than later, the partition of Ireland into a Catholic south and an autonomous six-county Protestant Ulster "statelet," which was amalgamated into Great Britain. Bitter civil war then ensued between Collins and other Free Staters and the IRA, which ended in 1923 shortly after Collins was killed by the IRA. Disarmed, the IRA led an uneasy existence with the Free State, headed by Eamon de Valera, who eventually in the 1930s and 1940s, after Ireland had achieved Dominion status and later (in 1937) declared itself a republic, "ruthlessly made use of emergency powers to cripple the organisation" (Coogan 55).
The IRA and pre-1968 Northern Ireland. IRA elements had fought the British in Northern Ireland, and, after 1921, Collins covertly sent them arms and "Flying Columns" (bicycling ambush squads) to subvert the new Orange regime. Impelled by long memories of religious strife and massacres, the Protestants, who dominated Catholics in the North by two to one, conducted pogroms against the Catholic minority and suppressed the IRA's operations with the aid of the B
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