Dr Margaret O’Callaghan (Principal Address

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

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. 5 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. 6 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.

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.

7 Margaret O’Callaghan ’Partition was no accident’, The Irish Times Special supplement 1921 Truce and Treaty, 25 May 2021, 18-19. 8 Mary Daly and O’Callaghan, 1916 in 1966; commemorating the Easter Rising (Dublin,2007) 9 Roger Casement to Stopford Brooke, 27 June 1907 (National Library of Ireland, Alice Stopford Green Papers, MSS 10,464(2)). 10 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.

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

11 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) 12 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. 13 Her most popular work was her first publication The making of Ireland and its undoing 1200-1600 (London, 1908).

14 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) 15 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) 16 The Liberals did attempt to introduce the Irish Council Bill in 1907. 17 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.

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.

18 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.

19 Lyrics from Canon Charles O’Neill, The Foggy Dew. 20 R.B.McDowell, The Irish Convention 1917-1918 (Dublin, 1970)

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.

21 Charles Townshend, The British campaign in Ireland 1919-1921; the development of political and military policies (Oxford, 1975) 22 Michael Hopkinson (ed.) The Last days of Dublin Castle; the diaries of Mark Sturgis (Dublin, 1999) 23 Ormonde de l’Epee Winter, British Intelligence in Ireland; the Final Reports (Irish Narratives) (Cork,2002) 24 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) 29 Catherine Morris, Alice Milligan and the Irish cultural revival (Dublin, 2012)

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 up- people 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

30 Conor Cruise O’Brien, States of Ireland (London, 1972). 31 See Christopher Magill, Political conflict in East Ulster,1920-22 Revolution and reprisal (OODBRIDGE,2020)> 32 Brian Barton, Brookeborough: the making of a Prime Minister (Belfast, 1988)

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

33 Leann Lane, Dorothy Macardle (Dublin, 2019)

34 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.