An tUachtarán leis an tríú seimineár sa tsraith “Machnamh 100” a óstáil

Machnamh 100 - Opening Words by President Michael D. Higgins

Áras an Uachtaráin, 27 May 2021

In choosing themes for today’s Machnamh seminar, I was conscious that in the historiography of the 19th century, dominated as it was by the campaigns for Emancipation, Repeal, Home Rule, the anti-tithe movement, the underlying theme for all such campaigns carried the resonance of land; be it access to land, to security of tenure, response to changes in production, population pressure – it is always there.

The vocabulary of Irish history in relation to land contains some of the most emotive terms in Irish memory, terms such as ‘enclosure’, ‘occupation’, ‘settlement’ ‘plantation’ ’eviction’, ‘improvements’.  Such resonating cries were all present in the discourse of the 19th century.

It is in relation to land that the most harrowing of confrontations in rural Ireland occurred. They would include evictions and the response to them, rallies and actions of the land war, confrontations, boycotts, divisions, and attempts at an eventual alliance between agrarian agitation and parliamentary action which would result in Land Acts that would utterly change Irish society. 

That change in status from insecure tenancy to proprietorship that the Land Acts facilitated had huge implications for those who worked on the land, be it in relation to the inheritance pattern of Post-Famine Ireland, or the agricultural labourers.  The position of rural women in Ireland would be changed, especially by the particular form of post-Famine stem family inheritance arrangements that would emerge, as would women’s participation in new patterns of emigration.

Beyond particular incidents that were violent, I see in these adjustments, far from harmonious, an institutional source of violence, which an orientation in the historiography has led to its being not given significant account. While this gloss on events is mitigated to some extent by the fulsome accounts of the fusion, late in the century, of agrarian revolt, with the parliamentary activity pursuing Home Rule, as exemplified, for example, by Charles Stewart Parnell and Michael Davitt, from the late 1880s where the grazier phenomenon emerges and prevails, it foretells how new violences in structure are made possible. Each theme of the 19th century – be it land, social class, gender – retained a unique capacity for the folk memory to recall experiences of outrage related to specific places and events.

Beyond that, in so many aspects of the brutality known to occur in later conflict, these tensions can be identified in form and inclination in an intensified, indeed often escalated and conjoined form, such as in the atrocities of the War of Independence and, in particular, Ireland’s tragic Civil War. 

The land is always there as an unresolved issue. Laurence J. Kettle, when publishing The Memoirs of Andrew J. Kettle: Right-Hand Man to Charles S. Parnell in 1958, put on the jacket of that memoir Fintan Lalor’s remark that “the land question contains, and the legislative question does not contain, the material from which victory is manufactured”.

While the usage of land changed, and did so profoundly and with consequences in the 19th century in Ireland, there never could be enough land for all who sought it, then or later. Its fixity in supply would influence both society and its conflicts.

There is nothing uniquely Irish in any of this. Land, of course, is an informing theme in violence in Classical and later European literature, be it contemporary or recalled. Conflict over land is not unique to Ireland. The conflicts and violences associated with it, and within it, are, after all, not only a staple in European literature, but in global myth. Such structural violences in relation to land, however, cannot be understood solely in analyses of disputes as to ownership. The different forms and possibilities of ownership mattered. Modes of living and production were important. What life changes were allowed, limited, or defined within homesteads or patches of land carried their own institutional significance, including familial, and class prescriptions and proscriptions, that could be violent in their imposition.

Today to discuss such themes among those themes they have chosen themselves, we are fortunate to have with us for this Machnamh third seminar distinguished scholars. The principal address will be given by Dr Margaret O’Callaghan (Queen’s University Belfast), and respondents will be Dr Caitríona Clear (NUI Galway), Professor Linda Connolly (NUI Maynooth), Ms Catríona Crowe (Royal Irish Academy), and Dr John Cunningham (NUI Galway).

May I again most sincerely thank Dr John Bowman, historian and broadcaster, for agreeing to chair today’s seminar, having fulfilled such a role for us already by chairing with such excellence our previous two Machnamh seminars in February this year and last December. 

Our inaugural seminar, held in December 2020, examined the nature and concept of commemoration itself in the contexts of today and of the national and global events of a century ago. Speakers included Professors Ciarán Benson, Anne Dolan, Michael Laffan and Joep Leerssen, and together we set out our intentions for what we are hoping to achieve from this series. 

In February of this year, I hosted a second seminar which focused, inter alia, on Empire, imperial attitudes and responses as they related to circumstances in Ireland. Our reflections included a consideration of the forms and practices of resistance to Empire in Ireland, as well as resistance to nationalism in its different forms and expressions.

