Machnamh 100 - President of Ireland Centenary Reflections by Áras an Uachtaráin

PRESIDENT OF IRELAND CENTENARY REFLECTIONS

VOLUME 1

Machnamh 100 Machnaimh ar Chomóradh Céad Bliain Imleabhar 1 Uachtarán na hÉireann, Micheál D. Ó hUigínn

Machnamh 100 Centenary Reflections Volume 1 President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins

Foilsithe in 2021 ag an Roinn Turasóireachta, Cultúir, Ealaíon, Gaeltachta, Spóirt agus Meán, 23 Sráid Chill Dara, Baile Átha Cliath 2, D02 TD30, Éire Tá an foilseachán seo ar fáil freisin mar ríomhleabhar le híoslódáil saor in aisce ó www.president.ie © Oifig Uachtarán na hÉireann © Is le hÁras an Uachtaráin/Maxwell Photography an cóipcheart ar na híomhánna mura ndeirtear a mhalairt Dhearbhaigh an t-údar a gcearta morálta san obair seo. Gach ceart ar cosaint. Ní féidir aon chuid den fhoilseachán seo a athchló ná a úsáid ar bhealach leictreonach, meicniúil ná ar bhealach eile atá ar eolas anois ná a cheapfar ina dhiaidh seo lena n-áirítear fótachóipeáil nó taifeadadh, nó eile, gan cead i scríbhinn roimh ré ó shealbhóir an chóipchirt. Le haghaidh eolais maidir le cead, déan teagmháil le: info@president.ie Branda Machnamh 100 le Karen Pappin, PointZero start@pointzero.ie Leagan amach agus dearadh an fhoilseacháin le Power Design www.powerdesign.ie Clóbhuailte agus dáilte ag Impress Printing Works Ltd. www.impress.ie

Published in 2021 by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, 23 Kildare Street, Dublin 2, D02 TD30, Ireland This publication is also available as a free to download eBook from www.president.ie © Office of the President of Ireland © Images are copyright Áras an Uachtaráin/Maxwell Photography unless otherwise stated The author has asserted their moral rights in this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reprinted or utilised in any electronic, mechanical or other means now known or hereafter invented including photocopying or recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder. For information regarding permission, please contact: info@president.ie Machnamh 100 brand by Karen Pappin, PointZero start@pointzero.ie Publication layout and design by Power Design www.powerdesign.ie Printed and distributed by Impress Printing Works Ltd. www.impress.ie

ISBN 978-1-7398408-1-5

25th of May 1921. Dublin’s Custom House, home to the British-controlled Local Government Board, is set ablaze by the IRA. Dáil Éireann’s propaganda department defends the Custom House attack, saying “the lives of four million people are a more sacred charge than any architectural masterpiece”.

25 Bealtaine 1921. Chuir an tIRA Teach an Chustaim i mBaile Átha Cliath trí thine. Is ann a bhí an Bord Rialtais Áitiúil a bhí faoi riail na Breataine. Seasann roinn bolscaireachta Dháil Éireann leis an ionsaí ar Theach an Chustaim, á rá: “the lives of four million people are a more sacred charge than any architectural masterpiece”.

Photo National Library of Ireland www.nli.ie Ref: HOGW 47/W.D. Hogan

Foreword

Réamhrá

Machnamh 100 – Part 1

Machnamh 100 – Cuid 1

The Context of the War of Independence

Comhthéacs Chogadh na Saoirse

President Michael D. Higgins An tUachtarán Micheál D. Ó hUigínn

The term ‘Machnamh’ is an ancient Irish concept encompassing reflection, contemplation, meditation and thought. Over the past six months, as President of Ireland, I have hosted Part 1 – the first three series of seminars inviting reflections focusing on the War of Independence, building on previous events that marked other pivotal moments in our nation’s history, including the 1913 Lockout and the Easter Rising. In November 2021 we commenced Part 2 of the series of six seminars. These seminars will focus on subsequent events including the Civil War and the formation of two new administrations on the Island. To fulfil this objective, I invited scholars from different backgrounds and with an array of perspectives to share their insights and reflections on the context and events of that formative period of a century ago and on the nature of commemoration itself. Through Machnamh 100, it has been my aim to facilitate presentations and discussions on specific themes, to explore more fully the various aspects of that period in Ireland’s journey, and its legacy for the societies and jurisdictions that were to emerge subsequently.

Is coincheap ársa Gaelach é ‘Machnamh’, a chuimsíonn meabhrú, rinnfheitheamh, midheamhain agus smaoineamh. Le sé mhí anuas, i gcáil Uachtarán na hÉireann, d’óstáil mé Cuid 1 – an chéad trí shraith seimineár ina ndearnadh machnamh ar Chogadh na Saoirse, ag tógáil ar imeachtaí roimhe sin a bhí ina dtréimhsí cinniúnacha i stair na tíre, lena n-áirítear Frithdhúnadh 1913 agus Éirí Amach na Cásca. Chuireamar tús le Cuid 2 den tsraith sé seimineár i mí na Samhna 2021. Díreofar sna seimineáir sin ar imeachtaí a tharla ina dhiaidh sin, lena n-áirítear Cogadh na gCarad agus bunú dhá rialtas nua ar an Oileán. D’fhonn an sprioc seo a bhaint amach, thug mé cuireadh do scoláirí ó chúlraí éagsúla a bhfuil dearcthaí éagsúla acu a léargas agus a gcuid smaointe ar chomhthéacs agus ar imeachtaí na tréimhse foirmithí sin céad bliain ó shin, agus ar nádúr phróiseas an chuimhneacháin féin, a roinnt. Bhí sé mar aidhm agam le Machnamh 100 cuir i láthair agus pléití ar théamaí áirithe a éascú, iniúchadh níos doimhne a dhéanamh ar na gnéithe éagsúla den tréimhse sin in aistear na hÉireann, agus iniúchadh a dhéanamh ar an oidhreacht a fágadh do na sochaithe agus na dlínsí a bhí le teacht ina dhiaidh sin.

Our inaugural seminar, held in December 2020 and entitled ‘Challenges of Public Commemorations’, examined the nature and concept of commemoration itself in the contexts of today and of the national and global events of a century ago. Speakers included Professor Ciarán Benson (University College Dublin), Dr Anne Dolan (Trinity College Dublin), Professor Michael Laffan (University College Dublin) and Professor Joep Leerssen (University of Amsterdam), and together we set out our intentions for what we are hoping to achieve from this series.

Reáchtáladh ár gcéad seimineár, dar teideal Na dúshláin a bhaineann le comóradh poiblí, i mí na Nollag 2020, inar pléadh nádúr agus coincheap phróiseas an chuimhneacháin féin i gcomhthéacs an lae inniu agus i gcomhthéacs imeachtaí náisiúnta agus domhanda céad bliain ó shin. I measc na gcainteoirí bhí an tOllamh Ciarán Benson (Coláiste na hOllscoile, Baile Átha Cliath), an Dr Anne Dolan (Coláiste na Tríonóide, Baile Átha Cliath), an tOllamh Michael Laffan (Coláiste na hOllscoile, Baile Átha Cliath) agus an tOllamh Joep Leerssen (Ollscoil Amstardam), agus leagamar amach le chéile na spriocanna a bhfuil súil againn iad a bhaint amach sa tsraith seo.

In February 2021, I hosted a second seminar, ‘Empire: Instincts, Interests, Power and Resistance’ which focused on imperial attitudes and responses as they related to circumstances in Ireland. Our reflections also included considerations of the forms and practices of resistance to Empire in Ireland, as well as resistance to nationalism in its different forms and expressions.

I mí Feabhra 2021, d’óstáil mé an dara seimineár, Impireacht: Nádúr, Leas, Cumhacht agus Frithbheartaíocht, a dhírigh ar mheonta agus freagraí impiriúla mar a bhain siad le cúinsí in Éirinn. Mar chuid den mhachnamh, rinneadh cineálacha agus cleachtais frithbheartaíochta i gcoinne na hImpireachta in Éirinn a mheas, mar aon le cur i gcoinne náisiúnachais i bhfoirmeacha agus léirithe éagsúla.

The main address was given by Professor John Horne (Trinity College Dublin), who provided an overview of the international context of the events in 1920s Ireland, including the fall of empires and the particular status of the British Empire. There were responses from Professor Eunan O’Halpin (Trinity College Dublin), Dr Marie Coleman (Queen’s University Belfast), Professor Alvin Jackson (University of Edinburgh), Dr Niamh Gallagher (St Catharine’s College, Cambridge) and myself. In May 2021, I hosted the third seminar of Part 1, on the War of Independence. Titled Recovering Reimagined Futures, the seminar focused on issues of social class, land and the role of women, and how particular gradations of violence emerged, were given expression, including that which was inflicted on women, forms that were class-based and deeply embedded, and other forms of violence that occurred more generally, impacting on wider society, such as those that were authoritarian, hostile to pluralism, dominating, or collusive to the impersonal structures of bureaucracy being imposed as a sole and inevitable modernity, the aftershocks of which have been experienced up to and including our contemporary Ireland.

Thug an tOllamh John Horne (Coláiste na Tríonóide, Baile Átha Cliath) an phríomhóráid, inar sholáthraigh sé léargas ar chomhthéacs idirnáisiúnta na n-imeachtaí in Éirinn sna 1920idí, lena n-áirítear meath Impireachtaí agus stádas faoi leith Impireacht na Breataine. Bhí freagraí ann ón Ollamh Eunan O’Halpin (Coláiste na Tríonóide, Baile Átha Cliath), an Dr Marie Coleman (Ollscoil na Banríona, Béal Feirste), an tOllamh Alvin Jackson (Ollscoil Dhún Éideann), an Dr Niamh Gallagher (Coláiste San Catharine, Cambridge) agus mé féin. I mí Bealtaine 2021, d’óstáil mé an tríú seimineár de Chuid 1, ar Chogadh na Saoirse. Díríodh sa seimineár, a raibh Athshealbhú Todhchaí Athshamhlaithe mar theideal air, ar shaincheisteanna aicme sóisialta, talún agus róil na mban, agus ar an gcaoi ar tháinig cineálacha áirithe foréigin chun cinn agus mar a tugadh léiriú dóibh. Áirítear orthu sin foréigean i gcoinne na mban, cineálacha aicme-bhunaithe a bhí fréamhaithe go domhain, agus cineálacha eile foréigin a bhí ag tarlú go ginearálta, a raibh tionchar acu ar an tsochaí níos leithne. Cuimsítear sna cineálacha sin foréigean a bhí údarásaíoch, in aghaidh an iolrachais, ceannasach nó claonpháirteach do struchtúir neamhphearsanta an mhaorlathais a bhí á mbrú chun cinn i riocht na nua-aimsearthachta dosheachanta nach raibh a mhalairt de mhúnla uirthi, ar cineálacha foréigin iad a raibh tionchar acu ar an tír le fada an lá agus a bhfuil tionchar acu fós ar Éirinn na linne seo.

The principal address was given by Dr Margaret O’Callaghan (Queen’s University Belfast), and respondents included Dr Caitriona Clear (National University of Ireland, Galway), Professor Linda Connolly (National University of Ireland, Maynooth), Ms Catriona Crowe (Royal Irish Academy), Dr John Cunningham (National University of Ireland, Galway) and myself. May I thank historian and broadcaster, Dr John Bowman, for agreeing to chair all three seminars, and for doing so with such excellence. May I also thank all those who contributed papers, as well as those working ‘behind the scenes’ who assisted in bringing this idea to fruition – Conor Ó Raghallaigh provided invaluable help, as did the production staff, as well as those within the President’s Office. Míle buíochas. May I also pay a particular thanks to Professor Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh of National University of Ireland, Galway, for his advice and support for which I am deeply grateful. It is my intention to host, as Part 2, a further series of seminars focusing on the Treaty negotiations, the Civil War, and the formation of the administrations which followed on our shared Island. These commenced in November 2021, and I hope to subsequently publish the proceedings from these seminars also. My hope is that you find the papers from these seminars as inspiring and thoughtprovoking as we who directly participated did, and that they perhaps provide a further reminder of the importance for all our sakes of transacting history, with a sense of ethical use of memory which can help us to come to a deep understanding with our past so that we achieve a better, shared future on this Island.

Is í an Dr Margaret O’Callaghan (Ollscoil na Banríona, Béal Feirste) a thug an phríomhóráid, agus i measc na bhfreagróirí, bhí an Dr Caitriona Clear (Ollscoil na hÉireann, Gaillimh), an tOllamh Linda Connolly (Ollscoil na hÉireann, Maigh Nuad), Catriona Crowe Uasal (Acadamh Ríoga na hÉireann), an Dr John Cunningham (Ollscoil na hÉireann, Gaillimh) agus mé féin. Ba mhaith liom buíochas a ghabháil leis an staraí agus craoltóir an Dr John Bowman as bheith ina chathaoirleach ar na trí sheimineár ar fad agus as déanamh amhlaidh ar bhealach chomh cumasach. Gabhaim buíochas freisin leo siúd ar fad a chuir páipéir isteach mar aon leosan a bhí ag obair sa chúlra agus a chuidigh leis an smaoineamh seo a thabhairt chun críche - chuir Conor Ó Raghallaigh cúnamh thar a bheith luachmhar ar fáil, mar a chuir an fhoireann léirithe, agus foireann Oifig an Uachtaráin. Míle buíochas. Ba mhaith liom buíochas faoi leith a ghabháil leis an Ollamh Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh, Ollscoil na hÉireann, Gaillimh, as an gcomhairle agus tacaíocht a chuir sé ar fáil, tá mé an-bhuíoch de. Tá sé de rún agam sraith eile seimineár a óstáil, mar Chuid 2, ina ndíreofar ar idirbheartaíocht an Chonartha, ar Chogadh na gCarad agus ar bhunú na rialtas a tháinig ina dhiaidh sin ar an Oileán comhroinnte seo againne. Cuireadh tús leo seo i mí na Samhna 2021, agus tá súil agam imeachtaí na seimineár sin a fhoilsiú ina dhiaidh sin chomh maith. Is é mo mhian go bhfaighidh tú an méid céanna spreagtha agus ábhair machnaimh ó pháipéir na seimineár seo is a fuair muide, a raibh baint dhíreach againn leo, agus go dtabharfaidh siad meabhrú eile ar a thábhachtaí atá sé dúinn ar fad stair a chíoradh ar bhealach a chaitear leis an gcuimhne go tuisceanach, eiticiúil. Cabhróidh sé sin linn tuiscint dhomhain a fháil ar an am atá caite le go mbeimis in ann todhchaí chomhroinnte níos fearr a bhaint amach ar an Oileán seo. Beir beannacht

Beir beannacht

Michael D. Higgins Uachtarán na hÉireann President of Ireland 9

Clár Contents Introduction by Dr John Bowman (Chair)

Speakers’ Biographies 15 First Seminar – Challenges of Public Commemorations – 4 December, 2020 29 Speakers President Michael D. Higgins (Principal Address)

Professor Ciarán Benson (Respondent)

Dr Anne Dolan (Respondent) 50 Professor Michael Laffan (Respondent)

Professor Joep Leerssen (Respondent)

President Michael D. Higgins (Concluding Comments)

Panel Discussion 66 Opinion – Ethical and Respectful Remembering by President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins

Second Seminar – Empire: Instincts, Interests, Power and Resistance – 25 February, 2021

Opinion – Why We Must Critique Imperialism by President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins

Speakers President Michael D. Higgins (Opening Words)

Professor John Horne (Principal Address)

Dr Niamh Gallagher (Respondent)

Professor Eunan O’Halpin (Respondent)

Professor Alvin Jackson (Respondent)

101

Dr Marie Coleman (Respondent)

105

President Michael D. Higgins (Reflections)

108

Panel Discussion 115 Third Seminar – Land, Social Class, Gender and the Sources of Violence; Recovering Reimagined Futures – 27 May, 2021 125 Speakers President Michael D. Higgins (Opening Words)

126

Dr Margaret O’Callaghan (Principal Address)

129

Ms. Catriona Crowe (Respondent)

137

Dr John Cunningham (Respondent)

142

Dr Caitriona Clear (Respondent)

147

Professor Linda Connolly (Respondent)

150

President Michael D. Higgins (Reflections)

160

Panel Discussion 168 10

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Photo National Library of Ireland www.nli.ie Ref: HOG 238

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Réamhrá leis an Dr John Bowman Cathaoirleach

Introduction by Dr John Bowman Chair

When invited to chair a series of centenary reflections by leading scholars on the War of Independence, the Civil War and Partition, I was not unaware of possible quicksands. I was also aware of the challenges involved. And I found especially ambitious – and promising – President Higgins’s choice of title for the series: Machnamh. This Irish word encompasses consideration, meditation, reflection and thought. What better attributes could be brought to an understanding of the more controversial events which mark the Decade of Centenaries? As was clear to those who lived through that momentous decade, it brought further instances of what had been a recurring British complaint throughout the nineteenth century: that just when the British came up with an answer to the Irish Question, the Irish changed the question. One would forgive David Lloyd George if he felt much the same in 1920-21 as he attempted to craft some outcome which would rid his government of the Irish imbroglio. A legendary quick fix politician – not for nothing was he known as the Welsh Wizard – he did not envisage his boundary line as permanent and would have been surprised if told that it would have survived a century. But that it would at that point – post Brexit – become a matter of such further controversy across the capitals of Europe would have astounded him.

Nuair a tugadh cuireadh dom cathaoirleacht a dhéanamh ar shraith ina ndéanfadh scoláirí móra na linne seo cur i láthair faoi Chogadh na Saoirse, faoi Chogadh na gCarad agus faoin gCríochdheighilt, b’fhollasach dom na deacrachtaí a d’fhéadfadh a bheith romham. Ba léir dom na dúshláin chomh maith. Agus leag mé suntas faoi leith ar a uaillmhianaí atá an teideal a roghnaigh an tUachtarán Ó hUigínn don tsraith – Machnamh – agus d’airigh mé go raibh gealladh faoi. Tagann cuid mhór i gceist leis an aon fhocal amháin Gaeilge seo: breithniú, midheamhain, meabhrú agus smaointeoireacht. Is deacair cuimhneamh ar thréithe níos fearr a bheith ag duine agus é nó í ag iarraidh cuid de na heachtraí níos conspóidí atá á gcomóradh i rith Dheich mBliana na gCuimhneachán a thuiscint. Bhí nós ag rialtas na Breataine i rith an naoú haois déag cur i leith na hÉireann go n-athraíodh sí an cheist a luaithe is a bhí an freagra aige, agus b’amhlaidh a bhí i rith na ndeich mbliana cinniúnacha sin. Thuigfí do David Lloyd George dá mbeadh an meon céanna aige in 1920-21 agus é ag iarraidh teacht ar réiteach de shaghas éigin a d’fhuasclódh a rialtas ó fhadhbanna na hÉireann. Bhí cáil ar Lloyd George as a sheiftiúla a bhí sé mar pholaiteoir, agus an leasainm Welsh Wizard baiste air dá réir, ach ní raibh an teorainn a tharraing sé ceaptha a bheith buan, agus bheadh iontas air dá n-abrófaí leis gur mhair an socrú sin céad bliain. Ach níl amhras ach go mbainfí stangadh as go mbeadh an teorainn ina cnámh spairne chomh mór sin i bpríomhchathracha na hEorpa trí chéile – mar a bhí amhlaidh i ndiaidh an Bhreatimeachta.

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Brexit not only changed Irish politics: it also changed Irish history. Common membership of the European Union had seemed to be a relatively tranquil path ahead. Then Brexit intervened and – to the surprise of so many – churned Anglo-Irish relations. It upset what had seemed a new set of alignments in the aftermath of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement. That this profound impact on Ireland had not been anticipated by the Brexiteers as they fought their campaign, was a sure indication of how invisible Irish concerns could be in Britain. The odd composition of the UK majority vote which determined the UK’s exit from the European Union also left a very odd international boundary – as has been so exhaustively demonstrated – between the United Kingdom and the European Union. The Brexit dimension to the Decade of Centenaries would be difficult to exaggerate and its echoes are not absent from these pages. It was originally intended to convene these sessions before a live audience and to include contributions and questions from the floor. As envisaged, each individual session of Machnamh 100 might well have resembled a half-day history conference. A simultaneous live webcast had always been planned as had publication of the proceedings. But like much else in our lives, during 2020 and 2021 COVID-19 necessitated a change in approach. Covid regulations precluded a public event with a live audience. So the first three seminars in the Machnamh 100 series more resembled an extended broadcast than an academic seminar. Manifestly Machnamh could not be postponed. It had been fashioned as an integral contribution to the Decade of Centenaries.

Nuair a d’fhág an Ríocht Aontaithe an tAontas Eorpach, ní hamháin gur athraíodh polaitíocht na hÉireann, cuireadh cor i stair na hÉireann chomh maith. Bhí an chuma ar chúrsaí idir an dá thír gur bealach réitithe a bhí ann, i bhfianaise iad a bheith ina mbaill den Aontas Eorpach agus an ailíniú polaitíochta nua a lean Comhaontú Aoine an Chéasta/Bhéal Feirste. Ach cuireadh an caidreamh Angla-Éireannach as a riocht ansin le himeacht na Breataine, rud a chuir iontas ar go leor. Agus lucht fágála an Aontais Eorpaigh i mbun feachtais, léiríodh cumas na Breataine neamhaird a dhéanamh de leas na hÉireann trí chéile sa mhéid is nár rith sé leo go bhféadfadh, dá n-éireodh leo, impleachtaí suntasacha a bheith ann d‘Éirinn. Tar éis do thromlach na dtoghthóirí an cinneadh a dhéanamh an tAontas Eorpach a fhágáil, fágadh gur teorainn idirnáisiúnta as an ngnách an ceann idir an Ríocht Aontaithe agus an tAontas Eorpach, agus impleachtaí an tsocruithe nua sin cíortha go mion ó shin. Níl aon amhras ach go bhfuil an ghné nua sin den chaidreamh Angla-Éireannach, a bhuíochas leis an mBreatimeacht, le haireachtáil go mór agus muid i mbun comóraidh ar eachtraí a tharla céad bliain ó sin, agus aghaidh tugtha uirthi sna páipéir acadúla seo. Bhí sé beartaithe ar dtús go mbeadh na seisiúin seo á dtionól os comhair lucht féachana beo agus deis á tabhairt dóibh siúd a bheadh i láthair labhairt, nó ceisteanna a chur, ón urlár. Mar a samhlaíodh an uair sin, d’fhéadfadh na seisiúin Machnamh 100, ina gceann agus ina gceann, a bheith cosúil le comhdháil staire leathlae. Bhí craoladh beo comhuaineach ar an idirlíon pleanáilte ón tús, mar a bhí foilsiú na n-imeachtaí. Ach mar a tharla maidir le cuid mhór gnéithe eile den saol i rith na mblianta 2020 agus 2021, d’fhág Covid-19 gur ghá dul i muinín cur chuige eile. Níorbh fhéidir cur i láthair beo os comhair lucht féachana a reáchtáil i ngeall ar rialacháin Covid. D’fhág sé sin gur mó cosúlachta a bhí ag trí sheimineár tosaigh Machnamh 100 le craoladh fada ná le seimineár acadúil. Ba léir nárbh fhéidir Machnamh 100 a chur ar athlá agus é beartaithe ó thús a bheith ina ghné lárnach de Dheich mBliana na gCuimhneachán.

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Keynote papers were being prepared, and historians and others had been invited to participate. So it was decided that allowing for Covid-19 the Machnamh 100 events would be hosted by President Higgins in Áras an Uachtaráin and the projected webcast would become the main means of access. There was arguably one gain from this arrangement. The Machnamh audience was now entirely on line. And there were no limits of capacity or geography: those participating in Machnamh were equal whether watching in Sydney, New York, Ballymena or Dublin. It is to be hoped that readers will find the reflections shared throughout this series to be informative and that they will trigger all the Machnamh virtues – consideration, meditation, reflection and thought. Where appropriate, some references have been added to enable readers to further explore some of the key themes. In the final session of each Machnamh event, there was an opportunity for the participants to discuss some of the issues raised in the individual papers. These have also been transcribed for this book with some minor corrections silently added and, where appropriate, some footnotes.

Dr John Bowman

Bhí na príomhailt á n-ullmhú agus cuireadh tugtha do staraithe agus do dhaoine eile a bheith páirteach. Socraíodh dá bharr sin, i bhfianaise Covid-19, go ndéanfadh an tUachtarán Ó hUigínn seisiúin Machnamh 100 a óstáil in Áras an Uachtaráin agus go mbeadh an craoladh idirlín a bhí beartaithe ar an bpríomh-mhodh rochtana anois. D’fhéadfaí an cás a dhéanamh go raibh buntáiste amháin ag an socrú seo. Bheadh lucht féachana Machnamh ina n-iomlán páirteach sa chomóradh anois, beag beann ar an líon daoine ná ar an tíreolaíocht: ba mhar a chéile gach duine a bhí páirteach in Machnamh, bídís i Sydney na hAstráile nó i Nua-Eabhrac, ar an mBaile Meánach nó i mBaile Átha Cliath. Táthar ag súil go mbainfidh na léitheoirí adhmad as an ábhar a cuireadh ina láthair i rith na sraithe agus go spreagfar iontu na tréithe sin ar fad atá luaite le Machnamh, mar atá, breithniú, midheamhain, meabhrú agus smaointeoireacht. Cuireadh roinnt tagairtí isteach sa téacs, sa chás gur chuí, chun cur ar chumas an léitheora cíoradh breise a dhéanamh ar na príomhthéamaí. Tugadh deis do na rannpháirtithe roinnt de na saincheisteanna a tarraingíodh anuas sna páipéir éagsúla a phlé ag seisiún deiridh gach ceann d’ócáidí Machnamh. Rinneadh iad sin a thras-scríobh don fhoilseachán seo chomh maith, maille le ceartú beag a dhéanamh go balbh thall is abhus, agus roinnt fonótaí a chur isteach nuair a d’fheil sé.

An Dr John Bowman

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Beathaisnéisí na gCainteoirí Speakers’ Biographies

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Micheál D. Ó hUigínn Uachtarán na hÉireann Michael D. Higgins President of Ireland

Michael D. Higgins, Uachtarán na hÉireann, President of Ireland, is currently serving his second term, having been first elected in 2011 and re-elected in 2018. President Higgins has forged a career as an academic and political representative at many levels, campaigning extensively for human rights, peace and sustainability. He was a member of Dáil Éireann for 25 years, and member of Seanad Éireann for nine years, and Ireland’s first Minister for the Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht.

Tá Micheál D. Ó hUigínn, Uachtarán na hÉireann, ag cur a dhara théarma mar uachtarán isteach faoi láthair. Toghadh é den chéad uair in 2011 agus atoghadh é in 2018. Bhain an tUachtarán Ó hUigínn slí bheatha amach mar ionadaí acadúil agus polaitiúil ar go leor leibhéal, i mbun feachtais ar son chearta an duine, na síochána agus na hinbhuanaitheachta. Bhí sé ina Theachta Dála ar feadh 25 bliana, ina Sheanadóir ar feadh naoi mbliana, agus bá é an chéad Aire Ealaíon, Cultúir agus Gaeltachta de chuid na hÉireann.

President Michael D. Higgins led the commemorations of the “Decade of Centenaries”, marking the centenary anniversaries of some of the seminal events in Ireland’s history. The President attended and spoke at a large number of State and other ceremonial events helping to shape national efforts at exploring and examining the background, impact and contemporary significance of the events being recalled.

Bhí an tUachtarán Micheál D. Ó hUigínn i gceannas ar “Dheich mBliana na gCuimhneachán”, ag ceiliúradh chomóradh céad bliain cuid de na himeachtaí is tábhachtaí i stair na hÉireann. D’fhreastail an tUachtarán agus labhair sé ag roinnt mhaith searmanais Stáit agus eile ag cabhrú le hiarrachtaí náisiúnta a mhúnlú chun cúlra, tionchar agus tábhacht chomhaimseartha na n-imeachtaí atá á gcomóradh a iniúchadh agus a scrúdú.

Since taking office, the President has published three collections of speeches setting out his approach: ‘When Ideas Matter: Speeches for an Ethical Republic’, ‘1916 Centenary Commemorations and Celebrations’, and ‘Reclaiming the European Street’ – Speeches on Europe and the European Union, 2016-20’.

Ó chuaigh sé in oifig, d’fhoilsigh an tUachtarán trí bhailiúchán óráidí ina leagtar amach a chur chuige: ‘When Ideas Matter: Speeches for an Ethical Republic’, ‘1916 Centenary Commemorations and Celebrations’, agus ‘Reclaiming the European Street’ – Speeches on Europe and the European Union, 2016-20’.

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An Dr John Bowman Dr John Bowman

Dr John Bowman is a broadcaster and historian. He has presented current affairs and historical programmes on RTÉ radio and television since the 1960s. He is author of Window and Mirror: RTÉ Television, 1961-2011, the first comprehensive history of Irish television. His PhD, De Valera and the Ulster Question: 1917–1973, won the Ewart-Biggs Prize for its contribution to North-South understanding. His latest book, Ireland: the Autobiography, is published by Penguin. He was elected an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College Dublin in 2009 and awarded an Honorary Doctorate by UCD in 2010.

Is craoltóir agus staraí é an Dr John Bowman. Chuir sé cláir faoi chúrsaí reatha agus cláir stairiúla i láthair ar raidió agus ar theilifís RTÉ ó na 1960idí. Is údar Window and Mirror: RTÉ Television, 1961-2011 é, an chéad leabhar cuimsitheach staire ar theilfís na hÉireann. Bhuaigh a thráchtas PhD, De Valera and the Ulster Question: 1917–1973, Duais EwartBiggs as cur leis an tuiscint Thuaidh-Theas. D’fhoilsigh Penguin a leabhar is déanaí: Ireland: the Autobiography. Toghadh é ina Chomhalta Oinigh de Choláiste na Tríonóide, Baile Átha Cliath in 2009 agus bhronn UCD Dochtúireacht Oinigh air in 2010.

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First Seminar

4 December 2020 Challenges of Public Commemorations

An Chéad Seimineár 4 Nollaig 2020 Na dúshláin a bhaineann le comóradh poiblí

Professor Ciarán Benson

An tOllamh Ciarán Benson

Professor Ciarán Benson is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at University College Dublin where he held the Chair of Psychology, and various terms of headship, over two decades. He has a background in social psychology, philosophy, aesthetics and education. In 2007 he held the Royden B. Davis Visiting Professorship in Interdisciplinary Studies at Georgetown University, Washington DC. He has written extensively on psychology, philosophy, education, cultural policy and art criticism. In 1979 he authored The Place of the Arts in Irish Education and, with Pat Clancy, Higher Education in Dublin: A Study of Some Emerging Needs. His books include The Absorbed Self: Pragmatism, Psychology and Aesthetic Experience (1993) and The Cultural Psychology of Self: Place, Morality and Art in Human Worlds (2001). He has chaired the Irish Film Institute (1980-84), the City Arts Centre in Dublin (1985-91), the ACE (Arts, Community, Education) Project funded by the Gulbenkian Foundation (1985-89), An Chomhairle Ealaíon/The Arts Council of Ireland (1993-1998), the Irish Museums Trust (2012-18), the Expert Advisory Group (Pillar 1/Children) for Creative Ireland (201821), the Grangegorman Public Art Working Group (2013-2021), amongst various other board memberships. Currently he chairs Poetry Ireland/Éigse Éireann. He has curated various exhibitions in Ireland (IMMA, for instance, and The Butler Gallery in Kilkenny), and held various international academic fellowships (including a Fulbright Fellowship to Georgetown University and a Royal Irish Academy–British Academy Exchange Fellowship to Linacre College Oxford). He is a member of the International Association of Art Critics.

Tá an tOllamh Ciarán Benson ina Ollamh Emeritus le Síceolaíocht i gColáiste na hOllscoile, Baile Átha Cliath, áit a raibh an Ollúnacht Síceolaíochta aige, agus ar chaith sé téarmaí éagsúla mar cheannaire thar thréimhse fhiche bliain. Tá cúlra aige i síceolaíocht shóisialta, fealsúnacht, aeistéitic agus oideachas. Sa bhliain 2007 bhí Ollúnacht Cuairte Royden B. Davis aige i Staidéar Idirdhisciplíneach in Ollscoil Georgetown, Washington DC. Tá go leor scríofa aige faoin tsíceolaíocht, fealsúnacht, oideachas, beartas cultúrtha agus faoi chritic na healaíne. In 1979 scríobh sé The Place of the Arts in Irish Education agus, le Pat Clancy, Higher Education in Dublin: A Study of Some Emerging Needs. I measc na leabhair atá scríofa aige tá The Absorbed Self: Pragmatism, Psychology and Aesthetic Experience (1993) agus The Cultural Psychology of Self: Place, Morality and Art in Human Worlds (2001). Bhí sé ina chathaoirleach ar Institiúid Scannán na hÉireann (1980-84), Ionad Ealaíon na Cathrach i mBaile Átha Cliath (1985-91), an Tionscadal EPO (Ealaíon, Pobal, Oideachas) ar mhaoinigh Fondúireacht Gulbenkian é (1985-89), An Chomhairle Ealaíon (1993-1998), Iontaobhas Mhúsaeim na hÉireann (2012-18), Grúpa Comhairleach Saineolaithe (Cuid 1 / Leanaí) Éire Ildánach (2018-21), Grúpa Oibre Ealaíne Poiblí Ghráinseach Ghormáin (2013-2021) ), i measc ballraíochtaí boird éagsúla eile. Faoi láthair tá sé ina chathaoirleach ar Éigse Éireann. Tá coimeádaíocht déanta aige ar thaispeántais éagsúla in Éirinn (IMMA, mar shampla, agus Gailearaí de Buitléir i gCill Chainnigh), agus bhí comhaltachtaí acadúla idirnáisiúnta éagsúla aige (lena n-áirítear Comhaltacht Fulbright in Ollscoil Georgetown agus Comhaltacht Mhalartaithe Acadamh Ríoga na hÉireann–Acadamh na Breataine go Coláiste Linacre Oxford). Tá sé ina bhall de Chumann Idirnáisiúnta na gCriticeoirí Ealaíne.

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Dr Anne Dolan

An Dr Anne Dolan

Dr Anne Dolan is Associate Professor in Modern Irish History in the Department of History, and a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin. She is author of Commemorating the Irish Civil War: history and memory 1923-2000 and, with William Murphy, Michael Collins: the man and the revolution, and has published widely on the history of violence in the revolutionary period, the politics of memory, and the social and cultural history of inter-war Ireland.

Is Ollamh Comhlach í an Dr Anne Dolan i Stair Nua-Aimseartha na hÉireann i Roinn na Staire, agus tá sí ina Comhalta de Choláiste na Tríonóide, Baile Átha Cliath. Scríobh sí Commemorating the Irish Civil War: history and memory 1923-2000 agus, le William Murphy, Michael Collins: the man and the revolution, agus d’fhoilsigh sí go leor faoi stair an fhoréigin sa tréimhse réabhlóideach, polaitíocht na cuimhne, agus stair shóisialta agus chultúrtha na hÉireann idir na cogaí.

Professor Michael Laffan

An tOllamh Michael Laffan

Professor Michael Laffan studied in Gonzaga College, University College Dublin, Trinity Hall Cambridge, and the Institute for European History, Mainz. He lectured in the University of East Anglia in Norwich, and then, for over three decades, in UCD (principally on Modern Irish History). He occupied various posts at faculty and departmental level, served as head of the School of History, was President of the Irish Historical Society, and is now an emeritus professor. His writings include The Partition of Ireland, The Resurrection of Ireland: the Sinn Féin Party, 1916-23, and Judging W. T. Cosgrave. He has also edited The Burden of German History, 1919-45. He has lectured widely throughout Ireland and across the globe.

Rinne an tOllamh Michael Laffan staidéar i gColáiste Gonzaga, i gColáiste na hOllscoile, Baile Átha Cliath, i Halla na Tríonóide in Cambridge, agus san Institiúid um Stair na hEorpa, Mainz. Bhí sé ina léachtóir in Ollscoil East Anglia in Norwich, agus ansin, ar feadh breis agus tríocha bliain, in UCD (thug sé léachtaí faoi Stair Nua-Aimseartha na hÉireann, go príomha). Bhí poist éagsúla aige ar leibhéal na dáimhe agus na roinne, bhí sé ina cheann ar Scoil na Staire, bhí sé ina uachtarán ar Chumann Staire na hÉireann, agus tá sé anois ina ollamh emeritus. I measc na leabhair atá scríofa aige tá The Partition of Ireland, The Resurrection of Ireland: the Sinn Féin Party, 1916-23, agus Judging W. T. Cosgrave. Bhí sé ina eagarthóir ar The Burden of German History, 1919-45, chomh maith. Tá go leor léachtóireachta déanta aige in Éirinn agus thar lear.

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Professor Joep Leerssen

An tOllamh Joep Leerssen

Professor Joep Leerssen is Professor of Modern European Literature at the University of Amsterdam. His work on identity formations in Irish history (Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael, 1986; Remembrance and Imagination, 1996) helped establish the interdisciplinary specialism of Irish Studies. His research fields are the comparative history of national movements in 19th-century Europe and the theory of national stereotyping and self-stereotyping. He is author of National Thought in Europe (3rd ed. 2018), editor of the Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe (2018) and of the collection Parnell and His Times (2021). Leerssen is an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy and an honorary fellow of Trinity College Dublin.

Tá an tOllamh Joep Leerssen ina Ollamh le Litríocht Nua-Aimseartha na hEorpa in Ollscoil Amsterdam. Chuidigh a chuid oibre ar bhunú féiniúlachtaí i stair na hÉireann (Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael, 1986; Remembrance and Imagination, 1996) le speisialtacht idirdhisciplíneach an Léinn Éireannaigh a bhunú. I measc a réimsí taighde tá stair chomparáideach gluaiseachtaí náisiúnta na hEorpa sa 19ú haois agus teoiric na steiréitíopála náisiúnta agus na féinsteiréitíopála. Scríobh sé National Thought in Europe (3ú heagrán 2018), agus bhí sé ina eagarthóir ar Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe (2018) agus ar an mbailiúchán Parnell and His Times (2021). Tá Leerssen ina bhall oinigh d’Acadamh Ríoga na hÉireann agus ina chomhalta oinigh de Choláiste na Tríonóide, Baile Átha Cliath.

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Second Seminar

An Dara Seimineár

25 February 2021

25 Feabhra 2021

Empire: Instincts, Interests, Power and Resistance

Impireacht: Nádúr, Leas, Cumhacht agus Fritbheartaíocht

Professor John Horne

An tOllamh John Horne

Professor John Horne is emeritus Fellow and former Professor of Modern European History at Trinity College Dublin. A Member of the Royal Irish Academy, he is also Vice-President of the Research Centre at the Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne (France). From 2013 to 2019 he was a member of the French official commission for the Centenary of the Great War and in 2016-17, was Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Oxford University. He has written widely on the history of the Great War, including (ed.), Our War: Ireland and the Great War (Dublin, Royal Irish Academy, 2008) and (ed., with Edward Madigan), Towards Commemoration: Ireland in War and Revolution, 1912-1923 (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2013).

Tá an tOllamh John Horne ina Chomhalta emeritus agus ina iar-Ollamh le Nua-Stair na hEorpa i gColáiste na Tríonóide, Baile Átha Cliath. Is ball d’Acadamh Ríoga na hÉireann é, agus tá sé ina Leas-Uachtarán ar an Ionad Taighde ag an Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne (An Fhrainc). Ó 2013 go 2019 bhí sé ina bhall de choimisiún oifigiúil na Fraince do Chomóradh Céad Bliain an Chogaidh Mhóir agus ó 2016 go 2017, bhí sé ina Ollamh Cuairte Leverhulme in Ollscoil Oxford. Tá go leor scríofa aige faoi stair an Chogaidh Mhóir, lena n-áirítear (eag.), Our War: Ireland and the Great War (Baile Átha Cliath, Acadamh Ríoga na hÉireann, 2008) agus (eag., le hEdward Madigan), Towards Commemoration: Ireland in War and Revolution, 1912-1923 (Baile Átha Cliath: Acadamh Ríoga na hÉireann, 2013).

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Dr Niamh Gallagher

An Dr Niamh Gallagher

Dr Niamh Gallagher is Lecturer in Modern British and Irish History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St Catharine’s College. Her book Ireland and the Great War: A Social and Political History is the first work of Irish history to win the Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield Prize. She has published on the political, social and cultural history of the First World War and is co-editor of The Political Thought of the Irish Revolution (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press, 2022). She is part of the Northern Ireland Centenary Historical Advisory Panel and leads the Mether Initiative at St Catharine’s College.

Is Léachtóir le Nua-Stair na Breataine agus na hÉireann in Ollscoil Cambridge í an Dr Niamh Gallagher agus is Comhalta de Choláiste San Catharine í. Ba é a leabhar Ireland and the Great War: A Social and Political History an chéad saothar faoi stair na hÉireann a bhuaigh Duais Whitfield Chumann Ríoga na Staire. D’fhoilsigh sí go leor faoi stair pholaitiúil, shóisialta agus chultúrtha an Chéad Chogaidh Dhomhanda agus tá sí ina comh-eagarthóir ar The Political Thought of the Irish Revolution (le teacht amach, Cambridge University Press, 2022). Is ball de Phainéal Comhairleach Stairiúil Comóradh Céad Bliain Thuaisceart Éireann í agus stiúrann sí an Tionscnamh Mether i gColáiste San Catharine.

Professor Eunan O’Halpin MRIA

An tOllamh Eunan O’Halpin MRIA

Professor Eunan O’Halpin MRIA studied at UCD and Cambridge. He was a civil servant before embarking on an academic career. From 1982 to 2000 he taught in Dublin City University, and from 2000 to 2020 was Bank of Ireland Professor of Contemporary Irish History at Trinity College Dublin. Amongst his works are Head of the Civil Service: A Study of Sir Warren Fisher, Defending Ireland: the Irish State and its Enemies since 1922, Kevin Barry: an Irish Rebel in Life and Death and (with Daithí Ó Corráin), The Dead of the Irish Revolution.

Rinne an tOllamh Eunan O’Halpin MRIA staidéar in UCD agus Cambridge. Státseirbhíseach a bhí ann sular chuir sé tús lena ghairm acadúil. Ó 1982 go 2000 mhúin sé in Ollscoil Chathair Bhaile Átha Cliath, agus ó 2000 go 2020 bhí sé ina Ollamh le Stair Chomhaimseartha na hÉireann i gColáiste na Tríonóide, Baile Átha Cliath. I measc a chuid saothar tá Head of the Civil Service: A Study of Sir Warren Fisher, Defending Ireland: the Irish State and its Enemies since 1922, Kevin Barry: an Irish Rebel in Life and Death agus (le Daithí Ó Corráin), The Dead of the Irish Revolution.

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Professor Alvin Jackson

An tOllamh Alvin Jackson

Professor Alvin Jackson is the Richard Lodge Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh. He was educated at Corpus Christi College and Nuffield College Oxford and has taught at University College Dublin, Boston College and Queen’s University Belfast. He is the author of seven books, including Ireland 1798- 1998: War, Peace & Beyond (second edition: 2010) and Judging Redmond and Carson (2018), and is the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish History (2014). He is both an honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Is é an tOllamh Alvin Jackson Ollamh Staire Richard Lodge in Ollscoil Dhún Éideann. Fuair sé a chuid oideachais i gColáiste Corpus Christi agus i gColáiste Nuffield Oxford agus mhúin sé i gColáiste na hOllscoile, Baile Átha Cliath, i gColáiste Boston agus in Ollscoil na Banríona, Béal Feirste. Tá seacht leabhar scríofa aige, lena n-áirítear Ireland 1798- 1998: War, Peace & Beyond (an dara heagrán: 2010) agus Judging Redmond and Carson (2018), agus tá sé ina eagarthóir ar an Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish History (2014). Is Comhalta oinigh d’Acadamh Ríoga na hÉireann é agus is Comhalta de Chumann Ríoga Dhún Éideann é.

Dr Marie Coleman

An Dr Marie Coleman

Dr Marie Coleman is a Reader in Modern Irish History at Queen’s University Belfast. She has written widely on the revolutionary period including a study of County Longford and the Irish revolution, 1910-1923. She is particularly interested in the role of women and gender relations during the period, the experience of the southern Protestant minority during the revolutionary decade, and the lives of revolutionary veterans after the conflict, including the award of pensions and medals. She is an advisor to the Department of Defence (Military Archives) Military Service Pensions Collection and to the Northern Ireland Office’s centenary historical panel, and a member of the Church of Ireland’s working group on historical centenaries.

Is léachtóir le Nua-Stair na hÉireann í an Dr Marie Coleman in Ollscoil na Banríona, Béal Feirste. Tá go leor scríofa aici faoin tréimhse réabhlóideach lena n-áirítear staidéar ar Chontae Longfort agus réabhlóid na hÉireann, 1910-1923. Tá spéis ar leith aici i ról na mban agus caidrimh inscne le linn na tréimhse, eispéireas an mhionlaigh Phrotastúnaigh ó dheas le linn na ndeich mbliana réabhlóideacha, agus saolta iarshaighdiúirí réabhlóideacha tar éis na coimhlinte, lena n-áirítear dámhachtain pinsean agus bonn. Is comhairleoir í do Bhailiúchán Pinsean na Seirbhíse Míleata sa Roinn Cosanta (An Chartlann Mhíleata) agus do phainéal stairiúil chomóradh céad bliain Oifig Thuaisceart Éireann, agus is ball de ghrúpa oibre Eaglais na hÉireann um chomóradh céad bliain í.

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Third Seminar

An Tríú Seimineár

27 May 2021

27 Bealtaine 2021

Land, Social Class, Gender and the Sources of Violence;

Talamh, Aicme Shóisialta, Inscne agus Foinsí an Fhoréigin; Athshealbhú Todhchaí Athshamhlaithe

Recovering Reimagined Futures

Dr Margaret O’Callaghan

An Dr Margaret O’Callaghan

Dr Margaret O’Callaghan MA (NUI) Ph.D. (Cantab.) is an historian and political analyst in the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queen’s University, Belfast. She has also taught at the University of Cambridge and the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. Her early work was on language and religion and the politics of identity in the Irish Free State. She is the author of British High Politics and a Nationalist Ireland; Criminality, Land and the Law under Forster and Balfour and ‘Women and Politics in Independent Ireland, 1921-58’ in Vol 5 of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. She has published numerous articles including ones on Belfast in the 1960’s, republicanism, policing and the state in nineteenth-century Ireland, genealogies of partition, the Irish Boundary Commission, the political thought of Roger Casement, and has co-edited with Mary E. Daly 1916 in 1966; Commemorating the Easter Rising (RIA, 2007). She has recently published on female political autobiography and is working on two projects – a study of Alice Stopford Green and a study of partition and the Boundary Commission.

Is staraí agus anailísí polaitiúil í an Dr Margaret O’Callaghan MA (OÉ) Ph.D. (Cantab.) sa Scoil Staire, Fealsúnachta, Polaitíochta agus Antraipeolaíochta in Ollscoil na Banríona, Béal Feirste. Mhúin sí freisin in Ollscoil Cambridge agus in Ollscoil Notre Dame, Indiana. Dhírigh sí ar theanga agus reiligiún agus ar pholaitíocht na féiniúlachta i Saorstát na hÉireann ina cuid oibre luaithe. Scríobh sí British High Politics and a Nationalist Ireland; Criminality, Land and the Law under Forster and Balfour agus ‘Women and Politics in Independent Ireland, 1921-58’ in Imleabhar 5 de The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. Tá go leor alt foilsithe aici lena n-áirítear ailt faoi Bhéal Feirste sna 1960 idí, poblachtánachas, póilíneacht agus an stát in Éirinn sa naoú haois déag, ginealais na críochdheighilte, Coimisiún Teorann na hÉireann agus smaointeoireacht pholaitiúil Roger Casement, agus bhí sí ina comh-eagarthóir le Mary E. Daly ar 1916 in 1966; Commemorating the Easter Rising (ARÉ, 2007). D’fhoilsigh sí go leor le déanaí maidir le dírbheathaisnéis pholaitiúil na mban agus tá sí ag obair ar dhá thionscadal – staidéar ar Alice Stopford Green agus staidéar ar an gcríochdheighilt agus ar Choimisiún na Teorann.

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Ms Catriona Crowe

Catriona Crowe, Uasal

Catriona Crowe is the former Head of Special Projects at the National Archives of Ireland, where she was Manager of the Census Online Project, which placed the Irish 1901 and 1911 censuses online free to access. She was editor of Dublin 1911, and an editor of Documents on Irish Policy. She presented the RTÉ documentaries “Ireland Before the Rising” and “Life After the Rising”. She is an Honorary President of the Irish Labour History Society and a former President of the Women’s History Association of Ireland. She is a member of the Royal Irish Academy.

Is iar Cheannasaí Thionscadail Speisialta i gCartlann Náisiúnta na hÉireann í Catriona Crowe, áit a raibh sí ina Bainisteoir ar an Tionscadal Daonáirimh Ar Líne, a chuir daonáirimh na hÉireann 1901 agus 1911 ar líne saor in aisce. Bhí sí ina heagarthóir ar Dublin 1911, agus ar dhuine d’eagarthóirí Documents on Irish Policy. Chuir sí cláir faisnéise RTÉ “Ireland Before the Rising” agus “Life After the Rising” i láthair. Is Uachtarán Oinigh í ar Chumann Staire Lucht Saothair na hÉireann agus iar Uachtarán ar Chumann Staire na mBan in Éirinn. Tá sí ina ball d’Acadamh Ríoga na hÉireann.

Dr John Cunningham

An Dr John Cunningham

Dr John Cunningham is a lecturer in History at NUI Galway and a former editor of Saothar: Journal of the Irish Labour History Society. He has published widely on subjects including the moral economy, Irish local history and global syndicalism. A founder and co-director of the Irish Centre for the Histories of Labour and Class, based at the Moore Institute in NUI Galway, he is co-Principal Investigator (with Dr Sarah-Anne Buckley) of the Tuam Home Oral History Project. He is editor (with Dr Ciaran McDonough) of Hardiman and Beyond: Galway Arts and Culture, 1820-2020, due from Arden in July 2021, and (with Dr Terry Dunne) of A Spirit of Revolution: Ireland from Below, 1916-1923, due from Four Courts in April 2022.

Is léachtóir le Stair in OÉ Gaillimh é an Dr John Cunningham agus iar-eagarthóir ar Saothar: Iris Chumann Staire Lucht Saothair na hÉireann. Tá go leor foilsithe aige faoin ngeilleagar morálta, stair áitiúil na hÉireann agus sindeacálachas domhanda. Bunaitheoir agus comh-stiúrthóir ar Ionad na hÉireann um Stair Oibre agus Aicme, atá lonnaithe in Institiúid Moore in OÉ Gaillimh, tá sé ina Phríomhthaighdeoir (leis an Dr Sarah-Anne Buckley) ar Thionscadal Stair Bhéil Bhaile Thuama. Tá sé ina eagarthóir (leis an Dr Ciaran McDonough) ar Hardiman and Beyond: Ealaíon agus Cultúr na Gaillimhe, 1820-2020, atá le foilsiú ag Arden i mí Iúil 2021, agus (leis an Dr Terry Dunne) A Spirit of Revolution: Ireland from Below, 1916-1923, atá le foilsiú ag Four Courts i mí Aibreáin 2022.

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Dr Caitriona Clear

An Dr Caitriona Clear

Dr Caitriona Clear teaches nineteenth and twentieth-century European and Irish history at NUI, Galway. She has published books and articles on a variety of historical topics including nuns, household work, women’s magazines, homelessness, children, health, oral history, emigration, work and welfare. She is currently engaged in a historical study of Irish popular writing (fiction, biography, hagiography) in the first fifty years of independence.

Múineann an Dr Caitriona Clear stair na hEorpa agus na hÉireann sa naoú haois déag agus san fhichiú haois in OÉ, Gaillimh. Tá leabhair agus ailt foilsithe aici faoi mhná rialta, obair tí, irisí ban, easpa dídine, leanaí, sláinte, stair bhéil, eisimirce, obair agus leas. Faoi láthair tá sí i mbun staidéir stairiúil ar scríbhneoireacht mhóréilimh na hÉireann (ficsean, beathaisnéis, naomhsheanchas) sa chéad chaoga bliain tar éis bhunú an Stáit.

Professor Linda Connolly

An tOllamh Linda Connolly

Professor Linda Connolly is Professor of Sociology and the Director of the Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute. Her research interests include gender, Irish studies, family, feminist theory and gender-based violence. She has published several articles, chapters and books, including: The Irish Women’s Movement: From Revolution to Devolution (London and New York: Palgrave/Macmillan and Dublin: Lilliput, 2003), Documenting Irish Feminisms: The Second Wave (with Tina O’Toole, Dublin: Woodfield Press, 2005 and Arlen Press, 2021), Social Movements and Ireland (with Niamh Hourigan, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), The ‘Irish’ Family (London: Routledge, 2015), and Women and the Irish Revolution: Feminism, Activism, Violence (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2020).

Is Ollamh le Socheolaíocht í an tOllamh Linda Connolly agus Stiúrthóir Institiúid Eolaíochtaí Sóisialta Ollscoil Mhá Nuad. I measc a cuid spéiseanna taighde tá inscne, an léann Éireannach, an teaghlach, an teoiric fheimineach agus foréigean bunaithe ar inscne. Tá roinnt alt, caibidlí agus leabhar foilsithe aici, lena n-áirítear: The Irish Women’s Movement: From Revolution to Devolution (Londain agus Nua-Eabhrac: Palgrave/Macmillan agus Baile Átha Cliath: Lilliput, 2003), Documenting Irish Feminisms: The Second Wave (le Tina O’Toole, Baile Átha Cliath: Woodfield Press, 2005 agus Arlen Press, 2021), Social Movements and Ireland (le Niamh Hourigan, Manchain: Manchester University Press, 2006), The ‘Irish’ Family (Londain: Routledge, 2015), agus Women and the Irish Revolution: Feminism, Activism, Violence (Baile Átha Cliath: Irish Academic Press, 2020).

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A bird’s-eye view of the devastation in the heart of Cork city centre, December 13th 1920. Five acres of property lie in ruins.

Radharc ón aer ar an léirscrios i gcroílár chathair Chorcaí, 13 Nollaig 1920. Tá cúig acra d’fhoirgnimh bánaithe.

Photo National Library of Ireland www.nli.ie Ref: HOGW 188

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Machnamh 100 President of Ireland Centenary Reflections

First Seminar Challenges of Public Commemorations 4 December 2020

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Principal Address

President Michael D. Higgins

Of Centenaries and the Hospitality Necessary in Reflecting on Memory, History and Forgiveness

President Michael D. Higgins Uachtarán Micheál D. Ó hUigínn

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The decades through which we are living have been referred to as ‘Decades of Centenaries’. It is inevitable that some centenaries be emphasised more than others, thus creating a challenge of understanding as to how memory, history and symbolism have been used or invoked to suggest difference, distance from ‘the Other’, as it were. The act of ‘commemoration’, I believe, need not, indeed should not, add to that distance from ‘the Other’. Indeed, I believe that, approached with a sophistication as to the uses of memory and recall, and a willingness to share the discipline of evidence-based historiography, it is possible to transcend such distance as was engendered, amplified, and is being sustained between communities on this island and with our nearest neighbour of whose empire we were a part just over a century ago. We are in new times and in a shared context of struggling to defeat a virus that has taken the lives of citizens without discrimination as to any boundaries between us. I want to suggest that we should take the opportunity of transacting, that is to say, confronting and working through, that which establishes the distance between us in terms of different narratives of violences recalled, the absolutisms that drove those impulses to violence, the careless and dangerous assumptions of ‘the Other’ which may have driven such violence. In previous considerations of public memory, I have suggested that amnesia as to painful events of the past is not an option. I was drawing, inter alia, on the work of Hannah Arendt, Paul Ricoeur, and Richard Kearney to indicate the necessity of coming to terms with recalled outrage, the essential ethical foundations of the appropriateness of memory, and the practical use of such procedures as would enable, to use Kearney’s phrase – “a hospitality of narratives”, that it to say, an openness to different narratives of the historical experience.

It may be difficult to personally experience the recall of the different forms that the sources of violence took, but there is a real gain in reflecting on, and confronting, the assumptions as to how and why there was recourse to violence, the further development and infliction of new forms of violence, what purpose was sought or served by these sources, proximate or ancient. What is at stake in making the reflection, I suggest, is not the offering of a set of competing rationalisations of opposing violences, but rather a recovery of contexts that need to be understood, whatever purposes may have been served by such rationalisations. Such recovered contexts must include in addition to a consideration of violence, adequate recognition of the efforts of those who sought peace in the face of emerging conflicts. They include the trade union movement North and South, pacifists, feminists, individual clerics such as Archbishop Clune of Perth. Their presence in the historiography tends to be understated. Violence, and recall of it, dominate. Yet peace matters. It is possible, for example, to see 1920 as a year of the lost opportunity for a peaceful transition, a loss that emerged from a series of opportunities not taken in the immediate years preceding. It is necessary, too, however uncomfortable, to hear the views of those who believe that, even with all the tragedy that emerged, perhaps a greater loss of life was avoided by the making of compromises and new accommodations, later to be the subject of contestation, even rejection. Even more important is the need to recognise that what was perceived by some, for example, as a loss to empire was for others, such as nationalists, a moment of emancipation, of a freedom long-delayed, and based, too, on remembered, deeply layered humiliation, loss of respect; an indomitable search for independence, the pursuit of which was a value inherited and an aspiration for freedom recovered from past failures, and the expression of a diverse but indomitable people. That aspiration, of course, accommodated within it different versions of freedom.

