Introduction: An Oral History of Irish Civil War Memory?

At first consideration, an oral history of Irish Civil War memory (or, more precisely, its received or ‘postmemory’ among later generations) seems like a dubious proposition, even a contradiction in terms. Erupting after a decade of revolutionary mobilisation against Ireland's political union with Great Britain, the 1922–3 Irish Civil War was fought between rival factions of Ireland's independence movement over a treaty with Great Britain that created a partitioned Irish dominion within the Commonwealth (rather than the all-island independent republic formally aspired to by the Sinn Féin movement). Whereas the Irish Republican Army's (IRA) 1919–21 insurgency against Crown forces, along with other revolutionary milestones such as the launching of the Irish Volunteers in 1913 and the 1916 Easter Rising, would be positively remembered and actively commemorated as noble contributions to the long national struggle, by its very nature, the Civil War resisted ‘remembering in common’.Footnote ¹ This did not preclude partisan remembrance at the expense of one's opponents in the split,Footnote ² a practice most actively cultivated by militant republicans and the families of victims of the victorious Irish Free State.Footnote ³ But for the most part, the intra-nationalist conflict's tragic implications for a generation steeped in shared ideals of national unity and the purity of their cause meant that the sordid, insular violence that closed the Irish revolution was considered ‘best forgotten’ by many on both winning and losing sides.Footnote ⁴ It is thus widely assumed that Ireland's social memory of the divisions and violence of 1922–3 became so enveloped in layers of public reticence and even wholesale forgetting that there was very little cross-generational transmission of the civil war experience and therefore scant prospects for oral history-based research into its memory legacies a hundred years later.Footnote ⁵

Yet as Guy Beiner notes of ‘social forgetting’ of the 1798 Rising and traditions of political radicalism among Ulster's Presbyterian community, ‘when communities try, or profess to try, to forget discomfiting historical episodes’, they nonetheless ‘retain muted recollections’.Footnote ⁶ While a profoundly ‘discomfiting episode’ within Irish nationalism, the treaty split and ensuing civil war that produced the independent Irish state and its two main political parties could not simply be obliterated from national consciousness. Síobhra Aiken has recently demonstrated the persistence of civil war memory in the public sphere in semi-fictionalised life writing, autobiographically inspired works of fiction, and other ‘alternative’ forms of personal testimony published during the first decades of the new Irish state.Footnote ⁷ The present article will examine a potentially larger but underutilised source of popular civil war memory that foregrounds the complex dynamics of inter-generational transmission of traumatic and contested historical episodes: oral histories of family and local memory of the conflict.

Although the revolutionary generation (born between the mid-1880s and early 1900s) has passed on,Footnote ⁸ it remains possible to explore the lingering social memory of the civil war by interviewing the descendants of conflict participants and witnesses. Supplemented by fieldwork on commemorative sites and research in public and private archives, oral history is the central methodology behind my current project examining how and to what extent the divisive memory of this ostensibly ‘forgotten’ conflict was passed on to the next generation in understudied local and family contexts.Footnote ⁹ Focusing on the years 1922–3, but necessarily ranging into earlier phases of the revolution as well as the post-revolutionary decades, my subject-based interviews overlap with a life story approach given that the personal histories and life details of interviewees are essential for appreciating the dynamics of postmemory – that is, when and in what contexts later generations connected with a past they did not experience themselves. Between 2012 and 2016 I conducted and recorded roughly forty interviews with nearly sixty participants (including a group interview plus several conducted simultaneously with siblings, parents and children, or married couples). Interviews took place in-person in rural areas and towns across Ireland, with clusters of interviews emerging in counties Kerry, Limerick, Galway, and Dublin, plus a handful of interviews with members of the Irish diaspora in the United States and Canada. Recorded interviews were supplemented by various contributions from local historians, commemorationists and others who generously shared their expertise, experiences, views, stories, and personal materials in conversations, email exchanges, and letters.Footnote ¹⁰ Oral accounts are often highly individualistic and localised perspectives on the past that complicate or challenge monolithic narratives associated with the state and national politics. Yet, they can also reveal continuities and patterns in experiences and shared memories at the community and family levels, and thus offer an indispensable perspective on a bitter conflict known for the highly localised and intimate nature of violence between rival factions of a formerly cohesive movement.