The main reflection was given by Professor John Horne, Trinity College Dublin, who provided an overview of the international context of the events in 1920s Ireland, including the fall of empires and the particular status of the British Empire. There were responses from Professor Eunan O’Halpin (Trinity College Dublin), Dr Marie Coleman (Queen’s University Belfast), Professor Alvin Jackson (University of Edinburgh), Dr Niamh Gallagher (St Catharine's College, Cambridge) and myself.

The point in our commemorative programme at which we have now arrived is one where we must confront, acknowledge, and come to terms with difficult aspects of what were the informing elements of context of the independence struggle, including a consideration of the forms and sources of violence that emerged, were given expression, including the gradations of violence that were inflicted on women. Other forms of violence were class-based and deeply embedded. Some forms of violence were carried out more generally and impacted on wider society, such as those that were authoritarian, hostile to pluralism, dominating, or collusive to the impersonal structures of bureaucracy being imposed as a sole and inevitable modernity, the aftershocks of which have been felt up to and including our contemporary Ireland.

I hope you find today’s seminar interesting, thought-provoking, perhaps even a further reminder of the value of transacting history.

Fáilte Romhaibh Uilig.

Machnamh 100 - ‘Of Land, Social Class, Gender and the Sources of Violence’

Áras an Uachtaráin, 27 May 2021

The act of commemoration involves a choice, and a decision to indicate an importance to an event or events chosen above others. To organise a celebration is to further add to the importance of envisaging as to how one’s choice will be construed, and the taking of responsibility for inclusivity as to how a discourse might be constructed in terms of response.

What Machnamh seeks to do is, rather like what we have just heard in this session today, to provide as wide a context of fact, comment and research as is possible, so that we may be able to make such a reflection as will enable, and empower, us to have a deeper, fuller view of past events, have a tolerant method of recall in present time, and allow neither the past nor the present deprive us of emancipatory futures, yet to be realised.

I have, quite often, been struck by how it is within literature rather than sociology or history that the complexity of a period is best captured. I encountered this in the past when studying and writing of migration. The formal scholarship in social studies seemed locked in an approach that could not handle the important core of the migratory experience – transience. Yet, in the novels of Patrick McGill or in Mici Mac Gabhann’s Rotha Mor an tSaoil, I found the texture of what I sought. This is not to suggest a substitution of literature for history, or a privileging of fiction over fact. Rather, it is to suggest that a sensitivity to literary sources can open the door to a necessary respect for a phenomenological approach in sociology and history, one that has not always been welcome.

In this regard and dealing with the title of my paper Land, Social Class, Gender and Sources of Violence, I have been returning to John B. Keane’s play The Field. What an introduction it constitutes to the distinction between “ownership” and “occupation”; the rocks hewn to clear the ground for the making of a field, not recognised in the sign ‘For Sale’; the isolation of the widow whose life has been made impossible, and is effectively left with a sole option of selling and leaving; the consequence, too, of realising that there will never be enough land and that, what is anticipated as becoming available creates passions that are not merely of acquisitiveness, or, as would become later, insatiable expansion, but of violence, covert and overt.

I think it is unreasonable to assume that issues such as those derived from land, of evictions, of the transmitted memory of An Ghorta Mór, of exile and forced emigration, were not present in the formation of the minds of those participants in either the War of Independence or the tragic Civil War which followed it.

These are issues which precede both. They are unfinished aspirations for many, of both the ancient and more recently, dispossessed. They run parallel with campaigns seeking more moderate forms of Home Rule short of full independence. Indeed, these issues illustrate for us what were the formative sources of both social class distinction, the decline and rise of new classes, and the new accommodations, that would compose an enduring conservatism drawn from an intersection of the different movements of the late 19th century.

Since the third decade of the 19th century, campaigns for Repeal, Reform of Tenants’ Rights, Home Rule, Clerical Activism, and Control of Protest of the lower classes had intersected. There are times when they seem to be on the same path, when a resolution appears in prospect, only to fade again.

Later in the century, the division within the landlords, reflected in the periods before and after the Land Conference of 1903, are an example of an opportunity that would come to be perceived as lost, just as the later failure of a British government to respond to the expression of the people’s will in 1918, or the attempts at peace, such as that of Archbishop Clune, might also have been viewed by some historians.

As to omissions, those left out, if more than 70 landlords attended the Land Conference of 1903, and if indeed there had been an argument as to how tenants would be chosen to attend, then surely it is also of significance that the agricultural labourers are not directly represented.

We have in recent times moved away from the once popular inaccuracies of suggesting that the experience of the Famine or its subsequent emigrations were a homogenous experience of the Irish people. Those with least and without the means of leaving the country died in higher proportions. Those with means to leave are heavily represented in the emigration statistics. It is part of the removal of the possibility of any meaningful revolution, or indeed deep revision, of distribution of the land in response to an increasing population.