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The result of excluded narratives or perspectives led for too long to the domination of a sealed, as opposed to an open, version of history. An evasive forgetting was as important as remembering in this selective approach, for both remembering and forgetting are utilised in the case of collective memories that generate exclusive narratives of ‘the Other’. Paul Ricoeur refers to this in his suggestion of the tendency of such an abuse of memory to be justified as loyalty, or faithfulness, an approach from which history in the pursuit of fact has to distance itself. This indeed might suggest that there may be an unavoidable tension between history and memory. History is important as an evidence-based framework for what public remembering we choose to do. We are fortunate on this island, I believe, in having sharply relevant new contributions from historians drawing on newly available sources, new considerations of context, scholars who are addressing neglected themes, others revising or deepening previous scholarship. Undertaking responsibility for the building of a capacity for achieving a hospitality of narratives is a task for us all. I particularly want to commend the work in this regard here in Ireland of Johnston McMaster and his colleague Cathy Higgins1, and others, who are giving such a lead in developing crosscommunity courses in ethical remembering which run a timeline of historical events as a background to the contested contexts of differing public memories. I believe great results can flow from such engagement. If I may quote from a recent paper of Johnston McMaster on this topic,

“History requires ethical analysis which in turn requires appropriate attention to contexts. […] Attention to context means that we cannot read history uncritically from the contemporary standpoint or current ethical perspectives. The perceived wisdom of the time needs to be engaged.”2

Why Commemorate? As we set about the task of ethical remembering, it may be useful to ask why do we commemorate, for whom do we commemorate, and why has it become such an important ritual over the centuries? Heather Jones, in her contribution to the superb Atlas of the Irish Revolution3, asserts:

“there have been complex historiographical debates about the nature of collective memory and war remembrance, but the term ‘commemoration’ has been less clearly analysed.”4 John Horne argues that the practices of commemoration “have their own history, which is that of traces left behind by the episodes that caused them and the changing awareness over time of their importance.5” In his book Commemoration, historian Seth C. Bruggeman calls commemoration “the lingua franca of public memory”, encompassing the various ways we have imagined—in monuments, ceremonies, festivals, pageants, fairs, museums, re-enactments—to register deep regard for the past by those in the present.6 Unlike history, which is concerned primarily with circumstance, commemoration dwells predominately in feeling. It could be argued, as Bruggeman does, that the diversity of rituals, objects and customs that we associate with commemoration are all intended to give public feeling to what are otherwise often private memories. Commemoration therefore offers the opportunity to reflect, to look deeply at change over time, to provide an understanding of where things have been, where they are today, and why. The idea of commemoration is always, correctly, rooted in agency and the intent to accord importance to an aspect of the past. It is therefore an active concept, encompassing social and cultural functions, and serving, for example, as a bonding tool for enhanced social capital, employed for pedagogical purposes to

See, for example, McMaster, J. and Higgins, C. (2015). Ethics and the Easter Rising, Junction Publishing.

McMaster, J. (2016). ‘Ethical Remembering: Commemoration in a New Context’ – available here: https://www.irishmethodist.org/ sites/default/files/pdf/csr/johnstonmcmaster1912_1916paper.pdf

Crowley, J. et al. (eds.) (2017). Atlas of the Irish Revolution, Cork University Press: Cork.

Jones, H. (2017). ‘Cultures of Commemoration: Remembering the First World War in Ireland’, in Atlas of the Irish Revolution, pp 838-47, Cork University Press: Cork.

Horne, J. (2014). ‘The Great War at Its Centenary’, in Winter, J. (ed.), The Cambridge History of the First World War, Volume 3, Civil Society: University Press: Cambridge.

Bruggeman, S.C. (2017). Commemoration, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers: Washington.

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spread awareness of historical events and, for some, acting as a form of retributive justice to honour those perceived to have been the victims. Commemoration brings to the fore a consideration of how the study of the past and our collective memory may be valuable to individuals, communities, and a wider society. Through commemoration, history helps create and nurture active, engaged citizens. I want to suggest that we should use the present context of the shared experience of struggles with the COVID-19 virus to be radical in our acknowledgement of what we have excluded and that there is value in seeking to work towards an ethical task together, one of inclusion and respect, one that brings us beyond – relieves us of the burden of – sectarian tendencies past and present.

Ethics of Memory In this decade of significant commemoration, we continue to be challenged to engage with our shared past in a way that is honest, authentic and pluralistic. The complex events we recall and commemorate during this decade are integral to the story that has shaped our nation in all its diversity at home and abroad. They are, however, events to be remembered that will be retold from many different standpoints, and it is through respecting these differing perspectives in all their complexity that we can facilitate a more authentic construction, not only of our intersecting shared history, but of our postsectarian possibilities for the future. While memory can be both constructive and reconstructive – that is to say, it is developed over time, built upon by age-old acquisition of the distant senses, imagination and thought – yet central to the concept of ethical remembering must be the notion of authenticity. This in turn is nuanced by what Professor Ciarán Benson describes as,

“the ever-present warning that remembering, whether individual or collective, is always shadowed by uncertainty and, from a responsible, moral perspective, ought to be accompanied by a knowledge of that possibility.”7

The act of remembering invites of course risk of an emotional kind, even if executed in private. If executed publicly, as commemorations, it has a wider impact. If the commemoration is to be hospitable to multiple narratives, to a plurality of interpretations, ground has to be given, from earlier, even comforting, foundational myths upon which one’s own personality and communal shared beliefs have relied. It seems to me useful to reflect on the purpose of the act of remembering as one prepares to issue an invitation to what is an increasingly diverse public to engage in the more public act of commemoration. Issues of the fullness of context, in its being taken into account, or being excluded, cannot morally be avoided. For example, when during our memorial services for the dead in the two wars of the twentieth century we state ‘we shall remember them from the break of day to the setting of the sun’, are we celebrating their lived and lost lives together in the conditions of war as fellow vulnerable human beings, or are we allowed also to see them as the human carnage of conflict, of a clash of imperial aspirations? What is the intention guiding our invocation? “To fail to remember”, is to “kill the victims twice”, Paul Ricoeur has written.8 Yes, it is undeniable that in the intimacy of trenches, under terrible bombardment, some of the greatest extensions of human courage, compassion and bravery have been delivered, but at a terrible cost. Acknowledging the context of what we recognise as the heroic should not be a problem. Who could not be moved by the inscription on a tombstone? But then, if we are to have an authentic act of public memory, should we not be moved in an ever deeper way at what a field of graves tells us of the failure that the slaughter of war has represented, not only in the twentieth century, but in all centuries? An ‘ethical act of memory’ has to be a critical act of memory, I suggest. There should be an engagement with the issues of context before the act of public memory is transformed to commemoration in any narrow sense. Commemoration is not only a public invitation, it is an act predicated on selection.

Benson, C. (2020). “Psychology and World Heritage? Reflections on Time, Memory and Imagination for a Heritage Context,” International Journal of Cultural Property, 27, 2 (Special Issue: ‘Authenticity and Reconstruction’), Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, May 2020: 259-276 (quotation from page 272).

8 In The Just (1995, University of Chicago Press), Ricoeur states, “To fail to remember”, is to “kill the victims twice” (p. 290). To forget is, therefore, equivalent to conspire and to injure, “to put to death without judgment for having dredged up the past”.

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The act of selection is challenging, and poses choices, as to what is appropriate as even a temporary excursion into collective memory. Such choices can never be neutral nor is there any way they can be claimed to be objective. Thus, assumptions that guided inclusion and exclusion are best stated. What can be achieved, I believe, is a transparency of purpose, an honesty of endeavour in keeping open the possibility of plural interpretations and future revision based on new facts or original analysis. This is put very well in relation to 1916 in Ethics and the Easter Rising again by Johnston McMaster and Cathy Higgins, where they write,

“Remembering ethically is not just about remembering inclusively, honouring all the dead in the mystery of their humanness, it is about taking responsibility ourselves for the present and the future. We cannot afford to be controlled or dictated to from the grave, but as human beings, take responsibility ourselves for our own distinctive time, place and world.”9 Thus, the challenge is, for example, to take the peace that we have put on paper in the Agreement we achieved over two decades ago, and use it to achieve peace in communities, a peace that will make dividing walls redundant, allow our children to share schools, read history with respect for difference and, moving through such a shared respect, achieve the ability for a shared fulfilment together in the future, encountering on the way such understanding as is necessary, and such forgiveness as is made possible.

Trading of Atrocities Commemoration itself can therefore be an important aspect of ethical remembering. However, discretion is required with regard to how we mark important historical events, particularly those that may be exploited for narrow political or partisan purposes.

Indeed, some historians have rightly warned us against the perils posed to historical truth by any backward imputation of motives, any uncritical transfer of contemporary emotions onto the past. Time and again, we have seen how history can be used and abused for insidious, morally dubious, purposes. As historian Roisín Higgins puts it,

“[The] fractious nature of the revolutionary period has created many possibilities for commemorative events, as well as a great deal of potential for division.”10 That it not to say that we should censor memory of painful events. To do so would be, at best, amoral, I suggest. For example, during the War of Independence the acts of aggression unleashed by Crown forces and administered by the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries in particular were often in the form of exemplary collective punishments and reprisals. Such horrors would be contrary to the modern-day Geneva Conventions and would be considered illegal under international law.11 Being as they were, an escalation of stateapproved violence, these acts became the mark of a policy and strategy of holding control. They were aimed at subjugation, installation of fear in a public that had in its midst those that sought and were fighting for independence. There is little doubt that the infliction of economic damage by both the Auxiliaries and Black and Tans was not merely a spontaneous series of acts by the uncontrolled, or the drunken. Rather it was a key strategic tool, a response of empire, employed in an attempt to quash support for any separatism that constituted a threat to that empire. The move by the British forces towards attacks on business and co-operatives, including rural creameries – which were major employers and sources of essential foodstuffs – marked an escalation in both the wider socio-economic impacts and the sophistication of reprisal tactics, harming local economies and livelihoods by punishing the civilian population through the destruction of a cherished public utility or key employer.

McMaster, J. and Higgins, C. (2015). Ethics and the Easter Rising, Junction Publishing.

Higgins, R. (2017). ‘Commemoration and the Irish Revolution’, in Atlas of the Irish Revolution, pp 848-856, Cork University Press: Cork.

See: Garner, Bryan A., ed. (2007). Black’s Law Dictionary (8th edition). Thomson West: St Paul, p. 280. Collective punishment was outlawed in 1949 by the Geneva Convention, specifically contravening the Fourth Geneva Convention.

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Reprisals and collective punishments were a key aspect of empire rule by the different forms of empire that were increasingly coming under opposition from below. Empire was challenged, along with its imposition of colonial power, laws, attributes and ideologies. Such violent tactics were already an established strategic tool of imperialist military strategy by the time they occurred in Ireland during the War of Independence. Such acts, and anticipation of them, drew a violent response in turn from a repertoire of responses, be it in relation to land, language or poverty, responses and innovations, too, that were available to Irish nationalists motivated by both new and recalled humiliations of which there was no shortage. The changed nature of the RIC, it having been augmented by a newly arrived force, some inexperienced in terms of discipline, and recently discharged, perhaps unemployed, soldiers, others officers ideologically driven, meant that its Irish-born members were now at risk of being constituted as part of the enemy forces. Those, and there were many, who may have joined for security of job and pension, or for housing or educational opportunities for their children, who were embedded in a community in previous times, were now in changed circumstances, targets, and the killing of them was often the instigation of forays from barracks by the new forces, burnings, exemplary collective punishments, and further tragic loss of life. Of course, the British forces were not alone when it came to reprisals and atrocities. Violence breeds violence. Cruelty is learned and, indeed, the history of Irish Republicanism is one in which the callous disregard for human life has been displayed on too many occasions, with civilians often constituting the target, in what is often termed “The Irish Struggle”. War is always ugly, and posthumous glorification is neither desirable nor morally sound. We must, therefore, I believe, seek to enable all of our citizens to engage with history and commemoration in a way that is inclusive, ethical, pluralist and honest, allowing for the evaluation of motives and of actions on all sides with fairness.

In terms of inclusivity, we have at times fallen short in our duty of public remembering in some significant areas of our shared history – for example, in Ireland, the State’s channelling of grief for those who died during World War I or those who died and suffered in the succeeding conflicts of the War of Independence and the Civil War. Indeed, on occasion, in the later 1920s for example, the State could be accused of being partisan and exclusive and thus divisive. Such an approach to official remembering, in which the State was often absent or selective, resulted in additional grief for many relatives of those who died in the struggle for Irish independence, owing to the sense that they had not received due recognition for their loss. This adds weight to the argument for State commemoration for all of those who lost their lives in the fight for Irish independence, even as a palliative measure that might aid personal grief. Recalling frailty, error or weakness is more difficult, it seems, for much of historiography. Speaking of strength in the pursuit of hegemony of narrative seems easier. Yet to achieve a capacity for peace or fulfilment, we need a recognition of weakness as well as strength, of error and failure, as well as of certainties vindicated. Arriving at such a “narrative hospitality”, to quote Paul Ricoeur12, such as I suggest, requires generous effort, and reaching an accommodation with conflicting versions of the past is merely a stage in the journey, via understanding, to what might be the destination that is forgiveness for past hurt, neglect or omission; a destination which, in so many areas of conflict, at home and abroad, past and present, many participants may never reach. It should be understood that we are concerned here with a very tentative horizon of completion, of a critical historical knowledge aware of its limitations, built on such a reconciliation of narratives as avoids binary opposites:

“Between history’s project of truth and memory’s aim of faithfulness is that small miracle of recognition [that] has no equivalent in history.”13

Much of Paul Ricoeur’s writings dealt with this topic, including his last major published book – see Ricoeur, P. (2004). Memory, History, Forgetting, Chicago Press: Chicago. This three-part work first takes up the question of memory and recollection in response to questions about uses and abuses of memory in contemporary society.

Ricoeur, P. (2004). Op. cit., p. 497.

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Ricoeur is suggesting, recognising, as we must, that what must come to be shared is beyond any narrow limitation, be it of history or memory. In order to move beyond the hospitality of narrative, a parity of esteem in the discourse of dealing with past events is necessary. It is an approach, however, that may in time create the possibility of a necessary forgiving. Remembering those voices who have been forgotten, excluded from public memory, either wilfully or perhaps unwittingly, is so very important if we are serious about nurturing a comprehensive ethical public memory. We must remember, too, as Ricoeur expounded so well, that there is a reciprocal relationship between remembering and forgetting which affects both the perception of shared, historical experience and the production of historical narratives.14 Approaching anew the tasks of remembering and forgetting in an ethical way is transformative. As philosopher Hannah Arendt has written, forgiveness is the only way to undo “the irreversible flow of history”: “Forgiveness is the necessary corrective for the inevitable damages that result from action. […] Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of consequence forever.”15 Thus, it is only through such an ethical remembering, as we now have an opportunity to attempt to undertake, that we can avoid revisiting the blinding categories of censure or denunciation, or indeed revenge and bitterness.16

Remembering Those Excluded Memory of Ireland’s War of Independence is complicated by the fact that it was followed so closely by the Civil War, resulting as it did in certain events and figures from the War of Independence often receiving less attention than the subsequent Civil War. Ethical remembering requires us to include those who may hitherto have been excluded from official, formal accounts of history, and to shine a light on overlooked figures and actions in an attempt to have a more comprehensive and balanced perspective on the independence struggle.

For example, the different social class background from which Volunteers came is important, as is the level at which they had the possibility to participate. Those who participated in the struggle for Irish independence constitute a long spectrum that stretches from academics of emancipatory disposition, through insecure smallholders, agricultural labourers with little rights, to shop boys and the trades. They each sought independence, I suggest, through the prism of their social class experiences. A central dimension of ethical remembering is a refusal of any kind of conscious or unconscious amnesia, not only of persons but events. Indeed, to reject important, if painful, events of the past is to deny those affected by them recognition of their losses or the right to have memories of those losses. I repeat that I believe that to do this would be counterproductive and potentially amoral.

Moral Vacuum and Gender Violence Ethical remembering entails, too, the inclusion of the voices of the marginalised and the disenfranchised in our recollections of the past. It must show a willingness to do justice, for example, to the essential roles played by women in this period that we now commemorate. Sinéad McCoole has written that women were the “eyes and ears” of the conflict17, providing safe houses, procuring arms, visiting prisons, spying and relaying vital intelligence and messages. While we have details of this in their pension applications in the 1920s, and in other decades, too, their work in the struggle for independence was, for too long, neither recognised, nor treated with any parity, in terms of respect, with male counterparts. Ethical recall should also include an examination of under-researched or avoided areas, such as the violence against women that occurred during this period. The examples of sexual violence that occurred during the War of Independence and later the Civil War can be viewed, as Professor Linda Connolly of Maynooth University has argued, “[as] a dark secret of the period’s historiography”.18

Ibid.

Arendt, H. (1958). The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press: Chicago

Ibid.

McCoole, Sinead (2019). “Women in 1919: The ‘eyes and ears’ of the conflict”, The Irish Times 21st January 2019. See: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/women-in-1919-the-eyes-and-ears-of-the-conflict-1.3745851

Connolly, L. (2019). ‘Sexual Violence and the Irish Revolution: An Inconvenient Truth?’, History Ireland, Vol. 27, No. 6, pp. 34-38

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Commemorations should not ignore horrific acts, such as head-shorning and sexual violence including the raping of women. It is important, too, to recognise the complexity that arises in seeking to differentiate between what were strategic acts of a military campaign and what were, in particular situations, acts carried out from a mixture of motivations, acts of cruelty, old hatreds, envy or greed. It is imperative that the Irish Revolution is not perceived as a war solely about or achieved by men. The civilian impact, where women come decisively into play, is so often neglected in the historical narratives of the period. The experience of women must be considered comprehensively, together with an examination of social class, if the commemoration of the War of Independence is to address seriously the most difficult questions of the past. Gender-based violence occurred and was inflicted with cruelty. It is an aspect of the revolutionary period that has been hidden, suppressed and denied for too long. It deserves a proper contextual examination. The assumptions as to what was to be the role of women in Irish society was of course to become a slow-burning issue that would reveal so much of what was bad and exclusionary rather than what might be good and inclusive right into our own times. We must face the exclusionary nature of the State that emerged a century ago. We must muster the courage to face the role played by institutions, including religious institutions, in providing the fuel and the exclusionary language for what became confessionalisms that fostered division, not cooperation.

The ‘Other’ The ethics of commemoration entails inclusivity being placed centre-stage, an openness to dissonant voices and stories of ‘the Other’, the stranger, the enemy of yesterday. We must also, through commemoration of the Irish centenary, face up to, acknowledge, and come to a form of reconciliation with some of the thorniest aspects of the struggle for independence, and the later practice of that independence, including the lingering sources of violence – be they land-based, local disputes, gender-based, treatment of prisoners – and particularly those based on stereotypes of ‘the Other’ from both sides.

I have written elsewhere as to how, in the British case, the stereotypes that related to the Irish and other colonised peoples involved the ‘othering’ of people, cultures and ideologies, their being regarded as inferior. Stereotypes were employed as instruments that rejected or ignored the humanity and dignity of those being colonised. I have also written of what a powerful moment it would constitute if a number of European societies made a public recognition of this, particularly in relation to Africa. By way of response, in the Irish case, there was no scarcity of figures responsible for past horrific acts of abuse, humiliation and indifference to poverty that could be drawn on as figures to describe and depict present opponents. ‘Othering’ was rooted in ideological assumptions, of superiority and inferiority in terms of race, culture or capacity, in the notion of the collective as a disloyal, hopeless or threatening version of the ‘Other’. The ‘othering’ of particular cultures, particular nationalities, particular attributes and particular ideologies served, for example, as an insidious rationalisation of, and distorted logic behind, British Crown Forces’ acts of violence, such as the collective punishments and reprisals to which I referred earlier. We must also be cognisant of stereotypical depictions of ‘the Other’ by some of those on the nationalist side as a process of generating a form of Anglophobia which has been utilised and exists in some quarters to this day, and is perhaps being fuelled by the worst aspects, and feared consequences, of Brexit. Hibernophobia, as it is sometimes called, was a deep current in late-19th and early-20th century Britain. But prejudice against the Irish, particularly as a migrant people, or as members of particular religious denominations, was not just confined to Victorian Britain, but was also evident in the United States, centred on the stereotyping of the Irish as inherently violent, alcoholic and unintelligent. It was a depiction that continued into, and throughout, the twentieth century. The response to it helped fuel actions that were horrific and were delivered against a civilian British public, with whom they should have been able to see a common culture. Thus, one form of hate reinforced another.

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There existed, it has to be recognised, a supportive intellectual tradition of pejorative attitudes towards the Irish by sections of British scholarship, which had been well-formed by this period. It includes, for example, Scottish philosopher David Hume who, having made a distinguished contribution to philosophy and its methods, that, as an intellectual of influence, could have made a significant contribution to upending such stereotypes. However, he was to write regressively in his History of England:

“The Irish from the beginning of time had been buried in the most profound barbarianism [sic] and ignorance; and as they were never conquered, even, indeed, by the Romans from whom all the Western world derives its culture, they continued still in the most rude state of society and were distinguished by those vices to which human nature, not tamed by education, nor restrained by laws, is for ever subject”.19 Indeed, two centuries later, Winston Churchill, claiming a distance from Irishness based on an assumed superiority, would write,

“We have always found the Irish to be a bit odd. They refuse to be English.”20 The ‘othering’ of Irish people and their culture was undeniably ingrained at significant levels of British society during the revolutionary era, and in Ireland this drew in turn a deep, hostile and comprehensive ‘othering’ of what might be considered English or British or alien. Clearly, the challenge we face all comes down in our present use of commemoration to the necessity of us making a new journey together based on better principles in terms of recalling history and memories. Such a task was well-described by His Royal Highness Prince Charles on the occasion of his speech at a central remembrance ceremony in Berlin. He ended his remarks with the words:

“As our countries begin this new chapter in our long history, let us reaffirm our bond for the years ahead.

Let us reflect on all that we have been through together, and all that we have learned. Let us remember all victims of war, tyranny and persecution; those who laid down their lives for the freedoms we cherish, and those who struggle for these freedoms to this day. They inspire us to strive for a better tomorrow – let us make this our common cause.”21 Not Merely Celebrating the Actions of the Victors For too long our understanding of the decade 1912-1922 and the surrounding period was hindered by an assumption that we can more easily make sense of events, and indeed our own sense of individual and national identity, if we keep historical narratives brief, simple and homogenous. We must challenge the urge to over-simplify as we commemorate. Embracing complexity is important. Complex events demand a scholarship that respects complexity, that seeks to unravel perceived contradictions rather than invest in, or rely on, simplistic reiterations that lead away from any deep knowledge and that may go on to assist in accommodating ideological manipulation. We must recognise, too, that, in the context of commemorating, understanding and even empathising is not the same as endorsing or valorising. It is not about celebrating merely the actions of those who won. In seeking to gain a fuller picture of the events occurring during the decade leading to independence itself, we have to recall not only the participants of war and rebellion, but also to recognise all of those who suffered in its midst and in its wake. As Declan Kiberd has written, “the stories of the past had celebrated the wrong people: the smiters of the world rather than the smitten.”22

Reconciliation and Forgiveness If I may, in summary then, return to the tools we might use in our new journey together, I have referred in other speeches to the work of Richard Kearney in this area of ethical remembering, and to his astute observation that engagement with

Hume, D. (1879). The History of England: Volume I, Harper: New York. First published in 1754.

Quoted from numerous sources. See, for example, “The Irish Find What They’re Looking For” by Maureen Dowd, New York Times, 21st May 2011: https://www.nytimes. com/2011/05/22/opinion/22dowd.html

A speech by HRH The Prince of Wales at the Central Remembrance Ceremony in Berlin, 15/11/20 – available here: https://www.princeofwales.gov.uk/speech/speech-hrh-prince-wales-central-remembrance-ceremony-berlin

Kilberd, D. (2015). Inventing Ireland: The Literature of a Modern Nation, Random House: London, p. 222.

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the plurality and diversity of various narratives could, over time, contribute to a culture of forgiveness. Forgiveness, reconciliation and healing must remain important and necessary objectives. They constitute our best, realistic hope of coming to terms with the past. Forgiveness is difficult but not impossible. The purpose of forgiving, as Hannah Arendt saw it, was to diminish a past event’s capacity to deprive one of the realistic possibilities of the present or the imaginative possibilities of the future. Forgiveness is not an abstract act, summoned up by an individual to address a particular wrong. It is a conscious, even painful, act and it can be the genesis of a new relationship forged between the forgiven and the forgiver. Engaging with the past is often not easy. On the contrary, it involves a complex negotiation of the manifold stories, memories, hurts, legacies and emotions, for example, of all who recall the revolutionary period leading up to independence, or were or are affected by what is too lightly called ‘the Troubles’. Finding a fair and comprehensive way of dealing with the past, one that will win the confidence and support of all, is a daunting challenge – however, it is a challenge that on moral grounds cannot be, should not be, I believe, shirked. It is the basis for us all not only of hope, but for the achievement of a new version of a life, one of fulfilment for all on our island and for all in our neighbourhood. For the sake of the future, we must break loose from the snares of the past.

Looking to the Future In facing up to that challenge, let us ensure then that our approach is characterised by a desire to remember ethically, to view forgiveness as a true release from the past, and to move forward to a new chapter unburdened by any bitter memory of that past, free to make of our imagining an emancipatory, inclusive achievement in laying out conditions for an enduring peace. In that process of re-engagement, we on this island of Ireland we share can, across a distance of a century, understand the events of a century ago as being about so much more than military or political actions. They also of course represented an act of imagination, a part of a social as well as a national revolution, whose leaders were inspired by the idea of creating a very different, much-improved Ireland founded on the old republican values of equality and liberty.

All of this was done in the context of a turbulent time in empire history in which global challenges were being mounted to relations between those who ruled and those who were being ruled. It was a time of a mass destruction, of a pandemic, the wrongly named Spanish Flu of which people were afraid, too numbed, too busy in conflict, to speak. It was the aftermath of World War I, empires were being re-forged, and across the world an urge for self-determination, including across the colonised world, was stirring. In Ireland, too, popular mandates, power realities, economic and social forces, choices, actors and passions all became key contextual components of our struggle for independence. Opportunities for peaceful transitions were forfeited. Cold military measures were invoked rather than the making of any sophisticated or informed, meaningful, diplomatic or institutional responses to the stated will of the people, as had been expressed through the ballot box. While in the best of its rhetoric, and in the hearts of its most selfless participants, it was an Ireland of equality and social justice that was sought, an Ireland of democratic citizenship and of collective participation, succeeding institutions would contradict rather than deliver such outcomes. As we re-engage with the ideals that lay behind this period in history, we are also invited to revisit our conceptions of what constitutes a real Republic – a Republic that would have solidarity, community and the public world at its heart; a Republic fit for a shared island of diverse tradition, hopes and loyalties, a Republic that would acknowledge the State not only as benign, but as active, as a shared responsibility, and recognise, too, its vital role in actively improving the common welfare of all citizens. This conception of a shared island, of the State and the Republic is so much richer than any narrow, individualistic definition of citizenship – and it is also, I suggest, closer to what the more idealistic leaders of this period of a hundred years ago had in mind. They in their generation included advanced thinkers, selfless women and men, who took all the risks to ensure that the children of Ireland would, in the future, live in freedom and be fulfilled with their fair share of Ireland’s cultural, social and economic advancements. The passage of one hundred years allows us to see the past afresh, free from some of the narrow, partisan interpretations that might have restricted our view in earlier periods.

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We have a duty to honour and respect that past, and retrieve the heroic idealism that was at its heart. We have an even greater duty to imagine and to forge a future illuminated by the unfulfilled promises of our past. This requires reviving the best of the idealism of this period so that coming generations might experience freedom in the full sense of the term: freedom from poverty, freedom from violence and insecurity, and freedom from fear. May I conclude by suggesting that the time has come for such an ethics of narrative hospitality as might replace our past entrenchments on this island; that we make possible all the best of our futures together.

As we continue to mark these pivotal moments in our nation’s history, let us together cultivate memory as an instrument for the living so that we may realise a collective memory at peace, unburdened, reconciled; an ethical remembering with its special energy and capacity to replace our past entrenchments, as well as offering an openness to others. Let us together strive to nurture memory and remembrance as a strong foundation of a shared, agreed future.

Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir’s is beir beannacht do’n tógra sin.

We have in the past experienced lost opportunities in the context of reconciliation from our violent struggle for independence and what followed it, but we now have an opportunity, as we mark the commemorative centenary, to seek true, lasting reconciliation on this island and build a bright, emancipatory future for all of us with our diverse histories and memories respectfully taken into account.

The Military Parade passes the G.P.O.

Téann an Pharáid Mhíleata thar Ard-Oifig an Phoist.

Source: Cuimhneachán, 1916 – 1966: a record of Ireland’s commemoration of the 1916 Rising (Department of External Affairs, 1966).

Foinse: Cuimhneachán, 1916 – 1966: taifead de chomóradh

Image courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

Íomhá le caoinchead Leabharann Náisiúnta na hÉireann.

na hÉireann ar Éirí Amach 1916 (An Roinn Gnóthaí Eachtracha, 1966).

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President Higgins laying a wreath in the Stone-breakers’ Yard, Kilmainham Gaol (2016) An tUachtarán Ó hUigínn ag leagan bláthfhleisce i bPríosún Chill Mhaighneann (2016)

2016 Centenary Commemorations – College Green, Dublin 2 Comóradh Céad Bliain 2016 – Faiche an Choláiste, Baile Átha Cliath 2

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October 1920. A boy boards up a broken window after a reprisal attack by Crown forces in Templemore, Co. Tipperary.

Deireadh Fómhair 1920. Féachann buachaill le cláir adhmaid a chur ar fhuinneog bhriste tar éis gníomh díoltais a rinne fórsaí na Coróineach sa Teampall Mór, Co. Thiobraid Árann.

Photo National Library of Ireland www.nli.ie Ref: HOGW 90

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Respondent

Professor Ciarán Benson

‘The Past’ as a Concept & Ethical Remembrance Brief Reflections Professor Ciarán Benson An tOllamh Ciarán Benson

Introduction If, as a citizen, you aspire to, and work to affirm, ideals of forgiveness, reconciliation, harmony, equality, justice, diversity, tolerance, compromise, sharing and a generalised orientation to an agreed common good, then collective acts of remembrance of an ethical kind will appeal to you. Such ideals are concepts to which those who hold them commit themselves, emotionally and practically. To understand why, and how, ethical memorialisation impacts our commemorative thinking about the War of Independence (21 Jan 1919 – 11 July 1921) and the Irish Civil War (28 June 1922 – 24 May 1923) we need, as the President argues, to frame our thinking about these acts more critically and abstractly than, perhaps, we have been accustomed to do.

My colleagues, as historians, will contextualise the particular details of those momentous events for this island.1 These last centenaries of our ‘Decade of Centenaries’ are especially difficult precisely because of the kinds of division that the events of those few years seared into the structures of Irish political and civic life for the last hundred years, cleavages within the Republic, fractures within Northern Ireland, ruptures between the Republic and Northern Ireland, and between both and Great Britain. What I want to outline, as footnotes to the President’s call, are some general philosophical and psychological contexts for the ethics, and for the practice, of ‘memory’. For brevity’s sake I rely on an argument for an ‘ethics of memory’ from the Israeli philosopher, Avishai Margalit.2

For a vivid and comprehensive account see Crowley, J., Ó Drisceoil, D. and Murphy, M., eds. (2017). Atlas of the Irish Revolution. Cork: Cork University Press.

Margalit, A. (2002). The ethics of memory. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

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Margalit writes against the backdrop of remembering that most extreme example of historical evil, still within living memory, the Holocaust. Tested against this extreme, his case for ethical memory, I believe, well fits our present purpose. This period of commemoration is an opportunity to reflect on where, as a State, we have come from and indeed, had things been different, where we might have gone. Two strands fabricate ‘the past’ for us as a symbolic entity: history and memory. In critical history, colder and more detached as Margalit sees it, “there is no backward causality. We cannot affect the past; we cannot undo the past, resurrect the past, or revivify the past. Only descriptions of the past can be altered, improved or animated.”3 In sharp contrast, memory in the form of “stories about the past that are shared by a community are as a rule more vivid, more concrete, and better connected with live experiences than is critical history.”4

So, how should we understand what we call ‘the past’? Let’s take a brief detour through the findings of contemporary psychology before returning to this idea of commemoration viewed through the lens of ethical memory.

‘The Past’ and its Possible Futures Our ideas about the past, about time and memory, shape our assumptions, and prime our expectations, of what it is possible to change in our relationship to the past. Reflections on our understanding of ‘the past’ challenge our common-sense notions of time. ‘The past’ is a complex system of concepts and images, inviting varying kinds and degrees of allegiance, animosity or of simple indifference. Change those concepts and images and you change the emotions animating your sense of ‘the past’.

Here are some questions the answers to which prompt both caution and optimism.

Is ‘the’ past ‘in’ the past, or should we think of ‘the past’ as having a future?5 The eminent German historian Reinhardt Koselleck titled his major work Futures Past.6 Here, I would like to briefly reflect on the idea of ‘the past’s futures’. Can we anticipate our past? Concepts of time are central to how we order our experience, both personally and collectively. But concepts of time, and their scales, vary greatly from one historical period to another, from one culture to another, from one language to another, from one discipline to another. In our everyday language we actually think of time spatially. The present is ‘here’, the past is ‘behind’ and the future is ‘in front’. In other words, we think of time linearly using the metaphor of space.7 This allows us to think of time as being short or long, and of events as receding from us or as approaching towards us.8 The point here is that our ideas of the past, and our metrics for temporally ordering those remembered or recalled events and experiences (such as, for instance, ‘calendrical time’), are constantly open to change and revision. Consequently, ‘the past’ is constantly open to change and revision, be it personally remembered or historically constructed. The more we learn from newly discovered materials in archives, diaries or letters, the more we can anticipate changes in ‘the past’. The more we create new frameworks of understanding, and attend to newly noticed domains of neglect in an existing canon, the more can ‘the past’ be redescribed, reinterpreted and reconfigured. To say that ‘the past’ arises from the present is not in any way to deny cause-and-effect in the unrolling of events that run their various courses.

Margalit, (2002), p. 66.

Margalit, (2002), p. 67.

Benson, C. (2020). Psychology and world heritage? Reflections on time, memory and imagination for a heritage context. International Journal of Cultural Property, 27, 2 (Special Issue: Authenticity and Reconstruction), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, May, pp. 259-276.

Click on this for read-only version: Psychology and World Heritage? Reflections on Time, Memory, and Imagination for a Heritage Context

Koselleck, R. (2004). Futures past: on the semantics of historical time. New Edition. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: the embodied mind and Its challenge to western thought. NY: Basic Books, Chapter 10.

Cepelewicz, J. (2019). The brain maps out ideas and memories like spaces. Quanta Magazine, January 14.

(2019). How the brain creates a timeline of the past. Quanta Magazine, February 12.

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It is to emphasise that ‘the past’ is a set of ideas whose use depends on memories and imaginings that function in the present, and that reflect the concerns of the present.9 For the issue of commemorations, then, we should pay detailed attention to the demands and dynamics of our present time in order to decide upon the contemporary purposes of historical remembrance. A key point is this, as the Northern Irish writer and poet Gerald Dawe has pointed out: in our present reflections, one of the things we do know is the ‘outcome’ of the past.10 Their past as it was, with its options and scope for decisions then, is not our past as it now is. Dawe can later ask “how a common past can now be achieved or even remembered,” and he goes on to say that “The past is not an ethereal thing, but is contained ‘in’ things and actions.”11 We have here again the idea of a commonly agreed past being formed as an ambition, as a future goal. Seamus Heaney wrote of the past as “the ghostlife that hovers over the furniture of our lives” where, to an imaginative person, such furniture “becomes a point of entry into a common emotional ground of memory and belonging.”12

Kinds of Remembrance Despite appearances to the contrary, Dawe and Heaney are not in disagreement in their respective uses of the words ‘not ethereal’ and ‘ghost-life’ when describing our senses of the past. Contemporary psychology and neuroscience confirm that when we remember, whether individually or, by extension, collectively, we do not retrieve some fixed and immutable ‘trace’. We constantly re-construct and re-imagine, subject to present demands. Our pasts are endlessly edited and re-edited, each version building upon its predecessors.13

If ‘the past’ is what is remembered, what can we say about the kinds of way there are of remembering? This is a vast and ever-expanding field of study, so let me select just a few ideas of relevance. There are many kinds of memory, and they interact in complex ways. Two of the most important are the ways in which we can each ‘time-travel’ back to episodes in our own past (episodic memory), and the ways in which we can recall what we know (semantic memory).14 Semantic memory has to do with recalling that something is the case whereas episodic memory is in play when I recall something specific that I did, or that happened to me. If episodic memory is a unique capacity of humans, it also lasts only as long as each human is alive. Each kind of memory conjures its own sense of time, and of its own past. And each kind nourishes the other. If episodic memories are what make witnesses, they also die with those witnesses. Insofar as they are part of collective memory their lifespan is about two generations.15 And what they then become, as historians like Jay Winter remind us, are ‘memories of memories’ or ‘postmemories’.16 Some scholars might prefer the term, ‘distributive memory’ to that of ‘collective memory’. These ideas are significant for commemorations, for the civic and political purposes to be achieved, and for the national and local vulnerabilities to be navigated. It is instructive to compare the kinds of preoccupation in play in staging the 1966 commemorations of 1916,17 with the issues facing commemoration of the Irish Civil War, the legacy of which darkly shadowed official thinking in 1966.18 The episodic witnesses to the events of 1920-23 are now gone, and if their memories found a record they have become available to be remembered as knowledge to be remembered (that is, as semantic memories).

Ó Tuathaigh, G. (2014). Commemoration, public history and the professional historian: an Irish perspective. Estudios Irlandeses, 9, 2014, p. 144.

Dawe, G. (2004). A question of covenants: poetry as commemoration. In Bort, E. ed. Commemorating Ireland: history, politics, culture. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, p. 220.

Dawe, G. (2015). The stoic man: poetry memoirs. Derry: Lagan Press, p. 85.

Heaney, S. (1993). The sense of the past. History Ireland, 1, 4, Winter, p. 33.

Tulving, E. and Lepage, M. (2001). Where in the brain is awareness of one’s past? In Schacter, D. L. and Scarry, E. eds. Memory, brain and belief. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 208–28.

Tulving, E. (1972). Episodic and semantic memory. In Tulving, E. and Donaldson, W. eds. Organization of memory. New York, NY: Academic Press, pp. 381-402.

Boyer, P. and Wertsch, J. M. eds. (2009). Memory in mind and culture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, p. 11.

Winter, J. (2009). Historians and sites of memory. In Boyer, P. and Wertsch, J.M. 2009, Chapter 11.

Daly, M. E. and O’Callaghan, M. eds. (2007). 1916 in 1966: commemorating the Easter Rising. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy.

Dolan, A. (2003). Commemorating the Irish Civil War, 1923-2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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But it is another connected kind of memory that seems particularly important at the present time and that is emotional memory, and especially negative emotional memories which we know play an outsize role compared to positive emotional memories in our lives. Whatever kinds of positive emotion, of pride and admiration, there might be in nationalistic opposition to imperialist or colonialist ideas, the kinds of negative emotion that attach to the fratricidal divisions of the civil war are of a different order – bitterness, resentment, humiliation, division, irreconcilability, and strong oppositional group identities.19 One concept, for instance, that of reprisal – a species of collective revenge – lies at the heart of some of the most egregious events of that time (Bloody Sunday? The assassinations? The 81 ‘official’ executions of Republican prisoners?20 Ballyseedy?21). The question ”How could they?” 22 transmuted into a more enduring and troubling question, “How could we?”23 As Margalit rightly points out, it is caring that marks out what is important to us, and caring is emotional. Emotional memories are strong determinants of adversarial allegiances and identities, of who we are and of who we are not, of who is with us and of who is against us, and indeed of the kind of person, or society, that we must not become.24 Feelings matter hugely. The simple everyday phrase “I regard that as history now”, as Michael Fitzgerald QC recently remarked concerning the killing of his uncle on the morning of Nov 21 1920 by Michael Collins’ ‘Squad’, is a discursive indication of the limits of emotional memory.25

But there is another reason why memory needs history in issues such as the ones we are now reflecting upon. An abiding possibility of error shadows memory, whether episodic or semantic. Most people trust their sincerely held feelings that something they remember did indeed happen as they remember it. Even when it is pointed out that, despite their sincere conviction, it did not happen in that way, or indeed never happened at all, and if they are given the evidence for this, the feeling that it did happen can persist. Trust in memory needs the supportive armature and authentication of history, whether personal or collective. The reason for this is, as Oliver Sacks succinctly concluded: “Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.”26

Purposes of Memory & Ethical Remembrance So what are the purposes and uses of memory, individual or collective? 27 Memory is fundamentally prospective.28 It is evolutionarily oriented to the future. It supplies what we need in order to imagine what is to come, to imagine what ought to come, and to imagine what, if at all possible, should not come to be. A difference between history and ‘collective’ memory is the difference between arguments and chronicles. Each kind feeds the construction of identities. These involve choices, and memory informs decision-making.

Deasy, L. (1994). Brother against brother. Cork: Mercier Press. See also, Ó Ruairc, P. Óg. (2018). CENTENARY: the women who died for Ireland. History Ireland, 26, 5, Sept-Oct.

Crowley et al. (2017), p. 737.

Crowley et al. (2017), p. 716.

For a sense of the diversity of the 2,850 deaths from 1916 to 1921 alone, see O’Halpin, E. and Ó Corráin, D. (2020). The dead of the Irish revolution. New Haven CT: Yale University Press. The overall death toll is uncertain but maybe in excess of another 2000 were killed between 1921 and 1923? See Clark, G. (2014). Everyday violence in the Irish civil war. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clark writes that ‘The Irish Civil War was not as bloody as was once proclaimed. Figures for combined pro- and anti-Treaty losses of 4,000 have recently been replaced with more conservative estimates’ (P. 3).

See the tearful lament of one of the ambush squad that shot Michael Collins, Jim Hurley: “How could we do it?”, in Dolan, A. (2003), P. 68.

Benson, C. (2003). The unthinkable boundaries of self: the role of negative emotional boundaries in the formation, maintenance and transformation of identities. In Harré, R. and Moghaddam, F. M. eds. The self and others: positioning individuals and groups in personal, political and cultural contexts. Westport CT: Praeger, pp. 61-84.

McGreevy, R. (2020). The IRA ‘got the wrong man’ when they shot my uncle. The Irish Times, 21 Nov, p. 2.

Sacks, O. (2013). Speak, memory. The New York Review of Books. February 21, p. 21.

Boyer, P. (2009). What are memories for? Functions of recall in cognition and culture. in Boyer, P. and Wertsch, J. M, 2009, Chapter 1.

Schacter, D. L., Addis, D. R. and Buckner, R. L. (2007). Remembering the past to imagine the future: the prospective brain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 8, pp. 657–61.

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I have long liked the American pragmatic philosopher John Dewey’s preferred use of the phrase ‘warranted assertibility’ to our everyday reliance on the word ‘truth’.29 Should we think of the contested past somewhat less in terms of what is ‘true’ or ‘false’ and somewhat more in terms of what can be asserted with a good guarantee or warranty, such as one that comes from rigorous historical methods? Our attention should be on the provenance of assertions about the past, as much as on what is asserted. From this perspective, ‘The past’ as a symbolic entity will always be an unfinished project. That is its nature. Historical truths, just like mnemonic ones, tend to the asymptotic, getting ever closer to the baseline of ‘what actually happened’ but yet never quite getting there. Much of our remembering is imagining, and as such is subject to radical uncertainty. This, like so much else in our psychology can be unsettling, but we also have our powerful rationality at our disposal to correct our potent tendencies to error and distortion.30 Part of history’s role is to diminish conjecture. Memory guides the construction of possible futures and, insofar as these futures concern those with whom we are most connected – our families, friends, comrades, fellow citizens, fellow members of commonly imagined communities, and so on – then we are in the realm of ethical memory as argued by Avishai Margalit, and by President Higgins. Given the malleability of ‘the past’, its openness to review and to reinterpretation, its imaginary scene setting, its changing potency over historical timescales, its transmissibility in object and action, there is for us now a fertile opportunity to deliberately shape, or re-shape, our own responses to the foundational events of Modern Ireland.

Here are Avishai Margalit’s conclusions about ethical memory. Slightly tongue-in-cheek, Margalit observes that “A nation has famously been defined as a society that nourishes a common delusion about its ancestry and shares a common hatred for its neighbors. Thus the bond of caring in a nation hinges on false memory (delusion) and hatred of those who do not belong.”31 Margalit’s concern is to diminish the extent to which wounding emotions, the scars of painful memory, can motivate political action.32 By contrast, what binds an ethical community together are positive emotional bonds. These may be forged in the solidarity of testing times and indeed in hostility towards a common enemy. That sense of solidarity is crucial.33 Our knowledge of the past is rooted in credible witnessing, in a hierarchy of those we trust.34 He goes on to argue the case for the redemptive power of forgiveness, but of a forgiveness that is based “on disregarding the sin rather than forgetting it.”35 Here the idea of ‘disregarding’, and of forgiveness, is of both as voluntary actions, as deliberately chosen policy. Margalit offers the idea of remorse as “a nonmagical way of undoing the past” by changing our interpretation of that past.36 Remorse empowers forgiveness. Here I am reminded of that letter in 1970 from the commandant of Beggars Bush Barracks, Sean Irwin, which Anne Dolan uses to powerful effect in her book Commemorating the Irish Civil War. Irwin was charged with executing his former comrades during the civil war. All those years later his anguish and anger, as the mandated executioner carrying out orders of the new state, is still poignantly raw:

Our acts of remembrance can become – without denial, distortion or suppression – instruments for a more ethically-oriented Ireland, one that is open to difference, and to conviviality in the best sense of that word.

Princeton Encyclopedia of Philosophy https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-pragmatic/#DewePragTheoTrut (Accessed 13 Nov 2020)

Kahneman, D. (2013). Thinking fast and slow. USA: Macmillan.

Margalit, (2002), p. 76.

______ (2002), p. 111.

______ (2002), p. 144.

______ (2002), p. 180.

______ (2002), p. 197.

______ (2002), P. 199.

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It is impossible to describe the harrowing and the anguish of the soul, of having to see one time comrades in arms brought out and shot to death by a firing squad. And to be aware that these men did not really know what it was all about.37 What would a fine commemoration of genuine political remorse look like? It would, I think, involve a commitment never to act like that again, but, more importantly, it would commit to generalise that remorse to a universal norm such that the nation as a whole would politically support international agreements and conventions that would outlaw all such actions (by, for example, signing the 1949 Geneva Conventions regarding the treatment of prisoners). Kant’s categorical imperative collectively obeyed – “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”38 Perhaps the strongest reason for forgiveness is this: that those who find themselves in the position to forgive are also the beneficiaries of the act since feelings of resentment, coupled with desires for revenge, poison those who hold them.39

Conclusion What materials are available for acts of commemoration? Stories of protagonists in those events are certainly prominent candidates, as are their decisions and actions. Statues and tableaux vivants are common means of publicly dealing with that kind of material from the past. However, as can be seen from recent engagements with such kinds of ‘memory’ from Virginia in the US to Bristol in the UK, the simplistic literalness of such objects can in time lead them into the dock of an ever-broadening court of history. The more specific, partisan,

and literal are such commemorative avenues the more likely they are to divide or to rekindle division. But events and protagonists are not the only material available for commemoration. There are also the ideas to which protagonists gave their allegiance, or opposed with their lives. Actors die but ideas persist, for good or ill. ‘Good’ people can associate with bad causes just as ‘bad’ people can associate with good causes. The commemorative focus can be on the quality of the cause, and the qualitative material of causes are ideas. This option, it seems to me, offers more creative commemorative possibilities for those whose understanding of how ‘the past’ is to be remembered is rooted in an analysis of which ideas, and which values, in the present time need proactive nurturing and support. The arts play a central role in making manifest these concerns. On the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Rising in 1966, the Garden of Remembrance – An Gairdín Cuimhneacháin – was unveiled in Dublin. Its designer, the architect Dáithi Hanly, commissioned the artist Oisin Kelly’s The Children of Lir for the garden. Drawn from the legend, the work depicts a process of transformation, of falling children metamorphosing into ascending swans. At the time it was criticised for being ‘inappropriate’, drawing as it did on a pagan metaphor for a Christian country! What is interesting here is what Kelly himself thought of himself as doing. Here are his reflections on his choice of the swan as symbol: The swan is the generally accepted image of resurgence, triumph and perfection, with undertones of regal sadness and isolation which is the image I would wish to give. It has a different symbolic character to say the dictatorial eagle…I should like a memorial which does not attempt to bully my countrymen into having splendid thoughts and noble feelings, but rather one whose message was implicit, a hint rather than a shout (my emphasis).40

Dolan, (2003), p. 1.

Kant’s moral philosophy; In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/ (Accessed 24 Nov 2020).

For a differently nuanced take on forgiveness as a virtue see Brudholm, T. (2008). Resentment’s virtue: Jean Amery and the refusal to forgive. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

I am indebted to Pat Cooke for this (Personal communication). Cooke’s source is an undated ‘Report on the Sculpture for the proposed Garden of Remembrance’ by Oisin Kelly himself. It is worth quoting Oisin Kelly further from this:

“My thought in the matter has been largely informed by the poetry of W B Yeats that men at certain moments in history are ‘transformed utterly’ that history is incapable of representational treatment no more than the photograph of a horse jumping resembles the experience of a horse jumping. The more truly one speaks of a great man the nearer one approaches myth. Speculation in the Lytton Strachey fashion on the actualities of the lives of Tone or Parnell or Casement or their physical structure or their personalities or their period costume is trivial and impertinent. The only human quality I should like to suggest is that of effort and suffering. I feel that in a formal way metamorphosis must be suggested as agony.”

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There is real wisdom in hinting rather than shouting in public acts of remembrance. Subtlety and nuance are the qualities desired. Artistic thinking has also strikingly transformed over the last century and has moved far from the representational orthodoxies of the statue and the tableau vivant as reflex modes of physical commemoration. Many modern examples come to mind of the creative match of art facing the challenges of commemorating complex ideas. To offer just one challenging example of an ‘anti-monument’: in 1986 the conceptual artists Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev Gerz created the Monument against Fascism memorial in HamburgHarburg. From 1986 to 1993 the monument, a 12 metre tall lead column on which the public left all kinds of message, slowly sank into the ground and thus disappeared from sight, but not from mind. Today’s visitor will simply see a flat square with a sign that reads: “In the end, it is only we ourselves who can rise up against injustice.”

I finish with this thought from Gerald Dawe who, when writing in 2004 of his poem Quartz (about his great-grandmother in Belfast) says:

Maybe from these hidden, uncanonical sources a common culture will emerge or resurface, out of which the next generation can mind diversity of background as a bulwark against (my emphasis) deadly and deadening division, and not the other way around.42 And here is a question for now: Should our commemorative projects not aspire to become what Heaney called “point(s) of entry into a common emotional ground of memory and belonging”? This, as I understand it, is what President Higgins is arguing for.

Here ‘the past’ is felt to be beneath, not behind, us!41 However, when choosing the most apt preposition to locate ‘the past’, perhaps an even better word to use is that appropriately ambivalent preposition, ‘before’. ‘The past’ is what happened before now, while also being a constantly transforming set of ideas that evolves before – ‘in front of’? – us! The past, it can then be usefully said, is what happened before us, while also unfolding before us as each additional enquiry adds facts, or shifts perspectives. The contemporary commemorative task is to select for exemplary remembrance those animating ideas from a century ago that persist to this day as worthwhile ideals for the Ireland that we, in our growing diversity, might wish for.

Paul Ricoeur wrote of memory and forgetting as lying beneath history, and of life as lying beneath memory and forgetting. See Ricoeur, P. (2006). Memory, history, forgetting. Trans. Blamey, K. and Pellauer, D. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Dawe, G. (2004). A question of covenants: poetry as commemoration. In Bort, E. (ed). Commemorating Ireland: history, politics, culture. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, p. 222.

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Respondent

Dr Anne Dolan

Worrying away at the Irish Revolution Dr Anne Dolan An Dr Anne Dolan

A coat can tell a lot about a man; not just whether he was clean, or he was careless, but with Thomas McGrath’s coat we can see that he was loved and that he’d be missed. Someone had sown a medal into the lining at the collar; someone had taken the trouble, someone wanted him minded, but the sainted medal didn’t bring him any luck. A marriage certificate in his pocket said he had a wife for all of two months; while a scrap of paper pinned to his lapel said he met his maker knowing she would bear the burden of the letters that spelled out SPY.1 And we can know all this only from a coat.

Torn pages found nearby show the attempts it took to write those three letters, S, P, and Y. The crossed out, thrown away tries might say much of an unpractised or of a nervous, unsteady hand, but there is something more in all the times it took to get such a short word right.2 Bits of paper and a coat, like so many of all the other things that we can find, all the mixum gatherum of so very many lives in the Irish revolution, leave us with a choice. It is a stark one perhaps for those who come to the period with the weight of a centenary, with the onus to commemorate, or to ‘cultivate memory as an instrument for the living’ as the President said.3 But it is a familiar one for most historians of the period: how do we choose to handle the violence at its heart?

Inquest on Thomas McGrath, Clonmel, 5 Mar. 1923 (National Archives of Ireland (N.A.I.), Co. Tipperary Coroner’s Inquests, 1C-86-110).

Ibid.

President Michael D. Higgins, ‘Of centenaries and the hospitality necessary in reflecting on memory, history and forgiveness’, 4 Dec. 2020, 15.

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The President’s plea for ‘ethical remembering’, is perhaps a timely prompt for historians of the period to reflect on their own priorities and practice.4 If we can get inside one man’s pocket, under the lining of his coat, we are clearly spoiled for the choice of pasts that we can bring into the light and we should be acutely conscious of the consequences of putting them in its glare. We know we make mistakes; we come to the wrong conclusions, we doubt, and doubt drives us back again and again with none of the certainty of commemoration’s promise of remembrance, none of the urgency of a centenary’s one chance to get it right. We worry away at the past whether it is the ninety-seventh, ninety-eighth or ninetyninth anniversary; and we will still be there when most everyone else has forgotten the hundred and first. The Irish revolution, itself a problematic label, is now very different to the one I first learned about. The students and historians I see working on it, driven by the richness of what we can now know, are undertaking thoughtful, engaging, challenging research that certainly doesn’t shy away from dealing with the hardest questions this past makes it possible for us to ask. There are fewer who aspire to be ‘keepers of the flame’, more who think in terms of a global revolution than ‘who shot who in Cork’, and more who take their cue from the methods of a Stathis Kalyvas rather than the memoirs of a Tom Barry or a Dan Breen.5 Which is why the President’s paper gave me considerable pause for thought. The challenges of commemoration he identifies seem older than I expected; they reflect or touch upon debates the historiography already knows are fundamental, debates that are already inherent and even somewhat outgrown, yet they still clearly underline current commemorative concerns.

We need only look to the vandalism at Glasnevin Cemetery’s commemorative wall for a second time in February 2020 for proof, or to some of the ‘more than 200 messages’ the then Taoiseach received, one telling him he was ‘a treasonous Tory piece of’ well you can fill in the rest, when there was mention of a possible commemoration of the Royal Irish Constabulary in January 2020.6 Which perhaps begs the question, if, as the President suggests, history is the ‘framework for what public remembering we choose to do’, could history be doing a slightly better job?7 The tension between history and commemoration is an old and hoary chestnut and I don’t intend to roll it out again here. I know as the historian, I’m the luckier one: I’m not compelled to see if the past can fix us, and I’m blunt enough to think we only have ourselves to blame for what happens now. But that said, even I can see how faded those wreaths laid in the Garden of Remembrance by President McAleese and Queen Elizabeth seem, how long ago those visits by Enda Kenny and David Cameron to Messines, to the Menin Gate now feel, and how all that talk of ‘shared history’ and being ‘close as good neighbours should always be’ has been clamoured out by sharper, harsher sounds.8 Brexit, ‘Brits’ and border polls are part of the vocabulary of a very different time. So, maybe history’s job is to make it harder to be so certain and so shrill. Part of the problem is the register that commemoration seems to work in. The President’s paper ends with reference to our ‘duty to honour and respect that past, and retrieve the heroic idealism that was at its heart.’9 Again, the historian has the easier task: I just have to try and see it for what it was. The President has to forge his ‘hospitality of narratives’ but many of our narratives still seem tied to a centenary calendar packed with dates and events that a Countess Markievicz or a Michael Collins might have picked.10

Ibid., 3.

Niall Whelehan, ‘Playing with scales: transnational history and modern Ireland’ in Niall Whelehan (ed.), Transnational perspectives on modern Irish history (Abingdon, 2015), 15; Stathis N. Kalyvas, The logic of violence in civil war (Cambridge, 2006); Tom Barry, Guerilla days in Ireland (Dublin, 1949); Dan Breen, My fight for Irish freedom (Dublin, 1924).

Irish Times, 6 Feb. 2020; Irish Times, 12 Feb. 2020.

President Michael D. Higgins, ‘Of centenaries and the hospitality necessary in reflecting on memory, history and forgiveness’, 4 Dec. 2020, 3.

Irish Times, 17 May 2011; Irish Times, 20 Dec. 2013; Brian Cowen, ‘A decade of centenaries: commemorating shared history’, Working Papers in British-Irish Studies, no. 108 (2011); Speech by Queen Elizabeth, Irish Times, 19 May 2011.

President Michael D. Higgins, ‘Of centenaries and the hospitality necessary in reflecting on memory, history and forgiveness’, 4 Dec. 2020, 15.

Richard Kearney quoted in ibid., 2.

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If someone had marked the centenary of, say, the introduction of the old age pension in 2009 we might have actually found a moment of shared history, a moment that improved the lot of every person on this island and the next. But in the centenary stakes the old age pension doesn’t set pulses racing and the anthems singing. While that may seem a rather contrary point, it is a sort of fundamental one all the same: whose pasts are we interested in commemorating, and just how inclusive are we really prepared to be? If we accept that commemoration is largely concerned with the more obvious political moments, then the real challenge of ‘ethical remembering’ revolves around the violence of this past.11 Who are we prepared to listen to when it comes to the violence of the period, and what are some of the consequences of that choice? If we can make our way into the pocket of Thomas McGrath’s coat what does history and commemoration do with that? So much of the evidence seems to suggest that the very basic things we take as certainties might be wrong. In April 1922 John Gunn was disbanded from the RIC on a Tuesday, made it back to Ennis by Thursday, where he had been stationed for 27 years, where he was to be married, and by Sunday he was shot dead.12 There were others killed like Gunn, others like John Haughey, given five days to quit the country who fled to London leaving a wife and eight children behind.13 For them and for many more, for those who fled and those who were fled from, there was none of the clarity about where one war ended and another began that we now seem so sure of. The more we see of the records the more the distinctions begin to blur. Irishmen killed Irish men and women throughout the period from 1916 onwards; there is a quality to the violence of the civil war that is clearly to be found in the years that had just gone before.

