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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,
1
J.P. O’Malley, “The myth and memory of Eavan Boland’s latest poems,” Irish Examiner, 11th January 2014.
2
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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