The early 20th century began with a significant change in relation to Irish rural society. There were times when progressive views for tenant-right reform seemed to fit together as is recounted, for example, in the memoirs of Andrew J. Kettle known as ‘right-hand man to Charles Stewart Parnell’. There were, too, those within the Home Rule movement who saw the resolution of the land issue as an outcome that would reduce support for their principle aim, by the removal of the support of the discontented and the variously organised land distribution activists.

Between 1870 and 1953 Ireland was recomposed in terms of land ownership. The appendix to his memoir of his father by Laurence J. Kettle published in 1958 opens with the phrase:

“The present generation of Irishmen (sic.) has little, if any, knowledge of the revolutionary changes which took place on the land in Ireland during the 19th century.”

He goes on to give an account of the structures of land holding that preceded the plantations of Ireland, including that of the 17th century on the part of King James I and of “how later on Cromwell confiscated 11 million acres from Irish and Anglo-Irish estates and planted on them his troopers and others to whom he owed money”. However, it is in relation to the discussion around the passing of the Land Acts that this valuable memoir that Laurence J. Kettle edited is most relevant for our purposes today.

Between 1870 and 1953, 450,000 holdings of land, 15 million acres out of 17 million acres changed ownership on an expenditure of £130 million, as Laurence Kettle puts it “£8 13s 4d per acre”. This, however, was no revolution but it is a formative influence on social class as it would go on to define a later island of Ireland. George Bermingham had written of how on enquiring of his local newsagent in County Mayo in the late 19th century as to how the vote on Home Rule had gone the previous evening in London, the shopkeeper-newsagent had replied, “To hell with Home Rule, it’s the land we’re after”.

The reluctance to deal with social class within Irish historiography is something on which I have often pondered. Is it accidental? Is it ideological? Is it a function of a historical tendency to assume a modernisation model as an explanation of change?

However such questions are answered, the close examination of the sources of conflict is not something that has attracted scholars in the social studies of the near modern period. The result is that we are left with significant omissions as to the experience, indeed of their place in Irish history, of those who were the subject of such omission, who were the victims of deep structural exclusions, and neglected consequences of accommodations to hegemonic notions of property, uncritical acceptance of clericalism, suppression of gender needs and aspirations, and recipients of an authoritarianism, with its unquestioned concept of hierarchy, that would feed its way into the institutional structure.

Historians have written in detail of how the cash component of the landlords’ settlement was an inducement and indeed as to how it had different consequences in Ireland and in England. There were in the late 19th century some landlords, now capitalised, who set about new strategies of management of their agricultural holdings. Others chose to expend their money in the contours of British society. There would be consequences for this in adjusting to later finalisations.

There had, however, been earlier attempts at “modernisation” of land usage. In 1982, John Gibbons and I, in our chapter ‘Shopkeeper-Graziers and Land Agitation in Ireland, 1895-1900’, published in Irish Studies 2 – Ireland: Land, Politics and People (edited by P.J. Drudy) give an example from County Mayo:

“In one case, Lord Sligo and the Earl of Lucan cleared 48,555 acres of their estates south of Westport to make way for Captain Houston, a Scottish grazier. All houses and smallholders’ buildings were broken down. The landlords received a rent of £2,100 per annum. They were saved, as they saw it, from the complications of collecting rents in small amounts from a multitude of poor tenant farmers. Houston went on to graze the land profitably for about twenty years and introduced new techniques and new breeds of cattle. He employed thirty herds of twenty labourers. He had five hundred cattle and twelve thousand sheep when economic depression, and particularly American competition, began to bear on his enterprise in the early years of the 1890s. During these years, sheep were selling at 10 shillings less per head than five years previously and cattle prices had decreased by £3 or even £4 per head during the preceding three years. The fall in the price of wool had been dramatic also.

The first commercial farming experiment to follow the land consolidation had thus failed. Captain Houston gave up the land, and it returned to the landlords ‘practically a useless wilderness as far as its original purpose was concerned’. The fact that the Earl of Lucan had divided up among smallholders two grazing tracts, one near Castlebar and one south of Westport, from which he had already cleared tenants, raised expectations in the case of the Houston ranch.

The Congested Districts Board (set up in 1891, to purchase and amalgamate land holdings as well as to promote development in general) had been alerted to the possibilities before the ‘ranch’ was handed back. Indeed a migration had been suggested.”

John Gibbons and I in that chapter went on to give details of a later evolution of the grazier phenomenon in County Mayo – the role of the shopkeeper-grazier.