The truce period as we traditionally know it – those months from July 1921 to the start of civil war in June 1922 can only be conceived as peaceful if we turn a blind eye to the continued use of violence, if we overlook those who go missing, those shot and killed, those driven out, those local settlings of old local scores. Also, the sequence of events we accept from 1918 onwards – through the war of independence (and we cannot even agree on a title for that), through the truce, through the civil war – makes no sense if we follow what becomes Northern Ireland’s trajectory of violence. Violence increases there during the truce period; it eases but continues through 1922 and 1923; but it never really gets included in what we define as the Irish civil war. There is a messiness about the whole period, a quality to the violence that makes for many civil wars, civil wars that bleed beyond the margins we have largely drawn for a kind of chronological convenience, so we can set our wars apart, classify them all neat and tidily away. And that is just the margins of the easy parts. The history of violence, the kinds of questions historians have been asking of violence for many years now, take us more and more to the experience of violence itself, to its meanings, to the sense of what violence asked of those who fought, to what it did to those who suffered in its wake. And the Military Service Pensions Collection is showing us, as we have never really seen before, the participants’ sense of what was done and at what costs.14 In August 1924 Michael White wrote to W.T. Cosgrave to remind him ‘I have lost a lot by fighting for my country’; and while it would serve to put his sentiments down to anger and frustration with the state of poverty he found himself in, there is the history of something else here at work, the history of the used up and the disappointed, the history of something, perhaps a feeling, that the best of everything is behind you, and that you deeply want it to be someone else’s fault.15 In May 1935, at the age of thirtyeight, Edward Devitt put it this way: ‘During the years 1918-1923 I gave all my attention and time to the cause of the Republic.

Ibid., 3.

Inquest on John Gunn, 24 Apr. 1922 (N.A.I., Co. Clare Coroner’s Inquests, 1D-39-113); Cork Examiner, 27 April 1922.

Correspondence from John Haughey, 1922 (N.A.I., Private Accessions, 99/46).

Military Service Pensions Collection (M.S.P.C.) https://www.militaryarchives.ie/collections/online-collections/military-servicepensions-collection-1916-1923

Michael White to W.T. Cosgrave, 24 Aug. 1924 (M.S.P.C., Michael White, 24SP202).

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The most important years of a man’s life, between the age of 21 & 26, I let slip without thinking of my future, depending on my country to look after me in case of need’.16 And thirteen pounds, one shilling and a penny per annum was all he got for what he thought he’d lost. Maybe I’m suggesting a history of resignation, maybe even a history of regret, but regret, not so much for what had been done or with what they had been asked to do, but rather with what life after had not gone on to become. Decades of ambivalence is a much more interesting force to reckon with than the public stories of heroics shined up like the medals for every Easter parade. Ambivalence is much more difficult to commemorate. Inclusiveness is not just about who we are prepared to hear but also what we are prepared to hear them say. Charles Dalton is a fascinating example of the nature of telling, of what he felt he could and couldn’t say, of how versions evolve, of the compunction to tell over and over again. And he certainly had plenty of chances to tell: Dalton was interviewed by Ernie O’Malley, he gave a Bureau of Military History Statement, he made his pension application, and he wrote a memoir, With the Dublin Brigade, published in 1929.17 While his memoir acknowledged the overwhelming impulse to flee what had been done on Bloody Sunday morning – ‘I started to run. I could no longer control my overpowering need to run, to fly, to leave far behind me those threatening streets’, that later, as he put it, ‘in the silence before the altar, I thought over our morning’s work, and offered up a prayer for the fallen’, his public Bloody Sundays were very different to his private ones, that for all he did not want to tell, there was more others did not want to really hear.18

But the challenges of the sources go beyond that. Charles Dalton comes to us from the pages of his pension application, where we find him for a time a patient in St Patrick’s and Grangegorman hospitals, as a victim of what he was made to do, barely even an actor in his own wars.19 But while he strikes a sympathetic figure in his own application, so too do the parents of Eamonn Hughes when an application was made on their behalf for a dependents’ allowance. Described as ‘both broken down completely physically and mentally’, Mark Hughes was the clerk who could no longer work, Annie Hughes the music teacher who could no longer teach, because their teenage son had been killed, possibly by Charles Dalton, on 7 October 1922.20 In 1933 the Pension Board was requested not to even send letters about the application to their home because over a decade after they still could not bear the mention of their son’s death.21 Is commemoration agile enough to accommodate all the hurt in all of that? The President’s plea for the inclusion of marginalised voices, is particularly striking in terms of how he frames the inclusion of women. (As the only woman speaking today among five men, I feel obliged to say that there are far more women then, as well as now, to find.) Do we want to know of Mary Herlihy who helped keep Mary Lindsay captive in the weeks before she was killed by the IRA; of Annie Watters as she recalled before a military court in June 1921 how she watched her two sons die, how she heard the shots fired into their bodies?22 Do we want to hear her voice as she identified their remains, confirming their ages – nineteen, twenty-one – is it easier to let her voice fade away and stay with the politics of whose side the Watters boys were on?23

Edward Devitt to the Pension Board, 28 May 1935 (M.S.P.C., Edward Devitt, MSP34REF2211).

Charles Dalton interview (U.C.D. Archives, Ernie O’Malley notebooks, p17b/122); Statement by Charles Dalton (Bureau of Military History, Witness Statement 434); Charles Dalton’s application (M.S.P.C., 24SP1153); Charles Dalton, With the Dublin brigade (London, 1929).

18 Dalton, With the Dublin brigade, 106, 108. 19

Charles Dalton’s application (M.S.P.C., 24SP1153).

Statement by G.W.J. Hughes, 6 Apr. 1933 (M.S.P.C., DP4559).

Michael Murphy to the Secretary, Department of Defence, 6 Apr. 1933 (M.S.P.C., DP4559).

Statement by Mary Herlihy, 7 Jan. 1954 (M.S.P.C., MSP34REF62035).

Statement by Annie Watters, Military court of inquiry in lieu of inquest on the bodies of Patrick and John Watters, 20 June 1921 (The National Archives (T.N.A.), WO35/160).

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Do we want to know of Kate Maher because she was used up by a group of British soldiers in December 1920 and left for dead on a patch of waste ground?24 Will we remember all the women dragged into things they had no desire to be part of, by husbands, sons, brothers, by being in the wrong place at precisely the wrong time, like Kate Burke hit by the shatter of a bomb while on her few days’ holidays in Dublin in March 1921?25 Can we include the many more men and women who lived in a world around revolution, who avoided it when they could, who worked and lived in its midst, who can be readily found in its records if we choose to look? What of Alexander Allan, a 50-year-old widower with eight sons, who was killed in Belfast keen to get to the second house performance, rushing to the Empire Theatre after a week in the shipyards, after a week with all those boys.26 What of the commercial traveller who may have taken his own life because the Belfast Boycott had left him without work?27 It is in their midst that we might have the best chance at finding that which is shared, that which is most ‘hospitable’ about this past.28 Even if it is because of the records generated by violence that we can find them, it is the many ‘mundane amicable interactions’, the ‘everyday accommodations’ people made across the things that divided them that, when it came to it, meant that our wars were never as bad as they might have been.29 Sometimes in a history of violence, as E.P. Thompson says, ‘it is the restraint, rather than the disorder, which is remarkable’.30 It might be time to give the history and commemoration of restraint a try.

Military court of inquiry in lieu of inquest on the body of Kate Maher, 23 Dec. 1920 (T.N.A., WO35/155b).

Military court of inquiry in lieu of inquest on the body of Kate Burke, 1 Apr. 1921 (T.N.A., WO35/147a).

Military court of inquiry in lieu of inquest on the body of Alexander Allan, 14 Mar. 1921 (T.N.A., WO35/148).

Military court of inquiry in lieu of inquest, 4 May 1921 (T.N.A., WO35/149b).

President Michael D. Higgins, ‘Of centenaries and the hospitality necessary in reflecting on memory, history and forgiveness’, 4 Dec. 2020, 5.

Stuart Carroll, ‘The rights of violence’, Past & Present, supplement 7 (2012), 139.

E.P. Thompson, ‘The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century’, Past & Present, no. 50 (Feb. 1971), 112.

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British soldiers of the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment search a train in Co. Kerry.

Saighdiúirí de chuid na Breataine ón Loyal North Lancashire Regiment agus traein i gCo. Chiarraí á cuardach acu.

Photo National Library of Ireland www.nli.ie Ref: HOGW 112

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Respondent

Professor Michael Laffan

Reminding and Remembering Professor Michael Laffan An tOllamh Michael Laffan

The past is not dead; it lives on, or it can be brought back to life, and it can be re-shaped. Sometimes it haunts us. It should be treated with respect. President Higgins has raised important and stimulating matters in his address. Prominent among them is his insistence that commemorations of past events should be open to different narratives of historical experience, and in particular that they should include the narratives of ‘the other’, the ‘enemy of yesterday’. They should not censor the memory of ‘painful events’ – even though aspects of the past can often be embarrassing or distasteful.

In commemorating people and events of earlier generations we should take heed of Eric Hobsbawm’s shrewd warning: ‘National myths do not arise spontaneously from people’s actual experiences … it is not a question of the people constantly remembering: they remember because someone is constantly reminding them.’1 All too often, those who remind the people use the past as a weapon with which to attack their present enemies, and ceremonies in remembrance of historical events can provide opportunities for stirring up old hatreds. Commemorative rituals have become historical forces in their own right; 2 they can be occasions for fostering myths and inventing traditions. In contrast, some important aspects of the past are seen as inappropriate to current needs or interests, and they remain uncommemorated.3

Eric Hobsbawm, The New Century (London, 2000), 24-5.

Ian McBride, in McBride (ed.), History and Memory in Modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2001), 2.

R. F. Foster, The Irish Story. Telling Tales and making it up in Ireland (London, 2001), 44-5.

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We should try to ensure that when governments ‘remind’ the people, they do so in a generous and inclusive spirit. Emmet O’Connor pointed out recently that annual state commemorations ‘normally focus on one or two big events, chosen not for their historical weight, but because they are deemed emblematic of how the regime would like to see itself’.4 The past should not be used, or abused, to glorify present leaders and their preoccupations. There is another and opposite danger: that they may result in ‘a bland, bloodless and bowdlerised hybrid of history, designed to offend no one, in the pious hope that it may command unanimous acquiescence.’5 Historians have a dual role: one is to try to understand what happened, why it happened, and with which consequences; to discover what the past was like; to see it in its own terms (often strange, and even alien); to avoid tidying it up, gentrifying it, or projecting back into it some of our own ideals or fantasies. History is a record of what one age finds interesting in another,6 but in looking at our ancestors we should avoid ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’.7 We should not mock the dead by distorting them and their beliefs; they did not share, and could not possibly have shared, all our values. In some respects they must disappoint us, as we would disappoint them. We should not search the past simply in pursuit of comfort or reassurance. Whenever there is historical falsification, whether by the state, by political or paramilitary groups, or by individuals, it is the task of those who study and write history to point this out – even at the risk of making themselves unpopular. On the other hand, historians also have to try to understand how the past relates to the present – in effect, how we came to be what we are, and how other societies came to be what they are. In doing this they should avoid a Whig interpretation of history in which everything leads naturally and inexorably towards our own times, one that ‘follows the furrow of progress to the present and praises the dead ploughman who deviated least from the appointed line’.8 Sometimes it is in this sense that history is abused for purposes of commemoration.

Without falling into the trap of creating ‘alternative histories’ we should appreciate that what happened was not predestined to happen; it was only one of many possibilities available at the time, and things could easily have turned out differently. In the context of the Irish Revolution, we should cast our net widely when looking at the ‘others’. These should embrace innocent victims of violence – who were often women and children; the defeated Irish Parliamentary Party, whose vision of a Home Rule Ireland within the United Kingdom was destroyed between 1916 and 1918; and ‘losers’, such as the minorities in the two new political entities that emerged in 1921-22 – northern nationalists and southern unionists. The ‘others’ should also include the triumphant Ulster unionists, and the British, who had their own perceived national and political interests – in particular, a refusal (at that time) to accept the idea of an Irish republic. Even now, some Irish people find it hard to accept that there was a ‘British point of view’. This was often at odds with the views of most Irish people, and therefore a particular effort may be needed to understand it. The teaching of history in Ireland should reveal that England and Britain have a long and fascinating (and often admirable) history, quite independently of their (often destructive) involvement in Irish affairs. Elizabethan England should be remembered for massacres in Ireland, but for many other and estimable reasons as well. Gladstone’s conversion to Irish Home Rule was important, but so was Disraeli’s commitment to the Empire. It can be too easy to fall into a Hibernocentric view of our neighbouring island. And in return, particularly during a phase of Brexit insularity, the English people should become better informed about the present and past of other European countries, including Ireland. An openness to multiple narratives involves seeing the Irish Revolution in a wider, international context. From this standpoint it is striking how mild and moderate were the changes that resulted from years of upheaval.

Emmet O’Connor, ‘Toasted Heretic’, Dublin Review of Books, November 2020.

Ronan Fanning, Fatal Path: British Government and Irish Revolution 1910-1922 (London, 2013), 5.

Jacob Burckhardt, quoted by Peter Gay, The Naked Heart (New York, 1995), 214.

E. P. Thompson, quoted in Fritz Stern (ed.), The Varieties of History (London, 1970), 427.

Oliver MacDonagh, States of Mind: a Study of Anglo-Irish Conflict 1780-1980 (London, 1983), 6.

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Despite persistent urban poverty there was little social unrest, largely because many Irish grievances had been resolved. Under British rule (particularly under Conservative rule) Ireland had already experienced its great social revolution: the change in ownership of most of the country’s land from unionist landlords to tenant farmers. This transformation has not received the recognition it deserves. The violence that played a central role in bringing about the new Irish state was limited in scale, especially when it is seen against the background of the Great War. The toll of violent deaths between 1916 and 1921 has recently been calculated at being under 3,000, 500 of them occurring during the Easter Rising.9 In the same week as the rebellion the Irish 16th Division suffered 570 killed and over 1,400 wounded, and the total number of Irish soldiers killed in the war was probably more than 27,000.10 In contrast, British casualties in Ireland between January 1919 and July 1921 were less than those on an average day on the Western Front.11 Ireland was one of the more peaceful areas of Europe. Irish revolutionaries were fortunate in their opponents. After the Easter Rising ninety rebels were sentenced to death, but only fifteen of them were executed. This is a modest figure compared with the 15,000 who were shot after the suppression of the Paris Commune; or with the fifteen hundred executed after the failure of the Kronstadt revolt against the Soviets in 1921; let alone with the murder or expulsion by the Turks of one and a half million Armenians between 1915 and 1922. Empires normally fight to maintain their possessions; ‘a Great Power does not die in its bed’.12 We should not be surprised that Britain used force to suppress rebellion in Ireland, or that until as late as May 1921 it refused to contemplate the idea of Irish dominion status.13 The Black and Tans and Auxiliaries were responsible for atrocities, collective punishments, reprisals and economic destruction.

But, sadly, in all guerrilla campaigns government forces resort to brutal and bloody measures. Individuals suffered, and their sufferings should be recorded, but Ireland’s experience a century ago was benign compared with that of more recent victims – for example, those who endured the campaigns carried out by the French in Algeria, the Americans in Vietnam, or the Soviets in Afghanistan. Even the British, who were milder than most other dominant or imperial powers, acted far more savagely elsewhere. In March 1919, two months after the first meeting of the Dáil, they shot at least 379 (and probably far more) peaceful Indian demonstrators in Amritsar. In 1920 they killed thousands of rebels in air and gas attacks in Iraq. The Irish were lucky to be white, not brown or black. In Liam Kennedy’s words we must continue to shun the old, absurd idea that the Irish were ‘MOPE – the most oppressed people ever’.14 They weren’t. In the past century, the Jews, the Poles, the Kurds and the Palestinians are among many whose experiences were vastly worse than those of the Irish. The British government could be – and was – shamed into changing its actions and policies. Irish rebels benefited from the fact that they were fighting a democracy whose leaders were responsive to domestic and international opinion. The centenary commemorations must also acknowledge that a quarter of the Irish population wanted to remain loyal subjects of the British crown; they wished then (and their descendants wish now) to exercise their citizenship and collective participation within the United Kingdom, not in an Irish republic. A century ago, if a war between nationalists and unionists was to be averted – a war that might have been comparable to that which destroyed Yugoslavia in the 1990s – partition was the obvious, natural solution. In 1914 John Redmond accepted it as a temporary expedient. It was also acknowledged in practice (although of course, not in theory) by the leaders of the Easter Rising two years later.

Eunan O’Halpin, in O’Halpin and Daithí Ó Corráin, The Dead of the Irish Revolution (New Haven and London, 2020), 8.

Keith Jeffery, Ireland and the Great War (Cambridge, 2000), 51; David Fitzpatrick, in Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery (eds), A Military History of Ireland (Cambridge, 1996), 392.

D. G. Boyce, Englishmen and Irish Troubles: British Public Opinion and the Making of Irish Policy 1918-22 (London, 1972), 56-7.

Martin Wight, Power Politics (London, 1978), 48.

Nicholas Mansergh, The Unresolved Question: the Anglo-Irish Settlement and its Undoing (New Haven, 1991), 173, 178.

Liam Kennedy, Unhappy the Land: the Most Oppressed People Ever, the Irish? (Dublin, 2015).

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Any attempt then to stage a rebellion in Ulster would have resulted in bloody sectarian conflict – with the unionists as the probable winners – so they confined their plans for insurrection to the three southern provinces. Ulster would be abandoned, and their northern followers were expected to retreat to the safety of Connacht.15 In similar fashion, with only a few exceptions, the War of Independence was fought in the south and not in the north – although there was much killing in Belfast and elsewhere, with nationalists as the principal victims.16 In the Treaty debates most Dáil deputies were preoccupied by the oath of fidelity to the crown and the degree of sovereignty to be exercised by the new state; partition was almost ignored. A century later many Irish people still find this hard to accept or understand. Without partition there would have been no full independence for what became the Free State. The British government did not begin to negotiate seriously with Irish nationalist leaders until the Ulster unionists had been satisfied, until after the Belfast parliament and government had been established. Only then did a compromise settlement become possible. In 1920-21 Ireland was partitioned in a manner that reflected the balance of power in British politics rather than the wishes of the people concerned. Ulster unionists got what they wanted – the largest possible area that they could control (and as a corollary, the area with the largest possible nationalist minority that could be controlled). By the standards of the 1920s – the only ones that really matter – it was a repudiation of the ‘spirit of the times’, of the ‘rights of small nations’. To resolve the problem posed by the existence of a one-quarter minority in the whole island, a new minority of one-third was created in the north. The result was a pattern of discrimination and resentment that endured for half a century and that ultimately destroyed the Northern Irish state. The fall of Stormont in 1972 had its origins in the events of 1920 and 1921.

All commemorations of the Irish Revolution should include this victory – a Pyrrhic victory – of its most determined enemies, the Ulster unionists. In the south a parallel development occurred. The British, no longer having to worry about protecting ‘Ulster’, abandoned the small unionist minority to its fate. Embarrassed by the nature of the campaign they had waged, and feeling that nationalist Ireland now caused more trouble than it was worth, they conceded a degree of independence unthinkable only a few years earlier. The Protestant minority in the Free State, being small and harmless, was treated well, apart from having to make distasteful but minor concessions to Catholic norms and to the government’s imposition of the Irish language. Compared with other European minorities at the time, it was lucky. In commemorating the revolutionary decade we must appreciate that independence was achieved not only by violence but also by the votes of most of the people – including, for the first time, the votes of women. The Irish Volunteers were accompanied in their struggle by the second Sinn Féin party, the Dáil, and a formidable underground administration. We should acknowledge the remarkable attempt – partly successful – to set up a ‘counter-state’ that tried to run the country as if British rule had already come to an end. To a limited extent, a rebel Irish government was already functioning before the handover of power in 1922,17 thereby helping to preserve the Irish democratic tradition in a time of revolution. Until recently this tradition has been neglected in national commemorations, which have been concentrated on military engagements, and it deserves an appropriate if belated recognition.

Charles Townshend, Easter 1916: the Easter Rebellion (London, 2005), 109, 225.

Michael Hopkinson, The Irish War of Independence (Dublin 2002), 154; Charles Townshend, The Republic: the Fight for Irish Independence (London, 2013), 175-6.

Tom Garvin, 1922: the Birth of Irish Democracy (Dublin, 1996), 63-91; Mary E. Daly, The Buffer State: the Historical Roots of the Department of the Environment (Dublin, 1996), 47-92; Michael Laffan, The Resurrection of Ireland: the Sinn Féin Party 1916-1923. (Cambridge, 1999), 304-45.

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Decades ago an English academic wrote that ‘the anniversary of the passing of the Great Reform Bill is an unlikely candidate for a national holiday, and old ballot boxes make dull shrines... where Marianne is on the barricades, an exposed nipple pointing the way to a contested future, Britannia is sedately seated, perhaps a co-opted member of some ad hoc committee.’18 In Ireland, too, people are lured to romanticize the barricades of the past at the expense of significant but unglamorous consolidations of democracy. Michael Collins’ leadership of the Squad and his escapes from capture have distracted attention from his achievements as an administrator. Even now, only a minority would share the view that the 1918 general election was the most important event of the period between 1910 and 1922.19

Commemorations held in the spirit of the President’s remarks should be welcomed. But we should have no illusions; a generous inclusivity will prove controversial in some quarters, and it will provoke resistance. In particular, some sections of Irish society remain dominated by their hatred of Britain, and they wish to project past grievances into the future. That should not be a deterrent. In recent years there has been much to admire in the ways in which the people and the state have examined and commemorated the events of a century ago, and we should build on this achievement.

Commemorations need not revive old animosities, although all too often they do – and it is quite possible that there are too many of them.20 Ideally they should reveal the past in its confusion and complexity, both the aspects that we can admire and others that we regret or deplore. We can select from the diverse patterns of our history those that we find valuable and constructive, and try to incorporate some of them in our present and future. Over time, the chosen features will change, to match society’s changing needs. This can and should be done without ignoring negative characteristics of the country’s history, such as intolerance and discrimination, with which the more congenial elements were often intermixed. The Irish Revolution involved cruelty and bloodshed; all revolutions do. Commemorations, while not glorifying such features, should not erase them. When the time comes to mark the centenary of the Civil War the atrocities carried out by both sides must be recognized, but also put in context; civil wars are normally more vicious than wars between rival states.21

Stefan Collini, Times Literary Supplement, 16 January 1987, 52.

Brian Girvin, From Union to Union: Nationalism, Democracy and Religion in Ireland – Act of Union to EU (Dublin, 2002), 61.

Eberhard Bort, in Bort (ed.), Commemorating Ireland: History, Politics, Culture (Dublin, 2004), 11.

On the Irish case see Bill Kissane, The Politics of the Irish Civil War (Oxford, 2005), and Anne Dolan, Commemorating the Irish Civil War (Cambridge, 2003).

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Respondent

Professor Joep Leerssen

Doing justice to the past: Relating pastness, presence, complexity Professor Joep Leerssen An tOllamh Joep Leerssen

I am delighted to join you from the Netherlands and I would like to begin my comments, which will chime with everything that has been said before, by quoting a few lines from a classic Dutch poem. It commemorates the Nazi occupation of my country and it ends as follows:

Come to me tonight with stories Of the war and how it ended And repeat them a hundred times over Each time tears will fill my eyes.1 These lines eloquently bring home to us how the past can be long ago but the emotions are still with us and continue to define us. How memory brings people together in shared remembrance, shared stories, shared emotions and that these stories do not wear with age but remain powerful in each repetition.

The poem is called ‘Peace’ but it teaches us that war continues to resonate even in the peacetime that puts an end to it. At the same time this poem is also about trauma, about the lingering damage of war; even in peacetime the war stays with us. It may haunt us with undiminished grief and horror. That recall can define who we are can prevent us from ever really wiping away our tears. Piety and pity are closely related and history can indeed become a nightmare from which we are trying to awaken. This was all addressed movingly and trenchantly in the President’s discourse. I should like to add a few side observations in the margin of all that, and I have seven points to make.

Leo Vroman, ‘Vrede’, in Gedichten 1946–1984 (Amsterdam: Querido, 1985): 157-8. In the original: ‘Kom vanavond met verhalen/ hoe de oorlog is verdwenen, / en herhaal ze honderd malen: / Ale malen zal ik wenen.’

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The first point is that when we face the past, we face a dilemma: Time sweeps us on towards the future. We inexorably move away from the past. If we lose touch with our past we lose touch with who we are and on the other hand if we get stuck in the past we lose out on what we can become. That’s a conundrum. The philosopher Hegel saw a way out of this; he called it ‘Aufhebung’. In that German word there are three meanings and each of these meanings is necessary to have a healthy relationship with the past. Aufhebung means, in the first place, to abolish, to discontinue, much as a peace treaty brings hostilities to an end. The war is over and we need to put it behind us. In the second place, ‘Aufheben’ means to preserve, to put something in safe keeping, in storage. We do not forget, we even enshrine the traces of the past in poems and monuments and museums, in precious things. And in the third place ‘Aufhebung’ means to lift something up, to elevate it to a higher position. The past, deactivated as it is, part of what is behind us and preserved in our cultural memory, loses its virulence and its rancour. It can become something that makes us better people, something that we can learn from. We can look back on the conflicts and hostilities of long ago the way we look back on our youth and on our youthful follies; something that made us what we are, something we had to outgrow, and something that enriches our store of experience. Hegel’s ‘Aufhebung’ works best when the past is very long ago. We can look back dispassionately at the disagreements between Daniel O’Connell and Thomas Davis. By now we realise that both men were right and wrong in their own ways, and that despite their differences both were equally part of a higher truth that we have moved towards since then. But in other cases memories, certainly of more recent conflicts, are more rebarbative. Nonetheless, sooner or later, and this is my second point, we must get over the rancour that all major historical events leave in their wake. One of the bitterest ruptures to divide a society was that of the French revolution. It destabilised the French state for an entire century, making it lunge from Republic to Empire to Monarchy and back again. But by now only cranks still commemorate the decapitation of Louis XVI, and on the evening of the 14th of July, Bastille Day, all the citizens of Paris happily waltz together, dancing in the city’s various fire stations, and that, to my mind, is the best commemoration of all: To be happy and convivial together.

I may on this occasion suggest to the President to identify a happy day for a recurring festivity, because it is not just trauma and high-minded seriousness that makes us a community but also a bit of ‘craic’. Possibly Bloomsday could become an official national holiday, possibly a new day could be instated, maybe the 16th of February. Why that day? It is in fact a day of glorious memory in Irish history. On that day in 1932 the Cumann na nGaedheal government, having lost the general election, ceded power to the victorious Fianna Fáil – Labour coalition. This peaceful, democratic transition of power came less than ten years after the bitter Civil War. It was, and here I follow Joe Lee’s view, an act of astonishing political maturity in the fledgling new state, and this at a time when almost all of these new states of Europe were abandoning their hard-won parliamentary democracies and installing authoritarian strongmen and dictators, from Poland and the Baltic, to Hungary, Greece, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Ireland in 1932, sensible and solid, was a shining exception. It had moved to a Hegelian ‘Aufhebung’ of its decades of strife and struggle. It is still a lesson for the present when it comes to peaceful transitions of power and that, too, is worth commemorating and celebrating. But what stays with us are the crises, with their terrible beauty. What people remember are not Gross National Products or shifting demographics. It is the crises. Indeed after a Decade of Centenaries it seems as if the things we commemorate are the very opposites of celebrations, even though an independent and democratic Republic of Ireland eventually emerged from it all. That is my third point: What we remember in this contemporary, vibrant, successful and modern Ireland still seems to gravitate towards the past–as–grievance. The bloody-mindedness of the Black and Tans, the denigration of snooty British aristocrats, seems to blend with the tuberculosis and neglect in mid-century orphanages and with endemic misogyny and child abuse. And we haven’t even started the centenaries of the Civil War period. Films like Neil Jordan’s ‘Michael Collins’ or Ken Loach’s ‘The Wind That Shakes The Barley’ have already, epically, recalled the animosities of that period and instilled them into the popular culture, and this may yet loom larger in public memory than the general election of 16 February 1932.

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In gravitating towards the commemoration of crises, Ireland is following a European pattern, but maybe that pattern should be reconsidered. And that brings me to my fourth point. Long ago, all we commemorated was triumphs. It was what Nietzsche called ‘the monumental view of history’. This changed in the 20th century: People turned to a more critical view. We became sensitised to the fact that each heroic triumph has its collateral damage, its sacrifices, its victims. What used to be triumphalist monuments became sites of mourning. Under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and elsewhere, the ashes of an Unknown Soldier were interred, and triumphalism became tinged with pity and remorse. Dublin, from the beginning, was part of this European shift from the triumphalist to the traumatic. It has its beautiful National War Memorial in Island Bridge, built in the final days of British imperial rule and now, after many years of neglect, restored to its original dignity and beauty. This is not about triumph, it’s not even about heroism. It’s about something that is common to all men and women, irrespective of nationality, race or creed: Our mortality, our vulnerability. Empathy with those who faced their mortality and vulnerability in the crisis of history, that is now the dominant mode of commemoration. The President built on that insight in his discourse today and part of the ‘ethics of commemoration’ is that it is fitting and necessary as a society to express and to foster that empathy. But I move to my fifth point and that is this: Both in the mode of triumphalism and in the mode of pity or empathy, we tend to approach the past as a shared property, a collective, and we divide the past in collectivities. When we celebrate our triumphs, we relive the moments when we faced our opponents, enemies, or a catastrophic crisis, and got the better of them. And we see ourselves in what we might call epic terms. And when we mourn victims, and save them from oblivion, we for all our inclusivity, may still empathise with them, for all their diversity, in terms of their group identity. And while we avoid the ham-fisted mode of epic we may over-balance instead into the sentimental mode of melodrama.

In literary studies we define melodrama as the type of narrative that relies on strong blackand-white contrasts between villains and victims. In melodrama the victims are always innocent and virtuous, and they suffer at the hands of those who are motivated only by wickedness and depravity. This, too, is a blackand-white view of the world. It took a great and original thinker, the frequently mentioned Hannah Ahrendt, to make us see that pure evil is often banal rather than satanic, and takes the face of a dull civil servant rather than a diabolical monster. Neither epic nor melodrama can do justice to the complexities of the past. They schematise the world into two groups, and they schematise the ethics of commemoration into a groupbased contrast: heroes against enemies, or victims against villains. So what’s the problem, you may ask. Well, here comes my point number six: My colleague Iraklis Millas, an ethnic Greek from Istanbul, has done a classic experiment with Turkish and Greek respondents. As you know Greeks and Turks belong to proverbially antagonistic nations and Millas wanted to see where he could locate that antagonism. So we asked Greeks how they felt about Turks and how they felt about themselves, and similarly for the Turks. The responses were surprisingly even-handed and serene. Sure, there were good ones and bad ones amongst us, as well as amongst them, and after all, the bottom line was that we were all humans, and the others were not all that different. Millas wondered at this surprising lack of antagonism and he probed further. He asked the Greeks, not how they saw themselves, or how they saw the Turks, but how they thought the Turks saw them. ‘How do you Greeks think that the Turks think of you?’ and the analogous question to his Turkish respondents: ‘How do you think the Greeks think of you Turks?’ The answers to these questions were indeed full of rancour, suspicion and animosity: ‘The others despise us, they do not recognise our civility and dignity as a modern and advanced nation, they begrudge us our independence, they think we are their enemies’. ‘They think we are their enemies’. It was there that the enmity was found, at the level of imputation: What we think that they think.

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There is a very important lesson in this experiment: Group antagonism is at its most virulent and at its most intractable when it is in camouflage and when it is unacknowledged. We are not aware of it in ourselves and only suspect it to reside in the other. We see the other as we think they see us. We are rancorous without being aware of it and we betray our rancour by pretending it is theirs rather than ours. This prejudice of how we think the others see us drains our confidence in each other’s intentions, prevents us from expecting or showing generosity, and makes us lonesome and isolated in what we feel is an unreliable world. It is good and necessary to move away from simplistic celebrations of identity, to include and embrace the groups that have been silenced by history and to emphasise the diversity of the past. But in order to fully achieve a Hegelian ‘Aufhebung’, we may need to go one step further, to acknowledge and uproot our rancour, and move towards generosity. That is how I understand Ricoeur’s notion of ‘hospitality’ as invoked by President Higgins: Whatever the past was, it was, as Professor Laffan pointed out, complex. It was not as ethically simple as our epic or sentimental commemorations imagine it, and too contradictory to be pigeonholed into groups. And this brings me to my seventh and final point. If we acknowledge not only the diversity of the past but also the complexity of the past, we may be able to replace rancour by generosity. The harsh quandaries and the perplexity of the past were most poignantly and relatably experienced at the level of the human individual, facing the turbulent forces of history. Individuals face the challenge of having to make difficult choices; collectives emerge from the choices that have already been made. That is why collectives are best visible from hindsight to us who commemorate, but individuals, more than groups, can impress us with something that is neither epic nor melodramatic but tragic and dignified and in a Hegelian sense uplifting.

Nowadays we are more aware of individual dignity in our commemorations. Anne Dolan has given very moving examples of this approach. We read out the names of victims, highlight them as relatable humans rather than as representatives of a group, people who hoped and feared and who had their own individual life to lead facing difficult choices. In the Immigration Museum in Paris, migrants and refugees leave personal mementos with stories attached to them. These stories speak to us directly from human to human, and they enrich us. And that’s the note I would like to conclude on. I would like to see the ‘com’ taken out of ‘memoration’. I would like to see a polyphony of personal narratives telling us how complex things were for each one of them. It would be great to see commemorative platforms put in place of people who come to us with stories, as the poem says, that allow us to relate individually to individuals in all their human complexity, rather than reducing them to group identities. And I think this would be a noble task for a future looking State.

Thank you.

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Concluding Comments President Michael D. Higgins President Michael D. Higgins An tUachtarán Micheál D. Ó hUigínn

May I most sincerely thank Professor Ciarán Benson of University College Dublin, Dr Anne Dolan of Trinity College Dublin, Professor Michael Laffan of University College Dublin, and Professor Joep Leerssen of the University of Amsterdam for the profoundly thought-provoking and intellectually stimulating addresses they gave today, at what was the first seminar of our Centenary Commemorations series, to which we have given the title Machnamh 100. Each presentation was a tour de force, shining a light on often under-researched and perhaps overlooked aspects of Ireland’s War of Independence and providing analysis and insights that were grounded in deep and methodical scholarly research. I also wish to thank Dr John Bowman for so deftly chairing today’s session, and Professor Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh who has been of great assistance to me and the staff here at Áras an Uachtaráin in his advisory role to the Machnamh 100 series. May I also thank all those who engaged by posing questions and making their own reflections on our offerings. Today was the first of our series of seminars that will mark the centenary commemoration of the War of Independence, The Civil War and the two new administrations on the Island. In these seminars we will invite residents of this island and beyond to reflect, with integrity, respectfully, and within a framework of a narrative of hospitality, on this foundational and complex period of our history. It is also that Machnamh 100 will in addition to being a forum for reflection, perhaps become an aid to moving forward together on a journey to the future, that it might, too constitute an archival record of the thinking of today while making a reflection on the past in preparation for the future.

I am grateful to Minister Catherine Martin and her Department for supporting this initiative, and to RTÉ who are assisting us in bringing it to a wider public. It is also my intention that the proceedings, including each of our papers, will be published. May I draw your attention to the next seminar which we have scheduled for late February 2021. The second seminar will focus on the theme of ‘Empire: Instincts, Interests, Power and Resistance’, and may I say we are so fortunate to have some of the finest scholars in the field of Irish history and historiography as confirmed speakers. I will announce full details of that event later this year, but among the topics to be considered will be an overview of the international order and the landscape of power that prevailed following the First World War; the fall and re-forging of empires, and the particular status and perceived power of the British empire circa 1920. We will reflect on resistance to empire and to nationalism within Ireland, and the position of Ulster and of Ulster Unionism in the debate on identities and power, with the establishment of the independent Irish State and Northern Ireland being the outcomes of this debate. I hope that you can all join us again in February for what I am sure will be another informative, constructive and memorable seminar. Thank you all for engaging with us in your different ways, and I do hope you enjoyed today’s reflections.

Mo bhuíochas libh uilig is beir beannacht.

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Panel Discussion Machnamh 100 – Seminar One 4 December 2020 John Bowman: Joep thank you so much for your contribution from Amsterdam. We have circulated the papers to some few who would have been with us today had Covid not restricted the audience. And we invited comments from them. And let me now put some of the points and questions which they have suggested to our panel, all of whom are still with us on line. Paul Johnston, the incoming British Ambassador to Ireland asks us to consider the teaching of history in both our countries. Michael Laffan, as you are a long-time teacher at third level, what is your opinion of how history is taught now and how it could be taught, perhaps improved, in our schools?

Left to right: Professor Michael Laffan, Dr Anne Dolan, President Michael D. Higgins, Professor Ciarán Benson and Dr John Bowman

Michael Laffan: I taught history for over thirty years and in that time there were an enormous number of changes; syllabuses were altered every five, ten years or so. There was, I am afraid in my own university, UCD, somewhat less of an emphasis on British history than had been the case in earlier years, though there was also a new concern with Asia, with Africa and America. British history tended to become somewhat marginalised and also – this I see as a serious fault – British history was seen largely in the context of Ireland. Britain appeared only when it was involved in Ireland and not, for example, when the industrial revolution was taking place. So I think there is a need for an examination of British history quite independently of Ireland, to study it in its own right. And also in reverse, I think Irish history can be seen as part of the history of the four countries that formed part of the United Kingdom, three of them still in the United Kingdom, or three and a bit.

Ó chlé go deas: an tOllamh Michael Laffan, an Dr Anne Dolan, an tUachtarán Micheál D. Ó hUigínn, an tOllamh Ciarán Benson agus an Dr John Bowman

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The new tendency towards studying United Kingdom history, including Ireland up to 1922, rather than English history, which dominated for so long, is an important element. I think there has been great progress and I think there will be even more progress in the future. John Bowman: Anne Dolan, what is your opinion of this, how we teach history here? Anne Dolan: I would share Michael’s views on this because again British history is something that is neglected in that way, I think, in my institution too. Even within Irish history – when we look at Britain and Ireland – it is often very much from the Irish perspective; and even just getting students to look at something like the Treaty, getting them to think from the perspective of British priorities can be challenging. More excitingly, our capacity to ask different questions of maybe familiar things is very clear because our students have access to materials that I certainly didn’t have when I was a student when Michael taught me. The fact that they can sit at their computers and read the Bureau of Military History Witness Statements, the Military Service Pensions Collection, they can now ask the complex questions, they can get to that level of the individual that I think Joep was talking about and that’s in a way central to asking and creating that narrative of hospitality really. This is now possible in a way that was not even imaginable ten years ago, never mind thirty years ago. John Bowman: Joep, do you have a view on this, how we teach history? Your point about the Greeks and the Turks and how each saw the other was interesting because I think that could be a parallel between Britain and Ireland too. Joep Leerssen: Absolutely, and it was intended as such; but I cannot presume to say anything about teaching curriculum in Britain or Ireland. But what does strike me is that, in the world at large now, we really have a great need for history to be actually taught. We have to create space for that in our curriculum at primary, secondary and tertiary level, because more and more, people get stories from the past, that are – if I may call it that – fake news. They get the epics, they get popcorn heroics, they get television serials, and sometimes we see history being falsified as it emerges, even in these last few months. So there needs to be some form of academic, calibrated narrative. Also, we need to teach people to think critically; and to teach them to realise that whatever you can say about the past, there were also differences.

The most important thing that I would feel in response to the question is, that the modern state needs to fund and accommodate more teaching of history in its school curriculum. John Bowman: President Higgins, what is your opinion on this and on its role at this Decade of Centenaries period? President Higgins: What I found very interesting, because it is something that would not have happened some years ago – even just a few years ago – was that those contributing and responding to my paper were quoting E.P. Thompson. Now I think that there is a clue in that; and the clue is, in relation to, at the common disability of the historiography, in both the case of Ireland and our neighbouring communities1 is the neglect of class, because this is very important. I very much agree with Michael Laffan, when he speaks, let’s just say of the industrial revolution and so on. What is striking is how difficult it would have been and maybe I am projecting now, for people, let’s say, who had joined the RIC, the people in the Auxiliaries, to understand the class that they came from; and this has always struck me as incredibly important, the big change that has taken place in history I think, in both places, is in fact people have become more extensive but if you take, let’s just say, the British history, it is absolutely festooned with symbolisms of a particular power expression but actually to get the history of the mining communities and what happens, to get the history of the people who were in the early days of the commercial revolution or the migrations that took place into the cities. But that is quite weak. John Bowman: But Thompson addresses that too. President Higgins: Thompson does that. But acceptance of Thompson’s approach to history has come late enough – maybe I am outside of history – but to me, I remember Thompson visiting Ireland and remember him speaking in Galway but he was not regarded as mainstream then. But of course he is a seminal figure, he is incredibly important and the same thing is true in relation to Ireland in a way, if after my paper and after the responses, people are at different levels of empowerment, in having access to the kind of literacy, in relation to historical events that I am speaking about and that has to be recognised and in fact, not only are they somewhat excluded but they can actually be preyed upon by, if you like by giving false versions of the past that actually stand in the way even of their own understanding and participation in the discourse.

E.P. Thompson, The making of the English working class, (London 1963) was a seminal work which is acknowledged as one of the most influential works of history in the twentieth century.

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John Bowman: Can I move on? I want to bring in Ciarán Benson on this. Dr Johnston McMaster, of the Irish School of Ecumenics, has sent us a question. ‘As confessionalism has fostered division, should the churches publicly acknowledge their exclusionary and divisive role and set out their vision of a reconciling pluralist and shared island?’ Ciarán Benson: I think that that is a very interesting point. I am someone who grew up with little history education in my Christian Brothers school. The sense of the world I got, I got by osmosis rather than by instruction. One of the things I learnt in my own college education in the late 1960s was how profoundly important was the persistence of ideas in the construction of the sort of person I was, including divisive ideas. So, when we come to the churches, in my experience, there was huge division. The idea of ecumenism that came in 1962-63 with Pope John XXIII was memorable, but then it seemed to fade a bit and.... John Bowman: Have they a role now, that’s the question. Ciarán Benson: Yes, absolutely, and there are new religions in here as well. I am struck by the growing numbers of the Irish population that don’t have any of this shared history. They are new and they are bringing their own churches with them. The civic divisiveness of churches would certainly be lessened if there was some shared commitment to ecumenism and to pluralism. John Bowman: Joep do you want to come in on that one, the role that the churches might take now since they fostered division for so long? Joep Leerssen: Well it depends what country you are looking at. Churches can play a very toxic role if their theology is aligned with the interest of the nation. They can also be a force of opposition. A church can be a very powerful mobiliser against a tyrannical regime. In any case, it is always up to the powerful to tender apologies. That is even a bit of a fashion these days. Now, as we heard today, if you want to have reconciliation, the importance of the apology lies in empowering the victim to give or withhold forgiveness. If it is just an apology as a press statement, it is a vain exercise. You must want to show some good will and see how you can actually do things differently in the future. That is all I have to say for that.

John Bowman: This brings up a point that Professor Peter Sherlow, the Director of Irish Studies at the University of Liverpool, made in response to the President’s paper, he recalled his own mother’s invariable response to violence during the Troubles, in always emphasising the grief – as she heard the radio in the morning – of yet another mother and her grief at this latest death. And he says that that short sentence was a giant leap across the divide. His mother’s words were in effect a commemorative act based upon a unity of grief and he wants to ask us: How do we emphasise those acts of inter-community protection and build them more firmly into memory, President? President Higgins: I think that they are very important and I think that Anne Dolan’s presentation, for example opening with the powerful image of the coat, I think was incredibly important but also you see how connected it is to other kinds of exclusion. If the woman’s experience has in fact been neglected and if, as I emphasise again, there has been a very comprehensive exclusion of class as an approach in Irish historiography – and to some extent in British historiography too – it is recent enough, and whatever it is, how could something as a very valuable expression of humanity and of being able to put oneself in the space of the other, it is connected to those two things: exclusion of the woman’s experience, the exclusion of class. And there is something I have to say as well about that; that it is that very often in the literature that it is caught. If you look at the poetry, you will see in fact the significance of these moments and of these gestures can be made central in a piece that in fact actually the narrative that is in a formally presented way that attaches itself to the larger events, misses entirely. This is one of the reasons, for example in relation to something quite different, in relation to the migrant experience that has been caught so perfectly in relation to literature of all kinds but missed in the formal sociological accounts for a very very long time. John Bowman: And why do you think that would be? President Higgins: I think it is the categories got frozen. This is again when I had in the paper mentioning about unfreezing moments in history and unfreezing forms and approaches, forms of method, you have to actually keep it fluid in a way to allow that which was previously neglected in; but also of course to avoid missing again what in fact you should have been noticing in terms of complexity.

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That is why complexity is not in fact actually a model that is closed. Complexity must be and I think that Ciarán makes the point in relation to memory as well – that there is a constant openness required and the possibility of revision. I had a line of one of my own poems and I said that the only thing of which I am certain is the impossibility of certainties. And this price paid for certainties has been a very high one; and it is reflected ritually, it has been in relation to history as well in both Great Britain and history here. The unwinding of these certainties will be a part of the whole exercise I hope and will be the better for it. John Bowman: But I think that has happened. Would you say that that has happened, say if you compared the centenary of celebrations with what happened fifty years ago in the golden jubilee, at the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising. There has been a huge change for the better hasn’t there, in terms of complexity? President says: Yes Anne Dolan: Yes there is. Absolutely and I think that there is a sense in which we are looking at different people and we are finding different people in the past which in a way forces that change. It forces us away from the big names and the big events and I think one of the things that I have been most struck by, which in a way was part of the sources I was looking at in the context of my response to the paper, like much of the evidence that I am looking at relates to people identifying a dead person, a person who died in this period and they are often identified by the official or by a policeman or by an army officer as a combatant, as a member of a particular battalion or whatever it might be. But then their next of kin comes in and says: ‘That’s my son, he was a carpenter, he was 28, he had two children’. And in a way we are coming at it now as very different historians too, in the sense that we are informed by things as the President says, the history of class but also the history of the family, the history of emotions and gender and we are thinking of people in these different ways. One of the things that is really important, and I think it came through in the context of centenary of the First World War, we saw a lot of people who had started to engage with genealogy at a very public level and in a way that very basic step of finding out about people in the past who were very close to you, very directly related to you, that they did what might seem like contradictory things, they could be lots of different categories that in a way does not fit an easy narrative and I think that has made people more receptive to this idea of

dealing with complex people in the past who don’t really fit the easy labels that we sometimes call them in the history books and that makes this a little bit too straightforward. John Bowman: Michael Laffan, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising, a colleague of yours in UCD, the late Reverend Professor F.X. Martin, wrote in a very celebrated article of what he termed a ‘national amnesia’ because so many families remembered any links with 1916 and the War of Independence; but in contrast there was silence from those whose parents were in the RIC or whose families were in the Great War although they were sixteen times more numerous.2 Michael Laffan: And very shortly before that fiftieth anniversary commemoration, Seán Lemass, as Taoiseach, made a famous speech in which he paid tribute to the Irish soldiers in the First World War. This was a breakthrough; particularly for a Fianna Fáil Taoiseach, it was quite remarkable. You mentioned F.X. Martin. In a volume that he edited at that time, Leaders and Men of the Easter Rising, he included two chapters, one devoted to Edward Carson, another to James Craig; even then, in 1966, people were trying to bring the Ulster Unionists into the story. So there were important things happening and opening up fifty years ago and I think they should be remembered. It wasn’t all bad back in 1966. John Bowman: It still took Studies, some years, until 1972, in fact, to publish the article by Francis Shaw S.J., ‘The Canon of Irish History – a challenge’, critical of Pearse’s philosophy which was originally commissioned for a special edition of Studies commemorating the Easter Rising in 1966 and not then published. Michael Laffan: That’s right. It was deemed to be too sensitive at the time. John Bowman: Too sensitive... yes. Michael Laffan: Yes John Bowman: On one point, I really compliment you, Joep Leerssen, on your 1932 point, that the losers in the Civil War would have taken power as Fianna Fáil, in 1932. Effectively de Valera was leading the losers of the Civil War into government within nine years. That, to a European view, obviously strikes you as a major achievement by both winners and losers: that through the ballot box such a change of power was effected.

F.X.Martin, ‘1916 – myth, fact and mystery’, Studia Hibernica, 7, 1967.

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Joep Leerssen: Yes, actually you see that in a lot of the commemorations and narratives that I encounter in Central Europe. In Poland or in Hungary, for instance, people have a narrative that they got their liberty in 1918 and it was swept away by Hitler and Stalin in the late 1930s; what is elided from that is the fact that they voluntarily gave up their hard-won liberty to dictator-type strongmen – Piłsudski in Poland and Horthy in Hungary, and there were many of that ilk; this turns out to be a bit of a pattern. And against that Ireland really stands out. I didn’t make this up on my own: it was Joe Lee who said this, and my mother-in-law who taught history in Dominican College also made that point to me. But in the European 1930s frame, it really stands out as something that is totally admirable that those who lost the election, so very shortly after a bloody civil war, ceded power. There was something in Irish politics – traumatic and disruptive as they were – that had a great inner resilience. That is also worth commemorating.3 President Higgins: I think the losers in 1932 were the people who had been excluded altogether, such as for example the people who formed the government in 1932 are from a very particular class. They have a particular record in relation to rejecting the Treaty and then changing their minds and entering politics but you must ask what about the agricultural labourers? You must ask what about all the working-class people who are being represented by the trade union movement and the consistent view of the people who were in the trade union movement, in the labour movement, right through North and South, is that they tried to find an alternative to the War of Independence. They make several attempts during the Civil War and then in fact when you want to make the very transition that is spoken about possible, they are the people who make it possible. But you also have something very interesting about who were the real losers. You get that actually through the 1930s. The 1930s is a horrific time because you find during this period the excesses of denominationalism, the women who had participated in the War of Independence are canvassing against the 1937 Constitution which is so ignorant really of the position of women; and you have at that time as well, the new Government’s review of the Pensions legislation which continues to ignore women, also it

continues in a very divisive way. The 1930s in Ireland, is an horrific time: you have the whole question of censorship, you have the burning of the headquarters of some political parties in Dublin, you have sermons really telling people that the priests should have the power to stick you to the ground if you were not obedient. So I don’t see it quite frankly. I see the losers as in fact, all those people who had hoped. Look, okay now, we have the two sides of what was originally a Sinn Féin version of something else, that they have come together to agree to hand over power, but outside of this you had the housing issue, the unemployed issue, the people were emigrating, and all the issues in relation to sexuality and so on. So excuse me for holding back my enthusiasm from seeing it as a great and glorious moment. I see it as just further failure. John Bowman: Michael Laffan, on the question of the Most Oppressed People Ever that you brought up, we did have a relatively easy time compared to Europe, didn’t we in our own revolution.4 Michael Laffan: We did, of course. If you go back in history, to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we see massacre on a grand scale, and Ireland’s experience then was particularly terrible. Ireland in the nineteenth century is sometimes described as a colony, and of course there were colonial elements in the BritishIrish relationship, but no other colony sent members to the parliament of the colonial power, and by the end, by 1918, Ireland was grossly over-represented in Westminster. Despite British negligence at the time of the Famine – and nobody can do anything except criticise or deplore that – by and large, the British influence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was very positive and Ireland was doing quite well – against a terrible background, of course – so we got off much more lightly than, say, the Poles under Prussians, Austrians and Russians or Germans. Things weren’t all that bad, which makes the revolution in a way, quite surprising. Ireland left the empire just at a time when the country had begun making a profit out of belonging to the United Kingdom, as a result of the Social Welfare legislation, Old Age pensions and so on, as mentioned earlier.

Joseph Lee, Ireland: Politics and Society; 1912-1985 (Cambridge, 1989) pp.172-177.

Most Oppressed People Ever [or MOPE] was coined by Professor Liam Kennedy to challenge what he sees as the pervasive assumption of Irish nationalists that the Irish have been uniquely victimised throughout history. Liam Kennedy Unhappy the Land: The Most Oppressed People Ever, the Irish? (Sallins, 2016).

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John Bowman: In general, are you optimistic that we can, through the Decade of Centenaries and the commemorations and so on that we can get through this with better relations between Ireland and Britain and between North and South and that that can be a positive experience and that the complexity of the story will be better understood? Michael Laffan: I think so. My worry looking ahead to the next year or two is the Civil War and whether discussions of atrocities on both sides will bring about the sort of hatred that might revive old animosities – for example, that might destabilise a Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael coalition. But in terms of your points John, in terms of BritishIrish relations, I think that things will get better. It’s important that Irish people understand that Britain had its own legitimate interests at stake in, say, the Treaty negotiations, in enforcing the Treaty after it had been voted on by the Dáil and by Parliament at Westminster. This was quite legitimate from the British point of view, and if the Irish appreciate that, we are making one more step towards a better understanding of the Irish past and the British past. John Bowman: Ciarán, what is your view on that? Ciarán Benson: I was thinking about the question of history in schools and the fact that its diminution seems to me to be a widespread tendency. History education has been diminished across the world, and is not present in the way that it should be. I think history is absolutely foundational educationally, and I think peoples in general as well as individuals, become what they are by virtue of a long timeline of events and ideas. We need to be reminded of what those ideas might be. I remember when I first read Father Shaw’s paper that the idea of revisionism was revelatory to me. I didn’t know what revisionism was, so this correction of my youthful, osmotically-arrived-at-idea of Irish history was memorable. I would love to see more interesting history in the schools. As to Michael’s general point, John Hume’s wry observation that the Irish never forget because the British never remember also comes to mind as we try to think about how to reconcile different histories. John Bowman: And President, what is your view of the role that history is now playing through the commemorations?

President Higgins: Well the most difficult point I had when I was involved putting together papers for the previous period from 1916 on. I have already said enough about class but I had a real difficulty about finding, getting attention to empire and I do think we should have been looking at what was happening in empire in the period because it is very important. I do see a difficulty still that I haven’t worked out and that is the sense of place and the intimacies of place, when a certain people have taken and this, I think all the local histories and the local histories movement is terribly important but it is very important that they bring in, if you like the small stories and the intimate stories and to do it in a very general way because what has happened very often is that places have had embedded upon them if you like versions of history which is very difficult to change. There is very little revisionism possible in some of the places because the folk story has taken on a particular colour. Now there is a huge difference between doing local history in which it is really local and inclusive and drawing on everyone who was in the locality and for example someone who has taken a grand narrative and imposed it on a place of stones or on a bog or on a field or something like that. That’s difficult and when we come onto the further seminars I’m sure it’s an issue and I will try to deal with it. John Bowman: But love of place, love of one’s own place is a very powerful sentiment and a positive one for all. President Higgins: Oh, absolutely and this is another distinction again between the people and for example in parliament, and I refer in my paper to the long spectrum of Irish nationalism. I made reference for example to the trades, and that of which my father was one, and I really think what I find quite astonishing is the people looking at those who were members for example of the volunteers. I would love to see a good study done, how many first-inheriting sons in the farms were members of the volunteers and a huge over-proportion of those who were working in shops, indentured people and so on who took most of the risks and when the new state forms they are not the people who are in Dublin. They are not the people heading into the high offices of the state; so that long spectrum is very class specific in relation to outcomes; and very class specific in relation to what would become the policies of the independent state, be it in relation to clericalism, be it in relation to equality, be it in relation to the idea of the public world – and very particularly in relation to the role of women in society.

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John Bowman: And these will be themes that you hope will be reflected in the next two seminars? President Higgins: Oh yes, I think the important part of it is to have the scholarship in its richness and diversity and how richer it is and all the new people and people are representing the neglected themes that they I’m hoping to make it as rich as I can. John Bowman: So you will meet Dr Dolan’s point about the fact that she was only one woman? President Higgins: Oh yes, and that was really simply because quite frankly we need, we had a specialist on memory and we had other difficulties with Covid but my intention has been from the very very beginning is to have an equality of participation. And what I have to say as well, is that some of the most significant writing I have quoted in my paper are in fact from women historians and we will be hearing from them John Bowman: Well before we finish on the questions, there are two from practising historians, not surprisingly they are interested in archives Diarmaid Ferriter and Catriona Crowe and they are wondering: in one case the Military Service Pensions Collection and the archives of industrial schools, Magdalene Laundries, mother and baby homes, what challenges are posed by these archives in relation to remembrance and commemoration? President Higgins: Well I think as far as I am concerned in relation to archives, they are important not only for the formal studies but they are important for all of the people mentioned in them and affected by them and the communities that they are taken from; and I believe very strongly that those that have been made accessible have been of enormous value. I think in relation to institutional archives, they should be opened up and this is all part of being able to deal with what happened in a mature and sophisticated way. I think that that is essential. My own family’s records are in the Military Service Pensions Collection that you mentioned and again what I found there is some more detail on my father and my uncles but the position of my aunt for example who was between brothers on each side of the Civil War I was so struck really by the way that women were dismissed, in particular in relation to pension applications. Women of all classes even widows of some of the principles and so forth, what differentiations between how they

were treated. Can you imagine when you had a situation where two widows for example, with their husbands being remembered in different ways but I think very particularly by people like my aunt who was in Cumann na mBan and who simply said how could I take a side when I have two brothers on both sides and bringing cigarettes to one lot in prison and another lot going in an ass and cart to actually seek to make representations on behalf of her brother who is in Tin Town.5 These women, they might be regarded as women who didn’t matter enormously in the scheme of things but they were the people who carried the texture and the experience of both the War of Independence and also the Civil War and then what came after it in a way and it’s not a good story. But I’m not saying it out of any bitterness, the time is to make sure that we make up for it and that’s why of course I would hope that you will find women participating not just doing but in terms of their great strengths as well, in all of the different areas. John Bowman: Well, Anne Dolan, do you think that will be redressed in the coming years? I’m not saying just within this Decade of Centenaries but future scholarship, do you think that there is an appetite there now for this story to be told? Anne Dolan: Yes, and I think the archives are central to that, the story can’t be told without them, but equally they can only be told if we have access to them and I think that Irish archives have led the way in this. It is very striking when you go to archives elsewhere, many collections in the archives here have been digitalised, things like the census, the bureau, the pensions, they are being digitised. They are being made freely available to anyone who wants to look at them. That is not the case in certain archives, in the archives in the UK for example. So I think we have done a huge amount of work there, there is a huge amount more to be done and I think it is very important. Michael Laffan: And the records are there for it to be done. Anne Dolan: Absolutely, I mean I think we need to move a little beyond seeing the period maybe in sort of chunks of centenaries if you like, because the important work that needs to be done is to see how things bleed out beyond 1922-1923 and let’s start thinking about the records of the Land Commission because if they are layered on top of the pensions, they would let you see the social history of twentieth-century Ireland for men, for women,

Tin Town was the colloquial name for the republican prisoners’ quarters in the Curragh Camp.