My project's main goal is to probe the extent and limits of the legendary silences pervading the period while uncovering patterns in its received memory as expressed through family stories, commemorative and political activities, local lore, and related phenomena. Notwithstanding the careful contextualisation and in-depth analysis that oral histories ultimately require, this essay will highlight a few themes and patterns that emerged in the course of my fieldwork, with select examples from a sampling of interviews I conducted. The first theme considered here is necessarily civil war silence itself, an issue that nearly every interviewee voluntarily emphasised and reflected upon and an essential context for appreciating what was selectively remembered and passed down. Amidst these silences, I then discuss some common ways my interviewees encountered family and/or local memories of the civil war. Along with its legacy of silence, the Irish Civil War is widely associated with powerful and enduring enmities, and thus, unsurprisingly, civil war animosity was a recurrent topic in my interviews, particularly its influence on post-revolutionary party politics, elections, and family and communal relations. After discussing animosity I look beyond stories and orality to physical and material manifestations of civil war memory that, amidst the culture of reticence around the conflict, often functioned as the primary means by which later generations acquired a postmemory of the civil war. The underlying argument is that while silence or the will to forget was indeed a defining cultural legacy of the Irish Civil War, the conflict's impact on the revolutionary generation that presided over Irish state and society for the next fifty years was ultimately too profound, too contested, and too recent to be consigned to a dead past. However inconvenient and awkward the civil war's memory could be for the state and the post-revolutionary status quo generally, a social memory of the conflict survived within families and communities and was transmitted to the next generation. The frequently fragmentary and furtive glimpses into the civil war that the next generation occasionally acquired contrast with the more robust remembrance of other phases of the revolution and national history. This disparity hints at the serious challenges to nationalist and revolutionary memory posed by civil war – a form of conflict long regarded as more corrosive to communities and nations than wars against outsiders.Footnote ¹¹ The Irish experience then might suggest insights and points of comparison for scholars studying how other nations and societies have remembered divisive and traumatising events like civil wars.Footnote ¹²

Historical Context

Before proceeding to an analysis of memory patterns in my oral history sources, it is helpful to frame the discussion vis-à-vis three contexts. The first is historical background on the civil war and its place in Ireland's revolutionary decade. The second is the question of how and why the 1922–3 conflict became so widely associated with silence and social forgetting despite its obvious salience to post-revolutionary politics. Thirdly, I offer a brief reflection on the ways that oral history, local history perspectives, and micro-traditions of remembrance ‘from below’ complicate assumptions about social memory drawn from official or national memory writ large.

Known colloquially as the ‘war of friends’ (Cogadh na gCarad in Irish),Footnote ¹³ the Irish Civil War was the last phase of a roughly decade long revolution that violently ended Ireland's parliamentary union with Great Britain. Serious political violence did not erupt until 1916, and then only briefly until the sustained fighting of the 1919–21 War of Independence, but the start of the revolutionary upheaval can be traced to a 1912 bill in the UK House of Commons to restore Ireland's parliament, the longstanding goal of Ireland's ‘home rule’ movement. Irish unionists (the political tendency of the Protestant minority) protested this threat to the status quo by recruiting and arming a civilian militia concentrated in their demographic stronghold of north-east Ulster. Nationalists responded in kind by forming their own militia, the Irish Volunteers. The existence of rival armed bodies outside of government control fed fears of a possible north-south/unionist-nationalist civil war. However, Britain's entry into the First World War averted the impending disaster, with home rule suspended for the duration (and after which unionist leaders expected some form of Ulster exclusion from its operation). While home rule and unionist leaders and militias pledged their support to the war effort, militant nationalists took over and radicalised a smaller faction of Volunteers and in 1916 launched a rising for full independence. Although it was a military failure resulting in the execution of its leaders and mass internment, the Easter Rising had an electrifying impact on the country. In 1917 and 1918, physical-force republicans flooded into and took over Sinn Féin, a previously small party known for its philosophy of national self-sufficiency and a strategy of running abstentionist electoral candidates who might one day unilaterally establish a popular Irish assembly, as nineteenth-century Hungarian nationalists had done. In 1918 Sinn Féin decimated the previously dominant Home Rule party in the first postwar general election, setting into motion a declaration of independence and the first meeting of Dáil Éireann, an assembly and executive that claimed a popular mandate to supplant British administration in Ireland. Sinn Féin activists proceeded to administer an underground republican government and the Irish Republican Army pursued a guerrilla campaign targeting the police and other manifestations of the ancien regime. After two and half years of uneven conflict, the British conceded the need to negotiate with republican leaders, but only after it had satisfied northern unionists by creating Northern Ireland, a six-county, Protestant-majority territory still within the United Kingdom. Partition caused an explosion of communal violence in the north between 1920 and 1922 that might be considered a forgotten civil war within the revolutionary decade.

