This analysis, based on many previously unused primary sources, offers the most authoritative account to date of the formative years of modern Ireland and the final years of the old United Kingdom. It is the first modern account to be concerned with the views and interventions of both the British and the Irish, military and political, placing events, interventions, and attitudes strictly in their historical context and radically reinterpreting the ambitions, interests and influences of the important figures of the period. Lawlor examines many issues hitherto neglected by historians, including the effects of the collapse of the British Liberal Party upon Ireland, the origins of the War of Independence and the Truce in the light of higher British politics, an analysis of how, after ratification of the Treaty, the 'republic' was merely part of a greater demand which unities of the dissident IRA made for control of their own 'destiny,' and a controversial re-examination of de Valera's role in the period prior to the Civil War.