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for whoever. I think it is only when we start to get access to those kinds of records, that we can actually facilitate this. Back to the point, I think others have raised about the importance of history at all levels, primary, secondary and third level, across the board. We are really facilitating people to ask those questions, we have moved beyond giving them finite, definite, divisive answers. What we want to do is equip them with the skills to ask questions of those materials and let them find the past in their own right. John Bowman: And let them ask their own questions and interrogate the records the better to answer those very questions. President Higgins: Absolutely. Anne Dolan: And they will come up with questions that we can’t even think of at the moment as historians of the period.

Joep Leerssen: No, it was very instructive. Commemorations and centenaries are a way of schematising history in all European nationstates and I think the way that this is being done in Ireland is exemplary. What I like as a take-away from the last bit is the importance of the archive but also of the stories within the military archives. Personal narratives have become formative and refreshing historical views. One would hope indeed that the archives and the public are no longer separated by the academic historians who write big books about them but that they can become themselves a platform for commemoration and for popular memory, for public memory. John Bowman: Thank you, Joep, very much for joining us from Amsterdam and thanks also to our guests here who have read papers and who have contributed to this discussion.

John Bowman: I ask you Joep Leerssen, finally, have you any comments to make on our discussions we have had here looking at them through Dutch eyes?

Left to right: Dr Anne Dolan, Dr John Bowman, President Michael D. Higgins, Professor Ciarán Benson and Professor Michael Laffan

Ó chlé go deas: an Dr Anne Dolan, an Dr John Bowman, an tUachtarán Micheál D. Ó hUigínn, an tOllamh Ciarán Benson agus an tOllamh Michael Laffan

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Opinion Ethical and Respectful Remembering Michael D. Higgins, President of Ireland

‘Machnamh’ is an Irish word that encapsulates meditation, reflection, consideration and thought. Machnamh 100 is my invitation to residents of this island, and to all those with an interest in our shared past and our futures together, to reflect on that tumultuous period of 100 years ago and what it means for us today. In particular, Machnamh 100 is a forum for reflection on the War of Independence, the Civil War and the two new administrations on the Island. On Friday, 4th December 2020, I hosted the first of a series of Machnamh 100 reflections at Áras an Uachtaráin that considered the nature of commemoration itself, why we do it, what we choose to commemorate, and what we may have chosen to omit from our commemorations. Four distinguished scholars presented fascinating but challenging papers which, along with my own contribution, I hope, set the scene for our work ahead. The proceedings are available for everyone to view on the RTÉ Player and the President of Ireland website. I suggested that we are all challenged to engage with our shared past in a manner that is honest, authentic and inclusive, and that if commemoration is understood in this way that it might assist in healing the wounds of conflicts, recognise different narratives as to their causes, and their repercussions, that cannot, and should not, be forgotten. The complex events we recall from a century ago are integral to the story that has shaped our peoples in all their diversity, and how they are recalled and understood will continue to shape us and the decisions we make into the future.

Amnesia will not help us. I believe that we, and those who are part of the discourse with us, must remember in full, taking all of the diverse perspectives and experiences of what happened into account, with a willingness to hear the stories that might prove less comfortable, and give space to the perspectives that might challenge each other. Ethical remembering will require us to shine a light on overlooked figures and events as all of us with intersecting stories attempt to achieve a deeper, more balanced and inclusive perspective. A central dimension of this is a refusal of conscious or unconscious amnesia, not only of persons but also of events and of the assumptions and actions that drove them. I suggested at what was our inaugural seminar in the series that it requires us to consider the marginalised voices, the disenfranchised, and voices ignored or overlooked in our recollections of the past. It must, for example, give adequate recognition to the essential part played by women and their experiences. The driving influences of class, power, violence and restraint must all be laid bare and, in doing so, perhaps allow us to find our own individual and collective openness to perspectives of the stranger, the ‘other’, including the enemy of yesterday. To this end, I am inviting scholars for a number of seminars from a variety of backgrounds to share their thoughts, to challenge us, and to challenge each other, in our dissection of the past and its implications for us today and also for tomorrow. History and access to it, drawing on good scholarship is so important for all of us. My hope is that Machnamh 100, through being a forum for reflection, will aid us in transacting our shared history in an ethical way and with a respect for complexity as we move forward together on a journey to the future.

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This approach to ethical remembering does not lend itself to simplification, or neatness, or a forced or inappropriate brevity in our contemplation of the past. Commemoration should not be restricted merely to celebrating the actions of the victors. Understanding and even empathising is not the same as endorsing or valorising. In seeking to gain a fuller picture of the events occurring during the decade leading to the establishment of separate jurisdictions on this island, we must recall not only the participants of war and rebellion, but also recognise all of those who suffered in its midst and in its wake. The second Machnamh 100 seminar, scheduled for February 2021, will focus on the theme of ‘Empire: Instincts, Interests, Power and Resistance’. Among the topics to be considered will be the fall and re-forging of empires, the particular status and perceived power of the British empire circa 1920, resistance to empire and to nationalism within Ireland, and the position of Ulster and of Ulster Unionism in the debate on identities and power, with the establishment of the independent Irish State and Northern Ireland being the outcomes of this debate.

We share a rich history together, but our past is sometimes painful, and it can, should we allow it, obscure the possibilities before us. We cannot and should not forget, but we must, I suggest, find a way to free ourselves from the snares of the past. The time has come for us to listen. I believe that an ethics of narrative hospitality, as philosopher Richard Kearney has put it, has the capacity to replace our past entrenchments, offering an openness to each other. In doing so, we may nurture memory and remembrance as a strong foundation of a shared, agreed future of fulfilment for all.

Published in The Irish Times and Belfast Telegraph on 12 December, 2020

A third reflection in May will examine gender and how social class influenced the differing aspirations for the future that existed. Later next year I hope to convene some sessions focused on the Civil War and Partition. As we proceed through our own tumultuous events of today, and as we look back on the last 100 years, may I suggest that we should be radical in our acknowledgement of what we have excluded, and that there is value in seeking to work towards an ethical task together, one of inclusion and respect, one that brings us beyond – relieves us of the burden of – sectarian tendencies past and present.

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Peace vigil outside the Mansion House, Dawson Street, Dublin 1921.

Bigil ar son síochána lasmuigh de Theach an Ardmhéara, Sráid Dawson, Baile Átha Cliath 1921.

Photo National Library of Ireland www.nli.ie Ref: HOGW 124

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Machnamh 100 President of Ireland Centenary Reflections

Second Seminar Empire: Instincts, Interests, Power and Resistance 25 February 2021

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Opinion Why We Must Critique Imperialism Michael D. Higgins, President of Ireland

Ireland is currently engaged in a process of recalling the transformative events of a century ago which culminated in Partition of the island. Six of the nine Ulster counties remained in the United Kingdom and the rest of the island opted for self-determination and what would become an independent Republic. As President of Ireland, I have been engaging with our citizens in an exercise of ethical remembering of this period. This is not only to allow us to understand more fully the complexities of those times. It is also to allow us to recognise the reverberations of that past for our societies today and for our relationships with each other and our neighbours. A feigned amnesia around the uncomfortable aspects of our shared history will not help us to forge a better future together. The complex events we recall and commemorate during this time are integral to the story that has shaped our nations, in all their diversity. They are, however, events to be remembered and understood, respecting the fact that different perspectives exist. In doing this, we can facilitate a more authentic interpretation, not only of our shared history, but of post-sectarian possibilities for the future. This journey of ethical remembering has allowed us to examine the nature of commemoration itself and how it might unburden us of history’s capacity to create obstacles to a better, shared future. It has entailed uncomfortable interrogations of the events and forces that shaped the Ireland of a century ago and the country we know today. Class, gender, religion, democracy, language, culture and violence all played important roles, and all were intertwined with British imperialist rule in Ireland.

It is vital to understand the nature of the British imperialist mindset of that time if we are to understand the history of coexisting support for, active resistance to, and, for most, a resigned acceptance of British rule in Ireland. While our nations have been utterly transformed over the past century, I suggest that there are important benefits for all on these islands of engaging with the shadows cast by our shared past. In my work on commemorations, memory, forgetting and forgiving I have sought to establish a discourse characterised by what the Irish philosopher Richard Kearney calls ‘a hospitality of narratives’, acknowledging that different, informed perspectives on the same events can and do exist. The acceptance of this fact can release us from the pressure of finding, or subscribing to, a singular unifying narrative of the past. In previous years I pursued this task by addressing issues neglected in the public discourse or in the historiography: Irish participants in World War I, the struggle of trade unionists, and what was suffered, and achieved, by women activists in campaigning for the vote, and by those excluded on the basis of social class. More recently, I have given the title ‘Machnamh 100’ to a series of reflections which examine the period 1920-1923, including the War of Independence, Civil War and Partition. ‘Machnamh’ is an Irish word encompassing reflection, contemplation, meditation and thought. The next seminar, which I will host on 25 February, will examine the motivations and practices of imperialism and of resistance to it, how both reacted to changing local and global circumstances.

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As I reflect on the topic, I am struck by a disinclination in both academic and journalistic accounts to critique empire and imperialism. Openness to, and engagement in, a critique of nationalism has seemed greater. And while it has been vital to our purposes in Ireland to examine nationalism, doing the same for imperialism is equally important and has a significance far beyond British/Irish relations. It may be fruitful to consider the relationship of what has been titled – and not without dissent – the ‘European Enlightenment’ within the project of imperial expansion for an understanding of how the mask of modernity has been used for cultural suppression, economic exploitation, dispossession and domination. Such consideration also helps explain a reluctance in former imperial powers to engage now with their imperialist past and to examine that past with descendants of those previously colonised, many of whom still live with the complex legacies of that colonialism. As I reflect on the instincts of those who have defended imperialism, I can see how the tool of an alleged ‘progressive modernity’, could be so effective. Those on the receiving end of imperialist adventurism were denied cultural agency, assumed to be incapable of it, and responsible for a violence towards the ‘modernising’ forces directed at them. From the perspective of the British imperialist mind of its time, attitudes to the Irish for example, were never, and could never be, about a people who were equal, had a different culture, or could be trusted in a civilised discourse of equals. From the perspective of the Irish who had their own ancient language, social and legal systems and a rich monastic contribution to the world, this view had to be resisted.

Both the imperialists and those they dominated developed a strategy of accommodation. At home in Britain, the imperialist experience was transmitted down through the classes; there was perhaps the glow associated with belonging to a global empire that could distract from problems of class rejection, an unjust society or an exploitative economic system. But antiimperialist struggles weren’t free of the traits of Empire either. They also at times lacked a consciousness of class exploitation. At its core, imperialism involves the making of a number of claims which are invoked to justify its assumptions and practices – including its inherent violence. One of those claims is the assumption of superiority of culture and it is always present in the imperialising project. Forcing an acceptance on those subjugated of the inferiority of their culture as a dominated ‘Other’ is the reverse side of the coin. Injustices perpetrated in the name of imperialism, and in resistance to it, often had a brutalising effect, leaving a bitter residue of pain and resentment, sometimes passed down through generations and left available to those willing to reignite inherited grievances. What our current reflection consists of, I suggest, is not the offering of a set of competing rationalisations for different kinds of violence. Instead it is about understanding the contexts in which they occurred. The rewards for this will come in the form in restoring the connection between moral instinct and public policy. That is an authenticity for which so many of our citizens, on this shared, vulnerable planet, yearn.

Published in The Guardian on 11 February, 2021

Some resistance was through an intensified cultural activity, literature, poetry, music and song. Others sought it within the domain of parliaments or through exerting political pressure from engaged emigrant populations in the United States. In other circumstances, the Irish found it through covert and overt violence. Most resorted to available strategies of escape through emigration, or survival within the Empire, with a widespread, if suppressed, anger over humiliation experienced or remembered.

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Opening Words by President Michael D. Higgins

President Michael D. Higgins with participants for Machnamh 100 – Seminar Two

An tUachtarán Micheál D. Ó hUigínn le rannpháirtithe Machnamh 100 – Seimineár a Dó

Left to right: President Michael D. Higgins, Professor Eunan O’Halpin, Professor Alvin Jackson, Dr Marie Coleman and Dr Niamh Gallagher and Professor John Horne

Ó chlé go deas: an tUachtarán Micheál D. Ó hUigínn, an tOllamh Eunan O’Halpin, an tOllamh Alvin Jackson, an Dr Marie Coleman, an Dr Niamh Gallagher agus an tOllamh John Horne

We are currently engaged in a Decade of Commemorations which has allowed us, as a nation, to revisit and re-engage with those seminal events of a century ago, that were to have such profound effects on the societies and jurisdictions that emerged on this island, and on our relationships with each other and with our neighbours.

Our commemorative journey to date has allowed us to re-familiarise ourselves with, and think afresh about, key historic moments such as the 1913 Lockout, the First World War, the ‘Spanish Flu’ Pandemic, the 1918 election, and the first Dáil. New scholarship, and perhaps further reflection with the passage of time, has given us an opportunity to hear the history of those who may have been excluded from previous tellings, providing us perhaps with a fuller, more informed, more empathetic understanding. Machnamh 100 is an initiative I have undertaken as Uachtarán na hÉireann to build on this previous work and specifically to allow for reflections on the wider context of, for example, the War of Independence, Civil War and Partition. I have invited leading scholars with diverse perspectives to share their insights on the context and events of that formative period of a century ago and on the nature of the act of commemoration itself.

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My motivation in convening Machnamh 100 is not for us to arrive at a singular unifying narrative of the past to which we might all subscribe, but rather to acknowledge that differing, informed perspectives on the past do and can coexist. Machnamh 100 can be, I hope, a welcoming, inclusive forum for listening, for learning and for reflecting. My hope is that Machnamh 100 will contribute to an inclusive commemoration, one that allows for uncomfortable truths to be acknowledged, one that might free us from the traps of remembered grievances and bitterness, and one that, through the sharing of a deeper understanding, might assist in our reconciliation with the past and with each other. May I thank Dr John Bowman, historian and broadcaster, for agreeing to chair these seminars. I could think of no one more suited to the task. Our inaugural seminar was held in December 2020 and examined the nature of commemoration itself in the contexts of today and of the national and global events of a century ago. Speakers included Professors Ciarán Benson, Michael Laffan and Joep Leerssen and Dr Anne Dolan and together with them we set out our stall of what we are hoping for from this series. We have arrived at a point in our commemorative programme now where we are obliged to confront, acknowledge, and come to terms with some of the most contested aspects of the independence struggle, including a consideration of the forms and sources of violence that emerged. This is not an easy task, nor is it a simple story. Our task requires an open-minded and inclusive reflection if we are to derive an understanding of how and why the multiple divisions within Ireland emerged in the way that they did, how they manifested themselves, and the strategies that were used to further their objectives. It requires, furthermore, an understanding of context, acknowledging the growing insecurity about the future of the British Empire in 1920, which resulted in an increasingly hostile, aggressive and violent response to civil unrest in Ireland as well as other colonised nations.

There will then follow four further reflections. Dr Niamh Gallagher from the University of Cambridge will give particular attention to the impact of World War I and its after-effects on Irish and British society, paying regard to changed attitudes to death, violence, trauma, authority, and health. She will also consider the Irish abroad and minorities in both the North and South of Ireland in relation to partition. Professor Eunan O’Halpin of Trinity College Dublin will examine ‘the crisis of empire’, exploring the roots of the paradox that, throughout the twentieth century, Irish independence has always been seen, not as an existential threat, but merely a tiresome secondorder problem for Britain in international affairs. Professor Alvin Jackson from the University of Edinburgh will give particular attention to the position of Ulster and of Ulster Unionism in the debate on empire, identities and power, with the establishment of Northern Ireland as an outcome of such debate. Dr Marie Coleman from Queen’s University Belfast will examine how the War played out in the lives of individuals affected by the conflict and its aftermath, the motivation of those who took arms, the experience of the Protestant minority in the south, and the resonance of partition and the border. Finally, I will offer some thoughts on the relationship between empire and violence, including how versions of the ‘Other’ may have served as sources of violence. I hope you find today’s seminar interesting, thought-provoking and even inspiring. Fáilte Romhaibh Uilig. Thank you for being with us at Machnamh.

Today we shall hear a number of considered papers from a range of eminent scholars in the field of Irish history, commencing with Professor John Horne of Trinity College Dublin who will provide an overview of the international order, and consideration of the fall of European empires and the particular the status and power of the British Empire circa 1920.

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Principal Address Professor John Horne

Ireland at the Crossroad, 1920-21: Nation, Empire, Partition Professor John Horne An tOllamh John Horne

A Uachtaráin agus a chairde. Thank you, President Higgins, for inviting me to address this second session of Machnamh 100 on the events of a century ago. You asked me to put them in a wider context. It is no easy task. Nothing less was at stake in 1920-1921 than Ireland’s sovereignty, its contested future, its fractured territory and the outcome of a war. A crossroad – that still shapes our lives today. Yet it was, indeed, part of a wider context, a ‘world crisis’, and reflecting on this may help us to think about our national history.1 However, this is not history for history’s sake. You also ask us to think about ‘ethical commemoration’. I take this seriously and shall return to it at the end.2 But first, and bearing it in mind, let me reflect on Ireland’s crossroad in terms of nation, empire and partition, through all of which runs the theme of violence.

1. Nation Ireland a century ago, we know, was embroiled in a war fought in the name of Irish sovereignty by nationalists and opposed not just by the British but by those in Ireland who wished to preserve the union. Put thus, it has the ring of inevitability. That comes from what went before (the home rule crisis, the Great War, Easter 1916, the rise of Sinn Féin) and from what came after, including our eventual Republic. Also, nationality has since become the basis of statehood and citizenship worldwide. In 1948 the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights made it an entitlement for everyone.3 So, it seems to me vital to break this teleology and recall just how fluid relations between nation, state and empire were in the era of the First World War (1912-23) and how diverse the sources of sovereignty (by which I mean political authority).

The phrase is Winston Churchill’s, from the title of his precocious history, The World Crisis, (London: Thornton Butterworth, 192331), 5 vols. The feeling that the war was both world-wide and had provoked a ‘crisis’ was a general one.

I have addressed this issue in the volume co-edited with Edward Madigan, Towards Commemoration: Ireland in War and Revolution, 1912-1923 (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2013), esp. pp. 169-75 (Conclusion).

Article 15 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares that: ‘Everyone has the right to a nationality. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality’.

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Colonial empires were at their peak, the British the largest. Dynastic empires (Habsburg, Romanov, Ottoman) which had ruled Eastern Europe, Russia and the Middle East for centuries only collapsed during the war, leaving multiple nationalities and new nation-states in their wake.4 And nationality did not always imply statehood. Nations might exist inside a state or an empire. If a nation became a state, who belonged to it? How did it assert its sovereignty? Ireland before 1914, was a laboratory of such ideas. Regarding the state, physical force for full independence vied with a legislated path to home rule. As for the nation, Thomas Davis imagined it in the 1840s open to ‘the stranger within our gates’ as to ‘the Irishman of a hundred generations.’ Later, there were more overtly cultural views, to which the Anglo-Irish (like Davis) contributed. Cultural nationalism mapped onto home rule politics even if a new generation urged full independence (Roy Foster’s ‘vivid faces’).5 In Ulster, mobilisation against home rule honed an opposed (and also cultural) sense of nationality in defence of the union. All this shaped plans ranging from home rule in 1914 to the Irish Convention of 1917, from the Government of Ireland Act, 1920, with its two parliaments, north and south (plus federal elements), to the Free State’s limited sovereignty. But such solutions were not just Irish. They also abounded elsewhere e.g. in Austria-Hungary (Arthur Griffith’s model for a joint Anglo-Irish monarchy) or Britain’s settler dominions. However, in the second half of the First World War, Irish nationalists radically redefined the relations of nation, state and sovereignty. We can find purely Irish reasons for this (which it is how it is usually seen). But I want to suggest that it was also part of the ‘world crisis’ I mentioned at the outset.6 For the Great War was above all an existential war. It mobilised whole peoples but at the cost of huge sacrifice.

With German defeat, the fall of Europe’s empires, the Russian revolution and colonial revolt, it galvanised the issue of sovereignty. Who ruled, by what authority, to what end? US president Woodrow Wilson caught this Zeitgeist with his idea of ‘self-determination.’ Briefly, he was a secular Messiah across the world. Seán T. O’Kelly, famously went to Wilson in Paris in 1919 with the First Dáil’s ‘Message to the Free Nations of the World’. This summoned other sovereign nations to support ‘the Irish Republic by recognising Ireland’s national status and her right to its vindication at the [Paris] Peace Congress.’ The case was dismissed not as that of a colony (as were those of India, Egypt and others) but because the Allies saw Ireland as a matter of internal British sovereignty. Ireland was thus caught up in the ‘Wilsonian moment’ of 1919 despite Wilson ignoring Ireland. 7 But while the Allies sought to build a European order with the new nation-states and through the League of Nations, Ireland was initially barred from this development. It was ironic. There was something deeply European both in Ireland’s claim to be part of this new order and in the form which this took at home. For the first Dáil acted as a classic constituent assembly in the tradition of the French Revolution (planning a new constitution and form of government), while also invoking the nation proclaimed by insurrection in 1916. Remarkably, it also forged an underground state in resistance to the British. This was national sovereignty in action. Could it have been pursued non-violently, as Gandhi did in India at the same time?8 We shall never know. That such a zero-sum clash over sovereignty (Irish versus British) led to war in Ireland is hardly surprising. But neither was it uniquely Irish. I have argued elsewhere that a ‘greater war’ prolonged something of the violence of the Great War until around 1923.

Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela (eds.), Empires at War, 1911-1923 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

Roy Foster, Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890-1923 (London: Allen Lane, 2014).

For an important review of the latest literature in both dimensions, see Heather Jones, ‘Romantic Ireland’s Dead and Gone? How Centenary Publications are Reshaping Ireland’s Divided Understanding of its Decade of War and Revolution, 1912-1923’, First World War Studies, 9/3, 2018, pp. 344-61. The late Keith Jeffery’s last work was a major study situating the 1916 Rising in its international context: 1916: A Global History (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). See also Enrico Dal Lago, Róisín Healy and Gearóid Barry (eds.), 1916 in Global Context: An Anti-Imperial Moment (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018).

Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Leonard V. Smith, Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), for the general question of sovereignty.

Gandhi supported Indian recruitment for the British war effort in 1918 in return for immediate home rule, reserving the right to conduct satyagraha (mass civil disobedience) if this was not forthcoming. This lay at the root of the Amritsar massacre of 1919. He explicitly rejected the Sinn Féin policy of armed resistance. Santanu Das, India, Empire and First World War Culture: Writings, Images, Songs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 56-67; Kate O’Malley, Ireland, India and Empire: Indo-Irish Radical Connections, 1919-64 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), p. 3.

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The Allies tried to make a Europe of nationstates but they did so in a world still in flames. Their writ was limited by wars, national revolutions, counter-revolutions and the world threat of Bolshevism. Thus, the Poland they decreed ended up twice as big after wars with Lithuania, Ukraine and Russia. Ireland’s war of independence (and civil war) were part of this ‘greater war.’ A century ago, Ireland shared a specific European context.9 Since the loyalties and identities of ordinary people were at stake in these border, national and revolutionary wars in Europe, and since the combatants included militias and paramilitaries, civilians tended to be both subjects and actors of violence. We could draw a grim diagram of mutual dehumanisation. One side might stigmatise the foe as collaborators or informers, the other as rebels, terrorists or ‘Bolsheviks’, feeding a spiral of repressive or dissuasive brutality. When Major Bernard Montgomery (the victor of El Alamein, who had Donegal roots) recalled that in battling the IRA in Cork in early 1921: ‘It never bothered me how many houses were burned. I regarded all civilians as Shinners’ (Sinn Féiners), he was voicing a sentiment heard from Silesia to Latvia, the Ruhr to Budapest.10 Yet this does not mean that violence was the same on both sides in Ireland, let alone everywhere else. The violence varied in nature and intensity, which brings me to my second theme, empire.

2. Empire One way to understand the war of independence is as a colonial conflict. This was often how it was portrayed by republicans at the time. Yet this is not self-evident, if only because the ‘colonial’ was so multi-layered in Ireland and its meaning varied so much. The union, after all, was the status quo of the British state itself. That made the First Dáil, let alone the IRA’s guerrilla war, a head-on challenge unlike any other colonial war.

The Great War, the Sinn Féin challenge and a Europe of nation-states meant that even Lloyd George’s Conservative dominated coalition now took some Irish devolution to be inevitable. The die-hard unionist, Walter Long, told the cabinet as much in 1919, referring to the new European order.11 Ireland might, it was finally accepted, have autonomy within the UK. But the price (signalled by the pre-war home rule crisis) was the exclusion of Ulster unionists, with their claim to be a distinct people.12 On this reckoning, nation and sovereignty, not empire, drove the Anglo-Irish war. Yet in other, often paradoxical, ways, the language and realities of empire enveloped the conflict. The insurgents saw themselves as battling not just Britain but its global imperialism. In this they reflected back Britain’s own self-image of an imperial mobilisation for the Great War. They drew on the legacy of those like James Connolly who put Ireland firmly in the camp of India or Egypt when condemning British oppression. This view was reinforced by events like the Amritsar massacre in India or the revolt of Saad Zaghloul in Egypt, both in 1919. As Art O’Brien, President of the Sinn Féin Association of Great Britain, remarked after Terence MacSwiney’s hunger strike in 1920: ‘From the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean it is the same combat against the same enemy. Today, we’re the avant-garde. But it isn’t just for Ireland that the Lord Mayor has died, it is so that the whole British empire is destroyed.’13 As for the British, they faced what some at the time saw as a ‘crisis’ of empire. Historians debate the point. Did the empire reach its apex in 1919-20, as it absorbed ex-German colonies and the former Ottoman Middle East, or did protests in India, Egypt, Palestine and Ireland signal, as Art O’Brien hoped, the beginning of the end? I think both are true.

John Horne, ‘Ireland and the Wars after the Wars, 1917-1923,’ in Horne and Madigan (eds.), Ireland in War and Revolution, pp. 5462; Robert Gerwarth and John Horne, ‘Introduction,’ in Gerwarth and Horne (eds.), War in Peace. Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 1-18.

Quoted (from Montgomery’s memoirs) by Ronan McGreevy, ‘An Irishman’s Diary’, Irish Times, 11 January 2021. See also Anne Dolan, ‘The British Culture of Paramilitary Violence in the Irish War of Independence,’ in Gerwarth and Horne (eds.), War in Peace, pp. 200-15. For examples in continental Europe, see War in Peace in general.

Ronan Fanning, ‘The British Perspective’ in John Crowley, Donal Ó Drisceoil and Mike Murphy (eds.), The Atlas of the Irish Revolution (Cork: Cork University Press, 2018), pp. 526-31. Long referred to ‘the peace conference [which] has dealt with so many analogous questions in Europe’ (p. 526).

Paul Bew, ‘The Strange Death of Liberal Ireland: William Flavelle Moneypenny’s The Two Irish Nations’ in Horne and Madigan (eds.), Toward Commemoration, pp. 21-28.

Joseph Kessel, ‘Le Lord Mayor est mort,’ Le Temps de l’espérance: reportages 1919-1929 (Paris: Tallandier, 2010), pp. 111-17 (p. 115).

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It would take another world war to bring decolonisation but from 1919 to 1923, imperial over-reach amid post-war retrenchment prompted a crisis of which Ireland was part.14 In mid-1920, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Henry Wilson, feared ‘the loss of Ireland to begin with; the loss of the Empire in the second place; and the loss of England itself to finish up with.’15 A southern unionist (he was a Longford man, killed by two IRA gunmen in 1922), he saw through the glass darkly. But the sentiment typified British Conservatism more generally. Colonialism shaped British responses in other ways. Reactions to the famine seventy years earlier exposed a double standard in behaviour imbued with the racial ‘othering’ which characterised rule in the non-settler colonies. Now, to see Sinn Féiners (and by extension the Irish) as barbaric, even ‘Bolshevik,’ justified a use of force by the regular army and above all the RIC Auxiliaries that would not have been tolerated in Britain itself despite a wave of social unrest there in the post-war years.16 It indeed echoed that used in India and Egypt. Yet many in Britain did not see the Irish like this. The 1920s were not the 1840s. Much had changed, including reforms in Ireland on the land, in education and welfare. Plans for home rule were proof of this. Ironically, home rule also suggested empire, but in a quite different form – the self-governing dominion. It was a model enhanced by the dominions’ role in the war (especially Canada and Australia) and their independent status at the Paris peace conference. These different threads of empire were woven into the ending of the war. By mid-1921, there was deadlock. Militarily, the IRA could not win, but the British had lost the battle for legitimacy.

The price of enforcing rule in nationalist Ireland was a revolt by liberal opinion at home. This remained convinced that Britain had fought the Great War for liberal values, including the rights of small nations. It accused the crown forces in Ireland of ‘Prussianism’, of atrocities (burning Balbriggan, Cork) like those committed by the Germans in Belgium in 1914.17 Sir Neville Macready, Commander-in-Chief, advised Lloyd George to negotiate – or fight a different war: ‘Will the cabinet begin to howl when they hear of us shooting a hundred men in one week?’ he asked.18 It was, I think, that tipping-point of counter-insurgency. In the 1950s, for the British in Kenya, the French in Algeria it led to torture, mass internment, collective executions.19 It was when the violence spun out of control. In Ireland, this did not happen. Following King George V’s appeal on opening the new Northern Ireland Parliament, came the Truce in July 1921. I don’t mean to downplay the violence that did occur. But maybe the fact that Irish nationalists fought a state to which they also talked distinguished the war from bloodier social and inter-ethnic conflicts in Eastern Europe where the imperial state had collapsed. Deaths in the Anglo-Irish war (as Eunan O’Halpin and Daithí Ó Corráin have shown) were very low by comparison (2,141 from January 1917 to December 1921).20 By contrast, Finland (with a similar size population to Ireland) underwent a brief civil war in 1918, including Terror on both sides, which resulted in 36,000 mainly civilian deaths – more than the Irish dead of the Great War.21 Moreover, if the war was less violent than some later wars of decolonisation, perhaps it foreshadowed these in that the colonial power ultimately had a limited stake while the rebels used the twin-track Irish model, political and military.

John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System, 1830-1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 305-417 (for the crisis of the empire). For a pioneering work, Keith Jeffery, The British Army and the Crisis of Empire, 1918-22 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).

Dolan, ‘Paramilitary Violence’, p. 213; Keith Jeffery, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson: a Political Soldier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

Jon Lawrence, ‘Forging a Peaceable Kingdom: War, Violence and the Fear of Brutalization in Post-First World War Britain’, Journal of Modern History, 75/3, 2003, pp. 557-89.

Edward Madigan, ‘“An Irish Louvain”: Memories of 1914 and the Moral Climate in Britain during the Irish War of Independence,’ Irish Historical Studies, 44/165, 2020, pp. 91-105.

The classic analysis is Charles Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland 1919-1921: The Development of Political and Military Policies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 173-99 (p. 189 for the quotation).

Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New York: Henry Holt, 2005); Martin Evans, Algeria: France’s Undeclared War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

Eunan O’Halpin, ‘Counting Terror: Bloody Sunday and The Dead of the Irish Revolution’, in David Fitzpatrick (ed.), Terror in Ireland 1916-1923 (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2012), pp. 141-57 (here p. 152); Eunan O’Halpin and Daithí Ó Corráin, The Dead of the Irish Revolution (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2020).

Pertti Haapala and Marko Tikka, ‘Revolution, Civil War and Terror in Finland in 1918’, in Gerwarth and Horne (eds.), War in Peace, pp. 72-84.

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Yet the tool used in the Anglo-Irish Treaty of January 1922 to square the circle over sovereignty and give a peaceful path to full independence (‘the freedom to achieve freedom’) was dominion status. The enhanced power of the dominion model, achieved as a result of the Great War, was confirmed by the imperial conferences of 1926 and 1930, the latter resulting in the Westminster Statute (1931), which consolidated dominion independence within the empire.22 The Free State, which participated in both conferences, benefited from this evolution. But partition was the pre-condition, civil war the price.

3. Partition Partition, my last theme, puts Ulster at the heart of Ireland’s crossroad. We can see partition (the segregation of religious and ethnic groups by dividing territories) as one more tool of empire. It had been tried before 1914 in India (with Lord Curzon’s failed attempt to partition Bengal in 1905-1911) as it would be in the new colony in Palestine.23 Yet we can also see it in the European context I began with in terms of the contradictions of nationalism. For the Allies at the peace conference wrestled with overlapping ethnic and religious identities as they tried to reconcile frontiers with peoples. Many new nation-states had other national elements within while claiming nationals of their own in neighbouring states. Nation and minority were inextricably linked (‘minority’ as a political term dates from this period) and the relationship was often framed in terms of ‘disloyalty’ and irredentism. This mattered less for a civic, pluralist idea of nationality, as espoused by Woodrow Wilson. But with the singular ethno-nationalism that so often prevailed in the new Europe (as later in the post-colonial world), minority protection was vital. Minority rights were stitched into the new state constitutions (e.g. that of Poland guaranteed the Jewish sabbath) and their protection concerned the League of Nations.24

The ‘two Irelands’ created in 1920-21 faced this question, albeit in unequal measure.25 In the south, during the War of Independence, the Protestant population fell by a third. Reasons for emigration varied – economic, cultural, intimidation, alleged ‘collaboration’ – but it occurred on a patchy basis. The IRA was not sectarian as such and Protestants were a minority of those killed, if disproportionately so.26 Any tendency to stigmatise a minority by its religion or old loyalties was local, limited and not endorsed by the new state – which is not to say that Protestants always felt at ease in the post-war south. In Northern Ireland, however, the failure of the union to provide a one-state solution for both islands threatened unionists with minority status in the event of an all-island republic. The answer was to reconfigure the union in Ireland as a territorial enclave. While the Ulster covenant of 1912 had shown the ability of unionists to defend ‘equal citizenship’ in the United Kingdom, the logic of events since 1916 pushed them towards a devolved state in order to do so. It realigned state, nation and sovereignty in opposition to Sinn Féin. Catholics and nationalists caught in this enclave became, in the modern sense, a minority. Tensions going back to the colonisation and subsequent industrialisation of Ulster were brutally redefined a century ago in ways that made Northern Ireland more akin to central and eastern Europe. Timothy Wilson has shown this in his comparison with Silesia, where Germans and Poles fought a bitter ethnic war in 1919-21. Shipyard expulsions in July 1920 and the ‘pogroms’ of 1920 to 1922 used violence to corral and redefine the living space of a minority that was not leaving. This was less guerrilla war than intercommunal conflict in the form of local siege. Battles in Belfast even reminded some of the western front, only the victims were mainly civilians.27

22 Darwin, The Empire Project, pp. 418-75. 23

Penny Sinanoglou, Partitioning Palestine: British Policymaking at the End of Empire (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2019), pp. 1-17.

Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews and International Minority Protection, 1878-1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Smith, Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference, pp. 157-65.

David Fitzpatrick, The Two Irelands, 1912-1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 137-204.

Peter Hart, The I.R.A. at War 1916-1923 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 223-40.

Timothy K. Wilson, Frontiers of Violence: Conflict and Identity in Ulster and Upper Silesia, 1918-1922 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 212-22.

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The irony is that a form of home rule enabled northern unionists to invest their own identity as a distinct people in a partly autonomous state.28 The cost was institutionalised discrimination against a supposedly ‘disloyal’ minority. So much is commonplace.29 Less commonly acknowledged are the implications for the United Kingdom as a whole as it adjusted to partition. For it is a further irony that the UK, which had played a key role in creating the new European order, including its minorities protections, acquired its own minority in Northern Ireland. But because Ireland had been treated in Paris as a purely UK matter, the northern minority remained unrecognised as such and outside the remit of the League of Nations (despite the Free State joining the League and the new European order).30 For that – and for many other reasons – this consequence of partition remained frozen for nearly fifty years. A Uachtaráin, I have tried to highlight the historical significance of Ireland’s crossroad a century ago by seeing it in the contexts of Europe, the British empire and a ‘world crisis’ down to 1923. I am conscious of what I have left out. For example, the class conflict (and socialism) of these years, epitomised by revolutionary Russia, gave a strong, radical undertow to events in Ireland.31 But there remains your challenge of commemoration. This, as you explored in the first seminar, means recovery: of actors (the ‘vivid faces’), of the unheard, of victims. Yet the point of commemoration is also to interrogate the past for the sake of the present, and of ‘ethical’ commemoration, to do so not for pious or political reasons but in order to be critical and self-critical – in a word pluralist. I hope the frameworks I have suggested help in this endeavour.

For me, commemoration includes using hindsight (while understanding the past in its own terms) to ask what is important about the past now. Since the link of past to present changes all the time, the answers are necessarily provisional and subjective.32 But in this spirit, let me end with four reflections drawn from the present as I see it. First, sovereignty is relative, not absolute, a lesson that sovereigns themselves have learned throughout history. It is a fiction, but one by which societies order their politics at home and abroad. It can be declined in degrees and practised at different levels. The only test is effectiveness, which includes being accepted. The events of a century ago were a hard, divisive lesson; but the Ireland which found a place briefly as a British dominion and later in Europe learned it to good effect. Now I find it striking to see the UK, whose empire dissolved mid-century, whose re-engagement with Europe has now ended and whose own union is under strain, wrestle with this same issue. Second, the nation, too, is something we construct, though it is rooted in lived reality. It is also the main entity in which sovereignty has been vested over the past century, for good or evil. Often it has been for evil, as when a unitary or majority identity defines the nation (and so the state) to the cost of its minorities. With the rise of fascism and communism, this led to irredentist wars, the redrawing of borders and the destruction of minorities, contributing to the Second World War. A Europe premised on civic, pluralist politics had to be painfully rebuilt.33 Ireland clearly suffered nothing like this. But was it totally exempt? The south fashioned a robust democracy, no mean feat for a new state. But a conservative social consensus left a heavy burden, one that also weighed on relations with the north. In the north, however, the Irish version of the inter-war minority question did not merely persist.

Thomas Hennessy, Dividing Ireland: World War I and Partition (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 159-201.

Charles Townshend, The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence (London: Allen Lane, 2013), pp. 376-89 (p. 377 for the comparison with the western front); Paul Bew, Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789-2006 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 57-63.

Patrick Keatinge, ‘Ireland and the League of Nations’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 59/324, 1970, pp. 133-47.

Emmet O’Connor, A Labour History of Ireland, 1824-2000 (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2011), pp. 102-27.

Proof comes from the flourishing history of commemoration. For the general case, see Jonathan R. Gillis (ed.), Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); for the Irish case see, amongst others, Roisín Higgins, Transforming 1916: Meaning, Memory and the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Easter Rising (Cork: Cork University Press, 2013) and Anne Dolan, Commemorating the Irish Civil War: History and Memory, 1923-2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). The half-century commemoration of the events of 1920-21 is ripe for study; it would have been radically different from everything that transpires on the centenary.

For a critical study written in the aftermath of the Second World War, Alfred Cobban, The Nation-State and National SelfDetermination (1945; revised edition, Glasgow: Collins, 1969); for the imaginary dimension, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; revised ed., London: Verso, 1991); see also Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

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It took a thirty-year conflict before equal nationalities, a layering of sovereignty, civic rights and an end to southern irredentism addressed this legacy of partition in the 1998 Belfast Agreement. Third, the nature of nationalism should not obscure the legacy of imperialism. Complex, many-sided (how could it be otherwise with a British Empire that ruled nearly a quarter of humankind in 1920?), this provided a way forward in Ireland in the dominion form I have described. That really is worthy of reflection. It also resulted in the violence visited by the Crown forces on Irish civilians and the Irish landscape. Cork city centre or Balbriggan, destroyed in late 1920, ought perhaps, in Anglo-Irish relations a century later, to be ‘sites of memory’ (to use the concept of historian Pierre Nora) or even reconciliation (they were, after all, decried in Britain at the time). But are they? If Ireland was Britain’s oldest colony, the war of independence was Britain’s first war of decolonisation since the loss of America in the late 18th century.

Finally, violence as such. The legitimacy of using violence to resist empire or occupation and assert sovereignty or defend a nation is an eternal debate. But violence always comes at a cost. In the era of the Great War, violence and politics were more closely linked than ever. Along with enrolment in legal mass armies, civilians took up arms as paramilitaries (for and against the state), as guerrillas, and so on. The Irish rebels were examples of this trend. But so, too, were the British irregulars and unionist paramilitaries in the north. The brutal short cut by which the gunman on any side presumes to incarnate the state or the national will cast a long shadow in Ireland (as elsewhere). Getting rid of armed paramilitaries, many of whose organisations trace their descent from the Great War era, has played out differently, south and north. But a hundred years on, it seems to have worked. Not the least important legacy of events a century ago may be our hard-won knowledge in both Ireland and the UK that peace (like sovereignty and the nation) is a process.

It was part of a process (including Palestine, India, Malaya and Kenya) that lasted till the 1960s. I wonder if the UK has yet come to terms with this side of empire, its violence, and in particular with the violence that accompanied decolonization.34

President Michael D. Higgins with participants from Machnamh 100 – Seminar Two An tUachtarán Micheál D. Ó hUigínn le rannpháirtithe Machnamh 100 – Seimineár a Dó

Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past (1984-1992; translated from French, New York: Columbia University Press, 1996, 2 vols). ‘Sites of memory,’ with its topical precision, is a better translation of the key idea. On British amnesia about decolonization, see Elkins, Imperial Reckoning, pp. 354-67.

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Photo National Library of Ireland www.nli.ie Ref: HOG 154

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Respondent

Dr Niamh Gallagher

Breaking down binaries: Empire, the First World War and Partition

Machnamh 100 – Seminar Two participants: Professor Eunan O’Halpin, Professor Alvin Jackson, Dr Marie Coleman and Dr Niamh Gallagher

Thank you, President Higgins, for inviting me to respond to Professor Horne’s paper on the wider dimensions of the centenary we are now living through. I have found, President, your own reflections on ‘ethical remembering’, Richard Kearney’s ‘hospitality of narratives’, and on challenging what you call a ‘feigned amnesia’ around the uncomfortable aspects of the shared history between Britain and Ireland to be very useful when contemplating the themes of sovereignty, nation and empire.1

Machnamh 100 – Rannpháirtithe Seimineár a Dó: An tOllamh Eunan O’Halpin, an tOllamh Alvin Jackson, an Dr Marie Coleman agus an Dr Niamh Gallagher

An imperial world Professor Horne reminds us that sources of sovereignty were not fixed in the period leading up to and after the First World War and that the world map of 1920–1 looked very different to that of today. We are often accustomed to remembering only one empire when we think of Ireland in these years, but this was a world made up of empires. During the First World War the British Empire was joined by the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Romanov, and German Empires, whose territories extended across continents and incorporated a diverse array of peoples, ethnicities, and nationalities. Some of these entities, such as the Ottoman Empire, had existed for more than 600 years.

President Michael D. Higgins, ‘Of Centenaries and the Hospitality Necessary in Reflecting on Memory, History and Forgiveness’, President of Ireland, Media Library, 4 December 2020 <https://president.ie/en/media-library/speeches/of-centenaries-and-the-hospitalitynecessary-in-reflecting-on-memory-history-and-forgiveness>.

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This is to say nothing of the Spanish or Portuguese, who had conquered large parts of the world in earlier centuries, or the East, where the Empire of Japan had begun to exercise rule across sections of Russia, China and the Pacific.2 We often anticipate the demise of empire when we think about Ireland one hundred years ago, but we have forgotten how powerful these entities seemed to the people who lived in their midst. Prior to the outbreak of the First World War, many Irish and British people of all backgrounds therefore came up with solutions to the question of Irish self-government in an imperial, rather than a post-imperial world. To give three examples: in 1904, Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Féin, devoted himself to thinking about what the future of Ireland might look like. He published a series of articles, later included in the second edition of his book, The Resurrection of Hungary, in which he dwelt on what he considered to be the historic fallacies of British governance in Ireland.3 Griffith sought to critique a particular brand of imperialism – ‘English imperialism’ – which he argued had subverted the interests of northern Protestants as much as it did those of Catholics in order to secure English national greatness: ‘English Imperialism decreed that Ireland must be struck down and kept down’.4 Yet he simultaneously argued that the late eighteenthcentury Prime Minister, William Pitt (the Younger), had missed an historic opportunity to create an Anglo-Hibernian empire, modelled on what would later become the Austro-Hungarian example under the 1867 Ausgleich. Griffith’s analysis of empire was not one of subjugation or repression but was instead about the spread of power relations across Europe in which he felt that Ireland could have been co-equal with Britain in managing its overseas empire.5 For Griffith in 1904, Irish nationality seemingly could be reconciled with empire. His vision for the future, two kingdoms of Ireland and Britain modelled on the Austro-Hungarian example, was an imaginative use of empire to solve the question of Irish sovereignty.

These ideas were the very opposite of what James Connolly proposed. In his work, Labour in Irish History, published in 1910, Connolly wrote that ‘the progress of the fight for national liberty of any subject nation must … keep pace with … the struggle for liberty of the most subject class in that nation’.6 For Connolly, drawing on the ideas of nineteenth-century German philosopher Karl Marx, democracy, and the essential sovereignty of the people, lay within the working classes, not within the middle and upper classes, who had been corrupted by capitalism and exploited the workers for their own gain. For Connolly, these were the true imperialists. No question of sovereignty could be solved by territory alone when the imperialist class continued to exploit the sovereign – the working classes of the world who had no territorial boundaries. Nationhood must therefore rest on the achievement of a republic, for only a world made up of individual republics could abolish the capitalist system and allow the proletariat of all nations to manage their own affairs with minimal influence from statecraft. Connolly’s republicanism was intimately tied to syndicalism, class conflict and the abolition of empires. Both of these nationalists used ideas of empire and imperialism in different ways to explore the question of Irish sovereignty, and the same is true for those who resisted Irish selfgovernment. Leopold Amery, a renowned academic, journalist, imperialist, and British Conservative politician, wrote an extended essay in 1912 called Home rule and the colonial analogy to make the Unionist case against self-government. Nationalists such as John Redmond, the leader of the Home Rule party, and Erskine Childers, a one-time imperialist who later became an Irish republican, had repeatedly referred to some colonies within the British Empire where self-government had been a success. Amery argued that their comparisons were ‘based on a series of confusions due … to … the vagueness of the phrase ‘Home Rule’, and to the general ignorance of the origin and real nature of the British Colonial system’.7

Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela (eds.), Empires at War: 1911–1923 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

Arthur Griffith, The Resurrection of Hungary: A Parallel for Ireland, with Appendices on Pitt’s Policy and Sinn Féin, 3rd ed., (Dublin: Whelan and Son, 1918).

Ibid, p. 138.

For further discussion, see Richard Bourke and Niamh Gallagher (eds.), The Political Thought of the Irish Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

James Connolly, Labour in Irish History (Dublin: Maunsel and Co, 1910), p. 11.

L. S. Amery, M.P., ‘Home Rule and the Colonial Analogy’ in S. Rosenbaum (ed.), Against Home Rule: The Case for the Union (London: Frederick Warne & Co., 1912), p. 129.

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Quite simply, Amery showed that governance within the British Empire took a wide variety of forms; there was no easy parallel between Ireland’s case and the colonial model. Canada was practically a sovereign nation state whereas South Africa had little more than county council powers; the Isle of Man continued to be operated on the age-old principle of ascendancy that resembled the much-hated law in Ireland, Poynings’s Act, passed in 1494 and repealed only in 1782. After demonstrating that there was no single model of colonial legislation within the Empire, and that nationalists who dwelt on the colonial analogy were fudging a complicated reality, Amery went on to dismiss the muchtouted Unionist case against Home Rule – that Ireland was richer because of the 1801 Act of Union. He wrote ‘Ireland suffers to-day economically and politically, from the legacy of political separation in the eighteenth century, and of economic disunion in the nineteenth.’ He argued that the Union had never really united all of Ireland with Britain; it had privileged some parts and exploited others. In contrast to many nationalists however, his solution was not one of separation, but of further integration by extensive social and economic improvement. For Griffith, Connolly and Amery, their respective visions for Ireland involved, resisted, and complicated empire in ways we are not accustomed to remembering. Their writings demonstrated that there was no easy dichotomy between nationalists and unionists in their position on empire, nor was there even agreement on what exactly empire was or its usefulness in solving Ireland’s dilemma.8 In the rush to explain the past using simple binaries – such as imperialists versus the colonised, physical force nationalists versus Home Rulers, nationalists versus unionists – we have done our shared history a disservice by simplifying complicated realities into easily accessible narratives about our past.

The long shadow of the First World War This is especially true when we think of the First World War. In recent years Ireland has engaged in much soul-searching about this contested conflict, and the efforts of President Higgins and former President McAleese have been significant in bringing the Irish who served in that war back into the forefront of national memory. It is difficult for us today to understand what that conflict was about. It has none of the certainty that comes with the Second World War, where moral judgements on good versus evil are much easier to make. But participation in the First World War made sense to millions of Irish people at the time. Motivations to back it were wide ranging. We are used to hearing the well-worn view that many nationalists signed up to secure Home Rule while unionists did so to prevent it, but the reality is less stark than this simple binary suggests. To take a few examples: Francis Ledwidge, the Catholic poet, famously joined up after a spat with his girlfriend; Tom Kettle, the Home Rule MP was in Belgium when the war began, and the atrocities he witnessed by the invading German Army encouraged him to join the Allies as ‘an Irish soldier in the army of Europe’.9 Charles Brett, a northern Presbyterian, couldn’t work out his motivation for enlisting until he saw the hundreds of dead civilians washed up in Cobh in Cork following the sinking of the RMS Lusitania by a German U-Boat on 7 May 1915. These men undoubtedly had other motivations as well, which differed from the incentives that enabled them to endure the war. Religious belief, the support of one’s comrades, military sanctions, and perhaps above all, the sending of letters and parcels through the lifeline that was the postal service, were the everyday support mechanisms behind why Irishmen of all backgrounds fought – and for so long. This is to say nothing of the thousands of Irish women whose motivations were just as diverse in the assistance they rendered on various home fronts and in field hospitals near the front lines.

For further information on the range of political thought expressed during the Irish Revolution, see Richard Bourke and Niamh Gallagher (eds.), The Political Thought of the Irish Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Senia Pašeta, ‘Thomas Kettle: “An Irish soldier in the army of Europe”?’ in A. Gregory and S. Pašeta (eds), Ireland and the Great War: ‘A War To Unite Us All?’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 8–27.

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That motivations were not exclusively tied to one’s position on Home Rule helps explain why 210,000 Irishmen from Ireland voluntarily joined up and thousands more enlisted in the British Dominion and American forces, but none of this would have been possible had it not been for a general belief that the Allies were fundamentally in the right while Germany was in the wrong.10 This is one binary not commonly discussed in analyses of the Irish at war, and while opinion towards the conflict evolved as time went on and varied across a spectrum, it helps explain the agency of so many Irish people in a conflict we find difficult to relate to today. Professor Horne has shown that some of the common expressions of right and wrong in wartime even endured in the War of Independence, as the discourse of Prussianism (that Britain had resorted to barbaric methods just as the Prussians – equated with all Germans – had done in wartime) was commonly expressed. He has also reminded us that the war did not end in 1918 and has suggested that it was part of a greater crisis that lasted until 1923. I would add that other chronologies are equally important. Most of the 210,000 Irish men who joined up from Ireland returned there in 1919, and some continued to serve in a military capacity well into the 1920s. Remembrance Day ceremonies across Ireland, which began in 1919, accelerated after 1923 when the civil war formally came to a close. They often demonstrated a sense of solidarity between Protestants and Catholics which had been fostered in various capacities during the war, even despite the new wars of 1919–23.11 Grief, trauma and disability had timelines which do not map onto the dates we commonly recall when marking centenaries. In 1915 the former Trinity College Dublin student, Captain David Campbell, lost his friend, Levis, at Gallipoli. Campbell wrote his memoirs in the 1970s and said that ‘I remember him every Armistice Day, and mourn his loss afresh’.12

In February 2021 I read an article in The Guardian about Europe’s oldest person who had just celebrated her 117th birthday. Sister Andrée, born in 1904, now in a care home in the south of France, had miraculously survived COVID-19. When asked why she felt she had lived so long, she answered ‘no idea… I’ve had plenty of unhappiness in life and during the 1914–18 war when I was a child, I suffered like everyone else’.13 For Sister Andrée, that conflict was still painfully present in her recollections. The First World War, rather than later wars including the Second World War, was the traumatic event she recalled more than one hundred years later as she pondered her life. For David Campbell, and the tens of thousands of Irish families who also lost loved ones in that war, the conflict did not end in 1918 or in 1923 but had its own timeline. For all of us who have experienced grief – and the present moment deserves its own reflection – histories of trauma, loss and memory remind us that the dates commonly used for marking centenaries are of limited use in understanding the lived experiences of the events we are now living through.

Power, empire and nation I wish to say a few words on some other aspects of empire we are not accustomed to remembering. Cormac Ó Gráda has reminded us that in the devastating famine of the 1840s, emigration was a vital lifeline that allowed many Irish people to survive. It enabled them to gain employment, freed up resources in Ireland so that those who stayed could manage, and helped successive generations build futures that were simply not possible in Ireland.14 Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Britain, and of course the United States became homes for Irish people during the Famine,15 but these places and others had already been homes for the Irish long before 1845, and they continue to be destinations right up until the present day.

Niamh Gallagher, Ireland and the Great War: A Social and Political History (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

11 Gallagher, Ireland and the Great War. 12

David Henry Campbell, Forward the Rifles: The War Diary of an Irish Soldier, 1914-1918 (Dublin: Nonsuch, 2009), p. 59. Also see p. 81.

The Guardian, ‘Europe’s oldest person survives Covid and set to celebrate 117th birthday’. Access online <https://www. theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/09/europe-oldest-person-sister-andre-survives-covid-celebrate-117th-birthday>.

Cormac Ó Gráda and Kevin H. O’Rourke, ‘Migration as disaster relief: Lessons from the Great Irish Famine’, European Review of Economic History, Vol. 1, No. 1 (April, 1997), pp. 3–25.

During the 1845–52 Famine 1.5 million Irish people went to the USA, 340,000 to Canada, 300,000 to Britain, and 70,000 to Australia.

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All of these territories – and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, large parts of the African continent – were part of the British Empire at one time or another. Ten million or so Irish people left Ireland between 1600–1921, eight million of whom left after 1801. Perhaps a further 1.5 million left between 1921–2000.16 The Empire wasn’t divorced from the dominions and territories in which millions of Irish people emigrated and settled. How the Irish were treated once they ‘got off the boat’ is a vast subject and differed across time and space, but the existence of hyphenated identities such as Irish-Americans, Irish-Canadians or IrishAustralians reflects attachments that endure today. Understanding why Irish people left Ireland is as complicated a question as deciphering the motivations that propelled Irishmen and women to participate in the First World War. There are push factors which completely deprived people of agency, such as deportations to penal colonies, refugees fleeing the Cromwellian conquests, or successive famines. There are those which incentivised people to leave, including economic dislocation and malaise, civil and religious discrimination, and poverty. But pull factors were also important, including the economic opportunities provided by the New World, religious and sexual freedoms, familial connections, and the opportunity to gain land and resources, much of which already belonged to indigenous populations, such as in America and Australia. Emigration and settlement are only one strand of the multitude of ways the Irish were connected to Empire. Illuminating these connections does not mean one is ‘taking sides’ on whether Empire was ‘good or bad’ but deepen our understanding of a complex ‘relationship’. Complicating the history of Ireland and Empire does not mean replacing one strain of experience with another. Experiences, even if contradictory, can sit alongside each other. We are good at remembering the worst excesses of the British Empire and Professor Horne has reminded us of the hard power and abuses wielded by imperial administrators.

And there is a long list to choose from, particularly from the land grabbing campaigns which began in the 1870s.17 But here too we can be more critical. If we look at the processes by which ‘hard power’ was exercised, the picture is less black and white than it first appears. In independent Ireland, civil society, the state, and churches wielded forms of repression that victims would find difficult to distinguish from some of the imperial power exercised within the British Empire. Penalties enacted on single mothers, separated families, those suffering mental disorders, and people of different sexualities were just as severe as some of the repression meted out to populations that were marginalised, incarcerated, and forced to suffer civil disabilities within the Empire. It goes without saying that there are major differences between the worst excesses of imperial power deployed within the Empire and power exercised within the new Irish state, and these distinctions should be preserved. But there is a gradation in how power was deployed in both empire and nation that muddies the boundaries between both. Ireland was not unique in marginalising groups of citizens and interwar Europe was hardly a beacon of tolerant liberalism in the aftermath of the First World War. Even in Britain, single mothers were pressurised into giving their babies up for adoption in the height of the ‘swinging sixties’ and ‘cultural revolution’ (approximately half a million babies were forcibly given up from the 1950s–70s).18 But some penalties did endure in Ireland longer than elsewhere, as the legacies of the Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes have demonstrated. If we are to really adopt a ‘hospitality of narratives’ about our past, we need to think harder about the processes behind power – whether Ireland was in the Empire or outside of it – and to recognise that after 1921, the freedom that was at the essence of the Irish demand for sovereignty was not granted to all Irish citizens in an equal share.