In the fall of 1921, Irish delegates met with British officials, including Prime Minister David Lloyd George, for weeks of intensive negotiations. With partition already a reality and the British government unwilling to countenance an Irish Republic in name or substance, a twenty-six-county Irish dominion in the Commonwealth was ultimately settled upon, albeit very reluctantly by several Irish signatories. While this Irish Free State would have its own autonomous parliament, executive and army, the Anglo-Irish Treaty limited Ireland's external sovereignty; recognised the Crown in a constitution, oath, and Governor-General post; and gave the British Navy continued access to several ports. It thus quickly proved unacceptable to many principled republicans back home. During weeks of heated debate in the Dáil, treaty advocates stressed the historic gains achieved, the freedom to build on these gains in the future, and the ruinous alternative to ratification: a return to a full-on war that a depleted IRA would likely lose. With the Catholic Church, commercial newspapers, and many public bodies expressing support for the settlement, pro-treatyites also claimed that the ‘will of the people’ was on their side. Anti-treatyites stressed revolutionary ideals and issues of honour and sacrifice, and they doubted whether the freedom of action enjoyed by distant dominions like Canada would ever be permitted to Ireland given its proximity to Britain and ambiguities in the treaty document itself. They also questioned the Dáil's right to disestablish the very republic it was created to embody during the revolution and argued that Britain's lingering threat of war negated alleged popular support for the compromise. In January 1922 the nationalist assembly narrowly voted to accept the treaty, precipitating a sharp split within the independence movement that, within six months, metastasised into open fighting between British-backed pro-treaty forces and anti-treaty sections of the IRA. While the treaty dilemma was thus the immediate cause of the ‘great split’ and civil war, it drew energy from previously suppressed but now unavoidable debates and frictions inside the movement regarding essential versus expendable ideals of the revolution; the substance of sovereignty, freedom, and liberty; popular limits on revolutionary vanguardism; the balance of power between military and political wings; centre-periphery, urban-rural, and social divides; and the comparative credentials of rival leaders and activist cadres. Class and status divisions, or what might be called hierarchies of respectability, also played an integral but complex role in the split and civil war, with so-called ‘stake in the country’ elements from the Church to commercial interests to the urban middle classes and ‘strong’ farmers firmly in the Free State camp, versus higher rates of republican sentiment amongst small farmers, agricultural labourers, and the land-hungry rural poor. However, the labour party and trade unions accepted the basic legitimacy of the new state, while many workers flooded into the new army, provoking outrage among republicans who expected the instinctive support of the ‘men of no property’ even as their movement prioritised political and military matters over social and economic ones.Footnote ¹⁴

The military conflict began in earnest in late June 1922 with brief but fierce fighting in Dublin, followed by mid-summer clashes for control of Munster's towns in which pro-treaty troops soon prevailed. Forced into retreat, anti-treaty fighters persisted in a low-level but destructive guerrilla campaign, especially in the rural west, while the larger and better-armed, yet often poorly trained and ill-disciplined, National Army adopted counter-insurgency methods not unlike Crown Forces before them. Indeed, with over eighty executions, mass internment, orchestrated atrocities against prisoners and other extra-judicial killings, the Free State and its army nearly surpassed Britain's hated Black-and-Tan mercenaries as the bête noire of the republican movement. The split amongst the revolution's leadership and organisations exercised the wider population as well, fracturing friendships, families, and communities. Civil war fighting disrupted economic life and impeded government administration and functional law-and-order, facilitating a fleeting epidemic of land and labour unrest, crime, sectarian harassment, and other social conflicts and ‘everyday violence’ that pulled at the seams of the social fabric.Footnote ¹⁵ Ultimately, however, the anti-treaty movement's dispirited military resistance and ineffectual political organisation failed to prevent the consolidation of a Free State governing authority and a gradual return to ‘business as usual’ in everyday life.Footnote ¹⁶ Yet, arrests, internment, executions, and sporadic killings by state forces escalated in the final months before the IRA abandoned its armed campaign in the spring of 1923, albeit without formally surrendering its arms or conceding the legitimacy of the new state.

Civil War Legacy and Memory

Along with causing tens of millions of pounds in material damages, the civil war claimed roughly 1,500 lives, making it a more intense conflict than the longer War of Independence.Footnote ¹⁷ Earlier histories tended to wildly inflate casualties in 1922–3, presumably an overreaction to the loss of major figures like Sinn Féin founder Arthur Griffith (albeit from natural causes) and revolutionary folk hero turned statesman Michael Collins, as well as many local heroes who succumbed to ambushes, executions, assassinations, and killings in the field. One must acknowledge that Ireland's grim experience nonetheless fails to match the scale of other civil wars and revolutions in inter-war Europe – the most frequent comparison being with Finland, which had a population roughly comparable to Ireland's yet saw well over 30,000 deaths in its 1918 civil war, including a staggering 12,000 executions.Footnote ¹⁸ Yet, the Finnish Civil War was based on comparatively starker ideological and class divisions between anti-Soviet ‘whites’ and pro-Soviet ‘reds’. The Spanish Civil War's extreme left-right cleavage, high violence levels, and the extent to which it became internationalised were similarly absent from Ireland's civil war, though in the 1930s some veterans of the Irish split took opposing sides in the Spanish conflict and even sent rival brigades to fight in Spain.Footnote ¹⁹ Ireland's intra-national and essentially intra-movement civil war is also a poor fit with other contemporary instances of mass violence in Europe which reflected long seething ethno-religious divisions unleashed in the wake of the First World War, especially following regime collapse amongst the Axis powers.Footnote ²⁰ The implicit presence of the British government – in dictating the treaty settlement and subsidising, arming, and coercing the pro-treatyite side into facing down its republican enemies – is arguably more reminiscent of anti- or post-colonial conflicts outside of Europe. Perhaps more exceptionally, the Irish Civil War literally pitted ‘brother against brother’ and erstwhile friends who, just months earlier, had been part of the same movement, fighting the same enemy, and finding shared inspiration from the same national myths and ideals. As older comradely bonds unravelled and both camps’ respective position on the treaty hardened, the actions of the other side became more incomprehensible and unforgiveable.

