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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?
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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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