Enda Delaney, ‘Migration and Diaspora’, in Alvin Jackson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 128–31.

For example, the Ashanti Wars (1870s–1900s), Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–80), Anglo-Zulu War (1879), Anglo-Boer Wars (1880–1; 1899–1902), Occupation of Egypt (1882), Matabele Wars (1893–7), Amritsar massacre (1919), Mao Rebellion (1952–60) and Cypriot War of Independence (1955–9).

Pac-UK, ‘Overcoming Trauma from Forced Adoption: Rebuilding my Life with PAC-UK’, available at <https://www.pac-uk.org/ about/casestudies/overcoming-trauma-forced-adoption-rebuilding-life-pac-uk/>. Also see recently news reports, BBC ‘Mothers demand apology over forced adoptions’, <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-57231621>, 25 May 2021.

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Partition and the border I want to finish by saying a few words about the ongoing centenary of partition and return to the discussion of binaries. The creation of two administrations on the island of Ireland following the Government of Ireland Act 1920, and the permanency of these entities since 1925, created new majorities and minorities across the island. The idea that Ireland could be divided into two homogenous populations was central to the Cabinet’s thinking behind the Act and this notion has been usefully deployed by politicians, and even historians, ever since. This ‘binary’ is of limited use when understanding partition. As Robert Lynch has shown, there was nothing homogenous about it. The new states barely represented two thirds of people within them.19 Partition created a corresponding sense of statelessness for southern Protestants, northern Catholics, and republicans, both North and South. It forced reimaginations of identity, from counties within an island to counties within one of two states, and new understandings of what it meant to be Irish or British were generated. Yet partition could never be all-encompassing. Rivers, harbours, and mountain ranges defied both partitions of the mind and physical realities. Ecclesiastical jurisdictions were maintained.

The lived experiences of partition both intersect with, and complicate, the hegemonic narratives of nationality and sovereignty which are deeply intertwined with well-known political identities in Northern Ireland. Attempts to scratch beneath the surface of those narratives can provoke frustration and anger, if not complete dismissal of history which tramples on ‘sacred cows’. As I have stated elsewhere, the history of Northern Ireland is messy. Whether one marks, acknowledges, remembers, celebrates or boycotts the centenary, no single narrative can be drawn from its turbulent past, and engagement with its history is not a prescriptive exercise in telling one how to remember.21 The history of partition should be part of the process of ‘ethical remembrance’ which the President has so aptly called for, and it should be explored both North and South. Reflecting on the past in a way which can assist and complicate, rather than threaten and simplify, is one of the ways we can come to terms with Irish experiences of Empire, the First World War, and Partition.

Communities that lived along the border were forced to come to terms with the hybrid spaces they now occupied, simultaneously having no clear geographical demarcation between the new Northern or Southern territories yet also having very real demarcations when roads were blocked or at customs checks. Border communities of all backgrounds, both North and South, shared their frustration towards the new social and economic problems generated by partition. But they also exercised their own agency to adapt to the new conditions. As George Sheridan, a Protestant farmer from Marlbank on the Fermanagh border explained: ‘you couldn’t live on the border and not smuggle… I myself have been in gaol ten times’.20

Robert Lynch, The Partition of Ireland, 1918-25 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), p. 162.

Ibid., p. 135.

See Northern Ireland Historical Advisory Panel platform piece on how to mark the centenary of Northern Ireland, Irish News, 1 May 2021; Belfast Newsletter, The Belfast Telegraph, 3 May 2021.

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A coloured British empire map 1920 showing its expansion since 1688 (and losses) with dates

Léarscáil daite ó 1920 le dátaí ar a dtaispeántar leathnú (agus cúlú) Impireacht na Breataine ó 1688

Contributor: Colin Walter / Alamy Stock Photo

Foinse: Colin Walter / Alamy Stock Photo

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Respondent

Professor Eunan O’Halpin

The Irish ‘nation’ and the challenge of ethical commemoration Nationalist Ireland was unified, and to an extent radicalised, as much by the Conscription Crisis of 1918 as by the 1916 Rising and its immediate aftermath. Citizens of Ireland should be careful that we in turn don’t now attempt to conscript everyone on the island into a single commemorative cohort. Our shared island includes people who see themselves both as Irish and as British, and others who are British through and through. Commemoration is not legitimised simply by inclusiveness, by remembering Ulster’s as well as nationalist Ireland’s dead of the First World War, or by belatedly discovering the role of women in the Irish revolution. Richard Kearney’s cheery nostrum of a ‘Hospitality of narratives’ is all very well, but we must recognise that some people will not wish to avail of it, just as we expect others to respect James McClean’s well-grounded unwillingness to wear the poppy. In 2018 I complacently observed how the selection of Heather Humphreys TD, a Border Protestant woman, to handle centenary commemorations had been an inclusive masterstroke. Afterwards a man who identified himself as a ‘Donegal Protestant’ told me that the use of the Defence Forces to bring the National Flag and the Proclamation to primary schools in 2016 had greatly troubled some in his community. Furthermore, he felt Minister Humphreys could not ‘speak for us’ while holding her commemorations role. This exchange brought home to me the reality that it is not only nationalists north and south who continue to grieve about the consequences of partition: there are families and communities within this state who feel still on the wrong side of the border.

What should we expect as the centenary cycle continues? Should that cycle conclude not in 2023, with the miserable trailing away of the Civil War, but with the quiet disavowal of the Boundary Commission’s report in 1925 and the dashing of faint hopes along the unchanged frontier? Equally, how should we commemorate the nationalist experience in the newly created Northern Ireland, enduring what Diarmaid Ferriter terms ‘the tyranny of the ‘Special’’? Between 1920 and 1922 many hundreds of them lost their homes and livelihoods, and scores their lives, in sectarian attacks. In 1922 my newly married Co. Down republican grandparents had to choose between the near certainty of my grandfather’s indefinite detention, or exile in the new Ireland.1 How many other active republicans faced that choice I don’t know, but the vast majority of Northern Ireland Catholics remained in a home rule Ulster which neither trusted nor respected them. In the new Irish Free State, many Unionists and Protestants, though not directly oppressed by the state’s agents, felt abandoned and unsafe. At least until 1924 they had every reason to be fearful and resentful of intimidation and violence by anti-Treaty forces, often administered under the authority of antiTreaty commander Liam Lynch, who mandated reprisals for the execution of republican prisoners including the shooting ‘on sight’ of all members of the Oireachtas who supported repressive legislation, along with ‘aggressive civilian supporters of Free State Government’ and employees of ‘papers unfriendly to [the] Republic’, and the destruction of the homes of ‘Imperialists … and those of the English interest’.2

Diarmaid Ferriter, A Nation And Not A Rabble: the Irish Revolution 1913-1923 (London, 2015), p. 306; Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, HA/5/617 and HA/32/1/360; Military Archives of Ireland. 24SP7067 HughEdwardHalpenny.pdf.

Lynch to An Ceann Comhairle, 28 Oct. 1922, quoted in Eunan O’Halpin, Defending Ireland: the Irish state and its enemies since 1922 (Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 27; University College Dublin Archives, Mulcahy papers, P7/B/89, text of captured IRA Dublin Brigade order, 7 Feb. 1923.

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Should we commemorate and explore such directions and their consequences, or is it best to follow Basil Fawlty, and just not ‘mention the war’ as experienced by religious and political minorities in this new state? This leads on to the question of whether we can ethically commemorate what we don’t yet fully understand. The 1916 centenary was notable for good humour and respectfulness more or less all round, but it did valorise rather than problematize the use of physical force by a small unsanctioned militant minority operating in tandem with ‘gallant allies’ who themselves were, incidentally, genocidal imperialists in colonial Africa (of this Roger Casement, who had first come to prominence as a British diplomat uncovering the atrocious excesses of colonial rule in the Belgian Congo, was well aware). Former Taoiseach John Bruton was surely right to argue that an uncritical focus on the Rising risked discrediting the achievements of John Redmond’s constitutional politics, which had culminated in the 1914 Government of Ireland Act. Bruton fairly asked whether valorising 1916 might not also validate the use of armed force ever since, whatever the democratic will, provided only that this was in the name of the unachieved sacred republic. Where does that leave electoral politics? People will differ on the achievements and limitations of the Irish state since 1922; most would surely recognise that her unbroken century as a functioning electoral democracy merits both explanation and respect, rather than passing acknowledgement on the margins of 1916 and War of Independence pageantry. The same phenomenon of the valorisation of armed force within a broadly based nationalist movement is visible in contemporary India. The overwhelmingly peaceful political means by which India – and Pakistan – won independence and partition in 1947 under the leadership of Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Muhammed Ali Jinnah are largely elided in Hindu nationalist political discourse in favour of a teleological and selective public narrative of armed struggle centred on a handful of iconic figures, particularly the youthful Sikh revolutionary socialist Baghat Singh (1907-1931) and India’s would-be wartime liberator Subhas Chandra Bose (1897-1945), whose independence project failed with that of his Japanese ‘gallant allies’ in 1945.3

There is never a mention of the one group and territory which the British could never conquer, the ‘tribal areas’ of the Pashtuns (Pathans) along the North West Frontier. The absence of these uniquely successful resisters to British colonialism from contemporary nationalist narratives of India’s freedom struggle is plainly because they are a Muslim people, and in any case are now Hindu India’s hated neighbour Pakistan’s problem.4 Our state has done well in enabling family, communal and academic research into the revolutionary era through the release online of the 1901 and 1911 censuses, the Bureau of Military History records and the extraordinary Military Service Pensions archive. These initiatives made long-closed records available uncensored and unfiltered not only in Ireland but across the world. Yet acute problems remain. Firstly, revolutionary records intensify focus on political violence and the relatively small number of people involved, at the expense of wider reflection on Irish society. That is why work such as Fionnuala Walsh’s new study of Irish Women and the Great War, exploring women’s lives on this island within a wider international framework, and Pádraig Yeates’s quartet of studies of Dublin life between 1913 and 1923, are so valuable.5 We need far more such scholarship on what might be termed prosaic lives and ordinary living on the island during and after the revolutionary era, if we are to have holistic histories. Such studies in social, economic and cultural histories are far more advanced elsewhere, not least in Northern Ireland. But to study ordinary lives in extraordinary times, people need records. This state is failing in that ethical and democratic challenge: the inaccessibility of the 1926 census records, and of the Land Commission’s vast archive, have delayed the systematic exploration of key human questions relating alike to ordinary lives and to the experiences of religious minorities during and immediately after the revolutionary decade. How can we understand the dramatic decrease in independent Ireland’s non-Catholic population between 1911 and 1926 without data? How can we work out how many northern minority families migrated south after partition rather than live under Unionist hegemony?

Judith Brown, ‘India’, in Judith Brown and W. Roger Louis (eds.), The Oxford History of the British Empire Vol IV The Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1999), pp. 421-46.

See, e.g. Council for Historical Research, Dictionary of Martyrs: India’s Freedom Struggle (1857-1947) (Delhi, 2012), and https:// www.pmindia.gov.in/en/news_updates/release-of-dictionary-of-martyrs-of-indias-freedom-struggle-1857-1947/ (accessed 18 Feb. 2021). For a vivid account of Britain’s struggles with the tribes, see Sir Andrew Skeen, Passing It On: Short Talks on Tribal Fighting on the North-West Frontier (1st ed., 1932, Aldershot).

Fionnuala Walsh, Irish Women and the Great War (Cambridge, 2020); Padraig Yeates, Lockout: Dublin 1913 (Dublin, 2000); Dublin: A City in Wartime 1914-18 (Dublin, 2011); A City in Turmoil: Dublin 1919-21 (Dublin, 2012); A City in Civil War: Dublin 1921-4 (Dublin, 2015).

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These are questions of rather greater moment and moral weight than how many men and women were in the GPO in 1916, or the size of Tom Barry’s pension, and they mirror the post-First World War experience of people elsewhere. Without access to crucial sources we cannot meaningfully explore the questions which John Horne’s paper begs, of how politicallydriven Irish migration compares with what was experienced in the new Europe created by the collapse of the continent’s empires. In not releasing these records which it created and which it holds, the state is failing in its duty both to the past and to the present.

Partition The new states of post-First World War Europe, and the ‘mandate’ territories of the Middle East, all contained uncomfortable minorities as well as ethnic majorities. After both world wars, almost all new states and territories nursed ethno-territorial grievances which poisoned relations with their new neighbours. Even today, Hungary mourns the loss of Transylvania to Romania. Russian minorities implanted by Stalin in the Baltic states after their brutal absorption into the Soviet Union in 1940 – by secret agreement with Hitler – are both resented and resentful. Germany herself became two states after Hitler’s defeat, and although reunified in 1990 – not without help from Taoiseach Charles Haughey during Ireland’s EU Presidency – never regained her pre-1938 eastern borders. What was once German Königsberg is now, bizarrely, part of Russia. Finland, which won independence from Russia in 1918, lost much of Karelia to Soviet invasion in 1940, regained it in 1941, and lost it again to Soviet Russia, this time presumably permanently, in 1944. What is striking about Irish partition is, in comparative terms, not its existence, its anomalies and its arguable injustices – still quietly felt as much in minority communities in parts of East Donegal or Cavan or Monaghan, as amongst nationalists generally – but its persistence. The Irish/UK land border is one of very few confirmed in the early 1920s – Turkey’s and Afghanistan’s are other rare instances – which have remained unchanged for a century. British India was partitioned in 1937, when Burma was hived off for colonial administrative reasons. Neither of the two states created in 1947 – Pakistan, which lost secessionist East Pakistan in 1971 after decades

of brutal misgovernment, and India, which lost territory to China in the 1962 war – now enjoy the borders which the British accorded them on departure. And partitioned Kashmir, or rather that part of it which fell to India in 1947 on the whim of its Hindu princely ruler despite the clear wishes of its Muslim majority, remains a running sore between two nuclear powers.

Empires Empire, imperialism and colonialism are easily denounced in the abstract. Varieties of conquest, migration, exploitation and expropriation have been the way of the world for as long ago as history and archaeology permit us to look. We may indict Christopher Columbus and stout Cortez for bringing European hegemony, despoliation and cultural ruin to the Americas, but colonisation and imperialism did not begin with them. Spain had itself just been freed from Moorish domination. Writing with all the confidence of modernity in the 5th century b.c., Thucydides speculated that there had once been a time when places and peoples had not interacted, traded, fought with and conquered each other. But he wrote of the struggle for mastery of the Greek world between democratic and yet relentlessly colonising Athens, and authoritarian, monarchical, austere and colonising Sparta, with the Persian empire waiting in the wings. His work still shapes how we conceptualise interstate conflict and conquest. John Horne’s paper reminds us that we must appraise Irish independence in parallel with the break-up of European empires and the emergence at the ‘Wilsonian moment’ of a range of new states, all of which faced complex internal ethnic and other difficulties. Irish separatists certainly looked to Versailles in 1919, but the British government was thinking of Ireland entirely in imperial terms. Britain was facing what the late Keith Jeffery termed ‘a crisis of empire’, yet that was then seen as a crisis essentially of expansion, not of disintegration.6 Russia’s collapse in 1917 appeared to reduce future imperial competition in Persia and Central Asia; the Middle Eastern mandates conferred on Britain and France promised opportunities as well as responsibilities. Compared to these challenges, fixing Ireland, once the Government of Ireland Act 1920 was in the bag, was an irritating second-order problem.

Keith Jeffery, The British Empire and the Crisis of Empire 1918-22 (Manchester, 1984).

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It is no accident that the British Treaty delegation’s key advisor on constitutional matters in 1921 was neither diplomat nor lawyer but Lionel Curtis, an apostle and architect of empire reform. He had already drafted the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms introduced in India in 1919, designed as the first step towards home rule and perhaps even qualified dominion status once Indians acquired sufficient experience in disciplined governance. A cynical friend wrote: ‘he was anxious, by bringing India into a parliamentary system, to cast her for a chief role in his master plan … He it was who had the chief part in devising the constitution of the two Irelands … while his theories did much to advance popular causes both in India and in Ireland, there were many who forecast that his main political objectives –a united Empire – would never get off the ground’.7 The British aim in the Treaty negotiations, partition being already a reality, was to achieve an autonomous twenty-six county Ireland which over time would blossom within an empire reimagined by Curtis as a Commonwealth of near-equals. To an extent the British succeeded: the new Ireland and the United Kingdom concluded a treaty which more or less disposed of the Irish question in British politics for fifty years, and produced an unexpectedly robust working relationship which generally met the needs of both states. Ireland under Cosgrave proved a surprisingly ‘restless dominion’, to borrow from David Harkness, but not an impossibly difficult one (indeed, in 1933 Senator James Douglas appealed personally to Curtis to secure ‘financial support for the Party supporting Mr Cosgrave’, to ensure that ‘Ireland is to remain in the British Commonwealth’). Free movement of people was maintained without fuss or fanfare until the Second World War, and was quietly reinstated as soon as possible thereafter. Britain’s overseas empire remained a magnet for Irish people in civil, military, police and missionary roles. Even de Valera, seen in London in 1932 as an unpredictable anti-Christ, did, through the ingenious External Relations Act 1936, maintain what Britain regarded as the essential unity of the empire as he methodically dismantled obnoxious features of the 1921 Treaty.

Irish religious denominations continued to colonise souls abroad, inside and outside the British empire. 2018 marked the centenary of the Maynooth Mission to China, now the Columban Missionaries, in which order two of my uncles made their lives. However noble their intentions, or those of the longer-established Dublin University Mission, we might reflect on the ethical implications of challenging entrenched and revered belief systems across Asia and Africa. The trope of the Irish, whether soldiers, policemen, officials, or male and female Catholic and Protestant missionaries, as somehow magically capable of connecting with indigenous peoples runs through British writings. We don’t have to rely on Rudyard Kipling for examples: an English woman missionary, reflecting on north-eastern India in the 1930s, recalled ‘the Irishness of the Dublin University Mission … the Irish folk are far more like the Indians than the English, in that time means nothing to them, they sit there, accepting people as they are’.8 It is perhaps too easy for Irish people to congratulate ourselves as having a special empathy for the oppressed because of our own often oversimplistic narrative of colonisation, of exploitation, of famine and of a freedom paid for in blood.9 In Africa and Asia, if truth be told, the Irish may not have been all that much holier than the British ‘thou’.

Ronan Fanning, Fatal Path: British Government and Irish Revolution, 1910-1922 (London, 2013), pp. 200, 274 and 310; British Library, MSEurF203/78, ‘A Soldier in India’, p. 17 (Caroe papers). Sir Olaf Caroe (1892-1981) was a senior British official in India until independence.

Cambridge Centre for South Asian Studies, Oral History Collection 043a (Dr Ruth Hardy, 23 June 1983).

These are key themes in the state’s supporting video for Ireland’s campaign for a UN Security Council seat: see https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=lBX9E01YCv4, released on 11 July 2020.

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Respondent

Professor Alvin Jackson

Empire, war and partition A Uachtaráin, I am most grateful for the invitation to speak today, and I am honoured to be part of this event. May I begin, perhaps, with the theme of empire, since the President has placed this at the heart of his concerns for our discussion – and since Professor John Horne has highlighted the issue in his eloquent introduction. Let me then move to consider partition, particularly in relation to unionism, since this has a relevance and challenge in terms of the President’s emphasis on ethical commemoration. Let me also attempt to follow Professor Horne, if I can, in his European and global approach to the history of Ireland a century ago.

Empire As Professor Horne has said, there is indeed a distinction between the great dynastic empires of the early 20th century, such as those of the Habsburgs, and the contemporary colonial empires of (for example) the French and the British. But there are also ways in which these categories overlap – and there are even senses in which there is an overlap between the concept of empire and that of union. In pursuing the idea of empire and imperialism, let me first take an example which was much invoked in the Home Rule era, and which has been mentioned already by others in the seminar.

Austria-Hungary, the Dual Monarchy, was the focus of a great deal of earnest Irish nationalist and British liberal reflection, most famously by Arthur Griffith, in his Resurrection of Hungary, but also by John Redmond and other home rulers in Ireland and Britain, including Gladstone and the Scottish scholar of central Europe, Robert Seton-Watson.1 All saw various forms of parallel or paradigm between Ireland and Britain and the constitutional relations within Austria-Hungary. Some even sustained this analysis for the period after 1918, seeing links between the UK and the Habsburg successor states.2 Not all of these efforts to find an ideal in central Europe were realistic.3 However, a careful comparison of the two, the UK and the Dual Monarchy, remains instructive as we reflect upon the history of Ireland’s relationship with union and empire a century ago. Austria-Hungary lacked an overseas colonial empire; but it was associated with periodic efforts at annexation and settlement in southern and eastern Europe, including, in 1908, Bosnia.4 Austria was associated with the military subjugation of its insurgent peoples. I would therefore add to the taxonomies already mentioned the notion of ‘internal colonialism’ – the idea that polities like the Dual Monarchy – or the United Kingdom – a century ago were characterised by complex colonial or colonial-style relationships with neighbouring territories, as well as having (in the case of the UK) an overseas imperial enterprise.5

Arthur Griffith, Resurrection of Hungary, new edition (Dublin, 1918); John Redmond Historical and political addresses (London and Dublin, 1898), pp. 191, 237-8; Richard Shannon, Gladstone: heroic minister, 1865-1898 (London, 1999), pp.372-3, 378; R.W. Seton-Watson, The southern Slav question (London, 1911), pp.ix, 66-71. See also Zsuszunna Zarka, ‘Irish nationalist images of Lajos Kossuth and Hungary in the aftermath of the 1848-9 revolution’ in Brian Heffernan (ed), Life on the fringe? Ireland and Europe, 1800-1922 (Dublin, 2012).

See eg R.W. Seton-Watson, The New Slovakia (Prague, 1924); Mark Cornwall and Murray Frame (eds), Scotland and the Slavs: cultures in contact 1500-2000 (Newtownville, 2001), pp.100, 121.

A.V. Dicey, A leap into the dark: a criticism of the principles of Home Rule as illustrated by the bill of 1893 (London, 1911), p.153.

For the Dual Monarchy and the occupation and annexation of Bosnia see Robin Okey, Taming Balkan nationalism: the Habsburg ‘civilising mission’ in Bosnia, 1878-1914 (Oxford, 2007).

A key starting point remains Michael Hechter, Internal colonialism: the Celtic fringe in British national development, 1536-1966 (London, 1975). For the wider comparison of 19th century empires see, for example, Jörn Leonhard and Ulrike von Hirschhausen (eds), Comparing empires: encounters and transfers in the long nineteenth century (Göttingen, 2011).

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Such empires were also commonly associated with different forms of social as well as territorial division, with in particular the notion of divide and rule; and this was applicable both in a dynastic empire like Austria-Hungary as well as in the multinational union and empire that was the United Kingdom. In Austria-Hungary at the beginning of the 20th century there were favoured nationalities and political classes through which Habsburg rule was sustained; and indeed the essence of the compromise of 1867 which shaped the Dual Monarchy was an agreement between the emperor and the Hungarian political elites to the exclusion of others.6 There are some similarities with Ireland: the union was effectively founded upon an agreement in 1801 between the British government and the Irish elite, that is to say the protestant ascendancy interest. Ireland under the union (certainly at first) was ruled in association with a privileged social and economic class, just as other European multinational states were held together partly through the agency of similarly privileged groups. Associated with ‘divide and rule’, however, were other policies of (what might be defined as) partial reinforcement, and which were practised throughout the history of the Habsburg monarchy as well as of the British and Irish unions. These embraced the simultaneous application of periodic reform as well as (often together with) suppression; and they were captured in the notion of ‘constructive unionism’, which characterised so much of British policy in Ireland (and Scotland) in the 19th and early 20th century.7 Expressing this in another way, British government applied both coercion and conciliation, ‘kicks and ha’pence’, in Ireland, where the Habsburgs and the Magyars applied what were sometimes labelled as ‘horsewhips and oats’ in the Dual Monarchy.8 Unions and empires survived for a time both because they demonstrated flexibility through periodic legislative concession – and because they combined flexibility with the violent suppression of dissent.

But since in both the United Kingdom and the Dual Monarchy the imperial centre held control over power and resource, so-called ‘subsidiary’ nationalities and groups were effectively encouraged to apply pressure and negotiate there, rather than to negotiate and deal with each other. And these were lessons learned and deployed both by Unionists and Nationalists across the years of union. Empires and unions were similarly affected by the First World War, a conflict which has been described as being both between and against empires and empire.9 We still tend to define the War in terms of the victors and the defeated; and there are obvious reasons for this continuing emphasis, given the complete collapse of the Dual Monarchy in 1918. In fact the impact of the war on complex multinational polities like the United Kingdom bears some comparison with its imperial adversaries.10 In both Austria-Hungary and the United Kingdom war brought the further marginalisation of ‘subsidiary’ nationalities such as the Irish. In both central Europe and the United Kingdom war brought the escalation of existing national tensions, as the smaller nations within wider unions saw themselves as being failed by their dominant partners. War brought the hugely increased influence of imperial military establishments, whether in London, Vienna or elsewhere across Europe, with related restrictions on civil liberties. War brought an end to the kinds of flexibility and ambiguity which had hitherto been essential in sustaining the governance of these complex multinational polities. In short, war magnified a set of tensions which were evident in different multinational unions and empires across Europe before 1914. In the case of the Austro-Hungarian empire it opened up a pathway to failure and dissolution. But even in the United Kingdom, one of the victors, and one of the arbiters of the post-war settlement, the impact of the war was felt in some broadly similar ways, and ultimately with some similar results: the relegation, alienation and insurgency of a ‘subsidiary’ nationality, the Irish.

See the pithy characterisations in Steven Beller, The Habsburg monarchy, 1815-1918 (Cambridge, 2018), p.127.

For constructive unionism see: L.Perry Curtis, Coercion and conciliation in Ireland, 1880-92: a study in conservative unionism (Princeton, 1963); Andrew Gailey, Ireland and the death of kindness: the experience of constructive unionism, 1890-1905 (Cork, 1987). See also Alvin Jackson, The Ulster party: Irish unionists in the House of Commons, 1884-1911 (Oxford, 1989).

Oszkár Jászi, The dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy (Chicago, 1929), p.370.

Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela (eds), Empires at War, 1911-23 (Oxford, 2014), p. 177.

Gerwarth and Manela, Empires at war, p. 4.

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Partition Empires were, as Professor Horne has said, closely embroiled with partition – in terms of the delineation of territorial acquisition. Partition has been closely associated with both the processes of decolonisation in Ireland, India and Palestine.11 It has also been closely associated with the fall-out from the First World War, with the deconstruction of the great European empires after 1918 and the complex definition of the boundaries of successor states.12 Let me finish by reflecting a little on these issues, not least because they have a bearing on the President’s theme of ethical commemoration. My particular focus today is on revisiting some of the complexities of the relationship between partition and unionism in this centenary years of the effective establishment of the main institutions of partition. First I would recall that for unionists in Ireland partition was originally a means to an end. Throughout the home rule era Irish unionists, including Ulster unionists, rejected Irish nationalism because they said that they feared for their civil and religious liberties, and for their economic prosperity, in the event of Irish legislative independence.13 This was their repeated message across the home rule era; and it was enshrined in their central canonical text, the Solemn League and Covenant of September 1912. Unionists, including Ulster unionists, for the first 28 years of their movement (between 1885 and 1913) did not actively seek the division of Ireland – because the division of Ireland was also the fundamental division of unionism itself. Edward Carson, the unionist leader, had direct professional and personal experience of the huge difficulties in negotiating a territorial border (between Alaska and Canada) as Solicitor General: it is likely that he was also aware, through political and family connections, of the failed partition of Bengal (1905-11).14

Unionists worked with (what was originally) an outside suggestion of partition as a means by which to wreck home rule; and they moved from nine county to six county partition, and from there to, again, an outside notion of a six county home rule scheme. Into this they subsequently entrenched themselves. But the purpose of their political agitation had now largely been replaced by the means; that is to say the effective upholding (as they saw it) of their civil and religious and economic rights had been overshadowed by the agency of partition. Means had overtaken ends.15 Second, and related to this, I would suggest that, in a sense, unionism after partition became that which it had ostensibly opposed. Just as the dissolution of the European multi-national empires produced successor states which were often themselves forms of mini-empire or indeed mini-union, so with the redesign of the United Kingdom in 1920-22. Northern Ireland was a form of successor ‘state’ to a failed union, and to an empire in crisis. Northern Ireland possessed home rule, or devolution, within a sovereign United Kingdom state: it was not itself sovereign, but it had some of the markers of a state. And it bore some comparison to other interwar continental European polities, products of the dissolution of empire, and with their own dominant and subordinate nationalities and cultures. The North was closely linked to an evolving dominant ‘Ulster’ identity, which developed alongside unionism, and which was by definition exclusively protestant; and it drew upon an imagined colonial or planter narrative of challenge and survival over 300 years.16 There was very little space or sanction in the North for those who lay beyond this dominant identity; and the consequences of this for northern Nationalists and their civil rights were very bleak indeed. Putting this another way, unionism was originally (at least in terms of its expressed ideals) about integration within a supranational union, and about protecting rights that (they said) were under imminent threat.

A key starting point remains T.G. Fraser, Partition in Ireland, India and Palestine: theory and practice (London, 1984).

Timothy Wilson, Frontiers of violence: conflict and identity in Ulster and Upper Silesia, 1918-1922 (Oxford, 2010).

For sustained discussions of the unionist movement and its arguments see Patrick Buckland Irish unionism II: Ulster unionism and the origins of Northern Ireland, 1886-1922 (Dublin, 1973); Alvin Jackson, The Ulster party: Irish unionists in the House of Commons, 1884-1911 (Oxford, 1989). The contemporary polemical literature was extensive, but as a starting point see S.Rosenbaum (ed), Against home rule: the case for the union (London, 1912).

14 H.M.Hyde, Carson: The life of Sir Edward Carson, Lord Carson of Duncairn (London, 1953), pp.188-95. 15

For a discussion of Carson’s tactical movement on the issue of partition see Alvin Jackson, Judging Redmond and Carson (Dublin, 2018), pp.121-36.

Alvin Jackson, ‘Unionist history’ in Ciaran Brady (ed), Interpreting Irish history: the debate on historical revisionism, 1938-94 (Dublin, 1994), pp.253-68.

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And yet unionists later often embraced an exclusivist set of identities and an at times deeply unjust set of actions which they themselves had once fearfully attributed to their purported enemies. They became a version of that which they had claimed to oppose. The third point that I’d suggest is that, while partition has for long been associated with the single British measure, the Government of Ireland Act of 1920, it was in fact a process, and not a single event.17 Partition was a dynamic which ultimately produced a radically different form of border to that which was originally and painfully debated by Carson and Redmond in 1912-1916.18 Partition in Ireland (as then conceived) involved the possible creation of an administrative border between two polities associated with a substantially redesigned United Kingdom; and even the Government of Ireland Act itself envisioned two home rule territories in Ireland which could have remained closely interconnected. The partition settlement which was finally confirmed in 1925 was reached by incremental steps, but it ultimately involved an economically and politically much more profound division of the island and of its people than had been foreseen when the notion had first gained traction in the years before the First World War. Expressing this another way, the story of partition is in part the story of unintended consequences in Irish history. Let me make a brief, fourth and final point in relation to partition and empire, and in doing so return to central Europe. One of the major themes within the current history-writing on Austria-Hungary is a focus on those who lived their lives, pursuing their personal, familial, social and professional priorities relatively distant from the wider political and military concerns of nation and empire: people whose values, ideals and integrity were expressed within the intimate and the local rather than any wider canvas.19 These notions have a wider relevance, including for Ireland, as the first ‘Machnamh 100’ seminar discussed.

It is worth underlining that not everyone a hundred years ago was a hero either of the union, or of the nation and of its revolution; and that (as the work of different scholars has pointed out) Irish people often led their lives quietly and in politically undemonstrative ways far removed from the epic struggles of resistance and liberation.20

Ethical commemoration ‘The point of commemoration’, Professor Horne has rightly said, ‘is to interrogate the past for the sake of the present’. And perhaps it may be about the interrogation of the past for the shaping of our vision of the future. Historians are ever-conscious of the burden of presentism and of the dangers of unduly shaping their work according to contemporary preoccupations. They are also, at best, sceptical or unwilling futurologists: as the Scots historian Tom Devine has said, “the future is not my period.” The complexity of the past, and an unquenchable curiosity, are historians’ stock-intrade. But, while allowing for all of this, it is important to reflect on past ideals, and upon the distance sometimes separating them and subsequent history. It is instructive too to pursue the comparative contexts within which Ireland and its future were defined and envisioned in the age of home rule and revolution. And it is surely worth reflecting on the contingent and dynamic nature of our history – and on the extent to which our past commemorations, both North and South, may have sought to privilege particular moments or particular people or particular classes to the exclusion of a much richer whole.

See eg Kieran Rankin, ‘Deducing rationales and political tactics in the partitioning of Ireland’, Political Geography, 26, 8 (2007).

18 Jackson, Judging Redmond and Carson, pp.105-62. 19

See eg Pieter Judson, The Habsburg empire: a new history (Cambridge Mass., 2016), p.312; Tara Zahra, National indifference and the battle for children in the Bohemian lands, 1900-48 (Ithaca NY, 2008); Tara Zahra, ‘Imagined non-communities: national indifference as a category of analysis’, Slavic Review, 69, 1 (Spring, 2010).

See eg K. Theodore Hoppen Elections, politics and society in Ireland, 1832-85 (Oxford, 1984); Alvin Jackson, Home rule: an Irish history, 1800-2000, paperback edition (London, 2004); Fearghal McGarry, The Rising: Ireland, Easter 1916, updated edition (Oxford, 2017); Brian Hughes, Defying the IRA: intimidation, coercion and communities during the Irish revolution (Liverpool, 2016).

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Respondent

Dr Marie Coleman

Recognising the “other” in the Irish revolution A Uachtaráin, Go raibh maith agat as an gcuireadh le páirt a ghlacadh i seimineár Machnamh 100. Prof John Horne has offered us a comprehensive yet succinct perspective on the themes of nation, empire and partition in the context of this island, and its wider place within the British empire and beyond, 100 years ago. I would like to explore how these themes affected the personal experiences of some of those who lived through the events and to reflect on how we remember, a century later, a distance sufficiently safe to allow for more inclusive reflection.

Nation and empire Prof Horne has suggested that the dynamics of nation and sovereignty were stronger driving forces behind the Irish revolution, than were concerns of empire. That is a convincing analysis from the perspective of the insurgents. But have we looked sufficiently at the factors motivating their adversaries, members of the Crown forces who served in Ireland during these years – from the Irish perspective, the ‘other’ referred to by the President in his remarks launching this series in December? In that reflection, the President noted how the violent actions of the Crown forces were strategic tools employed to defend empire, and certainly that was the vision of the political and military leaders who deployed these men to Ireland. But what of the individual motivations of the men who defended the British nation and empire in Ireland throughout 1920 and 1921?

We know something of what triggered reprisals, whether knee-jerk reactions to deaths of comrades or the inevitable consequence of overindulgence in alcohol. These events took place in Ireland, but what brought these men to Ireland in the first place? The President has cautioned against stereotypical depictions of ‘the other’. A way to avoid this in the case of the ‘enemy’ (the Crown forces), is to look to their own personal experience and testimonies in an effort to identify their motivations, while remaining cognisant of the later Prof David Fitzpatrick’s warning that personal motivation is notoriously resistant to historical enquiry.1 Just over one hundred years ago, on 2 February 1921, a group of nineteen men including engineers, mechanics, clerks, a messenger, a dairy assistant, an actor, a spinner, and a teacher and preacher, all of whom were members of M Company of the Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), were ambushed by the North Longford flying column of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in the isolated townland of Clonfin between the town of Grandard and the village of Ballinalee. Four Auxiliaries were killed and a further seven were subsequently discharged as medically unfit, never to serve again on account of the severity of the injuries which they sustained. The vast majority of these men had been in Ireland for six weeks at most and their original training, for trench or airborne warfare during the First World War, left them ill-prepared for an ambush on a quiet Irish country road. Testimonies of the injured and the families of the deceased in claims for compensation offer some insight into what led them to such strange surroundings.

David Fitzpatrick, ‘Protestant depopulation and the Irish Revolution’, in Irish Historical Studies, vol. XXXVII, no. 152 (Nov. 2013), p. 643.

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One survivor, William Bellingham, said he ‘joined the Auxiliaries merely to tide him over in the crisis in the engineering trade’. Harold Clayton, one of the fatalities, had been sending home £5 weekly to his pregnant wife and their child. The most unusual member of the group, Louis Martin Van Eyssen was a South African Boer War veteran, and had served on the side of his own former enemy during the recent Great War. He hoped, somewhat cryptically, ‘that something would come out of joining’ the RIC – indicating a possible ideological motive. Though the fact of his divorce later in 1921 suggests a possible element of escapism to his brief Irish adventure.2 Exploring the lives of the individual members of the Crown forces, allows us to view events in Ireland in 1920 and 1921 from the perspective of ‘the other’ and suggests that while at the macro level considerations of nation, identity, loyalty and empire drove the conflict, at the micro level of the individual participants more mundane considerations of job security and economic stability go some way to explaining how it was that many British men who served in the Crown forces during the War of Independence found themselves in Ireland in the first place. The centenary commemoration of the Clonfin ambush took place in February 2021, a much more muted event in the context of the pandemic and the restrictions on public gatherings. The event epitomised the spirit of ethical remembering which the President has done much to encourage.3 In a similar vein, the personal journey of reconciliation undertaken by Sr Maeve Brady, whose father, Tom Brady, was a member of the IRA ambush party at Clonfin, to visit the four cemeteries in England where the deceased Auxiliaries were laid to rest, was at once a simple but powerful and significant gesture.4

Partition In the final section of his discourse, dealing with the effects of partition, Prof Horne drew attention to the Catholic and nationalist minority ‘trapped’ in the ‘enclave’ of the newly created Northern Ireland, and also alluded to the problems that ensue when a nation or state becomes defined by the identity of the majority.

One hundred years on, as we live through the centenary of the creation of Northern Ireland, we face one of the most challenging contexts for all of the events that have to date been marked during this past decade of centenaries. For one community it is a heroic tale of survival against the odds and for the other of abandonment, alienation and discrimination. How can a middle ground be found between those extremes? Perhaps the answer is that one cannot, and therefore should not, be sought. The role of scholars is to expose the complexity of the facts from which the various competing narratives draw their interpretations. We should be wary of those who seek to appropriate conveniently cherry-picked events to make a statement relevant to current issues. In a similar vein, cheerful prognostications about the potential of the coming century, made in the context of centenary commemorations, runs the risk of ignoring how the present has been conditioned by past painful experience. The issues of identity, loyalty and nationhood explored at the outset by Prof Horne, are also pertinent to the experience of Ireland’s other minority population which found itself left behind in a majoritarian jurisdiction – the southern Protestants. When the first census of the Irish Free State was held in 1926, it revealed a significant demographic change – the reduction by one-third of the non-Catholic population of the twenty-six counties from the time the last (an all-island) census had been conducted in 1911. There is a relative level of scholarly consensus that this phenomenon was the result of a myriad of economic and demographic factors which played out over a long period of time, pre-dating the revolutionary period, but intensifying during it. Voluntary emigration for economic reasons; natural decline, where birth rates failed to keep pace with mortality; and the departure of the British garrison and other servants of the state in 1922, all contributed to the significant downturn, though there is dispute as to which of these were the most significant.5

Longford Leader, 18 June 1921; www.theauxiliaries.com http://theauxiliaries.com/men-alphabetical/men-t-u-v/van-eyssen/vaneyssen.html.

The Clonfin centenary anniversary commemoration https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Drw77ZL6rw.

Sr Maeve Brady, ‘A time to remember’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBtaO5KLS6w.

‘Protestant de-population in County Longford during the Irish Revolution’, in English Historical Review, vol. 135, no. 575 (Aug. 2020), pp 931-977.

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While scholars reject the emotive claims alleging ethnic cleansing, that is not to say that the revolutionary upheaval of the period was not a factor in Protestant departures, especially in the most violent years between 1920 and 1922. If Protestants were not targeted specifically because of their religion alone, their denominational affiliation was often part of a wider associational culture – such as membership of the Orange Order, or fraternising in church or social groups with co-religionists who were members of the Crown forces – that was part of the explanation for them coming under suspicion. In January 1922 southern Protestants faced an unknown future. The decline in their numbers by 1926 indicate that some at least departed, to Britain or Northern Ireland in many cases. However, the focus on departures can distract focus from the fact that the majority elected to remain. An editorial in the Church of Ireland Gazette in January 1922, soon after the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty by Dáil Éireann, recognised that ‘loyalists of the south and west’ did not ‘regard the change which is impending with any great enthusiasm’, but asserted that ‘they are determined to make the best of things’, promising to ‘give their whole-hearted and active support to the Irish Free State’.6 The enormity of that decision, and the wrench which it entailed for many in abandoning an integral part of their identity and association with ‘nation’ is one which should not be over-looked in our current commemorative landscape. For the descendants of those Protestant remainers, commemorating certain actions from the War of Independence and Civil War in the south will evoke painful memories of past family experiences.

We may think of these experiences as now belonging, thankfully, to the history books. Yet, similarities can be observed between the choice facing southern loyalists in 1921 – of whether to leave or to remain – and the choices that might yet face unionists in Northern Ireland in the current context of discussions about border polls and the constitutional future of the entity created by partition a century ago. During an interview with the comedian Patrick Kielty, for a television documentary made not long after the Brexit referendum, the then Northern Ireland First Minister, Arlene Foster, speculated that in the hypothetical event of Irish unity she did not feel she would be able to continue living in Ireland.8 These views were far from unanimous within unionism; by contrast, Lady Sylvia Hermon, then a sitting independent unionist MP for North Down, declared forthrightly ‘I’ll be staying, I’ve always loved this country … I will not leave it, even if it was ruled by Dublin.’9 While wary of drawing anachronistic parallels between the past and the present, we can still look to the past to inform the future. In the event of a united Ireland, are there lessons to be learned from the experience of the integration of the southern unionists after 1921, that could inform any future status of northern unionists in such an entity? Commemoration is a contemporary process. While the events being remembered belong to the past, commemorative rituals reflect current sensibilities, opinions and priorities. The future also has a role in this process. Reflecting in the present on how we did things in the past offers the opportunity to inform future practice.

The faith placed in the new state by Protestants was not always reciprocated. Discrimination against Protestants in the south was never comparable to that of Catholics in the north. Yet, in his memoir of early life in south-east Leinster, the late Church of Ireland Canon, the Reverend Norman Ruddock, recalled the ghettoisation of life lived around sectarian institutions, the divisions within families caused by Catholic insistence on Ne Temere, and the difficulties of navigating heightened local tensions as a recently ordained cleric during the Fethard-on-Sea boycott of the 1950s.7

Church of Ireland Gazette, 13 Jan. 1922.

Norman Ruddock, The rambling rector (Dublin, 2005).

Patrick Kielty, ‘My Dad, the peace deal and me’, BBC (6 Apr. 2018) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQJDoiqBjBE.

Belfast Telegraph, 4 May 2018.

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Reflections

President Michael D. Higgins

Versions of the ‘Other’ – As Tool in the Culture of Imperialism, and Rationalisation for Sources of Violence In today’s address, I wish to reflect on the relationship between culture and empire and how their interaction, in the case of an assumed British cultural hegemony at the time, generated versions of the Irish ‘Other’ that accommodated and rationalised violence. It helped, perhaps, in what was described as a project for the restoration of order, to invoke as background, an ongoing project that was one of replacing an inferior set of Irish cultural values with what were perceived to be a superior set of values worthy of an empire. The mind of empire included assumptions as to the ranking of cultures and thus generated what could be a comprehensive ideology for the defence of an empire that was at risk. Notions of cultural superiority, of inferior peoples and their cultures has as intellectual background the European Enlightenment, and in particular its concept of modernity which holds a key role in imperialist adventurism. Those of imperialist mind-set sometimes invoked the Enlightenment’s tool of modernity quite openly in the service of imperialist expansion. A significant minority of others, such as Kant, Diderot and Herder, held within Enlightenment thinking an antiimperialist view.

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As Sankar Muthu has noted, within the latter half of the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment era, is an anomalous period in modern European political thought:

“for it is only then that a group of significant thinkers attacked the very foundations of imperialism, not only defending non-European peoples against the injustices of European imperial rule, but also challenging the idea that Europeans had any right to subjugate, colonise, and ‘civilise’ the rest of the world”.1 By the nineteenth century, however, a regression had taken place, with prominent European political philosophers choosing to be either agnostic on the issue of imperialism or, like John Stuart Mill, Tocqueville, Hegel, and Marx, explicitly accepting of what they saw as the inevitability of the extension of European categories on thought and European rule over non-European peoples. Karl Marx, for example, while acknowledging the moral right of Indian rebels against British rule, believed that India could not progress without a European imperialism opening up what were dismissively suggested as closed Asiatic societies.

Muthu, Sankar (2003). Enlightenment against Empire, Princeton University Press: New York.

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That a critique of empire emerged at the very moment of expansive imperialisms is a testament to the importance that these radical dissenting minds attached to moral principles in both utopian and inter-people relations. Indeed, at this time imperialist expansion including that of Britain, France and other European empires presented their empires and their expansions almost exclusively as a force for moral good, political stability and economic progress. Little space was allowed at the time for any consideration of the negative, destructive, distorting or debilitating effects that imperialism was having on the cultural and social development of indigenous societies, or the cultural trauma that results from such subjugation.2 As Simon Potter notes in his paper on empire and cultures, stereotyped images of empire and of those peoples and cultures who were being colonised found their way into the homes of empires, including British homes, and may have constituted one of the most basic and pervasive ways in which citizens of empires at home were offered and consumed the experience of empire as a superiority in which they were partners, and thus came to hold as normal not only images of racial and cultural difference, but of superiority, and backwardness of different peoples.3 Imperialism, by its very nature, creates, reinforces and maintains unequal relationships between peoples, favouring the more powerful. This is a core aspect of its modus operandi. When we consider cultural imperialism, heavily informed as the concept is by the work of Foucault, Derrida, the seminal work of Edward Said and other post-structuralist and post-colonialist theorists, we can see why within the realm of post-colonial discourse, cultural imperialism is constituted as the cultural legacy of a stage of colonisation that succeeds conquest, and is not limited by it, but rather secures the conquest, by forms of social action, co-operation and administrative institutional arrangements, that contribute to the continuation post formal independence of British and other Western versions of hegemony.

An ideology that regarded those threatening empire as a dangerous ‘Other’, as Richard Kearney might put it, and one prone to violence, is helpful in explaining the violence employed by British Forces, by way of response to guerrilla and random attacks during the Irish War of Independence. What is particularly distinctive of that response is the use of collective punishments and reprisals that resulted in several atrocities, be it Bloody Sunday in Dublin, the sack of Balbriggan, the burning of Cork City, to name just three well-known events. The philosophy behind the reprisals, while rooted in the British attempting to re-assert control, often involved resorting to arbitrary reprisals, not only against republican activists, but often their surrounding civilian population. An unofficial government policy of reprisals with a community impact began in September 1919 in Fermoy, County Cork, when 200 British soldiers looted and burned the main businesses of the town, after one of their soldiers, Private William Jones, the first British Army death in the campaign, had been killed in an armed raid by the local IRA. The pattern of killings and reprisals escalated in the second half of 1920 and into 1921. The policy of reprisals, which involved public denunciation or denial and private approval, was famously satirised by Lord Hugh Cecil who reportedly stated:

“It seems to be agreed that there is no such thing as reprisals but they are having a good effect.”4 Many more reprisals occurred, which had a very deep community effect in all classes, such as the indiscriminate killing of Eileen Quinn, shot dead while seven months pregnant as she stood outside her house in County Galway with her three children by her side. Much of the reprisalbased violence was not sanctioned; indeed, officially sanctioned reprisals did not begin until January 1921 with the burning of seven houses in Midleton, County Cork.

There is of course considerable contemporary scholarly work addressing cultural trauma associated with Ireland’s struggle for independence. See, for example, Kissane, Bill (2019). ‘On the shock of civil war: cultural trauma and national identity in Finland and Ireland’, Nations and Nationalism 26(1): 22-43.

Potter, Simon J. (2007). ‘Empire, Cultures and Identities in Nineteenth – and Twentieth – Century Britain’, History Compass 5(1): 51-71.

Bennett, Richard (1959). The Black and Tans, E. Hulton and Co. Ltd.: London, p. 107.

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Eileen Quinn was killed in a reprisal attack in 1920 and was the Grandmother of one of President Higgins’ Council of State nominees, Gerald Quinn (2011-2018). Image provided by Orla Higgins, documentary maker and Grandniece of Eileen Quinn. Maraíodh Eileen Quinn in ionsaí díoltais in 1920. Ba í seanmháthair Gerald Quinn í, ar duine d’ainmnithe an Uachtaráin Ó hUigínn don Chomhairle Stáit é (2011-2018). Íomhá curtha ar fail ag Orla Higgins, déantóir chlár faisnéise agus gariníon Eileen Quinn.

It is important to bear in mind that the character of the violence between communities in what would become Northern Ireland at this time was different for a number of reasons including the proximity of the communities to each other and that the sources of such violence were not simply on a basis of religious difference. This will be the subject of a closer examination in a further seminar.

From the summer of 1920 onwards, British forces consistently responded to IRA activities by attacking co-operative creameries. By the time a truce between the IRA and the Crown Forces came into effect, 40 co-operative creameries had been destroyed, with another 35 rendered unfit for work. The destruction of each creamery put an estimated 800 farmers out of business.

The move by the British forces towards attacks on creameries – which were major employers and sources of essential foodstuffs – marked an escalation in both the wider socio-economic impact and the sophistication of reprisal tactics.

The death and destruction unleashed by the War of Independence, illustrate how violence in conflict imitates violence, has a brutalising effect, and produces extremes of further forms of violence that are no longer within the control of the original instigators. The cruelties and hardship that ensued in collective punishment were characterised by a decidedly economic dimension. Both guerrilla warfare and reprisals saw loss of life and widespread destruction of property. But, as historian Patrick Doyle has noted, the targeting of co-operative creameries caused maximum economic damage by destroying a cherished public utility and became a key tactic in the security forces’ war against the IRA.5

The first such attack commenced on 30th September 1920 with the destruction of Tubbercurry Local Co-operative Creamery, during which bombs and rifle fire left the building and machinery beyond use. Nearby Achonry Co-operative Creamery was also destroyed that night. The destruction of the creameries posed longer-term challenges to the economy. Damages to the local dairy industry amounted to £20,000 in buildings, machinery and stock, depriving 1,500 farmers of their main source of income.

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Doyle, Patrick (2019). Civilising Rural Ireland: The Co-operative Movement, Development, and the Nation-State, 1889-1939, Manchester University Press: Manchester.

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While reprisal-based violence was a key element of the British military strategy in the Irish War of Independence, it was not unique to the Irish experience, and had been used effectively by British ruling forces in India in the previous century. While conventional histories have counted only 100,000 Indian soldiers who were slaughtered in reprisal for the “India Mutiny”, Amaresh Misra argues that there was an “untold holocaust” in India causing the deaths of several million people over 10 years beginning in 1857, if rebels and civilians killed by British forces desperate to impose order are counted.6 Reprisals were, thus, a key tool in defending empire and in the imposition of colonial power, laws, attributes and ideologies. Collective punishments – were also used some decades later as an official strategy to suppress the Mau uprising in Kenya in 1952, and again in Cyprus in the same decade in the form of evicting families from their homes and closing shops where British soldiers and police had been murdered. The use of such punishment, and its justification to those who carry it out, is rooted in the notion of the collective as a version of the dangerous ‘Other’, a community harbouring the perpetrators of violent revolt in their midst. The othering of particular cultures, includes the attribution of particular tendencies and particular ideologies to those perceived as lesser. ‘Othering’, therefore, provided for an insidious rationalisation of collective acts of violence and reprisals.

project of colonialism had was quite general on culture, including mainstream written culture, on English and French novelists of the 19th and early 20th centuries, for example.7 Themes of imperialism, anti-imperialism, and decolonisation are well exemplified in the novel Robinson Crusoe whose story centres on a European man who creates a fiefdom in a distant, non-European island. An older example, centuries earlier, is of course, Shakespeare’s The Tempest. If the novel represents an aesthetic art form influenced by imperial expansion, it can be further argued then, that among Western imperialism’s most effective tools for domination of other cultures, its cultural assumptions of superiority of the powerful, and the lesser value of the culture of the ‘Other’, plays just as strong a role as political and economic strategies. Edward Said has put it succinctly:

“the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging”.8 By “other narratives” of course he is referring to those that might have been lodged in either ancient practice, as in the Irish case, or indeed in the utopian visions of imagined futures. Either can impede the successful colonisation of a people and thus require to be quenched in the interests of both the security and the expansion of the empire. As Said puts it:

“For the enterprise of empire depends upon the idea of having an empire […] and all kinds of preparations are made for it within a culture; then, in turn, imperialism acquires a kind of coherence, a set of experiences, and a presence of ruler and ruled alike within the culture.”9

The perpetrators of such became, of course, the oppressive ‘Other’ in nationalist perceptions, and to whom would be attributed real, and enlarged, fear-inducing attributes of character. The ‘Other’ was perceived as one which was indiscriminate as to who was to be included in reprisal, with tragic consequences for those not involved in the conflict. As we know from Irish history, this tendency has been employed by militant republicans to enable the contemplation, execution and justification of acts of brutality against those perceived to be agents or beneficiaries, of British rule in Ireland. The assumption of a cultural hegemony was not confined to the realm of State or military. In his seminal work, Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said has shown the impact that imperialist thought and the unquestioned

His observation is acute, for while the great expansionist ‘age of empire’ largely ended shortly after World War II when most colonies gained independence, imperialism, as a set of assumptions, as a mind of policy, continued to exert considerable cultural influence after formal independence.

Misra, Amaresh (2008). War of Civilisations: India AD 1857: The Road to Delhi and The Long Revolution, Rupa: New Delhi.

Said, Edward (1994). Culture and Imperialism, Vintage Books: London.

Ibid.

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Indeed, it is illuminating to examine how colonialists and imperialists have employed ‘culture’ to control distant lands and peoples, how the self-justifying rhetoric in the literature of the past could be utilised to bolster imperialism and rationalise, for example, the West’s dominance and exploitation of nonWestern people. Even in modern writing, invocation of the ‘white man’s burden’ occasionally re-emerges, with its inherent arrogance and racism towards the objects of its gaze, accompanied perhaps with a nostalgia for a world of servants that sought to relieve the discomfort of heat and life among what are perceived as a backward people. The cultural imperialism that was, and is, at the heart of empire, by its promotion and imposition of the culture of a powerful nation over a less powerful one – an experience that Priya Satia calls, “the imposition of an autocratic, racist, violent, and extractive form of rule” – resulted in the case of Ireland in a form of British cultural hegemony which attempted to shape and influence general cultural values in Ireland and among other peoples that were colonised.10 Culture is, however, a process, and the dominating culture would come to be changed itself by that with which it interacted, by what it experienced in the effort of colonisation, be it cricket in India or the West Indies or writing in the English language in the Irish case. In the long sweep of its history, British cultural imperialism in Ireland took various forms, manifesting itself in a set of exclusionary attitudes and ideologies, formal policies that were discriminatory and which subjugated Irish cultural traditions and expressions to a lesser consideration. While there was a religious base to this, it was not exclusively so. There were significant localised exceptions, such as that of the Presbyterian Church whose members have made, and continue to make, a singular contribution to Irish cultural practices old and new, including the restoration and development of the Irish language and music. If we are to achieve ethical remembrance and the creation of a shared memory at peace, it is important to recognise the role that the mind of imperialism, and specifically cultural imperialism, had as a precipitating force in the Irish independence struggle, and that we seek to understand the response to it.

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Irish cultural subjugation drew, by way of response initially, the re-assertion of what had been a suppressed cultural expression, one that would come in time to support a militant nationalism, as part of the independence movement. This took the form of campaigns for the revival of the Irish language, Irish sport, Irish music, religion and a wider Celtic reclamation. However, revivals that have the character of recovery of what was suppressed carry their own exclusionary danger. It is a danger which we have not been successful in avoiding. All cultural expressions in all their adaptations to, and inclusions of, each other must be part of a shared future. If there is a mind of the defence of empire that influenced events in Ireland a century ago, there is also a mind of Irish resistance to, and also anomalous accommodation to, empire, which had its exclusionary flaws, which it would go on to expand with some disastrous institutional consequences. We also must acknowledge that the British found willing agents of Empire among the native Irish from the earliest days of conquest. While many were drawn through economic necessity, it cannot be denied, that both at home in Ireland, and throughout the expanding Empire, some Irishmen became even enthusiastic accomplices to the excesses, cruelty and hubris of colonialism. In all of this, there is the grounding fact of humiliation, inflicted, experienced, recalled, remembered or imagined. The psychological impact of the cultural imperialism that was experienced over the centuries in Ireland, was perceived as a deeply ingrained urge to humiliate. This fact requires a profound meditation on a range of questions: How have our attitudes towards ourselves been influenced by hundreds of years of colonialism, of being constituted lesser, violent, drunk, indolent, backward? – the grotesque dehumanising depictions of the Irish in Punch cartoons are a case in point, but they are of the past. Are there residues of post-colonial inferiority in attitudes to the Irish language and wider Irish culture? Do the terms so often used as something being “very Irish” or even that on occasion decisions are described as “an Irish solution to an Irish problem” reveal a residual belief that a description of being Irish is synonymous with being lesser.

Satia, Priya (2020). Time’s Monster: History, Conscience and Britain’s Empire. Allen Lane: London.

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Lifting oneself into the present with the hope of a more fulfilling shared future requires a movement from old assumptions, from both sides of the equation that is the experience of empire. No more than with other European imperialisms, and there were many, and there are today States and Powers with imperialist tendencies, the legacies of imperialism have never been adequately addressed. Empire rule, wherever its source, and whenever, has led so often to the exploitation of peoples, and their subjugation on the basis of race and culture in a system maintained via the brutal and systematic violence of an expansionist force. Nostalgia for empire and imperialism is too often combined with a reluctance to see contemporary racism and xenophobia as being sourced in the grounding assumptions of imperial and colonial power. The time available today has permitted only a brief overview of some key aspects of imperialist-sourced violence, such as that which was part of the violences during the War of Independence, a war which led to the deaths of 2,000 people, of whom 750 were civilians. We, thankfully, now have an opportunity to transact that which establishes the distance between us as peoples in terms of different narratives of violences recalled, we all can, with much benefit, face and critique the absolutisms that drove those impulses to this violence and all violences, and the careless and dangerous assumptions of ‘the Other’ from which are sown such violences.