The Free State's military victory over the republican resistance did not decisively resolve the fundamental political controversy behind the conflict. Opponents of the treaty retained a significant minority of electoral support in the first post-war election of August 1923, especially in the poorer west, even as they boycotted governing institutions. But after several years suffering alleged economic discrimination, political harassment, and the mass emigration of activists, anti-treaty leader Éamon de Valera manoeuvred the majority of the opposition movement into his new departure, the Fianna Fáil party. By 1927, Fianna Fáil had committed itself to electoral participation and constitutional politics, albeit for the semi-revolutionary purpose of republicanising the state from within by undoing features of the Free State Constitution that limited southern Ireland's autonomy and sovereignty, which it did successfully between winning power in 1932 and passing a new constitution in 1937.

Paradoxically, while the civil war split created the two parties (Fianna Fáil and a pro-treaty coalition named Fine Gael) that dominated southern politics and government until only very recently, something of a taboo against unseemly public airing of the conflict's grievous memory was widely respected. For example, the Bureau of Military History – a government project (developed with bipartisan support) to archive veterans’ revolutionary witness statements – avoided the civil war period altogether, while most IRA memoirs and other popular histories similarly conclude in 1921. Nor would the civil war, the treaty, or the founding of the state be consistently recognised by the state or either mainstream party, apart from a half-hearted effort to memorialise fallen leaders Collins and Griffith (and later, murdered cabinet member Kevin O'Higgins) with a poorly-made monument.Footnote ²¹ Only in the annual commemoration at Béal na mBláth, county Cork, where General Collins fell in an ambush, does the Fine Gael party ritualistically remember its civil war roots in a consistent and robust public fashion. While cumainn or branches of the Fianna Fáil party have a long tradition of commemorating the deaths of anti-treaty martyrs, such traditions were sharply (and arguably successfully) contested by more militant republicans who rejected Fianna Fáil's political compromises (and record of repressing the IRA) once in office. Thus, while there is extensive republican commemoration of the civil war, it is largely the purview of local actors and organisations and is directed against the state, the status quo, and notions of shared memory or reconciliation. As a result, generations after the revolution and civil war encountered a deeply ambivalent memory of their country's violent birth in which the civil war and its legacy were at once absent yet omnipresent, buried yet close to the surface of everyday life, and unreconciled yet mutually mourned.

Oral History

This complex history of official silence and lack of commemorationism outside of localised or partisan contexts raises an important methodological point pertinent to memory studies and oral history alike. This is the need to look beyond national commemorative traditions, official state contexts, and mainstream public discourses to understand the complex ways societies (and communities and individuals within them) wrestle with their difficult pasts. Given the powerful divisions and animosities that accompanied and persisted long after the civil war, and the lack of a national narrative that could reconcile these differences, the social memory of the conflict was unlikely to find robust expression at the national level or in an official manner by the state. It is only in local history and lore, micro-traditions of commemoration mostly associated with militant republicanism, and the intimate confines of family stories that its ‘uneasy cultural memory’ was most likely to have survived.Footnote ²² These are precisely the contexts and perspectives that oral history and local fieldwork can best access.

For a long time, oral history was regarded with scepticism by academic historians given the historical inaccuracies, inconsistencies, biases, and other distortions that often characterise personal recollections and communal lore. However, questioning the positivist thrust of earlier academic practitioners, more interpretative oral historians came to embrace the inherent subjectivity of oral sources, valuing them less for the objective historical facts they might contain than for the unique insights they can provide into how people and groups selectively remember and give meaning to the past.Footnote ²³ As Alessandro Portelli reminds us, such ‘subjectivity is as much the business of history as are the more visible “facts”’. He goes on to say that what interviewees believe – and, we could add, remember – about the past is as constitutive of history as ‘what actually happened’.Footnote ²⁴ (Though, at the same time, individual, family, and community memory as revealed through oral accounts can also contain rich factual details that are lost or absent from ‘official’ textual sources.) There is an inherent affinity between memory studies and orality-based history: as Beiner notes, oral histories are, at root, ‘memory accounts’, while communal oral traditions have been called ‘compilations of “memories of memories”’.Footnote ²⁵ The multi-layered and evolving subjectivities of both orality and memory dovetail in the concept of ‘postmemory’ defined by Marianne Hirsch as ‘the relationship that the generation after those who witnessed cultural or collective trauma bears to the experience of those who came before, experiences that they “remember” only by means of stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up’.Footnote ²⁶ Hirsch's research on the intensely affective and life-defining impact of inherited memory of the Holocaust amongst the children of survivors is obviously an imperfect fit with the Irish Civil War, a small-scale conflict that hardly dominated the lives of the next generation, many of whom grew up hearing or knowing very little about it. Nevertheless, the concept of postmemory, which I will use interchangeably with inherited, received, and later-generation memory, is helpful in gesturing at the complex ways that my oral history interviewees’ own lives and recollections are often interwoven with the accounts of the civil war and revolution (and silences therein) they inherited through local stories and family history. It is to these interviews that I now turn.

