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{"title":"Clashmealcon Caves: Civil War History and Memory under Siege in North Kerry","authors":"Gavin Foster","doi":"10.1353/eir.2023.a910485","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eir.2023.a910485","url":null,"abstract":"Clashmealcon Caves:Civil War History and Memory under Siege in North Kerry Gavin Foster (bio) In Dunfort's cave they took their stand, the last in Ireland's rights,Three days and nights with rapid fire they nobly held the fight,Till worn out without relief, they did at length give o'erAnd they gave their lives for Ireland down by the Shannon shore.1 The Irish Civil War of 1922–23 was a conflict of great consequence both for the national revolution that it terminated and for the new state that it inaugurated. The deadly divisions that appeared within Ireland's independence movement over the Treaty with Britain touched on profound questions concerning the principles and ideals of the recent revolution. Yet in the ensuing \"war of friends\" the opposing sides waged an often brutal but mismatched and highly localized fight inflected by animosities and allegiances from the recent revolution as well as from older divisions and frictions in Irish society. In the patchy geography of mostly low-level rural violence, no part of the country stands out more than County Kerry, where the IRA guerrilla war and the Irish Free State counterinsurgency were waged \"more extensively and bitterly … than anywhere.\"2 Kerry is widely associated with the worst horrors of the Civil War, frequently summed up in one word: Ballyseedy, the site of a March 1923 massacre of eight republicans by their Free State captors. The first and largest [End Page 250] of several closely timed reprisals for an IRA trap-mine at Knocknagashel, Ballyseedy was the crescendo of a broader pattern of brutal state violence in the infamous Kerry command, the timing and scale of which was shaped by the intensity and duration of IRA resistance in the field. While Ballyseedy shocked and demoralized republicans in Kerry, it did not quite spell the end of the IRA's weakening campaign there. Following the \"last major [civil-war] action\" in Kerry in early April at Derrynafeena on the Iveragh Peninsula, the effective collapse of the republican campaign came a little over a month after Ballyseedy at a place on the north Kerry coast called Clashmealcon.3 The \"siege at Clashmealcon caves\" in mid-April 1923 would prove to be the \"last, epic struggle\" of the local republican resistance, followed a few weeks later by the decision of the anti-Treaty IRA leadership to abandon its armed campaign.4 Over the course of this small-scale but dramatic three-day siege three IRA Volunteers and two National Army soldiers lost their lives, with the execution of three surviving republicans occurring shortly afterward. The events of the siege were widely reported and became \"seared deep in the folk memory of County Kerry\" and the republican movement beyond.5 Refracting key dynamics of civil-war violence in Kerry, and associated with an extensive tradition of remembrance, the siege at Clashmealcon and its fraught memory over the last century invite deeper micro-historical attention. As with other controversial killings by Free Stat","PeriodicalId":43507,"journal":{"name":"EIRE-IRELAND","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135736667","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Treatment of Militant Anti-Treaty Women in Kerry by the National Army during the Irish Civil War","authors":"Mary McAuliffe","doi":"10.1353/eir.2023.a910480","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eir.2023.a910480","url":null,"abstract":"The Treatment of Militant Anti-Treaty Women in Kerry by the National Army during the Irish Civil War Mary McAuliffe (bio) On 2 november 1922 a short article entitled \"The Lot of Women in Tralee\" was published in Poblacht na hÉireann (Republic of Ireland), an anti-Treaty newspaper. It took notice of the reports in the daily press of the \"arrest by F.S. [Free State] troops of 10 Tralee girls\" on 10 October. It was evident, the author noted, that \"the Dublin Guards have failed to terrorise the women of Tralee into foreswearing their allegiance to the Irish Republican Army by breaking into homes at midnight, dragging them from their beds, painting their bodies, and heaping upon them every outrage and indignity that only the mentality of the Dublin Guards is capable of devising.\"1 The National Army had landed at Fenit near Tralee on 2 August of that year. Attacks on and arrests of anti-Treaty Cumann na mBan women began soon afterward and were reported in various mainstream and anti-Treaty newspapers.2 Poblacht na hÉireann was founded by Liam Mellows, Frank Gallagher, and Erskine Childers in 1922 to disseminate propaganda for the anti-Treaty side. The paper was published in broadsheet format to make it easy to paste onto walls (mainly the work of militant women), where it could be easily and widely read. The newspaper does not seem to have survived past June 1923, but during its lifespan it included many articles on the activities of militant republican women and on the violence committed against [End Page 72] them by the National Army. Although Poblacht na hÉireann generally \"detailed the anti-Treaty position in a mainly level-headed and often quite sophisticated manner,\" this newspaper article about the experience of republican women in Tralee contains both fact and hyperbole.3 Cumann na mBan women had indeed been arrested in Tralee. As the Evening Echo reported on 31 October, \"ten very active girls of [the] Cumann na mBan organisation were arrested in their homes in Tralee.