We must have a deeper purpose: to gain a clearer understanding of what occurred and why, acknowledging the path that has led each of us to where we are today; and, in being open to the perspectives of others, we must hope to extricate ourselves from the grip of any uncritical, simplistic version of our complex story. This, I believe will enable us to grasp together, the possibilities for a brighter future together, based on mutual respect, common interests and trust. It is my hope that by dwelling on some of the less-examined aspects, including the sources of violence and their repercussions, the context of a conquering empire in decline, and the challenge of fear of the loss of what was its most proximate part, that we can arrive at a more comprehensive narrative of the times, a deeper collective understanding, an ethics of memory and remembrance that may aid a process of healing for us all as we reflect on these events which have marked us so profoundly as a society. In doing so, the prize of an inclusive commemoration, one that becomes emancipatory in its consequences, becomes possible, one that allows for uncomfortable truths to be acknowledged, and, by doing so, on all sides, becomes achievable, allows us to envisage lives lived together free from the snares of remembered violence.

Beir beannacht.

The use of such violence on the part of the powerful ultimately became a decisive factor in the outcome of the War of Independence, having resulted in shock and outrage internationally, and garnering increased support for the IRA and the independence movement at home and abroad. It is important to be wide and generous in our willingness to critique our assumptions. We have, I suggest, shown an energy that is welcome in critiquing nationalism, less so in relation to imperialism. That is why I have today simply sought, with humility, to redress the balance. Today, we explore this past, not to air inherited grievances or seek justification for injustices perpetrated in our name, nor do we seek to compare atrocities committed in the name of nationalism, unionism or British Imperialism.

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Black and Tans at the London and North Western Hotel (North Wall, Dublin) in the aftermath of a raid.

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Dúchrónaigh lasmuigh d’Óstán London and North Western (An Port Thuaidh, Baile Átha Cliath) i ndiaidh ruathair.

Photo

National Library of Ireland www.nli.ie Ref: HOGW 117

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Panel Discussion Machnamh 100 – Seminar Two 25 February 2021 Dr John Bowman An Dr John Bowman

John Bowman: So, picking up now on what the President has been saying, I’m joined again by our four historians remotely: Eunan O’Halpin from Dublin, Alvin Jackson from Edinburgh, Marie Coleman from Belfast, Niamh Gallagher from Cambridge. And John Horne is still with us, and the President will join in as well. There are so many threads to pick up on in all of this. Alvin Jackson, can I come to you first? Partition itself has been mentioned in so many of the papers and it’s just a century old. Its centenary is coming up. How is that going to be commemorated? That’s a challenge because the Irish border is now back in the news with Brexit. It’s something the British first forgot about and then didn’t want to know about for so long and now, suddenly, it’s back, right on the table again.

Alvin Jackson: Well, to state the obvious, there are ferocious challenges with the commemoration, the marking, the revisiting of partition in this its centenary year; and there are others within this conversation who will be as well placed as I to speak to this and who are involved with the administration of this in different ways.

I think the essential difficulty is that the commemorative stimulus comes generally from the state whether you’re talking about the Decade of Centenaries in the South or this particular centenary in the North; and in the North the nature of the state is and was ferociously contested. What is to be done in these circumstances? Well, the state clearly has to have a role at some level but that role I think needs to be carefully considered – perhaps in both jurisdictions. And I think the role might well be about encouraging more of a bottomup approach to the reconsideration of events of the early 1920s than about a top-down approach. And I believe we historians have got a part to play in all of this through the work that we undertake. But I think as well there’s the work of local history communities as well in the North – as well as across the island as a whole – who’ve got a key contribution to make. John Bowman: Marie Coleman, what’s your opinion? You’re among the advisors to the Northern Ireland Office on this. Is it deeply contested? Is it controversial?

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Marie Coleman: Well, yes, it is in that there’s one community which is just not engaging with it. But I think there’s a wider community not just of historians, I should say, but also the arts are quite involved in this; and it’s seen as a somewhat safer space for commemoration. And there’s a sense among a lot of people that whether one can park the question of whether or not one agrees with the establishment of Northern Ireland and simply accept the fact that it is there and it was established 100 years ago; and if there are going to be commemorative events around it then it is best to look at it in the proper historical context. There are moves similar to what Eunan spoke about in the South regarding the 1926 Census to ensure that the fullest range of archival material is made available. So, I think there’s a wide sense of moving beyond one’s view on it to accept it as a historical fact and reflect on it from that perspective. John Bowman: Niamh Gallagher, what’s your opinion on this? Niamh Gallagher: I agree with Alvin and Marie. Marie and I are on the historical advisory panel. It’s an independent role, and that independence is crucial to the whole project. Yes, it was set up in so far as we were created by the British government, but in terms of what we ourselves decide to do in relation to helping to mark, to revisit, to think about the creation of the state, that comes down to us and to our expertise. And so, I think what we’re trying to do is to complicate a very hegemonic picture from one side or the other to show a range of different experiences that happened from 1920 to 1925 but also over the last 100 years. It’s about unfreezing these categories that President Higgins spoke about last time in his first talk in December. It’s about opening up questions of agency, behaviour, attitudes to historical inquiry. And hopefully we’re going to do a fair job on that. John Bowman: That’s not an easy job though; Northern Ireland particularly is a very special case where people tend to see their own history in a particular way. Are commemorations likely in your view to open minds rather than to leave people where they are? Niamh Gallagher: Well, that’s a really interesting question, John, and I think it touches on the differences between history and memory. So, people have very strong senses of their own history which often rely on selective narratives, selective versions of the past, and really, it’s up to them should they wish to think outside those confines. But in terms of what we are trying to do, we’re trying to bring more of a richness and a complexity to what actually

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happened in the past to the public domain. We’re not trying to be prescriptive. If people don’t want to engage with a more holistic view of the past, that is up to them. But that’s not what our role is. And our role is we are committed to the history, we are committed to thinking about experiences at the time, and we’re committed to bringing those to the wider public. John Bowman: Eunan O’Halpin, what’s your opinion? Eunan O’Halpin: Well, in relation to commemorating partition and the foundation of the Northern state if I take them together, my view is that certainly in this jurisdiction, the state will do as little as possible and stay away as much as possible and will encourage – particularly in terms of partition and the border – encourage and facilitate local groups to work ideally on a cross-community basis or a cross-border basis and so on. In other words, I don’t want to sound cynical but I don’t think anybody in government buildings wishes to in any way stir the pot. And I think that paradoxically the Covid virus especially… I was outside Mountjoy jail on the 1st of November 2020 for the centenary of my great uncle Kevin Barry’s execution. Myself and my wife were the only people there because of the virus, and that probably – in some ways – prevented what might have been a scrum of different sorts of rival commemorative groups. I do think in some ways the virus may – in the matter of occupying space and so on and inflammatory speeches and so on – the virus may help. And I do think the state here, it’s very conscious that there are different perspectives and different takes particularly along the border and so on and doesn’t wish to promote anything that’s going to cause political upset to anyone; but it is very willing to support local history societies in exercises like that, cross-community especially, and the EU of course as well has been funding a lot of cross-community activities generally and along the border. So, I think it’s not a matter of the less said the better exactly, but the less that’s said centrally by the government. And not at all – I don’t mean by President Higgins, but by the government – the less there is of any sense of trying to claim back a fourth green field or anything like that, the better. John Bowman: You yourself have said that the British saw this really as a second order problem but then it came bang on their plate in 1969 and then of course recently under Brexit it’s a different contour again. Lloyd George would surely be surprised to think that the bargain he made, the “fix” that he managed to deliver in 1920 is still centre stage.

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Eunan O’Halpin: Oh, absolutely he would be. And we forget, we see General Smuts who had been a rebel in South Africa in the Boer rebellion– who got terribly treated during the Boer War – suddenly get rehabilitated and becomes an imperial statesman. Smuts was ‘deothered’ as it were – if there is such a term or if I have just coined it. But my argument is that from 1921 from the British point of view, Ireland was a second order problem. And secondly that Ireland was to be incorporated into – we call it the Imperial or the Commonwealth project – with considerable success: even though she joins the League of Nations independently and so on, she actually uses the other Commonwealth dominions a lot as allies in international discourse and in discourse with Britain; so while an independent Ireland was anti-Imperial, it certainly wasn’t anti-Commonwealth. And even in 1949 there’s evidence that Mr de Valera, then in opposition, was appalled – not just because he would have preferred to be in government at the Declaration of the Republic, as he would have liked to take that step himself, perhaps without leaving the Commonwealth – but because he found it difficult to oppose the Costello government’s peculiar decision on leaving in public. John Bowman: Indeed. John Horne, what do you make of the whole question now of partition itself in terms of how Brexit has impacted on it and how it has come to the surprise presumably of the British Cabinet that this border which they didn’t know where it was pretty well and it wasn’t in the Brexit campaign at all when the issue was being debated. But now it’s in contention as it were again? John Horne: It is extraordinary. I think at the time during the referendum campaign the only people in Britain who were really speaking out in a warning way were Tony Blair and John Major, who of course had been instrumental in the Belfast Peace Agreement saying that this will be called into jeopardy. But I think it was simply off the screen, even though the warnings were there, and now of course it’s centre stage. In a curious way, though, I think it’s a logical and ironic result of Brexit. Brexit was in opposition to the European Union and failed to see the role that the European Union had played, that the single market had played, in reducing this border to nothing once the military conflict was over in 1998. And so it has indeed caught the Brexiteers completely by surprise, and what it’s thrown back absolutely to the centre is the nature of the Union itself because coming in tandem with the challenge from Scotland, a hundred years on we are back actually to something which Alvin alluded to and which was the way the Liberal Party in particular

at the turn of the 20th century thought of a kind of devolved Union; that Irish Home Rule might be accompanied by Welsh Home Rule, by Scottish Home Rule. At the moment we have a kind of disintegration of the Union, the United Kingdom Union, which has been crystallised by the issue of the border with the North. John Bowman: Again, it’s an unintended consequence, isn’t it? John Horne: It is, absolutely. But can I just come in? A quick remark. I am fascinated by the relationship of partition when it happened to commemoration now because we have talked about the commemorative aspect in a NorthSouth connection. I just wanted to ask Marie, I was fascinated by what you said about the Clonfin incident in County Longford and the way in which local people there had gone to Britain to seek out the tombs or the traces of the Auxiliaries; and coming back to President Higgins’ point about the violence in the War of Independence, I wonder whether you think that there is any space at the moment for some East-West exploration of that. It seems to me that during the commemoration of Balbriggan, the burning of Cork, the British were simply absent, but is this an opportunity to try to engage in some sort of commemorative activity? I think in the Republic this would have the effect of enabling us better to understand and demythologise the Black and Tans. Do you think that there’s any possibility of that or do you think that the authorities would prefer to let sleeping dogs lie? John Bowman: Marie, do you want to come in on that? Marie Coleman: I think there’s two aspects there. The first one you’re referring to there is the initiative undertaken by Maeve Brady herself, and I think what that reflects – and it’s something that Mary Daly has spoken about, her expertise looking at how 1916 was commemorated – is the importance of the initiative coming from below and not being imposed from above. So, giving local communities the power to facilitate them to set the agenda for commemoration I think comes across well there. My honest view with the British side of it, the East-West side, is that there is just a lack of understanding in Britain of what happened in Ireland in 1921. In 2016, most British people seemed to have woken up on the 24th of June and realised they had a land border with the European Union nation state. Most people in Great Britain do not seem to even recall the fact that the Union was changed in 1921 and that Britain lost a quarter of its landmass, so maybe there’s room there for greater engagement and trying to

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encourage greater British engagement with the Irish experience, but I just don’t think there’s enough understanding in Britain itself of what happened in Ireland to go as far as what we’re suggesting. John Bowman: Would you agree with that, Alvin? Alvin Jackson: Very, very strongly. So, Marie is absolutely correct in terms of the lack of knowledge of the events in Ireland of the early 1920s, an ignorance which has unfortunately resonated I think through the decades. I recall researching a book a number of years ago, working in the British National Archives at Kew. In particular I recall a letter from Edward Heath, then British Prime Minister, referring to what he described as the ‘British High Commissioner’ in Dublin (that is to say, as if Ireland were still within the Commonwealth). So, here was the British Prime Minister referring to the Embassy of his own country as a High Commission (and thus evidently unclear about Ireland’s constitutional standing). And that I believe, though merely one small instance, reflects some wider issues. I think there has been a tremendous self-satisfaction within Britain, historically speaking, this is, about the robustness as well as the adaptability of the British Constitution, and we’ve alluded to this earlier on. So 1921 is seen not in the terms that Marie has quite reasonably described but rather as a great victory for the flexibility of that constitution and yet further testimony to the ability of the United Kingdom and the British Empire to bring on board former enemies whether South African Boers as Eunan has instanced or indeed – delving further into the 19th century – insurgent or disaffected Quebecois within the Canadian context. So the Canadian Constitutions of 1840 and 1867 are seen again as triumphs of imperial statesmanship just as 1921 is. John Bowman: But isn’t it also the case that listening to all of your contributions today and that from Professor Horne that in some senses each of these major points in our history is best thought of as bespoke and as unique? That sometimes it’s not… I mean, partition itself, if one compares the scale of the issue say between Ireland and the Indian subcontinent, the scale is so different. The details and the circumstances are so different that they’re difficult to compare. Alvin? Alvin Jackson: I entirely take the point – and as historians we fret about these methodological issues such as the nature of historical comparison. And I entirely accept that there are differences in scale looking at Ireland and India – or in other comparative cases there

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may be as many distinctions and differences as points of comparison. But at the end of the day, many, many contemporaries made these interlinkages; and the fact of the matter is that the Irish partition had an influence of sorts in terms of British imperial policy within India. For example, the creator of modern Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was interested in the arguments over the partition of Ireland and interested in Carson in terms of the politics of what was then Britain’s Indian Empire and looking ahead to the possibility of a Muslim state. John Bowman: Yes but Carson himself for instance was a disappointed man in his later years because he got what he didn’t want. Alvin Jackson: Absolutely so. Carson did not want the 1921 Treaty. He did not actually much want the 1920 Government of Ireland Act though he went along with it. Carson in his later years embraced a full-blooded conservative imperialism which involved him taking very unprogressive stands on for example Indian selfrule in the 1930s. But in terms of Ireland, Carson was fundamentally about an integrationist unionism. It should be said I think as well that – to get back to one of the earlier points you were raising, John – he was also interested in the possibility of federalism across the islands of Ireland and Britain, which he saw as a way of sustaining some form of modified Union relationship. That is to say Ireland would have a form of self-government but so too would Scotland and Wales. This would be the new nature of Union; and he was prepared to buy into that. John Bowman: Eunan, did I see you on the screen attempting to come in there? Eunan O’Halpin: Sorry, John. No, I was just saying that Jinnah himself is… The analogy is with Carson is very interesting. And in some ways, like Carson, Jinnah at the end ended up with a state – in fact, a state bizarrely in two parts separated by about a thousand miles with which in a sense he wasn’t really familiar, being from faraway Mumbai (then Bombay) on India’s Arabian Sea coast. What Jinnah had been attempting was to defend Muslim interests either in an India that remained in a kind of home rule, or in an India where the Constitution would be so organised that Muslim interests would be explicitly and fully protected. And if you look now at how Pakistan is treated in India in terms of “othering”, treated with absolute contempt and referred to with absolute contempt in popular politics. And if you look at how Muslims are being treated by the aggressively Hindu nationalist BJP government – and really the narrative promoted by the

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Modi government is now all about a history of Mughal invasion and oppression, the Mughals being the Muslim rulers and conquerors of much of what we now think of as iconic India, the creators of the Taj Mahal and so on. Indian nationalist historians and politicians are busy trying to deny Indian Muslim identity by claiming that Indian Muslims are essentially the descendants of the Mughal invaders who overran and despoiled an idyllic Hindu India, long before the British, the French and the Portuguese embarked on their colonial enterprises in the sub-continent. John Bowman: Well, one man’s partition is another man’s liberation, of course. President Higgins, can I ask you about this othering point? Are you optimistic that we can go through this Decade of Centenaries with this more constructive approach that you’re hoping for? Or isn’t there a lot of room for pessimism as well, that people see the history they want to see and they find that it’s further embedded by the experience? President Higgins: I think that there are a couple of things. I very much agree that there is great significance in the movements from below about people who in fact actually want to repeat the experience themselves. Because for example I quoted the case of Eileen Quinn. Eileen Quinn’s grandson has been to see the relatives of the RIC men in Roscommon whose deaths had in fact led to the movement out from Gort towards Lady Gregory’s estate where that shooting took place. These are all very, very important. I think it illustrates something else as well – where there is need for care. And that is what if we were in fact actually seeking to recover lost opportunities and missing opportunities rather than in fact investing events? If you decide to load the symbolism on a particular selected event, there is a risk involved. There are opportunities in the way you do it. I think for example the speech of King George V for example, you could see positives in that very much. But also, I think there is a great case for the recovery of the better moments lost. For example, when I was looking at Geoffrey Lewis’s book on Carson, Carson’s speech to the Ulster Unionists of course in Belfast on the 4th of February 1921 where he says, ‘You will be a parliament for the whole community. We used to say that we could not trust an Irish parliament in Dublin to do justice to the Protestant minority. Let us take care that that reproach can no longer be made against your parliament, and from the outset let them see that the Catholic minority have nothing to

fear from a Protestant majority’.1 And there’s great scope in my view of going back to that discourse which we have stirred about the treatment of minorities, because those who for example speak of the Union, of what Union? But then equally those who are speaking of a united Ireland, of what kind of united Ireland? And so forth. If the discourse can move to the point where we are after all in entirely new circumstances, but it is actually wrong to say that what we have experienced in terms of partition and the consequence of partition was delivered as a neat finished package. There were those who from the very beginning retained hope for example that it would be temporary, which I think you could argue from some of the aspects of the King George V speech, you could also argue in relation to Carson’s speech in many cases. John Bowman: Partition of course was intended to be temporary but it became embedded and fashioned the two states within Ireland, North and South. President Higgins: That raises the question for example in relation to if you put yourself north of the border as it is now and you were seeing if you like a new state emerging, there was a need for an expression of a fundamental commitment to issues of conscience. Now, I don’t say that in a very critical way because after all Irish nationalism had taken on a particular colouration from Catholic Emancipation on through the Land War, and we will have a further seminar dealing with the impact of land and all of this. And that when we’re looking at the land issue, you will see huge points of commonality between issues in Ulster and other parts of Ireland. I do wish very much that everyone would participate with the advisory committee. That’s so important. It would be very, very, very helpful because it indicates a mind towards which if you are preparing for the future, you must say, well, we don’t intend to lock ourselves into the lost opportunities. You could even – I could have even equally been the first seminar speaking about for example the 1918 election. A point made in today’s paper that a substructure of a state came into existence through the Sinn Féin courts and the gathering of taxes and all of this and the rest of it. You might say that that was a great error to not be able to respond, to recognise that irrespective of what had happened in 1916, the response to it and then the further increases that took place and the conscription issue in 1918, that at the same time there was this impetus that had been there for people to run a state in an orderly way.

Geoffrey Lewis, Carson: the man who divided Ireland (London: 2005) p.227.

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It’s easy to say now that going back one could have responded differently, saved a great deal of lives. But that’s no reason for saying why for example in envisaging the future that you must get two points of original thinking rather than… And that’s the danger, what one has to be careful about, the symbolisms. The idea that you would for example symbolise something that was presented as a process but you’re going to recall it and commemorate it as a finished event. That’s foolish, in my view. But equally as foolish to say that to those who rejected that were in fact a form of martyrdom which is the exact same as everything else since. That’s equally fallacious in my view. So, that’s why I’m hoping to call on my six seminars, and they will be all together, to see it as process. There are ways we can cooperate on all of this and down through the levels. The next seminar is on social class and that is perhaps the most important of all, for example in relation to the pogroms which were mentioned – What about the trade unionists who – and the Protestant workers who were equally excluded from the shipyards. And what about particularly where everyone is using the phrase ‘Bolshevism’ and so forth. While there are many people who are entirely critical of what has happened to socialism and to communism and what happened much later on. This ease with which you can dismiss the dissenting intelligence about matters economic and social as Bolshevist, that was quite common North and South. And the brave people that when I look back on my visits to Northern Ireland long, long – many decades ago – was the great achievement of the trade union movement. John Bowman: And John Horne, we’ve heard of 1918 and conscription and how important that was, and Eunan mentioned that, but the 1918 election of course was a profoundly important use of the ballot box. So, as a revolution it brought an important signal to the world and to London: that the Westminster election was being used to measure the degree of Irish self-determination. John Horne: Exactly that, and I mentioned the kind of twin-track approach, if you like – a political movement and a military movement. And what I find fascinating and impressive is the way in which electoral politics were used throughout – the War of Independence, as Eunan has referred to. But also, how in terms of the gunman and the use of violence, that even within the revolutionary movement there was that whole question of civil military relations of who was actually in control. Was it Mulcahy? Was it the Dáil ministries? Was it the locals? And was it the local Sinn Féin

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clubs? Was it the local Volunteers? There’s a complexity there. And I think the way in which that issue itself within the independence and revolutionary process was dealt with, and not just as a question of the constitutionalists versus Sinn Féin, helps explain the stability and the permanence of democracy in the new state in the South. President Higgins in his address talked of empire as diversity and hierarchy, and said that one of the things empires also need is ideologies, and ideologies which explain those hierarchies and which use them and manipulate them. I agree. But it does seem to me it’s a dialectical process and certainly in the Irish case, the degree to which British parliamentarianism and the assumptions of parliamentary government are there within Sinn Féin itself and within that process is what we’re talking about. John Bowman: And they were indebted to the Irish Parliamentary Party and their achievement; to Parnell and to so many others. John Horne: And we’re back to the point of John Bruton’s observations about the continued influence of that IPP legacy within Ireland. John Bowman: They were now tenant farmers; there’s nobody more conservative than a man with 30 acres. And if he got the land from the Irish Parliamentary Party, then that was embedded also as part of the Irish political culture. President Higgins: And you would also see the significant distinction between the grazier class and the different layers of landholding beneath them. In a curious way, the historiography has found dealing with social class to be one of its most significant omissions, while very welcome to hear the case for people pushing their... John Bowman: And we should also add that there were two landslides in 1918 because in those six counties soon to become Northern Ireland, there were 22 unionist seats, four Irish Parliamentary Party seats and three for Sinn Féin. John Horne: But can I just add to the President’s observation that I think that as well as the democratic element and parliamentary element which is stitched through the revolutionary process, we also have the labour movement and what I would call that process of civic protest, the trade unions for example. Not just the strike against conscription in 1918 but of course the ongoing railway strike in 1920. The role in which the Irish Transport and General Workers Union reaches its maximum strength at this stage in the countryside because

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it’s recruiting the agricultural labourers who are brought into the fold. And even though at a political level we know that labour stands back and labour waits, it seems to be in a social way during the War of Independence, labour is absolutely one of the participants. John Bowman: I want to go back to our historians – who are remotely joining us – on one big issue, and many of you have mentioned it. Ordinary lives – too often ignored just in the nature of things. Commemorations tend to be about big events, very often spectacular and violent events and great moments. Ordinary lives don’t have that moment, if you like, and therefore are not often commemorated. Marie, what’s your opinion on all of this and how can it be redressed? Marie Coleman: I think the ordinary lives is what interests people and it’s the hook to get them interested in the wider subject. I’m thinking of Richard Grayson’s work on military history from looking particularly at the nationalists from parts of West Belfast who joined the British Army during the First World War.2 But also, his way of encouraging people to take an ancestor who fought in the war and to start with the name on the War Memorial and to take it from there and maybe find the obituary in the newspaper and work through the sources that way. But the ordinary life is the one that interests most people because we all have an ancestor of some sort. My grandparents got married in November 1921, so I wonder what they must have thought of the way in which the country in which they lived was about to change. And that’s what grabs us. I think if we can look at the ordinary lives, the people we knew, our own ancestors, and take their story, that’s the aim in understanding the wider picture for many people. John Bowman: Niamh Gallagher, you mentioned this as well, that there were too many ordinary lives not being celebrated. Celebrated is not the word I’m looking for – commemorated – in the way we’re approaching the centenaries? Niamh Gallagher: Yes. So, I think historians tend to be very interested in political histories which, as you mentioned, John, are the “big” histories. Big events, parliamentary activities, constitutional questions, which are heavily male questions as well at the time; we must recognise that fact. Ordinary histories, I agree with Marie, can be a way into thinking more generally about these big questions, but they can also subvert or challenge these “big”

things as well. So, by looking at the agency of what people do, what their attitudes are, what their experiences were, we can actually start to unpick and untangle some of these big concepts. And I think with empire this is a really good case study of how that can be done. We’ve spent a lot of time talking today, understandably so, about violence, about imperial forms of repression, all of the really horrible stuff of empire that affected so many people across the globe. But Ireland has multiple narratives of its engagement with empire. One huge one was settlement. And Ireland itself – we all know this – was a country of emigration. And between 1801 and 1921, something like eight million people left the island. And they went to other parts of the empire where they settled, where they retained their Irish identities, and those identities themselves were fairly malleable. And actually, if you look at what an Irish-American describes as Irishness today or an Irish-Australian, you might find that they’re quite different. But the fundamentally interesting point is that they retain some notion of Irishness which was capacious enough to link them to these different Irish communities. So, I think basically untangling these concepts where we look at ordinary people and what they do and what they did can allow us to open up to richer histories really. John Bowman: Eunan, on that point? Eunan O’Halpin: Well, on the same point, President Higgins, mentioned creameries and I’m glad he did because when I was young, I read about the destruction of creameries in narratives of the War of Independence. I paid no heed because I was interested in ambushes and things, and was a city boy with no understanding of rural Ireland. As a boy it never occurred to me to look at it through the lives of the wider community, what actually happened in the War of Independence. It’s not just about ambushes and killing. It’s about places that appear to be quiet counties, for example County Laois where two out of eleven deaths are the work of drunken policemen carrying out robberies at night, and so on. And so, the terror is felt – and the memory of the terror – in places where scarcely a shot was fired. And we’re often accused, in this state, of overstating the nature of the War of Independence as compared with how the British dealt with – and those Irish perhaps in British uniforms – dealt with trouble in India and elsewhere. But the memory, the cultural memory, what people experienced and retained … I can just mention my grandmother Annie

Richard S. Grayson, Belfast Boys: How Unionists and Nationalists fought and died together in the First World War (Continuum, London, 2010).

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Rice (1905-1980). I once asked her in the 1970s what it was like in the War of Independence in County Down, because her house was raided a lot because her family were known republicans. She just narrated to me a humorous joke song about a terrible girl named Dora – a play on the acronym for the Defence of the Realm Act 1914 which granted exceptional security powers to the British state – who would come into houses uninvited, break all the plates, tear open the bags of flower and so on. So, she relayed her experiences in a light-hearted vein. I only learned recently about how, talking to her youngest daughter, she recalled those days very differently, and described how the women and girls were alone in the house because the men had cleared out for fear of arrest or worse. She spoke of the sexual menace she felt as she, her sisters and mother were held at gunpoint not only by soldiers but by young Specials whom she knew because she met them on the road every day. So there’s different memories of terror at the ordinary or proletarian level if you like, and also highly gendered ones. And the more of them I think we understand, the more we’ll have a greater understanding of the depths of feeling and the resilience of feeling and memory right across the different communities in Ireland. John Bowman: Alvin Jackson, I can see you’re nodding to that? Alvin Jackson: Just in addition to all of this, and in terms of the individual and the local and the personal, I think we really should be celebrating the digitisation revolution of the past twenty years and the whole array of very individual and local materials that have been made available. The census records – Eunan has mentioned in passing – for 1901 and 1911 have been made available through the National Archives in Dublin. These are absolutely superb and also in many ways a wonderfully subversive resource. At the personal and familial level, I know through having trawled my own family’s records, that the accepted narrative of my own family history just isn’t borne out in terms of the documentation. And a really stimulating set of revelations and reassessments has been delivered through that material. But there’s so much else besides – for example, the National Archives in Dublin’s digitisation of some First World War records, in particular the wills left by Irish soldiers. Again, at one level these are very scrappy, very truncated, but my goodness, emotionally charged and wonderfully poignant records of these young soldiers who for the most part didn’t return from the Western Front and other battlefields.

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John Bowman: And accessing that sort of material and it being digitally available to the entire population turns those people into sort of historians, doesn’t it? Rather than reading your books. They can plough on and read books but it gives them that texture and that sense of finding something, discovery. Alvin Jackson: Absolutely so. John Bowman: Just on this general – the ordinary people, John Horne, in the records and in the commemoration, are you optimistic that we can deliver as it were the bottom-up approach? John Horne: My first answer is yes. When I look at what happened both north and south in relation to 2016 and particularly the area which Niamh is an expert in, the First World War, the experiences of the First World War, I’m really struck by the amount of family history interest. This democratisation of the archive that we’ve been talking about was absolutely crucial in allowing people to become interested in their own family and community stories, and I think that that was very positive. But – and Eunan has made this point – in a way we were pushing at an open door. Because if we were talking about bringing back into the picture – let’s call it generally the Catholic nationalist soldier – every side could agree. It was winwin. But as we’ve always recognised, the most difficult period of the Decade of Centenaries was going to be these few years. And in that sense, I am less optimistic. I mean, I hope it will happen but that was why I raised the question about British ignorance, because it is a triangular relationship. It’s not just northsouth. And I think that one comes across then… the more ideological narratives which we’ve had both North and South and the importance of unpicking those, the question again – I think Niamh raised it – of the ways in which complex experiences at the time became subsequently simplified in people’s own memories because of what they learned at primary school. Or because of simplified family narratives which then, as it were, fitted the established heroic mythifications of history. Actually unpicking those things and finding the framework, finding the space, in which one can do that and can allow these more complex issues to emerge is not easy.

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President Higgins: I think there’s a huge issue, John, in relation to literature as well. Restoring Seán O’Casey’s insights to their proper place in the entire canon of it all. It’s fascinating that O’Casey has in fact all of what we’ve been discussing, the people who came back maimed from World War I, the different views that people held in relation towards the people who had got fragments of Marxism and so forth. It’s all in O’Casey. But it tells you something to my mind about how O’Casey has not been given the attention on the island of Ireland that he has got for example in the United States by people who are studying the literature of the period. And it’s of enormous significance because you could get locked into the idea of an order lost and great chaos created. There’s an indulgence in that to my mind as a literary bias and I very strongly think that the great tragedies and the great plays that O’Casey wrote are of immense importance. And for example, why the rejection even of The Silver Tassie? They tell us an enormous amount about what were, if you like, in a way middle-class excluding attitudes in relation to just about everything in terms of experience.

The same thing is true in relation to the histories of sexual experience in literature – and that which was attributed as it were to the dangerous lower classes, and particularly women. So, there’s a great deal to go forward on if we were able to bring all these themes from below and also bring in gender, I think. John Bowman: Well, we’ll leave that there, and our thanks to Professor John Horne and to our contributing historians from Edinburgh and Dublin and Cambridge and Belfast. Thank you all. And thanks to the President for the original initiative indeed.

President Michael D. Higgins with participants from Machnamh 100 – Seminar Two An tUachtarán Micheál D. Ó hUigínn le rannpháirtithe Machnamh 100 – Seimineár a Dó

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Dublin Fire Brigade men remove the wounded after the IRA attack on the Custom House, Dublin, 25th of May 1921. The armed men are Auxiliaries.

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Baill de Bhriogáid Dóiteáin Bhaile Átha Cliath ag iompar daoine gonta amach as Teach an Chustaim tar éis ionsaí IRA, Baile Átha Cliath, 25 Bealtaine 1921. Póilíní Cúnta is ea na fir armtha.

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National Library of Ireland www.nli.ie Ref: HOGW 115

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Machnamh 100 President of Ireland Centenary Reflections

Third Seminar Land, Social Class, Gender and the Sources of Violence Recovering Reimagined Futures 27 May 2021

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Opening Words

President Michael D. Higgins

Land, Social Class, Gender and Sources of Violence Recovering Reimagined Futures

President Michael D. Higgins An tUachtarán Micheál D. Ó hUigínn

In choosing themes for today’s Machnamh 100 seminar, I was conscious that in the historiography of the 19th century, dominated as it was by the campaigns for Emancipation, Repeal, Home Rule, the anti-tithe movement, the underlying theme for all such campaigns carried the resonance of land; be it access to land, to security of tenure, response to changes in production, population pressure – it is always there.

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The vocabulary of Irish history in relation to land contains some of the most emotive terms in Irish memory, terms such as ‘enclosure’, ‘occupation’, ‘settlement’, ‘plantation’ ‘eviction’, ‘improvements’. Such resonating cries were all present in the discourse of the 19th century. It is in relation to land that the most harrowing of confrontations in rural Ireland occurred. They would include evictions and the response to them, rallies and actions of the land war, confrontations, boycotts, divisions, and attempts at an eventual alliance between agrarian agitation and parliamentary action which would result in Land Acts that would utterly change Irish society.

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That change in status from insecure tenancy to proprietorship that the Land Acts facilitated had huge implications for those who worked on the land, be it in relation to the inheritance pattern of Post-Famine Ireland, or the agricultural labourers. The position of rural women in Ireland would be changed, especially by the particular form of post-Famine stem family inheritance arrangements that would emerge, as would women’s participation in new patterns of emigration. Beyond particular incidents that were violent, I see in these adjustments, far from harmonious, an institutional source of violence, which an orientation in the historiography has led to its being not given significant account. While this gloss on events is mitigated to some extent by the fulsome accounts of the fusion, late in the century, of agrarian revolt, with the parliamentary activity pursuing Home Rule, as exemplified, for example, by Charles Stewart Parnell and Michael Davitt, from the late 1880s where the grazier phenomenon emerges and prevails, it foretells how new violences in structure are made possible. Each theme of the 19th century – be it land, social class, gender – retained a unique capacity for the folk memory to recall experiences of outrage related to specific places and events. Beyond that, in so many aspects of the brutality known to occur in later conflict, these tensions can be identified in form and inclination in an intensified, indeed often escalated and conjoined form, such as in the atrocities of the War of Independence and, in particular, Ireland’s tragic Civil War. The land is always there as an unresolved issue. Laurence J. Kettle, when publishing The Memoirs of Andrew J. Kettle: Right-Hand Man to Charles S. Parnell in 1958, put on the jacket of that memoir Fintan Lalor’s remark that “the land question contains, and the legislative question does not contain, the material from which victory is manufactured”. While the usage of land changed, and did so profoundly and with consequences in the 19th century in Ireland, there never could be enough land for all who sought it, then or later. Its fixity in supply would influence both society and its conflicts.

There is nothing uniquely Irish in any of this. Land, of course, is an informing theme in violence in Classical and later European literature, be it contemporary or recalled. Conflict over land is not unique to Ireland. The conflicts and violences associated with it, and within it, are, after all, not only a staple in European literature, but in global myth. Such structural violences in relation to land, however, cannot be understood solely in analyses of disputes as to ownership. The different forms and possibilities of ownership mattered. Modes of living and production were important. What life changes were allowed, limited, or defined within homesteads or patches of land carried their own institutional significance, including familial, and class prescriptions and proscriptions, that could be violent in their imposition. Today to discuss such themes among those themes they have chosen themselves, we are fortunate to have with us for this Machnamh third seminar distinguished scholars. The principal address will be given by Dr Margaret O’Callaghan (Queen’s University Belfast), and respondents will be Dr Caitriona Clear (NUI Galway), Professor Linda Connolly (NUI Maynooth), Ms Catriona Crowe (Royal Irish Academy), and Dr John Cunningham (NUI Galway). May I again most sincerely thank Dr John Bowman, historian and broadcaster, for agreeing to chair today’s seminar, having fulfilled such a role for us already by chairing with such excellence our previous two Machnamh seminars in February this year and last December. Our inaugural seminar, held in December 2020, examined the nature and concept of commemoration itself in the contexts of today and of the national and global events of a century ago. Speakers included Professors Ciarán Benson, Michael Laffan, Joep Leerssen and Dr Anne Dolan, and together we set out our intentions for what we are hoping to achieve from this series.

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In February of this year, I hosted a second seminar which focused, inter alia, on Empire, imperial attitudes and responses as they related to circumstances in Ireland. Our reflections included a consideration of the forms and practices of resistance to Empire in Ireland, as well as resistance to nationalism in its different forms and expressions. The main reflection was given by Professor John Horne, Trinity College Dublin, who provided an overview of the international context of the events in 1920s Ireland, including the fall of empires and the particular status of the British Empire. There were responses from Professor Eunan O’Halpin (Trinity College Dublin), Dr Marie Coleman (Queen’s University Belfast), Professor Alvin Jackson (University of Edinburgh), Dr Niamh Gallagher (St Catharine’s College, Cambridge) and myself. The point in our commemorative programme at which we have now arrived is one where we must confront, acknowledge, and come to terms with difficult aspects of what were the informing elements of context of the independence struggle, including a consideration of the forms and sources of violence that emerged, were given expression, including the gradations of violence that were inflicted on women. Other forms of violence were class-based and deeply embedded. Some forms of violence were carried out more generally and impacted on wider society, such as those that were authoritarian, hostile to pluralism, dominating, or collusive to the impersonal structures of bureaucracy being imposed as a sole and inevitable modernity, the aftershocks of which have been felt up to and including our contemporary Ireland. I hope you find today’s seminar interesting, thought-provoking, perhaps even a further reminder of the value of transacting history.

Fáilte Romhaibh Uilig.

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Principal Address

Dr Margaret O’Callaghan, Queen’s University Belfast

Recovering imagined futures in nationalist Ireland, in the summer of 1921 Dr Margaret O’Callaghan An Dr Margaret O’Callaghan

A Uachtaráin, Fellow Speakers – It is a great honour to be asked to participate in Machnamh. I have been asked by the President to reflect on the idea of recovering imagined futures in the Irish independence struggle and its historiography from the perspective of the summer of 1921. My colleagues have been asked to reflect on hope, class and gender, and on freedom as personal for women’s participation in politics. I hope also to provide contexts for their reflections. We know what happened after that summer of the Truce, but the protagonists at the time did not. I am going to look backwards from that crucial summer of 1921 and to reflect on some futures imagined both then and in the decades before.

On 22 June 1921 King George V opened the parliament of Northern Ireland and a month later the military Truce of July 1921 suggested a way for the end of the British-Irish war of the previous two years. Settlement talks between Britain and Dáil representatives were anticipated. Looking back at that summer of 1921 the key shape to see here is that British policy decisions have already put in place an entity called Northern Ireland, prior to any ceasefire, talks, or future accommodation with the rest of Ireland. Éamon De Valera and Michael Collins, Arthur Griffith and William T. Cosgrave, countless volunteers in the field, were preoccupied by the hope of an imminent all-Ireland settlement; but British policy had1 already put in place the reality of a new six county Northern Ireland. It would take a very brave man, Edward Carson, the leader of Ulster Unionism said to Andrew Bonar Law his Conservative ally in May 1921, to take away Ulster’s parliament.2

The Government of Ireland Act 1920

Quoted in Ronan Fanning, Fatal Path; British Government and Irish Revolution1910-1922 (London, 2013), 255.

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At the British cabinet table prior to the July Truce the discussion was of a ‘war to the death’ in Ireland, or a limited settlement. The choices presented were stark. As Ronan Fanning emphasised, in quoting Arthur Balfour in that summer of 1921, ‘we’ve made our Irish policy on all fours with our European policy of self-determination, and which no American can say is unfair’3 ; the point about apparently satisfying international norms on the question of respective group rights was the nub of it.4 American and international opinion of Great Britain could be satisfied by the structures put in place by the Government of Ireland Act of 1920; in foreign policy terms that mattered to London. International horror at home and abroad at reprisals in Ireland was embarrassing for London, but if a coherent narrative of respective self- determinations, however dubious, on the island of Ireland could be told by Britain as a solution to the situation, then the later choice articulated by the last Lord Lieutenant of Ireland FitzAlan- ‘now it must be peace or real war and no fooling’, could be made.5 Éamon De Valera’s push for an assault on the Custom House in May 1921 was part of his preparation for the expectation of imminent talks – a costly one. It reflected his desire for the Irish side not to be presented in peace talks as guerrilla gunmen as depicted by British propaganda. Ernie O’Malley and other men and women fighting in pursuit of the Republic, failed to apprehend or understand the new actuality of the border, until some of them fought on the ground, in what became the territory of Northern Ireland. In 2021 the Irish state and others commemorate aspects of the Irish past of one hundred years ago; we recognise that commemorations are traditionally used by states to glorify their origins. What is being attempted by the Irish state and separately though relatedly by the President is a more innovative approach- an attempt in this Decade of Centenaries to acknowledge the past in its diversity and complexity, while exploring and reflecting on a national narrative.

The desire too is to show empathy to those who opposed what the state retrospectively recognises as the national revolution, and to address the endless recurrence of division around partition as an issue in every generation. The President characterizes this as ethical commemoration or ethical remembering. We remember but we also forget. As Patrick Modiano in the novella recently published in English as Invisible Ink put it, we can’t remember without forgetting. Social remembering or commemoration is always a process of negotiation in society. No living person now actually remembers what happened in 1921. What we call our memory of it is a complex mixture of what we have read, what we have heard, how the social and community relations and media we are immersed in choose at a particular time to represent that past. Our memories are socially and culturally constructed. History aspires to be something different- an attempt to explain what happened and how and why it happened and to whom. This of course raises questions about where the historian is coming from ideologically and how their ideology informs the history they write. The particular history of the border drawn in Ireland by the British imperial government in the Government of Ireland Act 1920, the consequences of that divide, the Northern Troubles, the debate on Irish historical revisionism, reflections on the shared capital of Irish political and cultural nationalism since the 1970s: these and other considerations shape the framing of commemoration by the Government and President today. 6 Shaped by the post-1969 Troubles in Northern Ireland which those over a certain age have lived through and the consequent historical cultural wars about commemoration since the 1970s, much of this legacy is not apparent or relevant for most people under a certain age in contemporary Irish society. Commemorations are easy for societies where the outcome of the past is not contested. But in modern Ireland, because of the fall-out from partition’s legacies, history is and has been the raw meat of politics and of our recent conflict.

3 Ibid.,254 4

For then-contemporary debates on the rights of nationalities, and of the rights of majorities and of minorities, see Margaret O’Callaghan, ‘Genealogies of partition; history, history-writing and ‘the Troubles’ in Ireland’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 2006,9:4,619-634,DOI: 10.1080/13698230600942091, and by the same author ‘Old Parchment and Water’; the Boundary Commission of 1925 and the Copperfastening of the Irish Border. Bullan; an Irish Studies Journal, 5(2), 2755.

See Keith Middlemas (Ed), Thomas Jones Whitehall Diary, Vol111, Ireland 1918-1925 (London, 1971) 63-72 for a report of the British cabinet meeting of 12 May 1921 discussing the options – a truce or martial law.

Margaret O’Callaghan, ‘Reframing 1916 after 1969; Irish governments, a National Day of Reconciliation, and the politics of commemoration in the 1970’s’, Richard S. Grayson and Fearghal McGarry (Eds), Remembering 1916; the Easter Rising, the Somme and the politics of memory in modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2016), 207-223.

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It all relates back to the architectures put in place in that summer of 1921 when the beginnings of the process of partition took place and a Truce beckoned to a settlement. The partition of Ireland was not an act but a process.7 The shape that commemorations take tells us more about contemporary society than it does about the past it seeks to evoke. Partly because of the revelations about the treatment of women and the children born to them outside marriage in twentieth century Ireland, because of the ‘Waking the Feminists’ movement driven by women’s outrage at the Abbey Theatre’s marginalisation of women in commissioning plays in 2016, this decade of centenaries has had an unprecedented focus on women. The commemorative version of the past is always viewed through the rear-view mirror of a future that did not exist and was unlived at the time of that past- in this case the shadow of the treatment of women in independent Ireland. Social change in Ireland has been driven by women’s issues and the need for that change came from the nature of the post-revolutionary society. That commemorative ‘take from the present’ was particularly evident in the 2019 RTÉ – broadcast television series Resistance that focussed on women in the revolution. Apart from placing women at the centre of the action, it addressed the pregnancy of one of the key figures, an unmarried woman. It is inconceivable that the Irish media in 1966 – the 50th anniversary of the Rising – would have wanted to cover such issues.8 In the 1960’s James Connolly was the figure the republican left wished to focus upon, while more pious forces focussed on a treacled saintly version of Pádraig Pearse. From an historian’s point of view – trying to work out what actually happened at the time –Tom and Kathleen Clarke might have been more captivating and revealing figures to focus upon.

We know from the Bureau of Military History and the Pensions archives that many fought in the Irish revolution, but most people did not. No revolution in the world is so minutely documented. The revolutionary generation were brought up in the shadow of the revolutionary Land War period from the early 1880s that changed the ownership and class composition of rural Ireland. The providentialism of the Irish poor of the countryside has been seen as partly a consequence of famine trauma. The extraordinary rate of emigration, the social cessation of formerly common subdivision of rented land, and changed inheritance patterns, combined to create highly class-stratified rural communities. Their traditional Irish forms of Catholicism, around holy wells, places of pilgrimage, patterns and party wakes, had been ripped apart relentlessly, suppressed by the new monolithic and powerful Catholic Church after Paul Cullen, Archbishop of Dublin, a church which acted as brokers with the British state and enforcers of a hyper-pious sexual morality. Roger Casement in 1907 mocked the time John Redmond spent in the House of Commons negotiating the exclusion of certain ‘conventual establishments’ from British state inspections.9 The Catholic Church was well embedded with the prevailing structures of power before independence. The legislative and political delays on Home Rule in the years after Gladstone- from 1893, created a new, small, more radicalised and impatient nationalist generation in Ireland.10 I teach a course in Queen’s University called the The Politics of Irish literature and we read much of the extraordinary material produced by advanced and sceptical nationalist writers and theorists of the 1890s, 1900s and 1910s – journalists, poets, novelists, historians, polemicists. These works are seen and studied in the contexts of the writings of both Yeats and Joyce, and Yeats and Joyce are read in their contexts. Many of that generation were politicized during anti-Boer War, anti-imperial protests and commemorations of the 1798 rebellion in 1898.

Margaret O’Callaghan ’Partition was no accident’, The Irish Times Special supplement 1921 Truce and Treaty, 25 May 2021, 18-19.

Mary Daly and O’Callaghan, 1916 in 1966; commemorating the Easter Rising (Dublin,2007)

Roger Casement to Stopford Brooke, 27 June 1907 (National Library of Ireland, Alice Stopford Green Papers, MSS 10,464(2)).

See the work of Frank Callanan, in particular The Parnell Split 1890-91 (Cork, 1993) for a brilliant recreation of the Parnell split and its idiom. Recovering the imagined but lost Parnellite future shaped aspects of the work of both William Butler Yeats, James Joyce and their generations.

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The Boer War of course also strengthened a new invigorated unionism and a new imperial British vision.11 1916 was shaped by a small dedicated group who had a wider sympathetic cohort derived from those older who had waited for Home Rule for the decades since 1886. As the Tory project of killing Home Rule by kindness appeared to proceed apace in the 1890’s fear of successful total absorption into a British imperial project, cultural no less than political, drove many of the key figures to revolution in the twentieth century. Clearly there would have been no British- Irish war from 1919 to 1921 had 1916 not happened. It is also unlikely that anything other than the most restrictive form of Home Rule would otherwise have been on offer. Roger Casement wrote to his friend Alice Stopford Green in 1906 that he was convinced the Liberal government never intended to facilitate Home Rule.12 Alice Stopford Green, daughter and granddaughter of important senior clerical figures in the Church of Ireland, and widow of the then-famous liberal historian J.R. Green, was a key figure in the events of the years leading to revolution and afterwards. Éamon De Valera when asked years later to recommend a history of Ireland suggested hers. Her books were best-selling in Ireland from 1908 onwards.13 They countered the histories of establishment historians, mostly of Unionist politics, who endlessly iterated the Tory line that Ireland was not and never had been a nation except through English conquest. That seems scarcely believable today but it was the daily mantra of politics and propaganda at the time. Stopford Green funded the School of Irish Studies in Dublin and paid for most of the guns in the Howth gunrunning. In pushing for revolution Casement said ‘ Africa will still be Africa in 100 years’ time, but Ireland will not be Ireland’. In saying that he was expressing the fears of the core revolutionaries that Ireland was perhaps on the brink of being finally successfully integrated into the United Kingdom before the World War.

By the summer of 1921, as the new parliament was opened in Belfast on June 22, many of those who had protested against the prospect of Ulster exclusion before the War were dead: Casement himself, who had tried to organise an Ulster protestant resistance to the idea of Ulster exclusion, Sean MacDiarmid the former Belfast tram-conductor with who Casement had met in Francis Bigger’s house Ard Righ on the Antrim Road in Belfast with Bulmer Hobson. All the signatories of the Rising were dead. The Truce came to the new leadership cadre who had emerged. The radical impulse that lead to revolution had been started by the brilliant young women Alice Milligan and ‘Ethna Carbery’ in their Belfast popular newspaper publication The Shan Van Vocht in 1896. The focus on Irish history that so drove the analysis of the revolutionaries was inscribed in their journal. Arthur Griffith took over their subscription list for The United Irishman his popular print in which almost every active revolutionary was involved and which Maud Gonne part-financed. Almost everyone with radical advanced nationalist politics in Ireland read Griffith’s papers before the First World War.14 Futures were imagined for Ireland before the First World War15, but the imagined Home Rule legislative future had been a receding reality until the Parliament Act of 1911. Liberal ministers did not wish to introduce a Home Rule Bill for Ireland, as they made clear when they won power in 1906.16 The Liberal government legislated for Home Rule in 1911 only because the changed powers of the House of Lords, put in place for purely British reasons, mandated it, and they needed Irish votes to stay in power.17

See the work of Alvin Jackson for developments in Irish and then Ulster Unionism in these years. See in particular The Ulster Party; Irish Unionists in the House of Commons 1884-1911 (Oxford,1989) and Home Rule; an Irish History,1800-2000 (Oxford, 2003)

Roger Casement to Alice Stopford Green, 8 September 1906. Mss 10,464 (2) Cited in Margaret O’Callaghan, Ireland, Empire and British Foreign Policy; Roger Casement and the First World War, Breac, 2016.

Her most popular work was her first publication The making of Ireland and its undoing 1200-1600 (London, 1908).

For a detailed analysis of what else they read see Deirdre McMahon, The Moynihan Brothers in Peace and War, their new Ireland 1908-1918 ( Dublin,2004)

R.F. Foster has shown the expectations of some of those of this generation in Vivid Faces; The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890-1923 (London, 2015). The references in this work indicate the large range of primary material now edited and the range of figures for whom we now have biographies. See too Senia Paseta, Irish nationalist women 1900-1918 (London, 2013)

The Liberals did attempt to introduce the Irish Council Bill in 1907.

See James Doherty, Irish liberty, British democracy; the third Home Rule crisis, 1909-14 (Cork, 2019) where he convincingly argues that popular Liberalism had stronger ties and deeper commitments to the Irish alliance and to Home Rule as a part of a spectrum of progressive causes than this Liberal leadership perspective – excepting Henry Campbell-Bannerman and John Morley – suggests.

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John Redmond got an arguably unworkable bill because the Liberal leadership needed Irish votes to stay in government. That was not the fault of Redmond, nor was it the fault of the Irish Party; that was the limit of their leverage. The scale of Ulster resistance and British Conservative Party and establishment support for it from the Ulster Covenant onwards strongly indicated that some accommodation for Ulster would be found by the British cabinet. This is clear from the interventions of Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George from within the cabinet when they attempted early on to make some special provision for Ulster, and from the actions of all levels of the Conservative Party and the British Army from the Curragh mutiny onwards. The Buckingham Palace conferences show the complexity of the ties that bound politicians across party and the limited scale of the Home Rule proposal on offer. The summer of 1921 was when that Unionist resistance came to full fruition, in the opening of a hitherto unimagined Northern Ireland parliament with the King’s speech.18 The meanings of revolution are gradually constructed – they are remembered or forgotten. Yeats in his poem September 1916 bids to memorialise the 1916 Rising and asks ‘was it needless death after all’? In writing this poem at Maud Gonne’s prompting he reassumed his role as the Irish national poet. He reassumed that role in his crucial use of the term ‘our’ – ‘our part to murmur name upon name as a mother names her child, when sleep at last has come on limbs that had run wild’. In a sequence of poems he reflects uneasily upon the transformative power of their actions through the transformative power of his words. Images of Mac Donagh’s bony thumb, the image of watering the rose tree, are presented as politically dynamic and are rendered so by the commemorative act of the poetry. Yeats was a political genius of a kind. He was not sure that he liked the actions of those he had formerly met ‘at close of day’ here and there on the streets of Dublin, but he understood and added potency to the transformative power of the action of the rebel leaders and their executions and the politicization of a new generation through those actions.

Modern Ireland has difficulty with all of this but the historical record does show clearly that public opinion was decisively shifted by the actions and executions of 1916 and its almost immediate commemoration and immortalisation, in which Yeats played his own role. This is partly reflected in the results of the 1918 election as old loyalties face and are replaced by others in support of an imagined future of freedom. Why did the Irish revolution return to the gun in 1919? A series of British cabinet and Dublin Castle political decisions radicalised public opinion in Ireland from the attempted introduction of conscription in the early summer of 1918. Irish men had fought for Redmond. The Gallipoli campaign disillusioned many of Dublin’s middle class as they saw their sons go to death there ‘Better to die neath an Irish sky than at Suvla or Sud el Bar’.19 The Irish public was a spectrum from committed Unionists through liberal Home Rulers and Redmondite Home Rulers, to committed advocates of complete independence. The Irish Convention of 1917-18 had shown that while southern Irish Unionists wanted a compromise in an all-Ireland frame, northern unionists had dug in on the demand for separate treatment.20 Though Lloyd George had offered an immediate form of limited Home Rule to 26 counties after the Easter Rising it was clear that Irish work on the Home Front and Redmondite sacrifices counted for little in British political eyes from the end of the war. Redmond’s imagined future of a new dispensation between Irish unionists and nationalists who had fought together was just that – an imagined future; never to be. The Marquis of Londonderry, later Education Minister in the new Northern Ireland, said that the Ulster Unionist lack of acknowledgement of that shared experience and sacrifice on the European battlefields disappointed him. The so-called German plot in late 1918 alienated moderate nationalist public opinion and further radicalised those who had been earlier interned in Frongoch and were now arrested again. Lloyd George was busy. In Paris and elsewhere. Ireland could wait. But it didn’t. It radicalised.

For an analysis of the Jan Smuts influenced conciliatory speech delivered by the King see Nicholas Mansergh, The unresolved question; the Anglo-Irish settlement and its undoing, 1912-72 (London, 1991) which, with Fanning’s Fatal Path, remains the currently definitive work on the British-Irish settlement.

Lyrics from Canon Charles O’Neill, The Foggy Dew.

20 R.B.McDowell, The Irish Convention 1917-1918 (Dublin, 1970)

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That Walter Long, a political anachronism even before the war, was given the chairing of the committee on Ireland after the war was astonishing. Or perhaps not. The high political decision by the Tory-dominated cabinet in London to greet with repression the result of the 1918 Irish election and the establishment of Dáil Éireann was tactical. The best account of British thinking in this period is still Charles Townshend’s book The British campaign in Ireland.21 The extraordinary number of diaries and memoirs from Dublin Castle officials- Mark Sturgis22, Ormonde de Winter23, later written accounts by Andy Cope24, mean that we can see very clearly into their political calculations at different times. There is no mystery about what British politicians and officials intended by the summer of 1921. The intentions are documented on file and in publications. Punishing rebel Ireland after the war had been subsidiary to a policy of providing Ulster’s supporters within the Tory-dominated coalition cabinet with an acceptable palliative. Lloyd George’s continuation in power depended upon keeping his Tory allies happy. The palliative was the Government of Ireland Act of 1920. The time-line of policy roll-out is extraordinary. While the undeclared British war with nationalist Ireland proceeded from 1919 onwards details of the Government of Ireland Act 1920 were being drawn up. Called the fourth Home Rule Bill it had negated the premises of earlier Home Rule Bills and is better described as an act for the division of Ireland.25 The imagined Unionist future of remaining in an all-Ireland within the United Kingdom that Edward Carson had sought was apparently impossible, as it was clear by the summer of 1921 that the cabinet or some of it had made its choice.

Extraordinarily, Arthur Balfour who had fought Parnellism in the eighteen eighties and built Carson’s career in that process, was still strategically and tactically core to government decision-making.26 His later lines are telling ‘Behind Irish politics, behind the moderates, there is the real force making for change and that force always makes for independence, which this cabinet won’t give’.27 Women were active in the revolution and the revolutionary process. Many had cut their political teeth in the long and bitter war for the franchise only finally conceded with great reluctance after the war. The women of Inghinidhe na hÉireann, those who had been in the Gaelic League, in Cumann na mBan, the Stopford women, Albinia Brodrick the sister of the former leader of southern Unionists Lord Midleton, had joined other women like Kathleen Lynn. Irish Protestant women, many from Unionist backgrounds disproportionately joined the revolutionaries. The subscription lists for collections in Tralee shows the names of countless local Kerry women who subscribed from the US. Dulcibella Barton, cousin of Erskine Childers was like her brother Robert, who was to sign the Treaty, an advanced nationalist, but the rest of her family were Unionist, and she paid a high social price for her loyalties.28 Alice Milligan had no money and was forced to return to the support of her brother in ‘the north’.29 She described being in a partitioned Northern Ireland as like being in a prison. But as the Truce beckoned a new jockeying for position was in place. Mary MacSwiney was very close to De Valera, as were some other revolutionary women, but she was reluctantly in the US at this time. As the Truce settled it was the so-called fighting men who moved into the front-line of politics.

