1849)​

For the new Irish prime minister James MacCarthy, Ireland the free and Gaelic nation did not turn out to be as free as he had hoped. The same law which had allowed for Ireland's semi-independence stipulated that the island be a dominion of the UK, and that its government be monarchical in nature, rather than a full democracy. This did not please MacCarthy and it did not please the Irish people. But this hurdle could not be overcome straight away, as Ireland in the late 1830s was struggling merely to survive. Therefore, the PM grudgingly accepted British oversight until it could safely be thrown off and maneuvred to have an obscure nobleman by the name of Patrick Smith-Murphy - a man of mixed English and Irish parentage - crowned as the figurehead monarch, King Patrick I.

Nor was Ireland entirely "Gaelic". Some 15% of the national population were Unionist in their loyalty and Protestant in their faith, and in time this would lead to complications, although at first the Unionists were surprisingly docile.

The early 1840s saw a turn-around for Ireland. The budget stabilised with a healthy though small surplus; this in turn allowed the PM to lower taxes, especially on the rich, who were encouraged to become capitalists. Soon, instead of tens, there were hundreds of Irish capitalists ready to invest in new-fangled ideas like railroads and factories. Irish diplomacy was still tightly bound to Britain and PM MacCarthy grew resentful; when would he be able to form alliances with friendly nations like France and the US to act as "big brothers" against the sinister might of the new Queen in London? Even as he pondered this, he was organising an ingenious and complex coup that would allow him to rule as Prime Minister regardless of which party won the election. In effect, James MacCarthy would be head of government for as long as drew breath...


By the mid 1840s it looked like Ireland was able to stand relatively tall among the nations. An anonymous but hard-working statistician of the time consistently put Ireland at around 20th in world ranking: her industry was growing slowly but surely, some of her many peasants had been called upon to "volunteer" for the army, her research into humanistic areas of art was yielding much prestige, she was avoiding the Jacobin revolts that for some reason were tearing other nations apart, and the epidemics of disease and hunger which periodically hit the island were shrugged off by a people who were becoming confident of their future.

There was one slight problem. By 1846, Ireland was still a dominion of her unloved former masters. The people were not happy about this, and PM-For-Life MacCarthy was keenly aware of their concerns. On the streets of Belfast, Cork and Dublin the Irish Catholic majority were crying out for freedom, often accompanied by cries of "death to the traitor!". Although not directly named the PM could guess to whom they were referring. The same lawyers who had discovered the oddly convenient loophole in British law were hauled out of comfortable retirement to get to work on full independence. In time they yielded a strategy so fiendishly brilliant* that this historian is loath to go into any detail but will merely direct you to the Encyclopaedia Hibernica and will continue with the narrative.


Ireland was finally, truly, completely free, though still a constitutional monarchy. Celebrations were held throughout the island (though were rather muted in the northern province) and with that kind of political capital the PM could go on ruling for at least another decade, which was handy since his old enemies in the liberal Whig Party were now in power and showing no sign of abandoning it any time soon.

By 1849, Ireland was reaping the prosperity sown in years of hard work. She was free to conduct her own diplomacy and build friendships in Paris and Washington DC. A fresh batch of troops saw her army grow to 72 divisons. Two factories, one in the far south (Cork) and the other in the far north (Belfast) were swelling her coffers as the State encouraged poor farmers to become craftsmen and clerks. Her status was confirmed when the anonymous statistician declared her a Secondary Power of the world - just in time for the American Civil War....

*i.e. I figured out how to modify a savegame

Niall said:

It is a pity they include Ulster into an Irish Republic. Regardless I shall be popping back to see how you do against the evil Scots, Welsh and English!

Click to expand...

I do not consider it a pity. As for the Scots, Welsh and English - I will deign to let them live free... for now!

Thanks for the comments guys. I apologise for the lack of updates but RL is still intruding (planning on moving out of home). I hope to continue the AAR tomorrow.