Cross-Generational Silences

The first theme that demands attention is the Irish revolutionary generation's oft-cited efforts at silencing the memory of the civil war and preventing its transmission to their children and beyond. While oral histories of silence and memories of forgetting seem like paradoxical notions, they are essential subjects of study in oral history and memory studies given that silence and forgetting are the conceptual ‘other’ to orality and remembering respectively. How then did the legendary silences associated with the civil war inflect oral histories of family and communal memory that I collected? Many of my interviewees and correspondents emphasised how little their grandparents, parents or other relations discussed the civil war, particularly compared to other phases of the revolution. One interviewee's father had been a member of the republican youth organisation Na Fianna Éireann during the War of Independence in Limerick City, while an uncle was a member of the local IRA's Active Service Unit. Along with another brother, they all fought in the anti-treaty IRA in the civil war. Despite this deep family connection to the period, my interviewee recalled that his father ‘spoke very little of the war of independence. Nothing of the civil war’. He added, ‘I've spoken to other people of my age who had parents and they were exactly the same. It wasn't mentioned’.Footnote ²⁷ A participant in a group interview in Listowel, County Kerry said of two local IRA leaders who joined the Free State Army, ‘their sons, still alive, will tell you that they never spoke about the civil war, never, ever, ever…’.Footnote ²⁸ The grandson of Captain Con Brosnan, a Kerry IRA leader (and prominent Gaelic footballer) who became an officer in the Free State Army, confirmed that he heard ‘practically nothing’ from his father about his grandfather's civil war experiences, but what was ‘handed down, to the next generation, was the honorable war of independence’.Footnote ²⁹ Another correspondent's grandmother and grandfather (along with several of their siblings), all from Bantry in West Cork, were active locally in the IRA or Cumann na mBan (the republican women's organisation) during 1919–21 and took the anti-treaty side in the civil war, with several becoming active in the Fianna Fáil party subsequently. She recalled as a child briefly seeing a relative's revolutionary service medals and picking up a few spare stories. However, years later when she attempted to find out more about her grandparents’ revolutionary activities from her father and his brother, she ‘hit deep silence’.Footnote ³⁰

I also corresponded with the elderly children of Denis and Agnes McCullough. Denis was a leading figure in the vanguardist organisation the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) in Belfast during the pre-revolutionary years, rising to the position of President of the IRB's Supreme Council by 1915, though he was not privy to the plans for the Easter Rising. Immediately after the War of Independence, during which he was in the Volunteers and frequently arrested, he moved to Dublin with his wife where a branch of his music business was heavily damaged by an IRA mine during the civil war (presumably due to his ‘strong supportive’ position for the pro-treaty side). Agnes McCullough (née Ryan) was from a politically active family in Wexford at the centre of local republican networks. While she was pro-treaty, a brother fought against the treaty and remained a lifelong follower of de Valera, and her activist sisters split on the treaty and later married prominent figures on both sides of the political divide. The eldest son recalled that growing up within this politically divided family, ‘Any discussion at home on the civil war was taboo, up to our late teens. . . . They [parents, aunts, and uncles] were very anxious that any bitterness . . . should not extend to the next generation, in any form’. His brother similarly recalled, ‘there was little . . . communication from my parents on this subject. It seemed they didn't want to “involve” their children’. Their younger sister, born in 1930, confirmed that ‘the period . . . was never spoken of. They were not alone in that. The whole country seemed to have taken a vow of silence on this subject’.Footnote ³¹

As is suggested by these examples, later generations often attributed their elders’ reticence about the civil war period to a desire to prevent political and personal enmities from being passed on to the next generation, even as those enmities found expression in family traditions of staunch Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil support. But there were additional motives and contexts involved in this legacy of silence. Wartime activities by participants on both sides that transgressed the moral and social boundaries of ordinary civilian life – such as involvement in shootings, bombings, executions, assaults, looting, acts of betrayal, etc. – were harder to justify or explain in the aftermath of fighting, and thus do not often feature in surviving stories, even though they were constitutive of much violence in 1922–3. Some veterans clearly struggled afterwards with lingering feelings of guilt, shame, regret and anger, with histories of heavy drinking, mental health problems, and even suicide, likely connected to what we would today call post-traumatic stress disorder.Footnote ³² The avoidance of painful or unpleasant memories was understandable under the circumstances, though, as the private papers of major figures such as de Valera and his pro-treaty rival, General Richard Mulcahy, reveal, public silence sometimes masked private, life-long obsessions with the contentious period.Footnote ³³ Later political contexts and considerations also contributed to circumspection in ensuing decades. Active republicans, who rejected the legitimacy of the post-revolutionary southern state as much as they did the northern six counties still linked to the United Kingdom, risked drawing the attention of the Garda's ‘Special Branch’ and possible internment during the 1940s and 1950s. One of my Kerry interviewees and local guides was Dr. Tim Horgan, a respected local historian with impeccable republican credentials on both his maternal and paternal sides. His grandmother, Madge Clifford, was at the centre of action throughout the revolution, serving as personal secretary for republican government minister Austin Stack during the War of Independence and then for anti-treaty IRA leaders Ernie O'Malley and Liam Lynch, while his grandfather, Dr. Jack Comer, became medical officer for the IRA's Third Southern Division in the civil war. He spoke of the serious legal and personal risks associated with republican activism in the inhospitable post-revolutionary years that had ‘a huge effect’ on civil war veterans ‘telling the story’ of their revolutionary experiences to children ‘in their . . . teens or that . . . age when history gets passed from one generation to another’. His elderly mother, Eileen Comer, added that when her parents met with fellow republican revolutionaries in later years, they often ‘spoke in whispers’.Footnote ³⁴ Yet, other interviewees simply noted that when they were young they never thought to ask about the civil war because they knew nothing about it as a distinct historical event worthy of interest – a fact that might be attributed to its absence from school history curricula and public histories. The interviewee cited earlier whose father and uncles were activists in Limerick recalled that as a child he had ‘heard the words “civil war” mentioned, but it didn't mean anything to me’ at the time.Footnote ³⁵ When grown children began to evince an interest in family history, it was often too late to glean much direct information because the older generation had already passed on. Another consideration was that members of the civil war generation would not have been as inclined as modern parents are to talk openly with their children about personal experiences and feelings.