Charles Townshend, The British campaign in Ireland 1919-1921; the development of political and military policies (Oxford, 1975)

Michael Hopkinson (ed.) The Last days of Dublin Castle; the diaries of Mark Sturgis (Dublin, 1999)

Ormonde de l’Epee Winter, British Intelligence in Ireland; the Final Reports (Irish Narratives) (Cork,2002)

For some interesting insights into Cope in his own words see St John Ervine, Craigavon; Ulsterman (London, 1949) 405-10

25 Fanning, Fatal Path, 203-04 for Lloyd George’s delegation of the details of coming up with the two parliaments to Walter Long and Philip Kerr. 26

For Balfour’s earlier career in Ireland see Margaret O’ Callaghan, British high politics and a nationalist Ireland; criminality, land and the law under Forster and Balfour (Cork, 1994), 104-44.

27 Fanning, Fatal Path, 254 28

See Bureau of Military History entries for Dulcibella Barton and Alice Stopford Green’s nieces. A tenth of BMH statements are made by women. See too Leon Ó Broin, Protestant nationalists in revolutionary Ireland ; the Stopford connection (Dublin, 1985)

Catherine Morris, Alice Milligan and the Irish cultural revival (Dublin, 2012)

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The fact that women now had the vote did not mean the addition of a large number of active female names to the selection lists of candidates for election in 1921. The names of male candidates filled the nomination spaces. Alice Stopford Green had sold her house in London and moved to Dublin after Casement was hanged. She wrote anti-partition propaganda and travelled to Belfast to stay in contact with F.J. Bigger. Her house on St. Stephen’s Green was a hub of revolutionary activity. Griffith came to her for advice. Maire Comerford as her secretary was active. Alice Green’s niece in Foxrock provided a safe house for the Dáil cabinet to meet – her Bureau of Military History Witness Statement describes Collins stacking his bicycle outside her door. Numerous other women in the city were similarly engaged. In Unionist Ulster we can see political strategy revealed most clearly through diaries and letters of women who were close to the power brokers, drive much of the politics but had limited public roles. Who could imagine in the summer of 1921 that within a year Griffith and Collins would be dead? That a new cohort would die after the Treaty of December 1921, that the aspired for Republic with its radical demands would never be, or never as a thirty two country entity? Conor Cruise O’Brien has documented the class wound of what became the new dispensation to the families of those like his own.30 His aunt Hannah Sheehy Skeffington did carve out a future for herself as a radical republican feminist much excoriated by her nephew, but her sister Mary Sheehy who had married Tom Kettle had imagined a future she saw denied. Some of the revolutionaries in due course produced their own elite – often Irish-speaking, respectable and comfortable. Class change was perhaps exaggerated by the nineteen thirties, suggesting a transition from those educated by the Jesuits and Holy Ghost fathers who had expected to inherit a Home Rule Ireland to some of the Christian Brothers boys who ruled instead. But De Valera was himself a product of the Holy Ghost Fathers. In the novel Amongst Women John McGahern shows the father as a force of post-revolutionary disappointment – oppressing and quashing the next generation.

In that summer of 1921, still carried on by the hopes of a republic, many did not see the hard fates that lay ahead of some of them – exile, poverty, and loneliness. Some never got jobs again. Some fell into poverty and failure remembering the four glorious years when they were young and free and fought for Ireland. Outside church and state, free and on their own march, many of these men closed the door on their former female comrades. We look back now on that summer of 1921 and find it hard to understand that most nationalists at the time refused to believe that the partition effected in that summer could be permanent. Those who had run the Dungannon Clubs in 1907 and the northern revolutionaries around Ard Righ in Belfast did not believe that the Tyrone of George Sigerson and Patrick McCartan and Dennis McCullough would be permanently politically severed from the rest of Ireland. Sigerson’s daughter, Dora Sigerson Shorter never saw any future at all. Southern Unionists were uncertain but willing to try to accommodate whatever emerged. The writer Barbara Fitzgerald, daughter of John Allen Fitzgerald Gregg, Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin expressed the fears of those for whom the loyalties by which they lived appeared to have abandoned them. Once ‘the Truce’ was put in place in July all conservative forces in the country were anxious to maintain it. The summer soldiers joined uppeople who had not fought in the previous two years but signed up as Trucileers. The Truce provided an opportunity for some to settle old scores, agrarian and other. In ‘the north’, or rather the just-established jurisdiction of Northern Ireland, the Truce barely registered. The Northern Volunteers in fact became more active over that summer.31 All of this potentially strengthened James Craig’s hand in his dealings with Lloyd George and later Churchill in demanding a full security apparatus which at least on paper Northern Ireland was never intended to have. The role of Sir Henry Wilson in getting backing for A, B and C Specials was important. Basil Brooke’s push for a special constabulary in Fermanagh in these months is crucial.32

Conor Cruise O’Brien, States of Ireland (London, 1972).

See Christopher Magill, Political conflict in East Ulster,1920-22 Revolution and reprisal (OODBRIDGE,2020)>

Brian Barton, Brookeborough: the making of a Prime Minister (Belfast, 1988)

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Northern nationalists, southern unionists, women, the rural and urban poor all to some degree lost the peace in different ways – the futures they had imagined and hoped for were not to be. Kathleen Clarke who had spotted and hired Michael Collins, who had all the documents to keep the revolution running after the executions in 1916, lost her husband, her brother, and miscarried a pregnancy she never told Tom Clarke about. Back near the turn of the century after over a decade in prison Clarke, years older than her, known in prison as Wilson, amnestied due to Redmond’s campaigns and returned to recover with her family, the Daly’s in Limerick had, much to the family’s initial horror, married her. Her fascinating autobiography was not published in her lifetime because it was assumed that she really did not matter very much at all. Of the brilliant female writers and analysts in these circles at that time only Dorothy Macardle later succeeded in print.33 What appears to matter in that 1921 summer of the Truce is who will negotiate with Lloyd George? It seems clear that though the women had been the equals of the men in the struggle they were not to be included in the negotiations. And if you look at the nominations for safe Sinn Féin seats in the May 1921 elections you will see the pattern begin to emerge- very few women at all. We have the gift of knowing what happened. In the summer of 1921 none of the actors knew where the future would bring them. In the extraordinary language of the Nestor section of James Joyce’s Ulysses, a book concerned with all of these questions, there is that powerful riff on what are called the ‘ousted possibilities’. ‘Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted’. Recovering imagined futures from that summer of 1921 takes us back as well as forward and the Irish revolution has to be seen in the space from 1880 to 1925; it is from that timeframe we can make sense of the summer of 1921 and all of that which it presages.34

Leann Lane, Dorothy Macardle (Dublin, 2019)

This essay covers a long time-frame, from the mid- nineteenth century onwards. I have read hundreds of primary texts and published works on this period and cannot list them all here. I apologise for not listing brilliant works I have read and been informed by. I can only state in my own defence that I have not cited most of my own work on the period either.

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Respondent

Ms Catriona Crowe, Archivist

Recovering Archival Futures Ms Catriona Crowe Catriona Crowe, Uasal

My thanks to the President for inviting me to be part of Machnamh, a thoughtful, reflective set of explorations of vital issues during our Decade of Centenaries, valuable in so many ways, particularly when an unnatural pause for thought has been imposed by Covid-19 and the attendant closure of archives and libraries. The theme for this session of Machnamh is “Recovering Imagined Futures”. We are living out, at present, a fundamental disruption to our various imagined futures by a world-historical event, a global pandemic, which has wiped out the actual futures of millions of people around the world, and created futures dogged by illhealth, unemployment and poverty for millions more. It gives us some idea of how a war-weary Europe must have felt in 1918 when the flu pandemic arrived to destroy so many fragile imagined futures.

I have been an archivist for most of my working life. Archivists deal with the imagined futures of documents, many of them now electronic and in some peril. We have to imagine the potential futures of these documents in terms of their usefulness to scholars, genealogists and increasingly, to the general public. These emphases have changed over time to include new disciplines like social, gender, cultural and labour history, and archivists have to try to keep pace with these disciplines, and to remember that the material we deem worthy of preservation now may have many uses in the future that we cannot now imagine. The raw materials of huge statistical record sets like census records have become much more important over the last forty years, as family history has become an absorbing study for many individuals and scholars; the records were created to provide a statistical base for understanding trends in population, occupation, household composition, living conditions and education.

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These findings were and are, theoretically at least, supposed to provide a solid basis for national and local planning strategies, for educational provision and for fair distribution of electoral rights, among other things. The statistics generated by analysis of the forms we all fill out every 10 years are sufficient to provide that information. However, the huge interest in genealogy and family history which has grown over the last forty years has produced a new focus on the actual household returns made for each census, and a concerted effort by archivists to make them available, often through mass digitisation projects. The success of our own digitised 1901 and 1911 censuses bears testimony to the public embrace of records which shed light on their family pasts, and to the new tool of digitisation as a transformational aid to dissemination of archives to the broadest possible readership, what has been called “the democratisation of archives.”1 Margaret O’Callaghan has given us a scintillating overview of 1921, that crucial year in defining the futures of both parts of this island. I want to respond to her thoughtprovoking paper by amplifying the story of the archives which allow us to understand the period. All historical scholarship depends on the availability and accessibility of archives, the raw materials which allow us to know what we know about the past. The two biggest archival collections which have recently shaped our understanding of the revolutionary period are the Bureau of Military History collection2 and the Military Service Pensions files.3 The Bureau is the oral history of the period from 1913 to 1921; the Pensions files are the record of those who applied for pensions for active service in the various conflicts from 1916 to 1923. The release of the Bureau papers in 2003, and the online release of the Witness Statements in 2012, meant that the voices of 1773 people who played a part in 1916 and the War of Independence were available for the first time, and they were used by historians like Fearghal McGarry, Lucy MacDiarmaid, Roy Foster, Diarmaid Ferriter and Charles Townshend to really good effect.4

The Military Service Pensions files began to be released online in 2014, and their ongoing release continues, bringing us not just a comprehensive account of various engagements during the conflicts, but a kind of shadow history of poverty, ill-health and disappointment in the first decades of the new independent state, as people wrote heartbreaking letters seeking even small sums of money in recognition of their service. Ireland has one of the best-documented revolutions in the world. It was very important, as we approached the Decade of Centenaries, that this documentation would be available to inform our understanding of the anniversaries we would be marking. And now that it is in the public domain, this material provides rich sources for the period which can be mined well into the future. The wonderful Military Archives website has the digitised versions of both collections available online, free to access. One of the interesting features of this round of commemorations, which as Margaret says, always reflect society’s current preoccupations, is a new interest in victims of conflict. For example, Joe Duffy’s work on children killed during the 1916 Rising brought us a new lens through which to view that event – one that focused on the collateral damage inflicted on non-combatants.5 Many of us wanted to complicate the narrative of these years, and that has been done successfully, often due to the availability of the new archives I’ve mentioned. Because we now have the pensions files, we can discover the story of 16 year-old Bridget McKane, accidentally shot dead through her front door, off Moore Street, by rebels fleeing the burning GPO in 1916. Her father, Thomas, put in a claim for compensation 20 years later, when such claims became possible. He got £100, about €5000 in today’s values. This session of Machnamh focuses on the issues of gender, land and class. Gender and women’s history is thriving here in Ireland, particularly relating to women in the revolutionary period. The two major archives I’ve mentioned have plenty of material relating to individual women, like Grace Gifford, Louise Gavan Duffy, Constance Markievicz and Rosie Hackett.

See http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie

See https://www.militaryarchives.ie/collections/online-collections/bureau-of-military-history-1913-1921

See https://www.militaryarchives.ie/collections/online-collections/military-service-pensions-collection-1916-1923

See, for example Charles Townshend, Easter 1916; the Irish Rebellion (2005); Fearghal McGarry, The Rising: Ireland, Easter 1916 (2010); Roy Foster, Vivid Faces; the Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890 – 1923 (2015); Diarmaid Ferriter, A Nation and not a Rabble: The Irish Revolution 1913-23 (2015) and Lucy MacDiarmid, At Home in the Revolution (2016).

Joe Duffy, Children of the Rising (2015)

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But they also shed light on women who were not well-known, like mothers and sisters applying for pensions on foot of the loss or disability of husbands, brothers and fathers, laying out pitiful stories of poverty, sickness and resentment at the resolute determination of the state not to give money to those whose loved ones had given their lives or their health to the struggle for independence. When considering archives relating to women, we should remember the records of the religious orders who ran health, education and welfare services here well before 1922, and with added power and control thereafter. The recent report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes has reminded us that congregational archives contain vital information about tens of thousands of women and children who passed through these homes, as well as Magdalen laundries and industrial schools. They also contain records of the nuns who ran these institutions, nearly all of whom came from Irish families and communities. The fact that these essential archives are largely closed to researchers is unacceptable, considering the close relationship between church and state for most of the twentieth century. They should be public records, in acknowledgment of the congregations’ almost total control over essential state services, and their close and oppressive relationship with large numbers of our citizens. In this regard, the testimonies of survivors of Mother and Baby Homes, given to the recent Commission, form an extremely valuable sample of the experiences of tens of thousands of women and children who went through these homes, and whose lives are still being adversely impacted by those experiences. It is to be hoped that the backup tapes of their testimony, luckily discovered to be viable after the destruction of the originals, can form the nucleus of an archive, in consultation with the survivors themselves, which can be used for scholarship and for the education of our young citizens in former practices of our state and churches which may seem unimaginable today.6 Margaret referred to the land question, which from the 1880s on, changed the ownership and class composition of rural Ireland.

We have to remember that between 1890 and 1922, 75% of the land of Ireland was transferred from landlord to tenant, a quiet revolution which followed a noisy and successful Land War. Land was always the big issue, from the huge dispossessions of the 17th century onwards. The fact that the problem was solved so quickly at the beginning of the twentieth century is both fascinating and problematic. The Land Acts created a rural society of conservative Catholic small-holders with a new-found interest in respectability and sexual probity, both of which bore down most heavily on women, and had a lot to do with the establishment and maintenance of Mother and Baby Homes. The records of the Irish Land Commission, a vast collection spanning the 16th to the 20th century, are still, inexplicably, not available to the public. Their absence means that we cannot fully understand the creation of the modern state; these records are the last piece of the archival jigsaw relating to the revolutionary period, and what went before and came after it. The collection also contains vast amounts of genealogical material, in the Fair Rent registers from the 1880s and 90s, which are a partial replacement for the 1881 and 1891 census records, destroyed during World War 1, because of a paper shortage. The original deeds to the transferred estates, some going back to the 16th century, and a wonderful collection of leases from the Church Temporalities Commission, dating to the 18th century, are two other constituent parts of this enormous collection, which merited its own custom-built archival repository at the back of the Land Commission offices on Merrion St., in what is now the Merrion Hotel. When the Land Commission offices were sold in the 1990s, a rescue operation for the records had to be mounted to prevent them from being destroyed. They were preserved, only to be made inaccessible. The Land Commission records should, under the terms of the National Archives Act, be available to the public. Perhaps the Decade of Centenaries may provide a reason to insist on their release. There are decades of scholarship to be fruitfully carried out on these vital records. And while we’re at it, it would be wonderful to have a slightly early release of the 1926 census, the first held by the new Irish state, and currently closed until 2026.

https://www.gov.ie/en/publication/d4b3d-final-report-of-the-commission-of-investigation-into-mother-and-baby-homes/

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Class is an underexplored issue in Irish historiography. Labour historians, like Emmet O’Connor, Francis Devine, Padraig Yeates and Therese Moriarty, and John Cunningham have valiantly tried to illuminate our ambiguous and elided past with regard to class.7 The Irish Labour History Museum and Archive is the repository for many collections of trade union records and the private papers of individuals active in the labour movement. This is a very important archive of material which reflects the aspirations and activities of large numbers of our citizens. The trade union movement was, and to a sadly dwindling extent still is, the biggest and most effective civic society organisation in history, where working people could choose their own leadership and advance their legitimate interests. Yet the Labour History Archive receives minuscule funding from the state. The labour movement played a crucial part in the revolutionary period, from James Connolly’s writings and actions, to the Citizen Army’s involvement in the 1916 Rising, to the anti-conscription strike of 1918, to Tom Johnson’s draft of the Democratic Programme for the first Dáil, to the fascinating Limerick Soviet of early 1919. The tension between nationalism and socialism was one which continued after the establishment of the new state. Labour’s long wait to achieve some political power in government is a story we all know. But we don’t know enough about the ordinary men and women who drove the Trade Union movement on the ground. The state gives a richly deserved annual subsidy to the Irish Architectural Archive, a splendid organisation with an appropriately beautiful building on Merrion Square. But the Archive which holds the records of thousands of people, engaged in democratic pursuit of economic equality and badly needed protection for the rights of working people, gets no such subsidy. Labour, it seems, must wait, even when it comes to its valuable history. We are now in the middle of the period reflecting on the most turbulent aspects of the War of Independence, laid out so concisely and clearly for us by Margaret’s keynote paper. The establishment of the state of Northern Ireland, the burning of the Custom House, the Truce, the Treaty negotiations and debates: these will be our preoccupations in 2021.

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Questions of violent opposition to Britain, its destructive response, and the cessation of both one hundred years ago, the copper-fastening of partition, the Treaty debates, perhaps the most consequential debates on the shape of the country that we’ve ever had, and the looming prospect of civil war, will keep us all busy for the next while. There is value in anniversaries; without significant state support and funding for the Decade of Centenaries, and in particular for the release and accessibility of crucial archives, we would not have got to this point with an excellent record on events like the state commemoration of the Easter Rising, numerous valuable academic conferences, publications which have exceeded expectations, informative and accessible TV documentaries, and arts events like Paul Muldoon’s 100 Years A Nation or Anu Productions’ These Rooms, which used poetry, music, drama and dance to illuminate, respectively, the entire history of Ireland, and the North King Street massacre of 1916. The Expert Advisory Group to the government, composed of historians and archivists, has offered creative and constructive advice on the course to be taken during these years. Its members have also staunchly promoted the archival project. Fintan O’Toole said in 2016 that the Irish people now only trusted the Army and the Arts, because of the exemplary behaviour of both in the 1916 commemoration events. I think he would concede that others also deserve trust – our historians, archivists, museum curators, teachers and local committees who have played a significant role in commemorations of specific events. For example, the commemoration of the Soloheadbeg ambush in early 1919 involved descendants of the two policemen killed in that ambush, and was impressive in its solemnity and dignity. The Machnamh initiative is a valuable part of our intricate, many-layered, illuminating response to the events of 100 years ago. The pause in our lives inflicted by Covid 19 has given us a chance to interrogate and reflect on those events, and Machnamh has provided a welcome space for the fruits of those reflections.

See for example: Francis Devine, Organising History; a Centenary of SIPTU (2009) and Padraig Yeates’ four definitive books about Dublin from 1913 to 1923.

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13th of December, 1920. Photographs like this are printed around the world. The British government suffers negative international coverage, although some London papers merely write of “mystery” fires in Cork.

13 Nollaig, 1920. Tá grianghraif den chineál seo le feiceáil i gcló ar fud an domhain. Tharraing siad droch-chlú ar rialtas na Breataine, cé go ndearna roinnt nuachtán i Londain beag is fiú den scéal agus iad ag tagairt do ‘thinte rúndiamhracha’.

Photo

National Library of Ireland www.nli.ie HOGW 100/W.D. Hogan

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Respondent

Dr John Cunningham, NUI Galway

Recovering Imagined Futures: A Spirit of Revolution? Dr John Cunningham An Dr John Cunningham

In 1967, Martin O’Sullivan, a retired Athlone train driver, contributed two articles to the Irish Independent. Martin was originally from Galway, and he grew up in a railway family in the shadow of the Augustinian church in Middle Street before joining the Midland Great Western Railway himself.1

If the trade union embargo had a major impact on the conflict in 1920, it did not have the same impact on historical narratives, and nearly fifty years later Martin O’Sullivan concluded his account in the Independent by expressing his bewilderment that ‘those important events were not recorded in any recent history of Ireland’.3

In the articles, he discussed his part in the munitions embargo, a trade union action which impeded the movement of British military equipment between May and December 1920 and which, for that reason, loomed large in the calculations of Michael Collins and his colleagues.2

The embargo is the subject of a recent publication by railway and labour historian, Peter Rigney, and it features obliquely in the opening scene of Ken Loach’s The Wind that Shakes the Barley, but it would be fair to say that it remains part of the hidden history of the period. The same might be said, more or less, about other contemporary labour mobilisations. To give two examples: the Irish Trade Union Congress’s anti-conscription strike in April 1918 played a large part in changing the course of events during that fateful year; while the

That it involved large numbers is established by the figures for those dismissed or suspended for taking part – 1000 railway workers and 500 dockers.

I am grateful to Peter Rigney for his help with the following biographical note. Joining the MGWR as a fireman in 1911, Martin O’Sullivan (1891-1977) worked as a fireman and as a locomotive driver until his retirement from CIE in 1957. He married Mary Hughes, and the couple raised a large family at Bogginfin, Athlone. In retirement he was a long-serving national secretary of the CIE Pensioners Association. (Birth certificate for Martin Sullivan, Water Lane, Galway, 22 October 1891; 1911 Census, Household Schedule No. 4, Middle Street, Galway East Urban; ‘CIE Pensions’, Irish Independent, 9 December 1963; ‘He wins pension increases for 800’, Irish Independent, 2 December 1974; ‘Obituary: Mr M. O’Sullivan’, Westmeath Independent, 18 March 1977).

Peter Rigney, How Railwaymen and Dockers Defied an Empire: The Irish Munitions Embargo of 1920, Dublin: Iarnród Éireann with Umisken Press, 2021.

Martin O’Sullivan, ‘How Railwaymen Defied an Empire’, Irish Independent, 13 August 1967. The articles were published together in a historical journal after the author’s death: Martin O’Sullivan, ‘The Irish Munitions Strike of 1920’, Cathair na Mart: Journal of the Westport Historical Society, vol. 11 (1990), pp. 132-6.

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general strike of April 1920 forced the British government to release hunger-striking prisoners within two days.4 Martin O’Sullivan’s indignant disappointment has relevance to the Machnamh theme of ‘imagined futures’. Defying the military, he and unarmed comrades risked their lives as well as their livelihoods in defence of the incipient republic. They had the reasonable expectation of having this acknowledged, but in the dominant narrative of the struggle, their contribution was ignored – relegated by the drama of ambushes and elections, but also by the state-making imperatives of a conservative polity. Social remembering and commemoration, as Margaret O’Callaghan reminds us, has involved selective forgetting. Some of the forgotten things, one hopes, may be recovered in initiatives such as Machnamh 100.

Behind the mobilisations I’ve mentioned lay other imagined futures. Trade unions could put boots on the ground because of the increase in their membership, itself a reflection of a widespread determination to fight for a better life. The most remarkable growth was in the ITGWU, founded by the absent Jim Larkin, which grew from around 5,000 in 1916 to more than 100,000 in 1920. Of that number, approximately half were farm labourers, and their embrace of the ITGWU represented the impulse of a marginalised group to exert some control over their working lives. Strikes, workplace seizures, ‘soviets’, were among the weapons they used.5 As scholars including Pamela Horn, Emmet O’Connor, and Fintan Lane have shown, rural labourers had fitfully organised in previous decades in bodies like the Irish Land and Labour Association.6

They had exerted pressure, especially after labourers won the right to vote in local elections in 1898. The key achievement of the earlier collectivities was a transformation in housing. In the thirty years before the first world war, under the Labourers’ Acts, almost 50,000 labouring families had swapped their unsanitary hovels for council houses with tillage plots.7 The process was treated informatively and engagingly by the Loughrea writer, Séumas O’Kelly, in his one act play Meadowsweet. O’Kelly was familiar with the arcane workings of the Labourers’ Acts from his day job as editor of the Leinster Leader.8 But if labourers’ secured decent houses, wages and conditions were a different matter – in those respects, labourers had remained at the mercy of farmers and landlords. War would change the balance of forces in the countryside. Wartime demand brought price inflation – good for those like farmers with something to sell; bad for those dependent on wages. Other developments, though, gave workers a bargaining position. With military enlistment reducing the numbers available, compulsory tillage increased the demand for labour. An Agricultural Wages Board was established in 1917 to guarantee the wartime food supply by encouraging labourers to remain on the land.9 However, it was necessary for labourers to become unionised to claim their new entitlements and their share in agricultural prosperity. Initially there was something of a resurgence of the older Associations, but most were soon absorbed by the burgeoning ITGWU, which mushroomed in those parts of Leinster and Munster where farm labourers were most numerous.

Emmet O’Connor, A Labour History of Ireland, 1824-2000, Dublin: UCD Press, 2011, pp. 109-16; John Cunningham, ‘Éire 1920: Lucht Saothar ag Seasamh an Fhóid’, Tuairisc, Bealtaine 2020, https://tuairisc.ie/sraith-comortha-eire-1920-lucht-saothair-agseasamh-an-fhoid/, accessed 4 July 2021.

Francis Devine, Organising History: A Centenary of SIPTU, 1909-2009, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2009; O’Connor, A Labour History of Ireland, pp. 105-6.

Pamela Horn, ‘The National Agricultural Labourers’ Union in Ireland, 1873–9’, Irish Historical Studies, vol. xvii, no. 67 (1971), pp. 340–52; O’Connor, A Labour History of Ireland, pp. 41-44; Fintan Lane, ‘Rural Labourers, Social Change and Politics in Late Nineteenth Century Politics’, in Lane and Ó Drisceoil, eds, Politics and the Irish Working Class, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005, pp.

113-39. 7

Enda McKay, ‘The Housing of the Rural Labourer, 1883-1916’, Saothar: Journal of Irish Labour History, vol. 17 (1992), pp. 27-38.

Seumas O’Kelly, Meadowsweet: A Comedy in One Act, Dublin: Talbot Press, 1925; George Brandon Saul, Seumas O’Kelly, Lewisburg NJ: Bucknell University Press, 1971, pp. 15-42, 54.

O’Connor, A Labour History of Ireland, pp. 104-5.

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Even for a county like Mayo, with relatively few labourers, Francis Devine lists 19 ITGWU branches in 1918-19, including Achill Sound, Belmullet, Ballycastle, Cong, Crossmolina, Kilkelly, Kiltimagh, and Shrule.10 The story in Ulster was rather different, with complexities that I can’t do justice to here. It merits separate treatment. The ITGWU, of course, promised more than wage increases. In its periodicals and rhetoric, it also promulgated an imagined future of its own, encompassed in the idea of the Workers’ Republic. It was an idea formulated by James Connolly, and that union laid claim to its martyred leader and his legacy, increasing its authority throughout nationalist Ireland, while pointing frequently to the Russian revolutions as current manifestations of the Workers’ Republic.11 The Manchester Guardian reported in May 1920:

The returned Irishman would notice in his old market town a rich crop of buttons or badges on the coats of the younger men. These are not the badges of the League or Sinn Féin, but of trade unionism, usually of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union. He would notice if he peered into the old shop windows that it would be far easier to buy a photograph of James Connolly than of de Valera. The Irish Transport and General Workers Union, Connolly’s body, is particularly active all over the country and penetrates to such remote spots as Clifden, the far end of the desert of Connemara.12

While Guardian readers were digesting all this, another wave of unrest was sweeping from the west, this one involving small farmers – so-called ‘congests’ – anxious to add to their uneconomic holdings while there was still the chance. Land held by graziers was targeted, and the repertoire of agitation – cattle-drives, land seizures – was drawn from decades of agrarian struggle. The context is well analysed in works by Heather Laird, Fergus Campbell, Tony Varley, Michael D. Higgins and others.13 Of many dramatic episodes, I’ll mention one, where J.G. Alcorn, High Sheriff of Co. Galway and landholder at Kilroe, Corrandulla, was taken from his house in daylight by a crowd estimated at two or three hundred, submerged in Lough Corrib, and threatened with drowning if he refused to sign over his grazing land. He didn’t refuse. This was the culmination of a protracted conflict between Alcorn and local small farmers, in the course of which he had been shot and injured on his way to Mass in January 1918, and his steward shot and killed in March 1918.14

So alongside military engagements, separatist victories in elections, and the creation of Dáil courts, these social struggles were taking place. The overlapping and intersecting phenomena have been collectively characterised in recent decades as the Irish revolution. But was there really a revolution? The question is posed by Marc Mulholland who identifies features associated with revolutions, including a fundamental change in the social order, and found most of them lacking. If there was an Irish revolution, he suggests, it started in 1879 and one of its key achievements was the wresting of control of the land from the landlords.15

10 O’Connor, A Labour History of Ireland, pp. 105-6; Francis Devine, ‘The Irish Transport & General Workers’ Union in Mayo, 19181930’, Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society, vol. 71 (2019), pp. 91-108. 11

Donal Nevin, James Connolly: ‘a full life’, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2005.

Manchester Guardian, 13 May 1920. I am grateful to Dara Folan for this reference.

Heather Laird, Subversive Law in Ireland, 1879-1920: From ‘Unwritten Law’ to the Dáil Courts, Dublin: Four Courts, 2005; Fergus Campbell, Tony Varley, eds, Land Questions in Modern Ireland, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013; Michael D. Higgins, John Gibbons, ‘Shopkeeper-graziers and land agitation in Ireland, 1850-1900’, in P.J. Drudy, ed., Ireland: Land, Politics and People, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, pp. 93-118.

‘More Ruffianism’, Tuam Herald, 6 April 1918; ‘Dastardly Outrage’, Tuam Herald, 26 January 1918; ‘The Land Agitation in Co. Galway’, Connacht Tribune, 3 April 1920. Alcorn was a very headstrong individual. Injured by gunshot in the January 1918 episode, he proceeded to Mass and addressed the congregation afterwards. In the contretemps at Lough Corrib, he would not sign a proffered document, but he gave his word that he would settle, and this was accepted.

Marc Mulholland, ‘How revolutionary was the Irish revolution’, Working Paper, 2019: https://www.academia.edu/41110690/ How_Revolutionary_was_the_Irish_Revolution, accessed 7 July 2021.

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And if the process was protracted, the context was also very broad. In March 1919, Prime Minister Lloyd George, wrote in confidence to the Paris Peace Conference:

… The whole of Europe is filled with the spirit of revolution. There is a deep sense not only of discontent but of anger and revolt among the workmen against pre-war conditions. The whole existing order, in its political, social, and economic aspects, is questioned by the masses of the population from one end of Europe to the other. In some countries, like Germany and Russia, the unrest takes the form of open rebellion; in others, like France, Great Britain, and Italy, it takes the shape of strikes and of a general disinclination to settle down to work, symptoms which are just as much concerned with the desire for political and social change as with wage demands.16 Whether we conclude that there was in fact an Irish revolution, Lloyd George’s ‘spirit of revolution’ was certainly at large in the years around 1919. In addition to the examples I’ve given, there are many others in an imminent publication of that title that Terry Dunne and I have been putting together.17 And thanks to Terry for bringing the Lloyd George document to my attention. Frequently we see IRA Volunteers involved in contemporary labour and agrarian struggles, but this was discouraged by IRA and Sinn Féin leaders. Sinn Féin courts and dedicated land courts quickly clamped down on agrarian agitators, and from the period of the Truce, there was less tolerance of labour militancy. By the early free state period, strikes were being labelled labour ‘irregularism’.18 The servants of the embryo state generally saw social agitation that was outside their control as opportunistic, destabilising, and illegitimate. Vigorous interventions to stamp out agrarian militancy in 1920 were followed by similar

stands against labour unrest – ‘soviets’ early in 1922; farm labourer strikes in Kildare and Waterford in 1922-23.19 Research for the ‘Spirit of Revolution’ suggests that there was little to distinguish between the attitudes of pro- and anti-Treaty camps in this regard. The historiography has often echoed the architects of the state in treating social agitation as opportunistic and largely peripheral, which is puzzling insofar as influential social science and historical writings – notably Eric Hobsbawm’s and Charles Tilly’s – have recognised ‘popular contention’ or mass mobilisation as key markers of revolution.20 It is to be hoped that a more holistic view will be a legacy of decade of centenaries research. However, there is the risk that over-reliance on newly-available sources such as Bureau of Military History witness statements and military pensions’ application — exciting and informative as they are — will tend to give even more attention to ambushes at the expense of creamery soviets and land seizures. Contemporary newspapers and police reports tend to have more on popular contention.

My paper has focused on male manual workers, but their success in greatly increasing their wages drew others to trade unionism. There was an influx of women, and of professionals who would not hitherto have identified with labour. In discussing Annie M.P. Smithson, Caitriona Clear mentions the Irish Nurses’ Union, which was established in 1919. The new Irish Bank Officials Association went on strike in the same year. Established bodies, including the important INTO, treated definitively by Niamh Puirséil, affiliated with the Irish Trade Union Congress. In May 1920, at the peak of the cattle drives, the ASTI placed pickets on schools operated by the Christian Brothers and others, outraging the religious employers, some of whom would victimise the teachers involved when things settled a few years later. Other clergy, it should be said, were supportive of labour, acting as intermediaries and arbitrators.21

David Lloyd George, ‘Some considerations for the Peace Conference before they finally draft their terms’, quoted in Francesco Severio Nitto, Peaceless Europe, London: Cassell, 1922.

John Cunningham and Terry Dunne, A Spirit of Revolution: Ireland from Below, 1916-1923, Dublin: Four Courts, due April 2022.

Fergus Campbell and Kevin O’Sheil, ‘The Last Land War? Kevin O’Sheil’s Memoir of the Irish Revolution (1916-1921), Archivium Hibernicum, vol. 57 (2003), pp. 155-200; O’Connor, A Labour History of Ireland, pp. 121-2.

19 O’Connor, A Labour History of Ireland, pp. 120-3. 20

E.J. Hobsbawm, ‘Revolution’, in Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich, Revolution in History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 5-46; Charles Tilly, From Mobilisation to Revolution, London: Longman, 1978.

Gordon McMullan, ‘The Irish Bank “Strike”, 1919’, Saothar: Journal of Irish Labour History, vol. 5, 1979, pp. 39-49; Niamh Puirséil, Kindling the Flame: 150 years of the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation, Dublin: Gill Books, 2017; John Cunningham, Unlikely Radicals: Irish Post-Primary Teachers and the ASTI, 1909-2019: Cork University Press, 2009, pp. 48-53.

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Through all the ferment, some were looking forward to putting the spirit of revolution back in the bottle, and we can see this, inter alia, in debates on social issues in the Irish Ecclesiastical Record. I’ll mention one that is topical, drawing on research I’ve been doing with Sarah-Anne Buckley. An anonymous ‘Sagart’ writing in the Record in 1922 on ‘How to Deal with the Unmarried Mother’, argued that any new scheme should shield ‘the girl in trouble’ from further ‘degrading and corrupting influences’ by placing her in care, and should also have a ‘deterrent effect on the girls of her neighbourhood’. Continuing, he suggested that if the new Mother and Baby institutions were …

… brought into touch – quietly of course – with people throughout the country who would be likely to cooperate with them, people such as the clergy, nuns, members of the St Vincent de Paul Society’, Catholic doctors, district nurses, social workers, etc., they would receive a much greater number of cases.22 That all came to pass; the Workers’ Republic did not. The fact that radical visionaries were not as coherent or as cohesive in their vision was only part of the reason. Concluding, I’ll return to Martin O’Sullivan, so irked by the version of events in the history books that he put pen to paper himself. Before going to the Independent with his account of the rail embargo, he had written to RTÉ and to the history departments of all Irish universities. He got no reply.23 The theme of ‘imagined futures’ reminds us to be more attentive to stories like his.

In 1967, Martin O’Sullivan, a veteran on the munitions embargo of 1920, expressed his disappointment that ‘those important events were not recorded in any recent history of Ireland’. Photo courtesy of Trudie Gannon and Martin O’Sullivan. In 1967, léirigh Martin O’Sullivan, a raibh ról lárnach aige sa trádbhac arm in 1920, a mhíshástacht nach raibh ‘na himeachtaí tábhachtacha sin sa chuntas in aon leabhar staire de chuid na hÉireann le gairid’. Grianghraf le caoinchead Trudie Gannon agus Martin O’Sullivan.

Sagart, ‘How to deal with the unmarried mother’, Irish Ecclesiastical Record, August 1922, pp. 145-53. See also Sarah-Anne Buckley and John Cunningham, ‘Commemorating the Irish Revolution: Disremembering and Remembering the Women and Children of the Tuam Mother and Baby Home’, in Linda Connolly, ed., Women and the Irish Revolution, Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2020, pp. 198215.

O’Sullivan, ‘The Irish Munitions Strike’, p. 136.

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Respondent

Dr Caitriona Clear, NUI Galway

Everyday Working Life in the Revolutionary Era: Two Case Studies Dr Caitriona Clear An Dr Caitriona Clear

Margaret O’Callaghan has pointed out in her keynote address that people living a hundred years ago in Ireland did not know what was to come after, and that we cannot evaluate their experiences as if they had this knowledge. But neither did they look backwards and see themselves as inhabiting a gloomy ‘postFamine Ireland’. The people who came of age in Ireland in the years 1891 to 1921 experienced dramatic transformations in all aspects of everyday life. The numbers of men and women working in shops, offices, factories, workshops, transport and communication, schools and hospitals increased by thousands, at a time when population was falling. For example, there were over 7,000 more clerks and over 10,000 more teachers in Ireland in 1911 than there had been in 1891, and over 16,000 workers in the new field of telecommunications in 1911, and numbers in these sectors continued to grow.

All these workers and others like them had to present themselves for public view every day; their need for respectable and hard-wearing clothing and footwear created countrywide demand for dressmakers, tailors, seamstresses and drapery shops, which in turn created more jobs. And however poor their working conditions, waged and salaried workers had set time off, so clerks and shop assistants, factory workers and railway guards, teachers and nurses learned Irish, first aid or other skills, rowed on rivers, kicked football, made novenas, played in bands, and of course as we know well, joined trade unions and political organizations in their thousands. Irish people were still on the move out of Ireland – emigration figures remained high – but within Ireland the young and the single of both sexes were in a state of perpetual motion too.

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By 1900 almost the entire country was crisscrossed by railway lines, which enabled people to cover not only long but comparatively short everyday distances for work and for leisure, all over Leinster, Munster, Ulster and in eastern and southern Connacht. Gaps in transport provision were made up by the bicycle, increasingly affordable on the hire purchase to people of all social classes.1 Because imagination is partly what we are talking about today, the two people whose lives I am going to use to illustrate the social changes of this period were writers: the novelist Annie M. P. Smithson (1873-1948) and the poet Francis Ledwidge (1887-1917). They were different from each other in almost every way – age, gender, religious background, social class, occupation, geographical origin, even length of years – Smithson lived into old age, Ledwidge died young. But both were active adults in the decade of war and revolution, both were nationalists, both were trade unionists and crucially, both had the confidence to express themselves creatively. I am not here today to make literary judgments on either of them, although I thoroughly enjoy the work of both. I am interested in them as exemplars of the times they lived in. Annie Smithson was the older of the two, born in 1873 in Dublin, into a middle-class Protestant family which gradually fell on hard times. By the age of 21 she was that familiar figure, the non-earning daughter helping her overwhelmed mother to rear a young family. A sympathetic aunt spirited her away to train as a nurse in London and Edinburgh. Smithson returned to Ireland in 1900 to became a Jubilee nurse, one of those key apostles of public health, and over the next three decades she worked ‘on the district’ in Down, Clare, Offaly, Donegal, Mayo, Waterford and Dublin city. She became a Catholic around 1907, and around 1916 became an Irish nationalist, joining Cumann na mBan later, during the War for Independence. Her first best-selling novel, Her Irish Heritage, was published by Talbot Press in Dublin in 1917 and it was directly about the female revolutionary experience.

Smithson went on to write 19 more best-selling novels, all with strong women as their central characters. Always a fighter for nurses’ working rights, in 1929 she became Secretary of the Irish Nurses’ Union (later the Irish Nurses’ Organization), and she more than quadrupled the membership by the time she stepped down in 1942. She died in 1948.2 Francis Ledwidge was born in Slane, Co. Meath in 1887, the eighth of nine children. His father, an agricultural labourer, died when Francis was 5, and all through Francis’s childhood his mother Anne worked as an agricultural labourer; sometimes the fatherless family lived through hardship so severe that as Ledwidge later put it: ‘It was as though God forgot us.’ Francis left school at 14, and held various jobs until he became a road-mender employed by the county council, eventually rising to the position of ganger. From his schooldays he was always writing, and his first poem was published in 1910 in the Drogheda Independent. After publishing some more poems he came to the attention of Lord Dunsany (1878-1957), a writer and poet whose help was of great significance. Ledwidge’s first book of poems Songs of the Fields was published in 1914. As well as being involved in various cultural organizations, Ledwidge founded the Slane branch of the Meath Labour Union and in 1913 he got a clerical job as secretary of this union. A founder member of the Irish Volunteers in Slane, Ledwidge chose to follow John Redmond and the National Volunteers and joined the British Army, serving in the Balkans and all over Europe. He continued to write and to publish until his death at Ypres in Belgium in 1917. 3 These were two very different people, but both of their lives illustrate the changing times. Nursing and road-mending were responsibilities which had been taken on by the public authorities by the beginning of the twentieth century. Both were extremely demanding jobs physically – the demands of road-mending are obvious, but nursing at that stage involved a lot of pulling and dragging, not to mention the ever-present risk of infection. (Smithson contracted tuberculosis in 1912-13, but she recovered).

C. Clear, ‘Social Conditions 1880-1914’ in T. Bartlett (ed.) The Cambridge History of Ireland Vol IV (Cambridge University Press 2018), pp.145-67; Brian Griffin, Cycling in Victorian Ireland (Dublin: Nonsuch 2006).

Annie M. P. Smithson, Myself- and Others (Dublin: Talbot Press 1944). Also https://www.dib.ie/biography/smithson-annie-marypatricia-a8160. Contributed by Laurence W. White.

Alice Curtayne, Francis Ledwidge: a life of the poet (London: Martin, Brian and O’Keeffe 1972: Dublin: New Island Books 1998). Also https://www.dib.ie/ledwidge-francis-edward-a4753. Contributed by Donal Lowry.

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District nursing involved travel to and from patients, on a bicycle in all weathers, on call seven days a week. The bicycle was crucial to Ledwidge too – at one stage he was covering 40 miles a day going to and from work. It might seem perverse, therefore, to claim that both Smithson and Ledwidge were lucky, but comparatively speaking they were, because both had jobs which were relatively secure and permanent. And in other ways both writers benefitted from substantial improvements in social provision in late nineteenth and earlytwentieth-century Ireland. The Ledwidges, poor though they were, had moved into a solid three-bedroomed brick house built by the Rural District Council in Janeville, Slane, when Francis was a baby. So at least they had that comfort and dignity, and they were not exceptional; the Irish rural labouring class was the best-housed rural labouring class in Europe on the eve of the First World War.4 And although Ledwidge left school at 14 he had, up to then, the advantage not only of free National schooling (compulsory since 1892) and but also, of a teacher famed far and wide for his learning and dedication – Master Thomas Madden. After a very patchy and irregular early education Annie Smithson finally got to school in Bray, Co. Wicklow in her early teens, and gained honours in her Junior Grade Intermediate Certificate. These state exams, introduced in 1878, were open to girls as well as boys from the very beginning. 5 However, Ledwidge had to leave school at 14 to give his ageing mother a break from back-breaking agricultural toil, and Smithson had to leave school at 16 to help her mother with a new baby. For working-class boys and girls, and for girls of all social classes, family needs came before individual fulfilment. Smithson felt guilty all her life at having seized her independence when it was offered to her. Neither of these writers married. Ledwidge probably would have, had he survived the war. Although his first love went on to marry another man, he recovered in time and had plenty of girlfriends in a lively social circle.

Besides, working men who were active in organizations and other activities needed women to cook, clean and wash clothes for them, as they couldn’t afford servants. For working women who couldn’t afford servants, however – and Smithson fell into this category – a husband meant both additional life-maintenance work and a loss of financial independence. Smithson fell in love with a married man in the early years of the century; she gave him up, and does not document any other men in her life.6 Like many other working women in Ireland in the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s who chose a single life, she probably valued her independence too much to surrender it. 7 Margaret O’Callaghan has said that workingclass men and women in general, ‘lost the peace’ – were cast adrift somewhat in independent Ireland, and this is true. But some of their voices remained strong. Ledwidge’s poems went into several editions over the succeeding decades and were regularly anthologised, and taught in schools; Irish people obviously appreciated these reflections on human nature which evoked the rural scene in a fresh and vivid way. Smithson’s best-selling novels were republished regularly by Talbot Press up to the 1950s and new editions appeared from Mercier in the 1980s; her recurring theme of strong women working out their destinies must have appealed to many Irish people. Smithson was only one of many popular Irish female writers – novelists, biographers, travel writers, essayists – in the first four decades of independence. But that is a story for another day. Today, we are trying to stand in 1921 and to see what Smithson saw, and what Ledwidge, had he survived the war, would have seen – a world that each of them firmly believed was theirs to evoke, to record and, indeed, to shape and to define. That confidence was brought to fruition, in part, by the significant state-supported improvements in education, public health, accommodation and transport of the previous forty years.

Murray Fraser, John Bull’s Other Homes: state housing and British policy in Ireland 1883-1922 (Liverpool University Press 1996).

Caitriona Clear, Social Change and Everyday Life in Ireland 1850-1922 (Manchester University Press 2007), pp.42-56.

There may well have been other men in her life that she did not choose to document. A forthcoming biography of Smithson by Marie Bashford-Synnott to be published by Arlen House, will shed light on this question.

C. Clear, ‘Women in Ireland in the 1930s and ‘40s’ in A. Hayes (ed.) Hilda Tweedy and the Irish Housewives Association (Dublin: Arlen House 2012), pp.59-68.

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Respondent

Professor Linda Connolly, Maynooth University

Ethical Commemoration, Women, Violence and the Irish Revolution, 1919-23 Professor Linda Connolly An tOllamh Linda Connolly

As Ireland approaches the centennial commemoration of the Civil War and violent foundation of the new Irish State in 1922, we might ask – who will be remembered? In the aftermath of recent inquiries into Magdalen Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes, Irish society has in recent years become more acutely aware of the troubled and troubling place that women have occupied in Irish culture and history. The late poet Eavan Boland has vividly described how, as a young poet, she began to see a huge rift in Ireland between ‘the past’ and ‘history.’ As time went on, she said, it was apparent to her that the past was a place of whispers and shadows and vanishings, and that history was a story of heroes.1

The gulf that has existed between the established history (that of ‘heroes’) and women’s (‘hidden’) history in Irish studies was reflected in a gender hierarchy that was successfully institutionalized in the postrevolutionary State, and still persists. In Irish universities, for instance, women still occupy far less senior academic positions (over eighty per cent of the professoriate in Irish history departments are men) and only thirty seven women have been elected to the current Dáil, out of one hundred and sixty seats.2 The aim of this paper is to explore the ethical imperative of posing, in a moment of centennial commemoration, some of the more difficult, hidden and troubling questions about women’s experience of war and revolution,

J.P. O’Malley, “The myth and memory of Eavan Boland’s latest poems,” Irish Examiner, 11th January 2014.

For a discussion see: Linda Connolly, “Introduction,” in Linda Connolly (ed.), Women and the Irish Revolution: Feminism, Activism, Violence (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2020), pp.1-14.

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in the period encompassing the Irish War of Independence, Partition, and the Civil War and its aftermath. Françoise Thébaud suggests that developing gender-based approaches “changes and complicates our understanding of war, both of particular wars and of the general phenomenon of war.”3 Developing a greater understanding of the process of exiting from war, private life in wartime and genderbased and sexual violence, for instance, has the potential to enhance and further expand the scope of Irish revolutionary studies more inclusively understood.4 In agreement with Boland, retrieving the hidden, sometimes all-but-erased, stories of women’s lives can powerfully revise our sense of the past.5 Gender-based violence, including sexual violence, during wartime is, however, a complicated and sensitive question both in the past and present. Discussing issues often considered taboo, stigmatised or unpalatable can be particularly challenging in countries where tradition and religion play an important role in everyday life. Other considerations arise. For many women, it was more important to conceal such violence in order to protect their reputation and future life chances or safety (for fear of reprisal, for instance) rather than to report or reveal it. Nonetheless, shying away from discussing these issues in Ireland’s revolutionary past or erasing them is not an ethical option either in the context of truthful remembering and historical accountability.6 Individual women themselves, during and after the revolution, clearly inscribed in public archives with consent their stories of war, trauma and violence – and their quests for accountability and justice. Exploring and engaging with these sources is critical if an inclusive and more complete interpretation of the nature and outcome of the Irish Revolution is to be provided, in a moment of national commemoration and State led remembrance.

The narrative of the revolution as a chronology of great men and male militarism, with women presumed to have played a very subsidiary role, was the predominant framework in Irish historical writing for much of the last century. Nonetheless, pioneering feminist scholars, four decades ago, began to independently demonstrate how women in Ireland’s revolution were activists who could not be considered mere victims, stooges or protected bystanders, steered by male political leaders, heroes or militants. Women, it is clear, actively shaped the Irish Revolution while they were also profoundly impacted by it. The women’s movement, one of the most important social movements in the history of Irish society, was also a constant and critical presence in both the revolutionary period and in post-revolutionary Ireland.7 Ongoing campaigns for women’s social and political rights after votes for women was partially achieved in 1918 continued. A number of laws and measures subsequently introduced by the new State, and which limited women’s social and political rights in key domains, were opposed and challenged by feminist activists for several decades. Women’s role as combatants and militants in republican and labour causes has achieved more recognition in modern Irish history in recent decades as a consequence of early publications in the field. New research continues to extensively draw and build upon this work. Women were clearly crucial as republican activists and combatants during both the War of Independence and the Civil War but not in any uniform way. For example, although the internecine Irish Civil War is described as a ‘brother against brother’ conflict, it also had a ‘sister against sister’ dimension, with pro- and anti-Treaty Cumann na mBan forces coming into conflict with one another as the revolution progressed. Likewise, it was the women representatives who were notably recalcitrant on the anti-Treaty side in the Dáil debates in 1921-22.

Françoise Thébaud, “Understanding twentieth-century wars through women and gender: forty years of historiography,” Clio: Women, Gender, History, 39 (2014): https://journals.openedition.org/cliowgh/538

See Connolly, “Introduction.”

Eavan Boland, The Historians (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2021).

For a longer discussion, see Linda Connolly, “Honest Commemoration: Reconciling Women’s Troubled and Troubling History in Centennial Ireland,” in Oona Frawley (ed.), Women and the Decade of Commemorations (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2021), pp.300-314. See also: Linda Connolly, “Sexual Violence and the Irish Revolution: an Inconvenient Truth,” History Ireland, November–December (2019): pp.34-38; Linda Connolly, “Sexual Violence: a Dark Secret of War of Independence and Civil War,” Irish Times, 10th January 2019.

I discuss the role of the women’s movement during and after the period of revolution in more detail, in my book: Linda Connolly, The Irish Women’s Movement (London and New York: Macmillan Palgrave and Dublin: Lilliput, 2003).

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The tension in prioritising feminist and/or nationalist objectives during the revolution was a constant challenge and ongoing source of contention among female activists despite their evident solidarities. What Svetlana Alexievich has termed ‘the unwomanly face of war’ is a complex issue, however.8 In a different vein, over twenty years ago, the Irish sociologist Professor Louise Ryan published an early, ground-breaking article in Feminist Review on the completely unspoken about violence and terror women experienced in the War of Independence, including cropping women’s hair and sexual violence.9 The hidden and targeted violence that women are known to have experienced in other armed conflicts has only recently been acknowledged by historians despite being written about in Irish feminist sociology and in international war studies, over two decades ago. Margaret Macmillan retraces how in many contexts women civilians have feared “a particular fate in war.” An example of how rape was weaponised in the Algerian War of Independence is cited: “‘You are allowed to rape,’ said the French commando leader to his men in Algeria during its war of independence, ‘just do it discreetly’.”10 A violent, and invariably traumatic, internal civil war cast a long shadow after the Irish State was established in 1922. Yet public analysis and acknowledgement of several aspects of the trauma experienced in such a divisive conflict was met with silence for decades. As the President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, stated at the commemoration of the first Dáil in 2019: “Let us not look with any trepidation towards the commemorations of the coming years, lest we be tempted to avert our gaze, take refuge in evasion, or seek to ignore the difficult questions they shall raise for us all.”11

A key but difficult question arising in this moment of national remembrance is – if violence cuts to the very heart of the State’s foundation, how and in what ways is this gendered? And why was violence that women experienced marginalised, minimised or negated in official histories of this period for such a long time? In 2016, I established the Women and the Irish Revolution project to address these questions further.12 A wide range of archival sources (including newspapers, military archives, trial documents and personal papers) have been accessed, collated and mined, employing documentary research methods. Several cases of gender-based and sexual violence in the Irish Revolution 1919-23 have been presented and published to-date.13 Any contention that serious sexual and genderbased violence did not happen in Ireland’s revolution has been challenged in this project by comprehensively dissecting and merging the evidence contained in women’s own personal testimonies recorded in trials, compensation claims, pension applications, personal letters, witness statements and in medical documents recording the undeniable type of injuries inflicted. Hair cutting was a particularly common assault targeted at women on all sides and many cases in several counties in Ireland, conducted both by crown forces and republicans during the War of Independence, in particular, are identified. Newspaper reports and other archives document such incidents extensively, including the Military Services Pensions Collection, Royal Irish Constabulary reports, British Army reports and Bureau of Military History Witness Statements.

Svetlana Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face of War (London: Penguin Classics, 1985).

Louise Ryan, “Drunken Tans: Representations of Sex and Violence in the Anglo-Irish War, 1919–21,” Feminist Review, 66 (2000): pp.73–92.

Margaret Macmillan, War: How Conflict Shaped Us (London: Profile Books, 2021), p.190.

See: https://president.ie/en/diary/details/president-gives-keynote-address-at-the-centenary-commemoration-of-the-1st-dail/ speeches

Early, detailed papers and research findings from my research on the sexual and gender-based violence women experienced in the Irish Revolution were publicly presented and/or recorded at various events from 2016 on (for example, at the UCC Decade of Centenaries Lecture Series and the John Hewitt Summer School in 2016 and the West Cork History Festival in 2018). I was awarded an Irish Research Council, New Foundations Decade of Centenaries, grant in 2017 to complete the Women and the Irish Revolution project.

For a detailed account and summary of some of the research completed, see: Linda Connolly, “Towards a Further Understanding of the Sexual and Gender-based Violence Women Experienced in the Irish Revolution,” in Linda Connolly (ed.), Women and the Irish Revolution: Feminism, Activism, Violence (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2020), pp.103-128. A new book/monograph based on this project is also forthcoming.

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Women who forged friendly or intimate relationships by what was termed ‘keeping company’ with British combatants or Royal Irish Constabulary members were notably sexually policed, humiliated, intimidated and punished by republicans. Evidence of any close relationships with crown forces generated military and security concerns. Passing on information to the enemy directly or inadvertently could undermine republican activities and cause real danger. Assisting or supporting the crown forces through the provision of supplies, accommodation and other services was likewise not tolerated. Sexual policing (the social control of women’s intimate relationships, choices and movements) was also a common motivation for hair cutting. A romantic relationship with the wrong man could be treacherous for a woman and also her companion. The Irish Times reported on 11th May 1921 that a police report stated that the IRA cropped the hair of Rose Anne Logue, aged 23 years, a teacher from Falcarragh, Co. Donegal. She was walking near her home on 24th April 1921 when she was seized by armed and masked men who cut off her hair and warned her that they would murder her if she remained on friendly terms with the police. Miss Logue had laid a wreath on the grave of a constable who had been murdered in the neighbourhood. Women’s hair was typically cropped, clipped or shaved by groups of several masked men, in such incidents, in a secluded or domestic space. Another assault was reported in the Donegal Democrat on the 11th of September 1920. At Ballyshannon Quarter Sessions, Ellen Gillen claimed compensation for the cutting of her hair by armed and masked men. Ellen was taken away from the house she was staying in for associating with the police. When she returned, her hair was closely cropped and she was marked on the face and mouth and in a state of nervousness. The Irish Times also reported on 29th April 1921 that Miss Susan Sullivan, who was assaulted by a large body of “Sinn Feiners” on April 23rd, was “…still receiving medical attention as a consequence of the ill-treatment she received at Kenmare, Co. Kerry. She was dragged from her aunt’s house and marched through the streets in a torchlight procession before having her hair cut off… and was found in a dazed condition after the outrage.”

Margaret M. Broderick Nicholson, BMH WS1682.

See Connolly, Women and the Irish Revolution.

Shots were fired in her direction which did not hit her. Miss O’Sullivan had been previously observed exchanging “a few words” with a party of police in the village. Crown forces also conducted hair cutting extensively, typically during aggressive and frightening night raids on houses. Cumann na mBan activists, such as Kathleen Clarke’s sister Agnes Daly in Limerick and Margaret (Peg) Broderick-Nicholson in Galway, were targeted and subjected to this humiliating practice.14 Many more cases, involving varying degrees of force and violence targeted at women, have been collated and published in the Women and the Irish Revolution project.15 Members of the crown forces were also targeted for ‘keeping company’ with Irish women considered disloyal and deviant. One such case was reported in the Irish Examiner on 19th June 1920: “Startling Incident at Castletownroche. Ladies Hair Cut Off. Officers Motor Bicycle and Cab Burned. Our Mitchelstown correspondent wires: News has just reached Mitchelstown of a startling incident at Castletownroche, Co. Cork, where two respectable young ladies were attacked and their hair cut off, because it is alleged, they entertained at their own home two military officers. The military officers were also attacked by about 16 masked men who made them temporarily prisoners and burned their mode of conveyance, viz. a motor bicycle and side car. It is alleged that before burning the motor bicycle and side-car the attackers threw the hair shorn from the heads of the young ladies into the side car.” The degree of organisation involved in mobilizing such large groups of (often masked) men to police and assail women in such a strategic manner, and in so many different places in this period, is very apparent. Female sexuality – or ‘a girl’s offence’ – could evoke real danger and violence. The Irish Times reported on May 27th 1921 the house of John Neill, Edgeworthstown, Co. Longford, was attacked by a number of armed men. Shots were fired for nearly an hour. Mr. Neill’s daughter had been engaged to a constable named Booth who was murdered near Ballinalea on the 20th of May. On the day of the attack, she had attended the funeral of Constable Booth and placed a wreath on his grave. Women, however, also resisted or intervened during armed assaults including on their companions.

