Micheál Martin, the leader of Fianna Fáil, has signed a coalition deal which would mean him taking over as prime minister from Fine Gal leader Leo Varadkar, who would return as Taoiseach in 2022. Ireland's two traditional main parties were formed in the 1930s, in the wake of a brutal war of independence and a brief civil war.
A hundred years ago the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George's popularity was beginning to dip as a brutal conflict in Ireland began to undermine the acclaim he garnered for winning the First World War.
Before the war Lloyd George's Liberal Party had agreed to grant Home Rule to Ireland but then in 1916 British troops quelled the Easter Rising in Dublin and executed many of the participants.
In 1919 the Irish Republican Army (IRA) launched a guerrilla war in a bid to force Britain to withdraw its troops and grant independence to Ireland.
The following year Lloyd George decided to recruit more men for the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC).
Many were English, Scots and Welsh former soldiers who had served in the British Army in the trenches of Flanders. They became known as the Black and Tans and their brutality in Ireland would become notorious.
“This is definitely not a forgotten conflict. It is still very much in the Irish people's knowledge of our history, and something we have been talking about as part of the story of Ireland's fight for independence throughout our decade of centenaries,” Brenda Malone, Curator of Military…