The emigration of thousands of civil war veterans in the 1920s, particularly ex-internees facing political obstacles to employment, functioned as an additional impediment to the transmission of the social memory of the civil war. Two siblings I interviewed in Galway had an uncle, Martin Burke, who was executed by the Free State in January 1923 after his small fighting column was captured in arms, and another uncle who left Ireland ‘a very bitter man’ following his release from an internment camp. Though they grew up with some of their father's recollections of the revolution, the absence of the two uncles from their lives severed an important family connection and potential link to the period.Footnote ³⁶ An interviewee in Connemara similarly never got the chance to meet three of his father's older brothers, all active republicans who emigrated to the United States in the mid-1920s, never to return.Footnote ³⁷

Stories and Memory Transmission

At the same time, my oral history research challenges the popular notion of a universally observed ‘conspiracy’ of silence among the civil war generation.Footnote ³⁸ The sons of Westmeath-born Tomás Malone (alias Seán Forde when on-the-run) who was active in East Limerick IRA operations, had this to say when I asked whether their father spoke to them about the revolution when they were growing up. One said, ‘Non-stop! . . . We were very proud of him’. The other, ‘All the people who used to call, all the people called to the house were all republicans’. When I mentioned how many people I had interviewed who said the civil war was rarely if ever discussed with them by parents and others, one brother replied: ‘I'm sorry for them . . . what they've missed in their own country's history is very important’.Footnote ³⁹

More commonly, family and/or local history of the civil war was neither a frequent topic of conversation nor an entirely taboo subject. Rather, the status of its memory was more ambiguous and equivocal, shared sparingly and selectively in passing remarks or ‘the odd story’, with perhaps no more than a few moments of direct transmission in the course of growing up. Such instances of second-generation exposure to the civil war often occurred in the context of everyday family life, like bedtime or Sunday dinners. I interviewed the daughter of Bridie Clyne O'Rahilly, a veteran of Cumann na mBan who worked with the Dáil Éireann government and then joined the anti-treaty garrison inside the Four Courts (where civil war fighting first erupted) and later worked for de Valera's Irish Press. She described the quotidian settings in her youth when her mother imparted a little of her civil war history: ‘she'd collect me from school, and she'd sit down and, she'd often tell us a story, you know. But I . . . wasn't really paying much attention’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Another interviewee who grew up on Kerry's Dingle peninsula during the 1940s recalled how, out of sight, he would listen in on conversations amongst local men in his father's small shop, with discussion of the war then raging in Europe and North Africa interspersed with more animated exchanges about local civil war-era controversies.Footnote ⁴¹

Sometimes information on the civil war was not imparted to the next generation until many years later, or was passed down indirectly, not necessarily by parents but via other relatives, family friends, or community members. A Dingle resident recalled that the civil war incident he heard most about growing up in Ventry was the prolonged torture and brutal murder of captured anti-treaty IRA officer Daniel ‘Bob’ McCarthy. He recalled learning about the incident from a man who worked for his father and who ‘would have lived within a quarter of a mile of McCarthy’ and thus been privy to neighbours speaking about his fate.Footnote ⁴² Another Dingle interviewee spoke about the McCarthy killing, particularly community animus towards the locally recruited Free State intelligence officer involved in his torture and murder. According to a local story shared by his uncle, the officer, named Griffin, responded to IRA threats of retaliation against him by ‘sen[ding] word back to Dingle somehow that at 12 noon on a Sunday he was going to walk up the street. Which he did, with two 45s’, challenging his enemies, who never materialised.Footnote ⁴³ This, and other stories interviewees shared, underscores the social function and contexts of memory, and how in later generations individual experiences and memories can overlap with family stories, local history, gossip, and other influences.