\" This occurrence, it stated, was \"a new departure,\" and the women were lodged in Tralee Female Prison.4 Yet in this report there is no mention of the assault on their bodies with paint or of any other indignities that might have been heaped upon them during the arrest. The writer of this Poblacht na hÉireann article was here conflating the experiences of different groups of militant women in Kerry at the hands of the National Army. This essay focuses on the treatment of militant anti-Treaty women by the National Army during the Irish Civil War. Concentrating on the experiences of women in Kerry from August 1922 to the end of 1923, it explores the anxieties and misogynist ideologies that provoked harsh, gendered, and sexual mistreatment of women as well as both its immediate and subsequent impact on militant and non-militant women in the Irish Free State. Gemma Clark, the leading historian of everyday violence in the Civil War, asks, \"How distinctive were women's interactions with","PeriodicalId":43507,"journal":{"name":"EIRE-IRELAND","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135736939","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Civil Administration and Economic Endowments in the Munster Republic's \"Real Capital,\" July–August 1922","authors":"John Borgonovo","doi":"10.1353/eir.2023.a910478","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eir.2023.a910478","url":null,"abstract":"Civil Administration and Economic Endowments in the Munster Republic's \"Real Capital,\" July–August 1922 John Borgonovo (bio) The Irish Civil War opened with a six-week \"conventional phase\" during which the anti-Treaty Irish Republican Army (hereafter called the IRA) controlled most of the province of Munster, which historians often term the \"Munster Republic.\"1 This period ended when the National Army seized Cork city and the other major cities and towns in the province following simultaneous amphibious landings along the Cork coast. The IRA retreated into the hills and remote hinterland and thereafter controlled only a fraction of the province. Megan A. Stewart and Yu-Ming Liou have argued that \"territorial control is a tremendous military asset for insurgents, and such control should enhance any group's strength and latent capacity for violence (whether against civilians or the state).\"2 While the republican occupation of Cork city has been explored as the backdrop to the \"Battle for Cork,\" it typically receives only cursory mention in Irish Civil War studies, primarily as a curiosity rather than as a military center of [End Page 9] gravity for the anti-Treaty campaign.3 Yet republican-held Munster generally, and Cork city in particular, offered the anti-Treaty forces \"economic endowments,\" which Jeremy M. Weinstein has defined as \"resources that can be mobilized to finance the start-up and maintenance of a rebel organization.\"4 This article will explore how the IRA exploited economic endowments in Cork city. It will further identify republican attempts at civil administration within the city, discuss their challenges and shortcomings, and consider their implications during the republican campaign against the Irish Free State. Establishing the \"Munster Republic\" The Irish Civil War began with the National Army attack on the IRA's governing executive and general headquarters inside the Four Courts complex in Dublin. Situated outside the besieged Four Courts, Liam Lynch resumed the role of IRA chief of staff and returned to Munster to set up a new general headquarters and to mobilize and organize resistance to the Free State. Munster IRA units quickly captured pro-Treaty garrisons in Skibbereen and Listowel, consolidated their hold over the province, and advanced on Free State forces controlling Limerick city and west Limerick.5 Liam Lynch eventually set up a \"field headquarters\" and assembled a new headquarters staff in the extensive Fermoy Military Barracks in north Cork. Fighting the National Army along a rough line stretching from Limerick city to Waterford city during July, the IRA formed its \"field army\" comprised of numerous attached IRA flying columns and support units from various Munster brigades that probably numbered about three thousand full-time fighters.6 IRA brigades in counties Cork, Kerry, Waterford, and west Limerick reported to the First Southern Division, whose headquarters interacted directly with IRA general headquarters. T","PeriodicalId":43507,"journal":{"name":"EIRE-IRELAND","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135736666","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"One Little Slice, from a Child's Point of View\": Locating Childhood Experience during the Civil War in County Kerry in Archived Oral History","authors":"Helene O'keefe","doi":"10.1353/eir.2023.a910479","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eir.2023.a910479","url":null,"abstract":"\"One Little Slice, from a Child's Point of View\":Locating Childhood Experience during the Civil War in County Kerry in Archived Oral History Helene O'keefe (bio) \"My father had us all stretched on the floor after the first rattle of the slates. … 'Stretch,' he said, 'because the bullets will come in the windows.'