This thesis examines various social and political organisations that represented rank and file nationalists in east Galway from 1914 to 1921 and how they mediated and interpreted the political upheaval o f the revolutionary period. The activities o f many, perhaps more prosaic movements such as the Town Tenants ' League and the Ex-Soldiers and Sailors Federation have received scant attention in the historiography o f the Irish revolution which has focused overwhelmingly on the activities o f the Irish Volunteers and Sinn Féin and latterly on the demise o f the Irish Parliamentary Party and the United Irish League. The historiographical emphasis on the principal political agents has been to the detriment o f a fu ll understanding o f the complexities o f the nationalist response to revolutionary upheaval. To gain a full appreciation o f the formative political and social dynamics from which the Irish state emerged, a more comprehensive analysis o f the evolution ofpublic opinion is necessary. In a radicalised county like Galway, where local political culture was characterised by the intensity o f political rivalries, civic organisations such as the Gaelic Athletic Association played a crucial role in influencing local events as they became conduits fo r rival groups to garner support and undermine their opponents. The revolutionaries were a product o f their environment and east Galway was a complex and fractious society in which the traumatic upheaval o f the independence struggle continually defies a simplistic linear meta-narrative. A comprehensive study o f these events reveals many surprising and frequently awkward conclusions fo r local communities, which in retrospect, could not have been accommodated in the domain o f conventional local history. The principal question which this thesis explores is the extent to which people’s social and political aspirations evolved during the period and the degree to which they found expression in the respective campaigns o f the IRA and Sinn Féin.