Animosities

Despite calling out McCarthy's would-be avengers old west-style, the notorious local Free State officer was eventually forced to flee Dingle and then Kerry for his own safety,Footnote ⁴⁴ a fact that points to another critical undercurrent of Irish Civil War memory that exists alongside silence/forgetting: enduring animosities. These animosities, which fed into the party split between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, and indeed between Sinn Féin and Fianna Fáil, are widely regarded as having survived below the surface of Irish politics and social relations for decades. Were these enmities aired and passed along within families and between neighbours? Notwithstanding widespread cross-generational continuities in family political affiliations, many of my interviewees could not recall hearing their parents speak ill of a person or neighbouring family based on their allegiances or actions in the civil war per se. I did, however, encounter strong feelings against prominent figures in the civil war, particularly those who later held political office. In counties Sligo and Galway, I met with descendants of republican fighters killed in different circumstances by the Free State Army's Western Command, under overall leadership of General Seán MacEoin. Seamus Devins, remembered as one of ‘Sligo's Noble Six’, was murdered on Ben Bulben Mountain after surrendering to Free State troops. Martin Burke, a Galway Volunteer, was executed along with four comrades following their capture, court-martial and sentencing at Athlone barracks. MacEoin himself was purportedly present at the latter execution and even administered a coup de grace according to an account conveyed to Burke's family years later by a member of the firing squad. Popularly known as the ‘Blacksmith of Ballinalee’, MacEoin has been celebrated for his heroic exploits as an IRA flying column leader in County Longford during the War of Independence. After the civil war, he became a prominent Fine Gael politician and government minister. While he later contributed a lengthy statement and voluminous materials on his revolutionary record to the BMH project, according to the clerk responsible for gathering the materials, MacEoin ‘appeared to be most careful to avoid inclusion . . . of any reference to political and other controversies which arose in later years’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Yet, for the families of his military command's victims, he remains the subject of seemingly undiminished animosity, rebranded ‘the butcher’ of Ballinalee for his controversial civil war career.Footnote ⁴⁶

Perhaps more than anyone, de Valera inspired strong negative feelings, most obviously from the opposing pro-treaty tradition, but even from those with anti-treaty backgrounds. In the latter cases, it often reflected a stauncher republican tradition in family politics that rejected Fianna Fáil's political compromises in the late 1920s and 1930s. Others from solidly Fianna Fáil families where de Valera was highly respected by the older generation – viewed almost like a secular saint or a demi-god some have saidFootnote ⁴⁷ – developed a negative impression of the ‘Long Fellow’ after they grew up, evidence of the limits of civil war politics (and the phenomenon of party dealignment) and the evolving reputations of historical figures.Footnote ⁴⁸ General elections appear to have been key moments when civil war attitudes were vented and became palpable to the next generation. Interviewees who came of age in the first few decades of the Free State often recalled how the suppressed bitterness of the civil war could find expression, both verbally and physically, at election times when the ‘blood was up’ amongst Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil supporters.Footnote ⁴⁹ One interviewee in Galway shared a local memory about Free State Minister Ernest Blythe's visit to the area in the 1920s during which he was met by an angry mob who turned his ‘little trap . . . upside down and he was turned upside down’ inside it too.Footnote ⁵⁰ In north Kerry, I heard about ‘Blueshirts’ rallies in the 1930s that attracted republican counter-demonstrators, resulting in fistfights and even shootings. (Initially known as the Army Comrades’ Association, the ‘Blueshirts’, so-called for their uniform and ideological affinities with continental fascist movements, was created to defend the interests of pro-treaty army veterans when their civil war enemies came into office in 1932. They subsequently attracted broader support from other pro-treaty factions, including commercial farmers outraged by de Valera's economic war with the United Kingdom which decimated cattle exports). Many other interviewees remembered less dramatic instances of civil war divisions inflecting local elections up to the 1970s, including the fact that local party canvassers often had a clear mental geography of which homes to avoid based on political traditions going back to the treaty split. The influence of later experiences on the postmemory of the civil war is evidenced by some older interviewees’ tendency to anachronistically project the ‘Blueshirts’ label, always pejoratively, onto pro-treaty figures like MacEoin and Mulcahy even when discussing the civil war (i.e. a full decade before the emergence of the Blueshirts movement). Similarly, some militant republican families’ negative views about de Valera in the civil war were clearly influenced by his later actions, including recognising the Free State Parliament in 1927 and, even more unforgivably, interning and executing IRA men in the 1940s.Footnote ⁵¹

Newspapers were another aspect of family life through which civil war animosities and attitudes were manifested and refracted in later years. Asking interviewees what paper was read in their homes when they were growing up produced some revealing insights into the intricacies of civil war postmemory. That a neighbour would only read the Irish Press (the Fianna Fáil newspaper) outside of the home so as to not antagonise his wife from a pro-treaty background,Footnote ⁵² or that a militant republican family in Limerick actually preferred the Fine Gael-aligned Irish Independent over the Irish Press such was their hatred of de Valera and his ‘traitorous’ compromises following the civil war, suggests an underappreciated means by which later generations imbibed civil war politics growing up.Footnote ⁵³

