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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
1
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.
2
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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