\"1 Eighty-nine-year-old Michael Fleming moved closer to the oral historian's microphone to share one of his earliest memories of how the violence of the Irish Revolution invaded his childhood home in Kilcummin, Co. Kerry. He was eight years old in 1921 when crown forces raided the family farm about six kilometers northeast of Killarney, a safehouse for the local IRA during the War of Independence and Civil War. \"My aunt was in Cumann na mBan,\" Michael explained, \"but my father\" Gearóid Fleming, a farmer with six boys and two girls, \"could do nothing\" except \"give them shelter,\" and he \"had a couple of rooms let [to] the boys up in the mountain and bog between Kilcummin and Scartaglin.\"2 Gearóid, the first to hear the approaching lorries, \"jumped out of bed\" and \"gave the door a belt\" to alert the sleeping Volunteers, who got out and \"went for the mountain.\" Michael's account of the violent raid that followed, conveyed orally with visceral vividness, resonates with that particular acoustic of war: [End Page 35] We had to stretch there. My father and mother and all were stretched down on the floor. I heard the bullets coming through the roof of the room we were in. … They did that for a couple of hours and [then] things were quiet, but still, my father wouldn't allow us to get up. The next thing was, the old lorries, the army lorries, started clattering again and going back the road, going to Killarney. My father said, \"You can get up now.\" I'll never forget the smell of sulphur [that] was around the house. You know, I can smell it today. We were children and we were picking up the bullets. At that time the bullets bent when they hit the wall and the lumps of mortar, they knocked off of it, the smell of sulphur was in it. But we were delighted getting the bullets, you know.3 Oral-history testimonies are notoriously problematic, subject not only to what is asked during an interview and how the questions are understood, but also to the vagaries of human memory, subsequent experience, cultural contexts, and the distorting impulse to \"perform\" for posterity. Michael Fleming's memory of childhood, called up through layers of time and experience, yields few \"hard facts\" about the southwestern battleground in 1921. His powerful sensory recall, however, underscores the overwhelming nature of the event. It was an assault in every sense of the word. Uncertainty about dates, personalities, and even the duration of the raid is offset by the sound-scape of a childhood ordeal—an olfactory archive, the symbolism of domestic security shattered like slates. Across seven decades he summoned the cacophony of the \"old army lorries,\" his father's urgent voice, ","PeriodicalId":43507,"journal":{"name":"EIRE-IRELAND","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135736659","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A New Ranch War?: Cattle Driving and Civil War Agrarian Disorder, 1922–23","authors":"James S. Donnelly","doi":"10.1353/eir.2023.a910483","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eir.2023.a910483","url":null,"abstract":"A New Ranch War?:Cattle Driving and Civil War Agrarian Disorder, 1922–23* James S. Donnelly Jr. (bio) Emboldened by the military and judicial weaknesses of the new state and its truncated apparatus of repression in the early 1920s, and highly impatient for comprehensive new land-purchase legislation, large elements of Irish rural society became deeply engaged in a many-sided land war of almost national scope and extremely wide dimensions—a dramatic upsurge in multifaceted rural conflicts and collective action perhaps rivaling in their intensity (if not their duration) the great agitations of the 1880s under the Land and National Leagues as well as the Ranch War of 1907–12.1 Greatly elevated levels of agrarian violence and intimidation deeply marked the revolutionary [End Page 174] period of 1919–23, influenced to some extent by the impact of events in Russia from 1917 through the early 1920s.2 There were both immediate and underlying causes of this blitz of agrarian disorder. One major cause that prompted extremely widespread dissatisfaction and even anger was the more or less complete stoppage in the land-division and redistribution work of the Congested Districts Board and the Irish Land Commission throughout the Great War of 1914–18.3 A second reason was the nearly total interruption in the river of emigration for much the same years owing largely to governmental restrictions and fear of conscription in Britain. From a high of 31,000 emigrants in 1913, the exodus greatly narrowed to fewer than 