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The Belfast Newsletter on the 28th December 1920 reported that a girl was killed in Limerick while she tried to save a policeman’s life: “Dublin Castle reports that on Saturday night four men accosted Constable Richardson in the street in Limerick and took his revolver by force. One of the men fired at him, but a girl named Elizabeth Scales, aged 22, with whom the constable was walking, rushed between him and the man with the revolver, and received a bullet through the breast. She died instantly.” In Dublin, it was also reported in the Evening Echo on 18th December 1920 that a woman grappled with an armed assailant to try to prevent the shooting on Henry Street of District Inspector Philip J. O’Sullivan. The Inspector was assassinated while walking with his fiancée, Miss Moore, who reportedly “grappled pluckily” with one of the gunmen after the first shot was fired. Inspector O’Sullivan, who was employed in the office of the InspectorGeneral of the Royal Irish Constabulary at Dublin Castle, had been in the known habit of meeting Miss Moore, at about 6pm, after she left work. One of the assailants reportedly approached the couple and said “Hello, are you ready?”, produced a revolver, and fired at point-blank range. Miss Moore courageously seized his wrist, clung to it, and prevented him from firing again, but the second gunman fired a second bullet at the fallen man. Miss Moore bent over her lover, rendering what assistance she could. She was in a state of great distress and appeared completely dazed by the horror of her experience. A few minutes later, it was reported, a lorry full of Auxiliary Police arrived and the body was taken to Jervis Street Hospital. Miss Moore accompanied the remains of her lover who was only 22 years old, and was the son of a Mr. F. O’Sullivan, solicitor, of Kinsale, Co. Cork. Inspector O’Sullivan, himself, was a qualified solicitor and during World War I had served in the Royal Naval Division. Crown forces were also threatened with reprisals for conducting hair cutting on Irish women. A written card was found when armed police raided a Sinn Féin hall in Killorglin according to the Freemans Journal on 27th September 1920. The card issued a warning if any further bobbing of hair occurred in the district on their part. Such assaults, conducted during raids, as well as the parallel and more amorous activity of ‘keeping company’ or courting women, were treated with mutual contempt by republicans.

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Eileen O’Doherty, MSP34REF9256.

Reprisals for republicans cutting the hair of women can likewise be identified. The Irish Times reported on 26th October 1920 that: “Following the cutting of a girl’s hair in Ballinasloe two Sinn Féiners were taken from their beds by armed men. One of them had his hair cut off with a horse-clipper and the other man is missing.” As we engage with the Machnamh 100 theme of reflection and ethical recall, including by considering the history and legacy of Partition, we must also fully consider how women experienced life altering violence and trauma in Ulster in this period. For example, a member of Cumann na mBan (the women’s republican organisation formed in 1914) in Dromore, Co. Tyrone, a shopkeeper Eileen O’Doherty, made various applications for a pension/allowance under the Army Pensions Acts in respect of a gunshot wound (which resulted in the fracture of both legs) suffered on the night of 21st November 1920. Her pension application contains letters from her doctor outlining the catastrophic nature of her injuries inflicted when she was shot by B-Specials while standing at her front door.16 Eileen claimed she was permanently disabled as a result and unable to work. In an interview, she poignantly states that the wound she got had ‘finished’ her. The pension she applied for in light of her unstinting service to the cause of Irish independence and injuries suffered was declined. The designation ‘hero’ or economic provision for injuries inflicted was not extended to such women. Newspaper reports on other documented violence experienced by women in Belfast are likewise horrific. On 2nd June 1922, the Irish Times reported “Fire. Diabolical Outrage in Belfast. Four More Deaths. The total number of deaths in Belfast yesterday was four and thirty two people were injured, including seven of whom are suffering from burns. An inhuman outrage was committed at night when men called at a house pouring inflammable liquid over a woman and set it on fire. She was seriously burned.” Shock and nervousness are constantly mentioned in such reports including in relation to forced hair cutting and other assaults across several counties throughout this period. The psychological impact of experiencing and witnessing violence is documented in numerous sources.

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The Women and the Irish Revolution project has also demonstrated that cases of wartime sexual violence, including ‘gang’ or multiple perpetrator rape, are evident in different sources. Previously it was presumed this was not a feature of the Irish Revolution. A notable exception, however, examined by Robert Lynch in 2010, involved a vicious sexual assault in Dromintee, South Armagh in June 1922. This incident preceded the ‘Altnaveigh massacre,’ in which six protestant civilians were killed in one of the most controversial IRA actions of the revolution. According to Lynch, on the night in question B-Special forces intended to kill Unah McGuill’s husband James, who they believed had been involved in the shooting of a comrade, Thomas Sheridan, in the area a week earlier on 6th June. When eight special constables arrived at the McGuill premises (a public house) just after midnight on 14th June, however, they found that he had gone ‘on the run.’17 Other members of the family were at home including Unah, her mother, her two small children, a female servant and a friend of the family. After the special constables wrecked the pub, Unah was then subjected to a savage gang rape and violent attack by three members of the group. The ordeal ended only when the other women broke into the room. Mrs. McGuill was heavily pregnant at the time. A doctor in Newry recorded severe injuries and cuts to her body including a fractured skull from repeated kicks to her head. Mary McKnight, the servant in the house, also suffered a serious sexual assault and a savage beating that night. The attack on these women was embroiled in the overall cycle of violence in the region – women’s lives, bodies and sexuality were also targeted, transgressed and severely injured in the ongoing conflict. The compensation claims for the loss of lives in Altnaveigh, documented in the newspapers in November 1922, demonstrate the subsequent horror inflicted on other women.18 Mrs. Isabella Heslip of Lisdrumliske witnessed her husband John Heslip, and son Robert, being shot in front of her by the IRA at the entrance to their yard. Elizabeth Crozier and her husband were also shot dead in front of their young family.

Interlinked trauma on both and all sides therefore lives on a hundred years later and these atrocities are still raw and remembered on the hills, farms and lanes of the Irish border counties and in other communities impacted by transgressive violence in this period. More than a dozen properties were also destroyed in this border area in this episode. Protestant and catholic women, in this instance, were both severely harmed by transgressive violence and aggression. The Women and Irish Society project has documented and outlined at least nine cases of rape or ‘gang’ rape in the Civil War. Two of those include the widely condemned, horrific gang rape of Mrs. Eileen Mary Warburton Biggs in Dromineer, Co. Tipperary, by four local members of the IRA on 16th June 1922, and an attack on Margaret Doherty, a member of Cumann na mBan, at Currinara in Foxford, by three National Army soldiers on 27th May 1923. Eileen’s experience is documented in detail in an Irish Grant’s Commission compensation claim.19 In Maggie Doherty’s case, a pension application made by her mother Catherine stated she had been raped by National Army forces and included medical evidence and submissions by doctors, religious leaders and members of her community. Eileen Biggs and Maggie Doherty clearly never recovered from the ordeal they experienced. Both of these women died in ‘mental homes’ or psychiatric institutions – Maggie, in Castlebar in 1928, and Eileen in St. Patrick’s, Dublin in 1950. Maggie is laid to rest under the shadow of the Ox Mountains in Co. Mayo and in recent years I located Eileen in an unmarked grave in Mount Jerome cemetery in Dublin, buried with her sister Hilda V. Robinson. Commemoration and remembrance that the intergenerational families and associates of such women often engage in, outside of official State programmes, is a reminder of the possibility and power of local acts and healing gestures. The power of finding and opening closed archives documenting such women’s experience of the revolution cannot be underestimated either.

Robert Lynch, “Explaining the Altnaveigh Massacre,” Éire-Ireland, 45, 3 (2010): pp.184-210.

See “Night of Terror,” Irish Times, 18th November 1922.

Mrs. E.M.W. Biggs, Irish Grants Commission, National Archives [London], CO 762/4/8. Other such claims related to assaults of women in the archives include: Thomas John Day Atkinson and Mrs. Cicely Helen Burrington Atkinson, CO 762/32/26; Mrs. Norah Slattery, CO 762/154/20; Mrs. Margaret Fox, CO 762/17/22. See Connolly, “Towards a Further Understanding of the Sexual and Gender-Based Violence Women Experienced in the Irish Revolution,” for a review of the literature in the field.

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The detailed file on the Court of Inquiry held in what was the Ballina workhouse on the 18th of July 1923, concerning the rape of Maggie Doherty, was retrieved in the course of my research in the Irish Military Archives in November 2019 and made available to the Doherty family.20 All of these cases are examples of the subaltern, hidden history of women impacted by the violence of the revolution, which received no official acknowledgement in the decades after the State was formed but which firmly remained in the collective memory of their families and communities. Women severely injured by sexual assaults were not killed in combat but they could and did in some cases ultimately die from the trauma or severe injuries, psychological and physical, caused. Others shouldered the burden of this trauma throughout their life. Gang rape is particularly violent and causes serious injuries. The damage inflicted is plain to see in the sources retrieved and examined in both these cases. The sense of injustice felt by such women and their families and the lack of accountability for such revolutionary violence is also apparent in evocative first-hand accounts. While women clearly experienced threat and danger throughout this period they also sought justice and prosecution or compensation including with the support of communities outraged by revolutionary violence. Other cases of gender-based violence, such as the Greetiagh robbery and Tankardstown assault case in Co. Meath, were pursued through the courts. The Meath Chronicle reported on the 16th of September 1922 that during the early hours a raid was made by armed and masked men on the licensed premises of Mrs. Elizabeth Finegan, who proclaimed themselves to be “Irregulars.” A very detailed report in the Meath Chronicle on 13th January 1923 records a large crowd in attendance at a special court held in Kells. On the 7th of October 1922, Dr Gavin, stated he examined Mary Doyle, a seventeen year old servant in the employment of Mrs. Elizabeth Finegan, Tankardstown.

He gave evidence to the “packed” court which was then cleared to allow for the testimony of Mary Doyle. Mrs. Finegan had encouraged Mary to report a rape and second attempted sexual assault by two members of the raiding party (who were brothers). A trial subsequently was heard in Trim Circuit Court where the jury elected that there was not enough evidence to prove the identity of the four men who broke into the premises. The subsequent charge of rape against two of the men did not proceed in the court as a consequence and they were released from Mountjoy. Bridget Carolan, likewise age seventeen, appeared in a documented public court case in Longford town in September 1923. She was allegedly subjected to an indecent assault reported to be perpetrated by two senior National Army officers in the Officer’s mess, when she was visiting a prisoner in Longford barracks. The two officers in question were also acquitted in this case. Far less women than men died in combat in the Irish Revolution. Nonetheless, it is still important to record female fatalities that did occur. The individual stories of thirteen women killed in County Cork during the War of Independence, for instance, have been recently recovered by Andy Bielenberg.21 Mary Hall, who worked in Cork city, was killed in crossfire in the Upton train ambush on 15th February 1921 on the way home to visit her parents in Castletownbere, Co. Cork. She was their only child. Other women were killed in different circumstances. Kate Maher died on 21st December 1920, after she was found with a head injury and other documented injuries that suggest sexual assault occurred. She had been in the company of members of the Lancashire regiment in Dundrum, Co. Tipperary.22

Margaret Doherty, DP2100. For further discussion of this case, see: See Connolly, “Sexual Violence and the Irish Revolution,” pp.34-38; and Connolly, “Sexual Violence in the Irish Civil War: A Forgotten War Crime?” The court of inquiry held to investigate the rape of Maggie Doherty is recorded in: ‘Discipline – Charge against Lieuts. Waters, Benson and Mulholland, Ballina’, Military Archives, Dublin, A/11837. My thanks to the family of Margaret Doherty for opening this file, which is the subject of a forthcoming publication.

Andy Bielenberg, “Female Fatalities in County Cork during the Irish War of Independence and the Case of Mrs. Lindsay,” in Linda Connolly (ed.), Women and the Irish Revolution: Feminism, Activism, Violence (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2020), pp.164-182.

“Death of Kate Maher, 22 December 1920, Dundrum, County Tipperary,” National Archives, Kew: WO 35/155B/4.

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A small number of conflict-related murders of women or disappearances in this period are also in evidence including on the border and more research is needed. Another woman from near Casteltownbere, Bridget Noble, was abducted on 4th March 1921 and subsequently killed and disappeared by the IRA for allegedly providing information to members of the RIC (her hair was shorn as a prior warning).23 Mary Lindsay, a protestant from Coachford, Co. Cork, and Kate Carroll, a catholic from Aughanameena, Scotstown, Co. Monaghan, in the border region, both suffered a similar fate for allegedly intercepting or providing information to crown forces.24 These incidents occurred across the established religious and class lines in Irish society at this time. Another Military Service Pension file relates to Kate Connolly’s unsuccessful application under the Army Pensions Acts in respect of the death of her daughter Mary (Minnie) Connolly, who died from gunshot wounds on 23rd July 1922 at Edenappa, Jonesboro, Co. Armagh.25 Her death certificate noted that the cause of death was “bullet wounds...inflicted by members of his Majesty’s forces”. The applicant claimed that the deceased was on her way home from supplying milk and provisions to members of the IRA at the Ravensdale camp, Co. Louth when she was shot by British forces. One of the two Moore girls who was with Minnie, Margaret Moore, was also killed in the incident. No provisions under the Army Pensions Acts to consider the claim was awarded.

Conclusion Women in Ireland’s revolution clearly experienced a broad spectrum of transgressive violence that is documented and recorded in surviving evidences – it is in plain sight when excavated. The long term impact of the bodily and psychological trauma and injury caused is apparent in detailed sources that contain the personal testimonies and stories of individual women. Similar experiences of sexual and gender-based violence are also evident in more recent periods, including during the period of ‘the Troubles’ in Northern Ireland (1968-1998).

In a 2016 article, Susan McKay recalled that in December 1982, the Irish National Liberation Army bombed a bar during a disco at Ballykelly, killing seventeen people.26 Eleven of the dead were British soldiers, the primary target. However, what perhaps received less attention at the time was the fact that some of the others killed were young local women referred to as ‘consorts,’ who were associating with the soldiers. Five of the civilians killed were young women, three of them teenagers. One of the women killed was celebrating her engagement to one of the soldiers who survived the incident. In the 1970s republican paramilitaries also forcibly cut hair and tarred and feathered women deemed soldier ‘dolls’. Reference to these issues can also be found in Seamus Heaney’s powerful 1975 poem, Punishment, which speaks to the punishment of women during the conflict in Northern Ireland. The poem describes a woman who was unearthed from the bogs. She had a noose around her neck, a blindfold around her eyes and her head was shaved. During the middle ages, denuding a woman of what was considered her most seductive feature (her hair), which had biblical origins, was a punishment for adultery and an act of desexualisation. Hair cutting was also implemented and reintroduced in twentieth century wars to target female sexuality. The poem ends with what is understood to be a direct reference to sexual violence in armed conflict as – “…the exact and tribal, intimate revenge.”27 The punishments inflicted and the language of ‘consorts,’ ‘collaborators’ and ‘dolls’ is not that different to the gendered assumptions about women in the Irish Revolution who engaged in ‘keeping company’ with members of the crown forces. The IRA appear to have expended a great deal of energy policing female sexuality in the War of Independence. During the revolution, products like tar, dirty motor oil and paint were also doused over women considered disloyal, dangerous and of loose morals.

Bielenberg, “Female Fatalities in County Cork,” p.163.

The killing of Kate Carroll by the IRA is documented in a detailed Court of Inquiry Report on 8th September 1921. “Death of Kate Carroll or Catherine Carroll, 17th April, 1921, Scotstown, County Monaghan.” National Archives, Kew: WO 35/147B/5.

Mary (Minnie) Connolly, DP122.

Susan McKay, “Soldier Dolls in Belfast,” London Review of Books, 21st April 2016: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n08/susanmckay/diary

Seamus Heaney, “Punishment,” in North (London: Faber and Faber, 1975).

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The same method was employed by National Army soldiers in a brutal attack on two sisters, Flossie and Jessie McCarthy, who were also severely beaten and assaulted in what became known as the Kenmare incident in June 1922. The nascent Executive of the Irish State was fully aware of such attacks at the time but failed to prosecute perpetrators. Both the Kenmare and Maggie Doherty cases were also examined by the Army Inquiry Committee in 1924.28 Power, gender and sexuality are intertwined in all violent wars and conflicts with women’s bodies targeted to varying degrees. However large or small the scale of gender-based violence is, in a given conflict, the consequences for individual women are profound and often stigmatizing. As Margaret Macmillan observes: “Women who have been raped not only have to live with their injuries, both psychological and physical, but often also bear the additional burden of being shunned by their own communities…”29 Because women are often seen as the progenitors of the nation, societies can react savagely to any hint that they might be willing to consort with the enemy. In France after the Liberation, for instance, thousands of women were also publicly shamed and had their hair shaved for ‘consorting’ sexually with the enemy. In many other contexts and wars, such as the Greek and Spanish Civil Wars, women’s heads have been shaved. ‘Hair taking’ by States is an established weapon of war aimed to humiliate, control, degrade and desexualize enemy women.

The documented experience of some women, such as, Maggie Doherty, Eileen Biggs, Mary Doyle, Bridget Carolan, Unah McGuill, Mary McKnight, Isabella Heslip, Elizabeth Crozier, Mary Lindsay, Bridget Noble, Kate Maher, Kate Carroll, Elizabeth Scales, Minnie Connolly, Margaret Moore, Eileen O’Doherty and others, represent an interconnected account of what happened to women from different social and religious backgrounds, both during and after Ireland’s revolution. But, how many other women’s stories both of hidden injuries and of survival remain unknown? As Sandra Greene asks, what of things not said, the stories, the statements made only in whispers behind closed doors, away from the eyes and ears of officials and family?30 Ireland has now entered the final stages of a decade of centenaries that has prompted several new, important questions about women’s role and experience in the revolution. What was known as ‘the violence’ of the revolution clearly masked another violence which had largely been experienced in silence and secrecy. However, it remains to be seen: will the official commemoration of the Civil War in 2022-23 find a way to ethically remember, understand and mutually honour these women, as an act of retrieval, one hundred years later? Or will the commemoration of the final stages of the revolution reproduce the gender hierarchy and power dynamic in Irish history that negated, diminished and excluded these women’s experience and contribution, in the first place?

Women may have died in smaller numbers than men in the Irish Revolution but life altering injuries were experienced. Naming and recovering the lost experience of women impacted by the violence of the revolution is in itself an act of ethical retrieval. The revolution did not just terminate in 1922, however. Sociologically, its impact was felt long after. Communal memory of violence is long and often deep. Broken hearts, nervous breakdowns, mental illness, disability, institutionalisation in asylums, emigration, loss of job opportunities, family members and livelihoods, and pregnancy loss, all feature prominently in the postrevolutionary, personal testimonies of activist and civilian women.

For a more lengthy discussion and review of the literature on the Kenmare incident, see Connolly, “Sexual Violence in the Irish Civil War.”

29 Macmillan, War, p.192. 30

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Sandra E. Greene, “Whispers and Silences: Explorations in African Oral History,” Africa Today, 50, 2 (Autumn – Winter, 2003): pp.41-53

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“I” Company Auxiliaries, under Platoon Commander C.E. Vickers (beside driver), at Amiens Street station, now Connolly Station, Dublin, 1920.

Póilíní Cúnta, Complacht “I”, faoin gCeannasaí Buíne C.E. Vickers (taobh leis an tiománaí), ag stáisiún Shráid Amiens, a dtugtar Stáisiún Uí Chonghaile anois air, Baile Átha Cliath, 1920.

Photo National Library of Ireland www.nli.ie Ref: HOGW 41

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Reflections

President Michael D. Higgins

Of Land, Social Class, Gender and the Sources of Violence Recovering Reimagined Futures President Michael D. Higgins An tUachtarán Micheál D. Ó hUigínn

The act of commemoration involves a choice, and a decision to indicate an importance to an event or events chosen above others. To organise a celebration is to further add to the importance of envisaging as to how one’s choice will be construed, and the taking of responsibility for inclusivity as to how a discourse might be constructed in terms of response.

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What Machnamh seeks to do is, rather like what we have just heard in this session today, to provide as wide a context of fact, comment and research as is possible, so that we may be able to make such a reflection as will enable, and empower, us to have a deeper, fuller view of past events, have a tolerant method of recall in present time, and allow neither the past nor the present deprive us of emancipatory futures, yet to be realised. I have, quite often, been struck by how it is within literature rather than sociology or history that the complexity of a period is best captured. I encountered this in the past when studying and writing of migration. The formal scholarship in social studies seemed locked in an approach that could not handle the important core of the migratory experience – transience.

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Yet, in the novels of Patrick McGill or in Micí Mac Gabhann’s Rotha Mor an tSaoil, I found the texture of what I sought. This is not to suggest a substitution of literature for history, or a privileging of fiction over fact. Rather, it is to suggest that a sensitivity to literary sources can open the door to a necessary respect for a phenomenological approach in sociology and history, one that has not always been welcome. In this regard and dealing with the title of my paper Land, Social Class, Gender and Sources of Violence, I have been returning to John B. Keane’s play The Field. What an introduction it constitutes to the distinction between “ownership” and “occupation”; the rocks hewn to clear the ground for the making of a field, not recognised in the sign ‘For Sale’; the isolation of the widow whose life has been made impossible, and is effectively left with a sole option of selling and leaving; the consequence, too, of realising that there will never be enough land and that, what is anticipated as becoming available creates passions that are not merely of acquisitiveness, or, as would become later, insatiable expansion, but of violence, covert and overt. I think it is unreasonable to assume that issues such as those derived from land, of evictions, of the transmitted memory of An Ghorta Mór, of exile and forced emigration, were not present in the formation of the minds of those participants in either the War of Independence or the tragic Civil War which followed it. These are issues which precede both. They are unfinished aspirations for many, of both the ancient and more recently, dispossessed. They run parallel with campaigns seeking more moderate forms of Home Rule short of full independence. Indeed, these issues illustrate for us what were the formative sources of both social class distinction, the decline and rise of new classes, and the new accommodations, that would compose an enduring conservatism drawn from an intersection of the different movements of the late 19th century.

There are times when they seem to be on the same path, when a resolution appears in prospect, only to fade again. Later in the century, the division within the landlords, reflected in the periods before and after the Land Conference of 1903, are an example of an opportunity that would come to be perceived as lost, just as the later failure of a British government to respond to the expression of the people’s will in 1918, or the attempts at peace, such as that of Archbishop Clune, might also have been viewed by some historians. As to omissions, those left out, if more than 70 landlords attended the Land Conference of 1903, and if indeed there had been an argument as to how tenants would be chosen to attend, then surely it is also of significance that the agricultural labourers are not directly represented. We have in recent times moved away from the once popular inaccuracies of suggesting that the experience of the Famine or its subsequent emigrations were a homogenous experience of the Irish people. Those with least and without the means of leaving the country died in higher proportions. Those with means to leave are heavily represented in the emigration statistics. It is part of the removal of the possibility of any meaningful revolution, or indeed deep revision, of distribution of the land in response to an increasing population. The early 20th century began with a significant change in relation to Irish rural society. There were times when progressive views for tenant-right reform seemed to fit together as is recounted, for example, in the memoirs of Andrew J. Kettle known as ‘right-hand man to Charles Stewart Parnell’.1 There were, too, those within the Home Rule movement who saw the resolution of the land issue as an outcome that would reduce support for their principle aim, by the removal of the support of the discontented and the variously organised land distribution activists.

Since the third decade of the 19th century, campaigns for Repeal, Reform of Tenants’ Rights, Home Rule, Clerical Activism, and Control of Protest of the lower classes had intersected.

Kettle, Laurence J. (Ed.) (1958). Material for Victory: The Memoirs of Andrew J. Kettle, Right-hand Man to Charles S. Parnell, C. J. Fallon: Dublin.

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Between 1870 and 1953 Ireland was recomposed in terms of land ownership. The appendix to his memoir of his father by Laurence J. Kettle published in 1958 opens with the phrase:

“The present generation of Irishmen (sic.) has little, if any, knowledge of the revolutionary changes which took place on the land in Ireland during the 19th century.”2 He goes on to give an account of the structures of land holding that preceded the plantations of Ireland, including that of the 17th century on the part of King James I and of “how later on Cromwell confiscated 11 million acres from Irish and Anglo-Irish estates and planted on them his troopers and others to whom he owed money”.3 However, it is in relation to the discussion around the passing of the Land Acts that this valuable memoir that Laurence J. Kettle edited is most relevant for our purposes today. Between 1870 and 1953, 450,000 holdings of land, 15 million acres out of 17 million acres changed ownership on an expenditure of £130 million, as Laurence Kettle puts it “£8 13s 4d per acre”. This, however, was no revolution but it is a formative influence on social class as it would go on to define a later island of Ireland. George Bermingham had written of how on enquiring of his local newsagent in County Mayo in the late 19th century as to how the vote on Home Rule had gone the previous evening in London, the shopkeeper-newsagent had replied, “To hell with Home Rule, it’s the land we’re after”. The reluctance to deal with social class within Irish historiography is something on which I have often pondered. Is it accidental? Is it ideological? Is it a function of a historical tendency to assume a modernisation model as an explanation of change? However such questions are answered, the close examination of the sources of conflict is not something that has attracted scholars in the social studies of the near modern period.

Ibid.

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The result is that we are left with significant omissions as to the experience, indeed of their place in Irish history, of those who were the subject of such omission, who were the victims of deep structural exclusions, and neglected consequences of accommodations to hegemonic notions of property, uncritical acceptance of clericalism, suppression of gender needs and aspirations, and recipients of an authoritarianism, with its unquestioned concept of hierarchy, that would feed its way into the institutional structure. Historians have written in detail of how the cash component of the landlords’ settlement was an inducement and indeed as to how it had different consequences in Ireland and in England. There were in the late 19th century some landlords, now capitalised, who set about new strategies of management of their agricultural holdings. Others chose to expend their money in the contours of British society. There would be consequences for this in adjusting to later finalisations. There had, however, been earlier attempts at “modernisation” of land usage. In 1982, John Gibbons and I, in our chapter ‘ShopkeeperGraziers and Land Agitation in Ireland, 18951900’, published in Irish Studies 2 – Ireland: Land, Politics and People (edited by P.J. Drudy) give an example from County Mayo:

“ In one case, Lord Sligo and the Earl of Lucan cleared 48,555 acres of their estates south of Westport to make way for Captain Houston, a Scottish grazier. All houses and smallholders’ buildings were broken down. The landlords received a rent of £2,100 per annum. They were saved, as they saw it, from the complications of collecting rents in small amounts from a multitude of poor tenant farmers. Houston went on to graze the land profitably for about twenty years and introduced new techniques and new breeds of cattle. He employed thirty herds of twenty labourers.

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He had five hundred cattle and twelve thousand sheep when economic depression, and particularly American competition, began to bear on his enterprise in the early years of the 1890s. During these years, sheep were selling at 10 shillings less per head than five years previously and cattle prices had decreased by £3 or even £4 per head during the preceding three years. The fall in the price of wool had been dramatic also. The first commercial farming experiment to follow the land consolidation had thus failed. Captain Houston gave up the land, and it returned to the landlords ‘practically a useless wilderness as far as its original purpose was concerned’. The fact that the Earl of Lucan had divided up among smallholders two grazing tracts, one near Castlebar and one south of Westport, from which he had already cleared tenants, raised expectations in the case of the Houston ranch. The Congested Districts Board (set up in 1891, to purchase and amalgamate land holdings as well as to promote development in general) had been alerted to the possibilities before the ‘ranch’ was handed back. Indeed a migration had been suggested.”4 John Gibbons and I in that chapter went on to give details of a later evolution of the grazier phenomenon in County Mayo – the role of the shopkeeper-grazier. Earlier in 1974, Peter Gibbon and I had drawn the wrath of modernisation theorists by publishing Patronage, Tradition and Modernisation: the Case of the Irish Gombeenman.5

Our work was out of the tradition of transactionalism in the anthropology of the time. We had been looking at the credit relations that prevailed on the fringes of society even when they were contemporaneous with evolving banking systems at the centre of society. We did not purport to make a statement on shopkeeper-tenant credit relationships in general. Our evidence was drawn from government reports on the West of Ireland. The 1982 chapter took account of what would later be the confrontation in the 1898 local elections in Mayo which consisted of shopkeeper-graziers in alliance with, as the local press put it, “The Snobocracy”, versus nongrazier-shopkeepers in alliance with the trades. Based on John Gibbons’ fieldwork, we showed how by keeping the regions of their credit relationships separate from the regions of their grazing activities, the shopkeeper-graziers could prevail, could even find a space of influence within the movements of the land war. This would become exposed, and become a point of confrontation, in the later United Irish League of 1898. In our chapter ‘Shopkeeper-Graziers and Land Agitation in Ireland’ contained in Land, Politics and People from 1982, John Gibbons and I gave an illustration of the impact that the grazier acquisition and consolidation had on land holding patterns:

“In 1902 in the Westport Poor Law Union, 66 graziers held 98,790 acres out of 280,730 acres in the Union. Eighteen of these graziers were shopkeeper-graziers from adjoining towns. Some held two, three or four ranches. The Kilmaclasser District in the Poor Law union gives us an even clearer example. The district was made up of 21 townlands in all. Of these eight were held by shopkeeper-graziers from nearby towns, two were held by a local grazier farmer and two were held by the landlord, The Earl of Lucan.”6

Higgins, M.D. and Gibbons, J.P. (1982). ‘Shopkeeper-Graziers and Land Agitation in Ireland, 1895-1900’, Irish Studies 2 – Ireland: Land, Politics and People (Ed. P.J. Drudy), Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

Gibbon, P. and Higgins, M.D. (1974). ‘Patronage, Tradition and Modernisation – the Case of the Irish Gombeenman’, Economic and Social Review, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp 27-44.

Higgins and Gibbons (1982). Op. cit.

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Clearing the land, as tillage with its labour intensity is abandoned, is not, and was not, a uniquely Irish experience. The Enclosure Acts in England were a significant source of the men, women and children who would become the human content of its Industrial Revolution. Emma Dabiri, in her recent What White People Can Do Next, quotes from Meiksins Wood’s The Origin of Capitalism:

“… between 1750 and 1850 around 4,000 Enclosure Acts were passed, pushing dispossessed workers into the rapidly expanding cities as casual labourers.”7 Between 1604 and 1914 over 5,000 Enclosure Bills were enacted by the Parliament which related to over a fifth of the total area of England, amounting to about 6.8 million acres. It would not be an insignificant achievement of Machnamh if students in Ireland and Britain had the opportunity of seeing how the history of these neighbours, Ireland and England, are inextricably linked. This was, as nearly all agree now, an imposed experience based on what was the informing ideology, expansion, and indeed adventurism, of the new expansionist, commercial and industrial changes that were taking place at the heart of the empire. That interconnection, the wider view, is important. Even the closest attention to detail as to the delivery of a particular event in its locality or particular time, cannot compensate for missing the influence of the ‘Other’ in either direction. No more than in relation to our present capacities, or our mutual future aspirations, we have been interconnected, and deeply so, through the tumult, tragedy and achievements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The massive expansion of the Irish population in the 19th century is well known to Irish students, but perhaps much less so are the facts of the English Enclosures. Later in the late 18th century and into the 19th, the factory system would again change everything. This is recorded in the poetry of the time (the practices of rural life giving way to migration). Wordsworth’s poem ‘Michael’ is an example. Factory life, mining life would change even the most private aspects of workers’ existences. While a new source of wealth had emerged, industry, the source of status, title, advancement in the artificialities of a society exempt from work, remained attached to land – a factor that would not be unimportant to an Irish landlord class, particularly its absentee component, whose pursuit of status in English society, combined with the eschewing of prudence in lifestyle, accelerated, even if it was not the source, the bankruptcy of their Irish estates. The Land Acts punctuate the decline of Landlordism. However, I have suggested that the transformation in land ownership created a new class that could, as absentee landlords could not, for the most part, shelter behind the masks of religion and nationalism. It was in the same Volume of Irish Studies 2 that the differing positions of Samuel Clarke, a distinguished member of that group of United States historians to whom we owe so much for pioneering on the social history of the 19th century, be it land, religion or social movements, and David Fitzpatrick whose work is seminal.8 Samuel Clarke identified agrarian classes as at least a potential for revolt, both sporadic and organised. He saw it in the structure. David Fitzpatrick, however, drew our attention to violence within and between the network of families.

It is, of course, important as to whether that interconnection is worked in terms of choice or coercion, willingly or by overt or covert colonisation – a topic I sought to address in my consideration of imperialism in Machnamh Seminar Two.

Dabiri, Emma (2021). What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition, Penguin Books: London.

P.J. Drudy (Ed.) (1982). Op. cit.

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There are points of convergence between their views. David Fitzpatrick wrote:

“The most universal problem faced by members of the rural population was that of getting and keeping the land, a problem that was becoming steadily more serious in the years after the Napoleonic Wars as a result of overpopulation and the deterioration of the Irish economy. But did this violence represent a collective assault by the Irish peasantry on the landowning class? The answer very clearly is that it did not. Much of this violence was a struggle by small farmers and labourers against large farmers.”9 I believe that David Fitzpatrick’s work, including his insistence on the stem family having prevailed before the Famine, and the consequences that flowed from a sub-division where perhaps one member had a sustainable habitation and others did not, was a valuable contribution. With life expectancy low, as some historians have put it, young people snatched from life what they could and sought shelter in the corners of fields. Fitzpatrick’s account of Cloone in 19th-century Leitrim describes conflicts in Cloone as follows:

“ intensive conflict both within and between a wide range of social strata, conflict so pervasive that concepts such as ‘community’ or class ‘collectivity’ carry little conviction. Conflict between members of different social strata cannot always be interpreted as the struggle of the downtrodden against their oppressors, despite the numerous intimidatory notices and more violent ‘outrages’ which were executed by labourers against farmers, or by tenants against landlords and their agents.

Other outrages manifest the relentless but less familiar struggle of the oppressor against the insufficiently downtrodden. In 1839, for example, two attempts were made to burn down the cabin of Bryan Monaghan of Edenbawn: the first by his nephew (who subsequently fled the country), the second ‘at the instance of his (Monaghan’s) Brother who is wealthy and occupies the entire Farm, with the exception of the Cabin in Question, and if the Cabin could be destroyed, the poor Man who occupies it would then have no claim to the lands.”10 It is important not to ever forget the experience of those at the bottom of the class hierarchy, as Clarke or Fitzpatrick have written of. Wherever one is on the island of Ireland, there are examples. The cottier who had only his labour to deliver, in pre-Famine times, paid for access to his shelter and a plot that could produce his daily seven pounds of potatoes, with about 200 days of labour per year. While the English landholding system carried, and carries, its inherited traces of feudalism, and that Ireland did not, it is hard to regard the experience of such a cottier as being substantially different from that of a serf. When one speaks of this, the sheer contrast with what would be described as the seminal anthropological account of rural life in County Clare in 1934 by Conrad Arensberg and Solon Kimball, is astonishing. Within a decade of a civil war, surrounded by land conflict, in an atmosphere of clerical prohibition, of banned crossroad dancing, pastorals on the sinfulness of the body and the dangers of losing the faith in a suggested Godless city to which all might emigrate, the authors found a system that was neat in its reproduction of itself. This was as the authors’ model prescribed, carrying as it did the structural-functionalist elements that would dominate sociology for decades.

Fitzpatrick, D. (1982). ‘Class, Family and Rural Unrest in Nineteenth Century Ireland’, in P.J. Drudy (Ed.) op. cit.

Ibid

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Yes, they did identify the harshness of country reactions where the property transition model had been disturbed, be it “the barren wife” or “a young widow without issue”. In accordance with social custom, they were required to accept repayment of their dowry and to return to their families. Where a husband had married into land (cliamhain isteach), he, too, was expected to return to his people on being refunded his dowry if no children were born of the marriage after a reasonable period of time. Such situations still pertained elsewhere in Ireland into the late 1950s. Arensberg and Kimball state the matter succinctly:

“ The country districts recognize only vaguely the right of a woman to hold property. The patrilineal identification of family and land is incompatible with it. Whatever farm a woman works or controls is regarded as a trust for a son or brother of her husband or father”.11 Such a relationship to the economy as was possible to the married woman might include having produce to sell at the local market, be it eggs, butter, poultry, vegetables, fruits or flowers. This was possible while a railway system existed, and as a source of income it effectively disappeared with the closure of the railways. The buses that were offered as a substitute did not facilitate the carrying of such produce to the market, and together with a meagre income of such women the markets themselves withered. Until the 1960s the Irish Census, we must remember, had a category headed “Relatives Assisting”. This referred, among others, to those members of the family, who had not, as Arensberg and Kimball put it, “travelled”. An examination of wills of the period shows, too, how limited was their life world. They were offered “a room in the house and a seat in the car to Mass”. That, as I wrote elsewhere, in my poem ‘Relatives Assisting’ had to be their consolation together with “their High Nellie bicycle and their prayers”.

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Violence takes many forms and is not limited to the use of physical force. It can be sourced and expressed in a variety of ways in structures. The patriarchy of land ownership that existed in Ireland, the remnants of which perhaps remain with us, was one form of economic and cultural control, in a society whose institutional sources of power were in a collusion with what amounted to little less than a land-based patriarchal violence that served to maintain men’s power and dominance. Gender-based physical and sexual violence was also inflicted with cruelty, and is an aspect of the revolutionary period that has been suppressed and denied, until recently by some pioneering and fine historians. It is a neglect that has gone on for too long. The assumptions regarding what was to be the role of women in Irish society was to become a slow-burning issue that would reveal so much of what was exclusionary. It lasted well into modern times. While the present generation may experience some of the gains made in terms of rights, generations of women had just the experience of the struggle, often cruel and frequently harsh. Violence was unleashed on women in several forms and from all backgrounds. Gradations of such violence included the control of women over their bodies, the legacy of which lingered on shamefully into modern times, manifesting in the form of Mother and Baby Homes, forced adoptions, ‘marriage bars’ and unequal participation in many aspects of society, including participation in juries in the courts. We must now face up to all of the aspects of the period as part of our process of ethical recall. Such a commitment will help the ongoing shaping of a more compassionate and equal society. This necessitates an understanding of women’s complex role as activists, the detrimental impact of violence and social and political divisions on them, and their part in the foundation of the new State, a State that would ultimately ignore the feminist and socialist ideals of the rhetoric of the early revolution, leaving women to live essentially as second-class citizens in a conservative, clerically dominated nation.

Arensberg, Conrad M. and Kimball, Solon T. (1968). Family and Community in Ireland (Second Edition), Waveland Press: Long Grove, Illinois.

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What I have outlined are sources of violence that were still in the ether of the period of the War of Independence and the tragic Civil War. These are events about which now there can be no equivocation. Reading recently of, for example, the manner of the shooting of Mary Lindsay who, on identifying preparations for an ambush on her land, sought to have it cancelled before reporting it, I was made to recognise again how important it is to be unequivocal in condemnation of such horrific violence, of not allowing a particle or any strut of heroism to be attached to such a perpetration of not only the ending of a life, but the doing so in a way of exceptional cruelty, one that included the denial of a place of burial.

In shining a light on the contested and divisive narratives of the past, including the sources and consequences of the gradations of violences, the linkages between land, social class and the experience of women in early and more contemporary times in Ireland, we engage in a process of inclusive ethical commemoration in a manner that promotes tolerance, healing, and prompts consideration of the often conflicting senses of identity in contemporary Ireland, north and south. With a multiplicity of narratives being given public space, an emerging spirit of humility, maturity and tolerance is a prize worth seeking.

May we achieve it. Together. Beir Beannacht.

Machnamh 100 Seminar Three – Left to right: Dr John Cunningham, Professor Linda Connolly, Dr Margaret O’Callaghan, President Michael D. Higgins and Ms Catriona Crowe Seimineár a Trí, Machnamh 100 – clé go deas: an Dr John Cunningham, an tOllamh Linda Connolly, an Dr Margaret O’Callaghan, an tUachtarán Micheál D. Ó hUigínn agus Catriona Crowe, Uasal

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Panel Discussion Machnamh 100 – Seminar Three 27 May 2021

President Michel D. Higgins and Dr John Bowman An tUachtarán Micheál D. Ó hUigínn agus an Dr John Bowman

John Bowman: And following now on all of those presentations we’ll have a questions and answers session. First, Catriona Crowe, land was central – the President emphasised this as many other speakers did – but the Land Commission records, for instance, which you mentioned are not available now; they are a treasure trove, hugely important, and they are public records and ought to be available. Catriona Crowe: They certainly should be, John. It’s been a bone of contention since they were rescued from the back of what is now the Merrion Hotel in 1992. At that point they were transported under very difficult circumstances to the National Archives building in Bishop Street in Dublin and thereafter they went down to a warehouse in Portlaoise where they still are. And repeated attempts by scholars like Professor Terry Dooley – who is extremely interested in the land question – have failed to get the Department of Agriculture who are the legal entity who have control over these records to release them. It is at this point illegal not to have them available.

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In ways, I suppose we can account for it a little by the fact that the National Archives Act is relatively new – 1986 – but still I’m hoping that, perhaps partly as a result of the discussion we’re having today, that there’ll be a resurgence of interest in getting them out there. John Bowman: Registry of Deeds would be another instance of important records not being available. Catriona Crowe: The Archives or the Registry of Deeds and the Land Registry. The Land Registry in many ways is more important because that is completely closed but that archive contains the instruments of transfer of land largely between parents and children and they’re very revealing about what is allowed to the older people in the house when they hand over to their son or … John Bowman: And they’d be especially suited and, in fact, the best way they could be handled would be digitally, wouldn’t it, online.

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Catriona Crowe: It’s not the only way but it would be a much better way, it would make it more accessible. Same with the Registry of Deeds which goes back to 1708, so covers a very long period of time. So, it’s something we’ve ignored. These archives really would change scholarship on the whole issue of land ownership, transfer, possession, dispossession, the arrangements that were made in the new State. John Bowman: They would tell us so much more, wouldn’t they? President Higgins, you’d be supportive of that initiative? President Higgins: Very much so. I think it’s just so important, certainly. The Land Commission as well in relation to developing the history of the land and land ownership not just for the people involved but also the sizes and the changes of holdings and what is happening. I’d say absolutely, I think it would be so valuable. I would strongly support what Catriona is saying, yes. John Bowman: Margaret? Margaret O’Callaghan: If you recognise that the Liberal-party established the Land Commission from 1881 was initially setting what they called a fair rent, which was believed and politically argued to be interfering in the absolute status of property, which is why Tories objected to it; and then, subsequently, by the early 20th century the Tories were centrally involved in facilitating the sales of estates, ostensibly to rescue the landlord class, the amount of social and political history contained in these archives is literally transformative, I think their importance would probably exceed anything that we already have. John Bowman: And I’m reminded of Patrick Kavanagh’s lines: ‘who owned that half a rood of rock, a no-man’s land surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.’ There would be a lot of history and local history and family history. Margaret O’Callaghan: Yes, it would be remarkable, absolutely remarkable. And, of course, I haven’t seen them, so I’m assuming that if the records have been kept properly – as one assumes they have – that there will be this vast tract of material there. Catriona Crowe: Endless, endless, volumes of fair rent registers giving really clear detail about what was going on in different places. I said they’re almost a replacement for the lost census records of 1881 and 1899.

Margaret O’Callaghan: So, it has the capacity to transform the history of the second half of the 19th century utterly. Catriona Crowe: It would. John Bowman: And obviously that was an important period, John Cunningham, because you queried in your paper’s very title: was there a revolution, question mark. John Cunningham: Indeed, yes. John Bowman: And it underlines the importance of the land acts and the amount of land which had been transferred from tenant to farmer; there’s nobody more conservative than a tenant who’s become a farmer with 30 acres. John Cunningham: Well, arguably indeed yes. I suppose with regard to the record to understand the process at the lower level, which is something we must understand if we are to understand the general dynamics; yes, this would open up, would transform social history, I think, and local history in Ireland. With regard to the records: to understand the process at the lower level – which is something we must understand if we are to understand the general dynamics – yes, this would open up, would transform, social history, I think, and local history in Ireland, I just wonder if I can ask Catriona: what would it take in terms of the resources which would be required? Enormous resources went into making the Bureau of Military History records available. Catriona Crowe: Not enormous at all. It cost very little, actually. Digitalisation has become much cheaper, for example. A lot of the Land Commission records are, as Margaret suggested, in good order already. They’re where they should be in terms of the cataloguing of the collection. It wouldn’t take that much to be honest. It takes the will to do it as with so much more in this country. If somebody had the will to do it, this could be done; and similarly with the Land Registry records. Partly it’s because of under-resourcing of the National Archives who do not have enough staff to take on any of this. The same would apply to another huge cohort, the 1926 census. John Bowman: But the reason I was mentioning digital access is that rather like the census, any one record is of special interest to the researcher who wants to know what happened to a particular 30 acres.

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Catriona Crowe: Absolutely. Digital access is a tool. It’s a tool for dissemination to a much broader cohort of people than the ordinary paper records for which you have to come to a repository and visit there. But it’s only a tool, as we have … John Bowman: You have to travel, somebody has to bring them out to you and so on, but they’re made for digital access. President Higgins: There is another important point: the important distinction between the agricultural sector and farming. It is the only record we would have of what farming was – in all its diversity at different levels of size of farm and different relationships to the farm in terms of labour. Once you go past the lost Land Commission records, you’re into a discussion of sectors and output but not of farming. So, it’s a crucial interest in relation to understanding the history of Irish farming families and their lives. John Bowman: On the question of sources, take Arensberg and Kimball, for instance, that you quoted. That is a repository, isn’t it, an extraordinary record by these two American anthropologists who came to Clare and recorded just in time a way of life that was vanishing. President Higgins: Well, 1934, it’s the Harvard study, it’s preceded by a physical study that was going on. The expert on it, probably I would think, Professor Anne Byrne, a colleague of John’s [at NUI Galway] and then they added additional chapters to produce – The Irish Countryman in 1934, the parishes of Luogh, Rynamona, and then you get the add-in chapters to give you Family and Community in Ireland which appears in 1968. The interesting side of it is it’s a kind of neat model, but they had consultations with Mr de Valera, facilitated by Bishop Fogarty and they found a consensus really, in my view. I’ve raised some questions about it because in County Clare at that time was – as I have described it in my paper – people were fighting over land, about music, about the Dance Halls Act. And when I went to study as a postgraduate myself, people would ask you about the Arensberg and Kimball study, it was the most known, most quoted account of Ireland in anthropology circles for a long, long time.

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John Bowman: And a new edition from Clare County Council is again in print. President Higgins: I think that that’s it, Professor Byrne and Tony Varley and Chris Curtin and others who have done very valuable work.1 John Bowman: Caitriona Clear, can I come to you? Why were women so invisible for so long? Caitriona Clear: I think one thing that’s coming out today is that you’ll only find in history what you look for. When you look, you will find people. Linda looked for the records of violence in the newspapers. She found them. I’ve been looking, for example, at women novelists, writers, essayists, biographers, hagiographers in the 1920s to the 1950s. I’ve been looking in the newspapers. I’ve been finding them. They’ve been published. We all started to ask questions about women in history about forty years ago in this country because of the feminist revolution, I suppose, if you want to call it that. And therefore that’s what we found. It’s the questions that you ask really. So, I think that’s it. We’ve become more interested in women’s participation, women’s role, women’s mentalities on that over the past while and that’s why we’re finding them more and more; and the more questions we’re asking the more we’re finding. And about men as well, a lot of men that we don’t hear about. Not necessarily working-class men but other male writers that have disappeared as well. So, you know, they’re all there. John Bowman: And what of fiction now as a source of history, what’s your view of that? Caitriona Clear: Well, I think you have to be very careful using fiction as a source, but I do think it’s interesting as an indication of what was preoccupying people in the period. The theme of women having to choose between love and work or love and their mission to serve Ireland, this was a common enough theme in fiction in Ireland. But of course the theme of women, strong-minded women since the novel began or, you know, if you go back to Jane Austen, any of those novelists, you always get strong-minded women according to the mores at the time in fiction. British fiction around this time as well had this theme of conflict, women being conflicted between love and work and so on, so it shows you Ireland wasn’t actually that much different from other countries.

Conrad M. Arensberg and Solon T. Kimball, Family and Community in Ireland, with a new introduction by Anne Byrne, Ricca Edmondson and Tony Varley, Ennis, CLASP Press, 2001.

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John Bowman: Linda Connolly, on genderbased violence, isn’t it also the case that euphemisms will be used, and matters will not necessarily be recorded. It’s in the nature of the evidence, isn’t it, that that will be the case. Linda Connolly: Absolutely. In relation to some of the cases I have looked at, I use documents that are very clear as to what happened. But there are also a whole range of wide terms used. The term ‘outrage’, for example, is sometimes used in a first person testimony by a woman, where she might refer to something that happened to her. One of the sources I looked at described how a woman was being watched in County Tipperary by the IRA. She was visiting the barracks after work (in a chemist shop). She describes the manner in which she was intimately searched, having been followed by the IRA and to me the description reads as a sexual assault, but she didn’t use that terminology. Likewise terms we use today arise: sexual harassment, for instance. Again you can read a report or even some of the witness statements where similar events are described and to me reading that as a contemporary observer, that’s what it was. But that was not the language of the time. The agency that women have today, perhaps, in terms of calling out something like that simply didn’t exist. But, having said that, women did have agency, of course. You know, they wanted to have relationships and friendships with men so there was this tension between the policing of female sexuality, which I referred to earlier and the choice of women to engage in relationships or friendships that maybe didn’t necessarily fit with social expectations. John Bowman: And John Cunningham, you mentioned The Irish Ecclesiastical Record, for instance. That’s a mine of information, isn’t it, on the mentality of the clergy of that period. John Cunningham: Indeed, yes. I think I referred to the mother and baby homes specifically but there are debates going on over months and years about a whole range of social issues and you can see the differing opinions, of say, Sir Joseph Glynn who was a native of Gort, Co. Galway. He was head of the Vincent de Paul for an extended period, and he has quite very interesting observations which are somewhat at odds with the clerical interventions.2

He counsels against placing religious in charge of mother and baby homes, for example, because nobody would go into them if religious were in charge. But there are these quite interesting and resonant debates and I think – as I mentioned in terms of thinking about imagined futures – the future was very concretely and tangibly being created. And planned, in the pages of that particular journal, and a number of others as well at the time. John Bowman: But in terms of women’s experience, for instance, you’re saying of violence against women that that would be unlikely to find its way into the Bureau of Military History archive which after all was being collected some thirty years after the events it describes. John Cunningham: That’s right. I’m reminded here of a pension application from a Galway woman, Katie Fahey from Athenry, later Mrs Nelly when she married in Gort. In her pension application, she spoke about being at Moyode in 1916 and there’s a phrase there – ‘Something happened’. She was there with a lot of others, but you just wonder because she went home, something happened and I went home. So, how do you read that in a letter that was communicated 30 years later when she was justifying her application for a pension and the ‘something’ that happened, her abandonment of her station as it were in 1916 in Moyode was possibly what denied her a pension. John Bowman: Do I also pick up from what you were saying that there was too much in our history of ambush and physical-force violence and there’s so much more, there are many other layers that we need to be exploring? John Cunningham: Yes. I was trying to make a case for revisiting some of the mass mobilisations, whether they were relating to labour or to agrarian struggle, specifically in the years that we’re talking about. There’s the movement from the west from where such movements often emanated in the previous decades, the land seizures around 1920, which created a response on the part of the emerging state which was quite determined that this must be stopped because it was creating divisions among the nationalist people – essentially class divisions within agriculture, I suppose.

Sir Joseph Glynn (1869-1951] solicitor, writer and Catholic social activist, was president of the Society of St Vincent de Paul from 1917 to 1940. Peter Rigney, How Railwaymen and Dockers Defied an Empire: The Irish Munitions Embargo of 1920, Dublin: Iarnród Éireann with Umisken Press, 2021. See also Charles Townshend, ‘The Irish Railway Strike of 1920: Industrial Action in the Struggle for Independence’, Irish Historical Studies, vol. 22, no. 83 (1979) pp. 265-82.

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Margaret O’Callaghan: Could I just pick up on that, there? You talk about The Irish Ecclesiastical Record, well I suppose one of the things published there were the quarterly statements of bishops and archbishops during that period, so if we want to try and approach what’s the thinking about women, one of the ways to look at it is to look at their statements and public pronouncements from the early 1920s onwards. John Bowman: Lenten pastorals. Margaret O’Callaghan: And it’s quite interesting that first of all in 1919 and 1920, they’re condemning violence, every individual act of violence is an act of violence. By 1921-22, they’re retrospectively sanctioning that which they had formally condemned, but by about 1923-24, they’re expressing all this anxiety about a lack of moral probity, a collapse in moral values, and it’s mostly focused upon analysing the sexual behaviour of women. So, I think we need to creatively read these sources and look at those sermons and ask what are they really about? You know, they’re kind of about violence. Then during the Civil War, they say violence is a degenerating malaise that’s come upon the island. John Bowman: I remember just one phrase from a Lenten pastoral – I’ve forgotten the bishop – but if your daughter comes back late from a dance, lay the lash upon her back. President Higgins: What he said was: ‘if your daughter is home late, lay the lash upon her back, it was the old way and the good way.’ The other important part about that is that there was a kind of a hierarchy of Lenten pastorals. They were all published. John Bowman: At great length and in great detail. President Higgins: At great length, yes. John Bowman: So, how many questions then, how many layers have we opened up today? Gender, class, and land. They’re very, very big issues. And there remains a lot of work for scholars to continue doing, isn’t that the case? Catriona?

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Catriona Crowe: Yes, absolutely. Well, as an archivist, this is all grist to our mill or should be, that the more that archives can be made available that people can consult and I’d like to make a little bit of a protest in defence of the Bureau of Military History, because one of the interesting things they did and you made the point, John, and you’re perfectly right, these records are dated some decades after the events they’re describing and therefore have to be treated with caution. But one of the things they ask people to do is ask them about their ideology. How did they get involved in the nationalist movement in the first place? All of that is fascinating information that isn’t to do with ambushes and shootings and all the rest of it. There’s a lot more to the bureau and particularly to the pensions files than simply the accounts of engagements that took place. Margaret O’Callaghan: It’s a question of how people use them really, isn’t it? Catriona Crowe: It really is a question of how you interrogate the material. A lot of it is online now. Which means you can search it in all kinds of different ways and that allows for endless interrogation. I always describe the pensions files as sort of a shadow social history, of a certain part of Ireland during the 1920s, 30s and 40s, because you get details of poverty and illhealth and all of those things that don’t come to us in any other way. So, I think they’re very useful. That does not in any way mean that the land records aren’t badly needed. They really, really are. Nor does it mean that exploration of the local newspapers is not a fantastic endeavour and far easier now that they have been digitised, that you can search those in a way that you couldn’t before. John Bowman: Some of those journalists were known as ‘penny-a-liners’. This was because they were paid one penny per line and that’s why they wrote at great length and gave such detailed exposition. They were stenographers rather than reporters. But that is now to our advantage since we have such a complete record. President Higgins: Oh I do think there are huge omissions that we haven’t gone near yet. For example, the whole history of what I would like to say the people in the cottages and it isn’t just the bishops who were suggesting that society was falling apart on a base of sexuality; there was a very strong support in parishes and from voluntary organisations and others who were very much supporting this notion. And when you actually look at the newspaper accounts, it’s directed against the people who are the lower-income people, people who were

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casually employed. And you have the phrase again and again and it’s a very interesting lesson for Ireland in the present time about its inability, for example, to even achieve the notion that of equality in relation to housing. The phrases that were used about the people in the cottages. But one thing, and not just to be pessimistic about it, historians might well like to investigate at what point in Ireland did we decide that building large housing estates was somehow or another the wrong thing to do. It is to the great credit to think that 50,000 labourers’ cottages were built between the 1880s and 1920. Then you move on to the urban housing and so forth. And what you don’t really hear is that these people were deeply committed to education and to making the country work, and no more than as I said the graziers capturing the renting of the land. Another class had captured the professions and it is the people who actually came through this public housing and so forth, getting the right to have education for the first time, were going into the professions. The omissions are very serious.

John Bowman: May I thank you, President, for the invitation to chair and also thanks to our speakers today? To John Cunningham, Linda Connolly, Margaret O’Callaghan, Catriona Crowe and Caitriona Clear. And that concludes our discussion today and the third session of Machnamh 100. I hope that you’ve found it stimulating and thought-provoking. Thank you for joining us at this session which came to you from Áras an Uachtaráin.

Left to right: Dr John Cunningham, Dr Margaret O’Callaghan, Dr John Bowman, President Michael D. Higgins, Sabina Higgins, Professor Linda Connolly, Ms Catriona Crowe and Dr Caitriona Clear.

Clé go deas: an Dr John Cunningham, an Dr Margaret O’Callaghan, an Dr John Bowman, an tUachtarán Micheál D. Ó hUigínn, Sabina Higgins, an tOllamh Linda Connolly, Catriona Crowe agus an Dr Caitriona Clear.

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Irish Peace Conference, July 1921. Delegates entering the Mansion House, Dawson Street, Dublin, on their return from London.

Comhdháil Síochána na hÉireann, Iúil 1921. Toscairí ag déanamh a mbealach isteach chuig Teach an Ardmhéara, Baile Átha Cliath, ar a bhfilleadh dóibh as Londain.

Photo

National Library of Ireland www.nli.ie Ref: NPA DAP02

Machnamh 100 - President of Ireland Centenary Reflections

Articles inside

Professor Linda Connolly (Respondent

Dr Caitriona Clear (Respondent

Dr John Cunningham (Respondent

Ms. Catriona Crowe (Respondent

Dr Margaret O’Callaghan (Principal Address

Dr Marie Coleman (Respondent

Professor Alvin Jackson (Respondent

Professor Eunan O’Halpin (Respondent

Dr Anne Dolan (Respondent

Professor Michael Laffan (Respondent

Speakers President Michael D. Higgins (Opening Words

Professor John Horne (Principal Address

Opinion – Why We Must Critique Imperialism by President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins

Opinion – Ethical and Respectful Remembering by President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins

Dr Niamh Gallagher (Respondent

President Michael D. Higgins (Concluding Comments