Material and Physical Manifestations of Memory

Family memory is not only transmitted verbally or through textual accounts. In the absence of stories or direct discussion of the civil war, received memories of the period could assume other forms. The memory of the civil war was sometimes physically manifested in bodily injuries, scars and health problems or disabilities caused by revolutionary activities that many veterans still suffered from in later years.Footnote ⁵⁴ A native of Kilkenny I interviewed in Canada discussed how his father, who may not have been very politically active in the civil war, was nonetheless held by the Free State in the Curragh internment camp, apparently to ensure the good behaviour of his older brother, a school teacher and IRA member who was considered more politically suspect. My interviewee's father subsequently took part in a mass prisoner hunger strike in the fall of 1923 and as a result suffered from digestive problems for many years after. His father's physical discomfort and his mother's efforts to keep him on a mild diet kept the civil war period alive in his consciousness growing up until the family emigrated and his father had surgery to correct his stomach problems.Footnote ⁵⁵ Cormac O'Malley, the son of famous IRA organiser and soldier Ernie O'Malley, recalled accompanying his father on visits to the homes of IRA veterans in the late 1940s and 1950s when he was busy compiling his revolutionary interview notebooks that have become an important source on the period. Although present for some of the interviews, Cormac learned very little about the period directly from his father, who died prematurely in 1957, leaving behind a massive collection of political and artistic writings, correspondence, and historical materials that Cormac has supervised the formal archiving and publication of. However, he did recall as a child seeing indentations on his father's back, which his father briefly explained were from having bullets surgically removed (after his shootout with Free State troops on Ailesbury Road in Dublin). And that, when driving at night, his father had to pull the car over when oncoming cars approached because he was easily blinded by headlights due to having his retinas damaged with hot pokers during a violent interrogation in Dublin Castle.Footnote ⁵⁶ Other veterans were scarred by bouts of TB, pneumonia, the Spanish ‘flu, scarlet fever, scabies and other illnesses, or suffered lingering physical problems from battle wounds, hunger strikes, or the deprivations of life on the run and in unhygienic prisons. Many died relatively young in the 1950s, 1940s, or even the 1930s, which was hardly conducive to inter-generational transmission of the memory of the period.

Material history and family souvenirs such as photographs, old uniforms, weapons, prison autograph books, internment camp crafts, and personal effects like rings, watches, and even locks of hair can function as mnemonic devices that connect later generations to the revolutionary period. I spoke with the granddaughter of Charles Downey, a Dublin docker and active service IRA member who was dispatched to Tralee with the Free State Army's notorious Dublin Guards to subdue republican resistance in Kerry in the civil war. She distinctly remembered how when she was only seven or eight, her father got her grandfather to show her his Free State officer's uniform, which he had proudly kept after being demobilised. ‘And it was all in very good nick . . . I do remember seeing this sword and it had a hilt, and there was a star on the sword which I now know was a little Free State insignia’.Footnote ⁵⁷ The youngest daughter of Denis and Agnes McCullough, introduced above, recalled how at age eight she was putting away sheet music in a chest when her father told her to be careful as the chest was the only thing he had managed to recover from the ruins of his music store, destroyed by the IRA in 1922. That was the first time she had heard about the civil war, and one of the only occasions when one of her parents spoke about it to her.Footnote ⁵⁸ The families of many revolutionary veterans inherited internment camp crafts such as drawings, leatherwork, macramé, wooden Celtic crosses, and rings forged out of coins. A ring that belonged to Sligo IRA officer and TD (i.e. member of parliament) Seamus Devins shows the profound affective connections that material items can generate in families. The ring was gifted to Devins in May 1922 by the proprietor of a local shop for his role in preventing looting during an IRA raid for guns. Months later, when Devins along with several other IRA men were captured and summarily killed on Ben Bulben mountain by Free State troops, the ring was stripped from his body by a soldier. However, General MacEoin succeeded in retrieving it after Devin's widow ‘kicked up quite a stink’. Their son inherited the ring and then passed it on to his son, my interviewee. In the context of very little direct family history being passed down, the grandson deeply cherishes the ring as a tangible link to his grandfather's heroic life and unjust death.Footnote ⁵⁹

Numerous other interviewees acquired mini-archives of family historical materials. The fact that so much of this was preserved and passed down amidst the verbal silences about the period highlights the palpable tension within some families between burying the past and preserving it for posterity. The survival of such materials is also quite fortuitous given the omnipresent risks of loss, damage, or destruction over time. I spoke to one gentleman who, notwithstanding the many silences and gaps in his knowledge of his father and uncles’ revolutionary experiences, managed to acquire considerable historical detail. When I pointed this out, he told me the ‘strange’ story about how his aunt had preserved lots of documents and newspaper clippings that he periodically looked over. Then one day she said, ‘Why don't you just take that away?’, which he fortunately did, because ‘a week later the house burned down’.Footnote ⁶⁰

Similarly, inspired by what they knew – or did not know – about their family's revolutionary history, others I interviewed have engaged in extensive research of their own, voraciously reading about the national and local history of the period and examining family members’ census returns, BMH statements, military pension records, newspaper clippings, and the like. Some have gone on to publish biographies or other books about their family members’ involvement in the revolution. Relying on inherited historical sources and materials, and/or seeking out additional information from books, media and archives can, of course, be seen as a form of genealogical or family history. However, the fact that these sources get implicitly contextualised and given meaning by personal memories and family stories creates a more complex relationship to the past that is neither quite simply history nor memory, but a more complex, constructed hybrid relationship to the past.