1,000 in 1918, and even in 1920 it was little more than half the 1913 figure.4 This situation undoubtedly exacerbated the land hunger of the greatly enlarged number of rural young men and deepened postwar unemployment.5 In addition, the normal peacetime migration of mostly young Irish harvest workers to England and Scotland—\"an essential supplement of income to the miserable holders of uneconomic holdings and to the young landless men\"—was cut off for as long as four years during wartime.6 Yet another major factor was the enormous inflation of prices (including the cost of land) that accompanied the First World War. By the end of this conflict, with its staggering human losses [End Page 175] and enormous wartime expenditures, the cost of purchasing land had skyrocketed. The bank accounts of graziers and large farmers had swelled in almost unprecedented fashion from 1914 to 1918 as a result of expanded livestock and grain exports to Britain, greatly facilitating their ability and disposition to enter the land market and to enlarge their holdings, thus leading to runaway land prices.7 As former land commissioner Kevin O'Sheil later emphasized, there was an uncontrolled surge at this point in the prices of acquiring land. \"At this period,\" he declared, \"it was not unusual for a small parcel of land to be sold for more than twenty times its pre-war value, and such transactions had naturally the effect of rousing the land hunger, particularly in the congested","PeriodicalId":43507,"journal":{"name":"EIRE-IRELAND","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135736661","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Three Conceptions of Civil War Politics","authors":"Bill Kissane","doi":"10.1353/eir.2023.a910481","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eir.2023.a910481","url":null,"abstract":"Three Conceptions of Civil War Politics Bill Kissane Until 1966, when Fianna Fáil's Jack Lynch became taoiseach, the politics of the Irish Republic were dominated by men who had become prominent in the War of Independence (1919–21) and the resulting Civil War (1922–23). There is nothing unusual about a revolutionary cohort continuing to dominate a new state in this way. That it could be a bone of contention is suggested by the character of Moran in John McGahern's novel Amongst Women. Moran asks of the independence struggle, \"What did we get for it? A country, if you'd believe them. Some of our own johnnies in the top jobs instead of a few Englishmen.\"1 This veteran of both the War of Independence and the Civil War clearly suffered from postrevolutionary disillusionment. And Moran had a point. All taoisigh appointed before 1966 had been involved in the Civil War in some way. Later, Liam Cosgrave, chosen in 1973, and Garrett FitzGerald, chosen in 1981, as Fine Gael Taoisigh, were sons respectively of the president of the Executive Council and the minister of external affairs during the Civil War. Charles Haughey, taoiseach on three separate occasions between 1979 and 1992, was a son-in-law of Seán Lemass, who ended the Civil War in an internment camp and had been taoiseach between 1959 and 1966. Between 1973 and 1974 the president was Erskine Childers, whose father had been executed by the Provisional Government in October 1922. Evidently, Irish politics remained in the shadow of the Civil War for quite some time. The impact of the conflict on Irish political development has also long been an issue in Irish Studies. Most historians consider this impact to have been deep and traumatic. For Ronan Fanning Irish society \"never escaped the bloody shadow cast at its birth.\"2 Fearghal [End Page 101] McGarry concluded that it is \"difficult to overestimate the Civil War's impact.\"3 Niall Whelehan suggested that its \"psychological impact\" was \"immense.\"4 When it comes to party politics specifically, the Civil War \"shaped and structured the new party system.\"5 It both \"froze the development of party politics in a unique mould\"6 and \"fixed attitudes in a way that would otherwise have been absorbed into the political system quite differently.\"7 Up to the formation of the current Fianna Fáil/Fine Gael coalition in 2020, the pattern established in the 1920s had been \"difficult to shift.\"8 This article explores the impact of the Civil War on Irish party politics through a fresh look at an old concept, \"civil-war politics.\" This concept has been used to characterize a specific style of politics emanating from the conflict and to convey a sense of its overall impact on Irish party politics. This article looks at the different ways in which the style of politics rooted in the Civil War allowed the larger two parties to fend off challengers and to dominate Irish politics for most of the twentieth century. The causality involved ran in two directions: the Civil War ga","PeriodicalId":43507,"journal":{"name":"EIRE-IRELAND","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135736937","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Big House Burnings in County Tipperary during the Irish Civil War","authors":"James S. Donnelly","doi":"10.1353/eir.2023.a910484","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eir.2023.a910484","url":null,"abstract":"Big