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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?
1
Inquest on Thomas McGrath, Clonmel, 5 Mar. 1923 (National Archives of Ireland (N.A.I.), Co. Tipperary Coroner’s Inquests, 1C-86-110).
2
Ibid.
3
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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