Winston Churchill’s long, complicated, and controversial relationship with Ireland began with his arrival in Dublin as a young child when his grandfather, the 7th Duke of Marlborough, became the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and continued through his second premiership in the early 1950s. During those intervening years Churchill was regularly concerned with Irish affairs both personally and publically, with his greatest involvement being during the Home Rule crisis of 1912-14, when as Paul Bew points out he was at “the centre of everything,” and in the negotiation and implementation of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. His role in those events as well as in his approach to Anglo-Irish relations during the Second World War, lead Bew to observe in his brilliant study Churchill and Ireland that Churchill determined the “shape of the relationship between and within the two islands more than any other British politician.”
Paul Bew, a professor at Queen University…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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