House Burnings in County Tipperary during the Irish Civil War* James S. Donnelly Jr. (bio) County Tipperary is of particular interest in any examination of what has been termed the \"last land war\" in the midst of the Civil War of 1922–23.1 More Big Houses (twenty-nine mansions) of the fading Irish landed gentry and aristocracy were burned in this county than in any other in all of Ireland between January 1922 and April 1923. What remains to be discovered is the combination of motivations that prompted incendiarism on such a widespread scale in this particular county.2 Quite recently, Terence Dooley has drawn attention to the much greater role played by land hunger and agrarianism during the Civil War of 1922–23 in southern Ireland, though he is careful to identify and discuss the other motives that were also sources behind such a dramatic and terrorizing phenomenon.3 Tipperary not only provides abundant evidence for his argument but also demonstrates the range of other significant motives that were frequently in play. Among the reasons for this extremely widespread destruction of mansions were certain military and political factors that should also be carefully investigated. The very first Tipperary mansion to be burned during the Civil War was Castle Fogarty, belonging to Major-General Valentine Ryan [End Page 224] and located at Ballycahill near Thurles on 19 April 1922.4 In the absence of the owner, members of the British Army and the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) had previously occupied the castle for an extended period ending in February 1922, when it was reportedly \"taken over by members\" of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) \"in a dilapidated condition.\"5 Whether these occupiers from opposing sides contributed in some way to the castle's destruction is uncertain, though the armed presence of British soldiers and the RIC may have prompted the agrarian militants to delay taking action.6 What is clear is that agrarian motives played the largest role in the destruction of this Tipperary mansion. Providing evidence of the agrarian motives at issue were a combination of violent events extending over many months in 1922 and 1923. Beginning in March 1922 Ryan was subjected to what became \"continuous outrage\" when cattle were driven off his demesne and \"after much difficulty and searching by motor car, etc., were finally discovered 25 miles away.\" Then incendiaries set fire to his mansion (as noted earlier) on 19 April; they also burned his hay barn, hay, and harness room and its contents on 27–28 April; raiders destroyed his avenue gates and ornamental timber on 6 and 7 June; and just ten days later they burned down the house of his steward James Cusack.7 [End Page 225] Not yet done, incendiaries set fire to 55 tons of Ryan's hay early in December 1923.8 The infliction of multiple injuries also attended the destruction of the mansion of Charles C. C. Webb, the owner of Kilmore House near Nenagh in north Tipperary, and the storied residence of Ro","PeriodicalId":43507,"journal":{"name":"EIRE-IRELAND","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135736936","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/eir.2023.a910486","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eir.2023.a910486","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43507,"journal":{"name":"EIRE-IRELAND","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135736938","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Editors' Introduction: The Civil War of 1922–23","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/eir.2023.a910477","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eir.2023.a910477","url":null,"abstract":"Editors' Introduction:The Civil War of 1922–23 Marie Coleman (bio) and James S. Donnelly Jr. (bio) During the \"Decade of Centenaries\" much new scholarly work has appeared in the form of books and articles on the War of Independence of 1919–21 and the Civil War of 1922–23. Both of these subjects have been greatly enriched by this renewed attention over the past ten or a dozen years. This enhancement of the corpus of scholarship has been facilitated by the granting of new scholarly access to large collections of historical records, including the witness statements collected by the Bureau of Military History in Dublin; the detailed personnel records of the Military Service Pensions Collection in the same city; the county-based series of compensation claims hosted by the Irish National Archives, Dublin; and the compensation claims submitted to the Irish Grants Committee, held by the National Archives, London. Nevertheless, it is probably true that the War of Independence has attracted more interest from scholars and other writers than the Civil War of 1922–23. In recognition of this imbalance, the coeditors of this special issue of Éire-Ireland have worked to assemble a collection of essays from distinguished scholars that is intended to help redress this imbalance. While other scholars have given special attention to military aspects of the Civil War, the coeditors and contributors to this volume have ranged much further afield. John Borgonovo, for example, while concerned in part with the military actors heading the \"Munster Republic,\" is much more interested in the workings of anti-Treaty civil administration and the economic resources of Cork republicans. On the other hand, contributor Adrian Grant is certainly dedicated to exploring where those whom he terms \"neutral Northerners\" fit in the military plans and arrangements of southern politicians and military [End Page 5] leaders. But in his close examination of this important topic, he takes a fresh biographical approach. The political dimensions of the Irish Civil War have not gone unexplored, but Bill Kissane takes a nontraditional approach that is much less concerned with political leaders and much more interested in the decisions and thinking of Irish voters. His essay provides a close inspection of voting patterns and the reasons (or theories about reasons) that help to explain the early development of the party system in the fledgling Free State. The roles and circumstances of women and children (especially the latter) also merit much more attention than they have so far received. Both Mary McAuliffe and Helene O'Keefe focus on these important subjects in the context of County Kerry, which was a cockpit of civil-war conflict and became notorious for the actions of General Paddy Daly (or O'Daly) and his Dublin Guards. McAuliffe dissects the fraught interactions between militant anti-Treaty women and members of the National Army and finds that Free State soldiers frequently abused these wome","PeriodicalId":43507,"journal":{"name":"EIRE-IRELAND","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135736663","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Neutral Northerners during the Irish Civil War: A Biographical Study","authors":"Adrian Grant","doi":"10.1353/eir.2023.a910482","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eir.2023.a910482","url":null,"abstract":"Neutral Northerners during the Irish Civil War:A Biographical Study Adrian Grant (bio) One could be forgiven for assuming that the Irish Civil War was a conflict that split the entire nation, with everyone clearly taking one side or the other. The term \"civil-war politics\" dominated political discourse and analysis in the Twenty-Six Counties until quite recently and perpetuated the notion that supporters of the two main political parties in the Republic of Ireland were the descendants of those who had fought for or supported one side or the other during the Civil War.1 It would be more accurate to describe this twentieth-century political phenomenon as \"Treaty-split politics,\" given the fact that a large proportion of not only the general population but also the IRA itself remained neutral during the Civil War. As Bill Kissane has demonstrated, numerous civil-society organizations maintained a neutral line throughout the conflict, advocating peace to no avail.2 The Labour Party also maintained a neutral position, or as its leaders perhaps more accurately termed it, an \"antimilitarist\" one. Labour assumed the role of official opposition in Dáil Éireann, and in doing so, signaled its intention to accept the institutions of the Free State that emerged from the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Sensing the lack of appetite for further violence in the country, the Labour leadership believed that this strategy presented the best means of advancing a progressive agenda on social and economic issues.3 However antimilitarist the [End Page 139] country may have become in 1922, the constitutional issue remained at the forefront of Irish political discourse. Republicans generally viewed Labour supporters with contempt for this strategy, arguing that they had effectively taken the pro-Treaty side and were actively legitimizing the Free State through their actions.4 While the IRA was definitively split over the Treaty, not all members were willing to carry their strongly held opinions into a violent confrontation with former comrades. The Neutral IRA Association was formed in December 1922, and its membership was open to those who had been active during the War of Independence but were opposed to the Civil War. It claimed a membership of around 25,000 and advanced peace proposals to the political and military leaders of the civil-war belligerents.5 These went unheeded, despite the strength in numbers of neutral IRA members and public support from a large number of local-government bodies. Again, while these individuals remained neutral in the Civil War, it is clear that most of them were not supporters of the Treaty or the Free State.6 In Ulster the IRA generally followed the national trend, with its divisions declaring either in favor of or against the Treaty. The exception was the 4th Northern Division under the command of Frank Aiken; this was the only division in Ireland to declare a formally neutral position on the Treaty. Aiken and some of his men later took the anti-","PeriodicalId":43507,"journal":{"name":"EIRE-IRELAND","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135736664","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}