Earlier in 1974, Peter Gibbon and I had drawn the wrath of modernisation theorists by publishing Patronage, Tradition and Modernisation: the Case of the Irish Gombeenman. Our work was out of the tradition of transactionalism in the anthropology of the time. We had been looking at the credit relations that prevailed on the fringes of society even when they were contemporaneous with evolving banking systems at the centre of society. We did not purport to make a statement on shopkeeper-tenant credit relationships in general. Our evidence was drawn from government reports on the West of Ireland.

The 1982 chapter took account of what would later be the confrontation in the 1898 local elections in Mayo which consisted of shopkeeper-graziers in alliance with, as the local press put it, “The Snobocracy”, versus non-grazier-shopkeepers in alliance with the trades. Based on John Gibbons’ fieldwork, we showed how by keeping the regions of their credit relationships separate from the regions of their grazing activities, the shopkeeper-graziers could prevail, could even find a space of influence within the movements of the land war.

This would become exposed, and become a point of confrontation, in the later United Irish League of 1898.

In our chapter ‘Shopkeeper-Graziers and Land Agitation in Ireland’ contained in Land, Politics and People from 1982, John Gibbons and I gave an illustration of the impact that the grazier acquisition and consolidation had on land holding patterns:

“In 1902 in the Westport Poor Law Union, 66 graziers held 98,790 acres out of 280,730 acres in the Union. Eighteen of these graziers were shopkeeper-graziers from adjoining towns. Some held two, three or four ranches. The Kilmaclasser District in the Poor Law union gives us an even clearer example. The district was made up of 21 townlands in all. Of these eight were held by shopkeeper-graziers from nearby towns, two were held by a local grazier farmer and two were held by the landlord, The Earl of Lucan.”

Clearing the land, as tillage with its labour intensity is abandoned, is not, and was not, a uniquely Irish experience. The Enclosure Acts in England were a significant source of the men, women and children who would become the human content of its Industrial Revolution.

Emma Dabiri, in her recent What White People Can Do Next, quotes from Meiksins Wood’s The Origin of Capitalism:

“… between 1750 and 1850 around 4,000 Enclosure Acts were passed, pushing dispossessed workers into the rapidly expanding cities as casual labourers.”

Between 1604 and 1914 over 5,000 Enclosure Bills were enacted by the Parliament which related to over a fifth of the total area of England, amounting to about 6.8 million acres.

It would not be an insignificant achievement of Machnamh if students in Ireland and Britain had the opportunity of seeing how the history of these neighbours, Ireland and England, are inextricably linked.

This was, as nearly all agree now, an imposed experience based on what was the informing ideology, expansion, and indeed adventurism, of the new expansionist, commercial and industrial changes that were taking place at the heart of the empire. That interconnection, the wider view, is important. Even the closest attention to detail as to the delivery of a particular event in its locality or particular time, cannot compensate for missing the influence of the ‘Other’ in either direction.

No more than in relation to our present capacities, or our mutual future aspirations, we have been interconnected, and deeply so, through the tumult, tragedy and achievements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

It is, of course, important as to whether that interconnection is worked in terms of choice or coercion, willingly or by overt or covert colonisation – a topic I sought to address in my consideration of imperialism in Machnamh Seminar II.

The massive expansion of the Irish population in the 19th century is well known to Irish students, but perhaps much less so are the facts of the English Enclosures. Later in the late 18th century and into the 19th, the factory system would again change everything. This is recorded in the poetry of the time (the practices of rural life giving way to migration). Wordsworth’s poem ‘Michael’ is an example. Factory life, mining life would change even the most private aspects of workers’ existences.

While a new source of wealth had emerged, industry, the source of status, title, advancement in the artificialities of a society exempt from work, remained attached to land – a factor that would not be unimportant to an Irish landlord class, particularly its absentee component, whose pursuit of status in English society, combined with the eschewing of prudence in lifestyle, accelerated, even if it was not the source, the bankruptcy of their Irish estates.

The Land Acts punctuate the decline of Landlordism. However, I have suggested that the transformation in land ownership created a new class that could, as absentee landlords could not, for the most part, shelter behind the masks of religion and nationalism.

It was in the same Volume of Irish Studies 2 that the differing positions of Samuel Clarke, a distinguished member of that group of United States historians to whom we owe so much for pioneering on the social history of the 19th century, be it land, religion or social movements, and David Fitzpatrick whose work is seminal. Samuel Clarke identified agrarian classes as at least a potential for revolt, both sporadic and organised. He saw it in the structure. David Fitzpatrick, however, drew our attention to violence within and between the network of families.

There are points of convergence between their views. David Fitzpatrick wrote:

“The most universal problem faced by members of the rural population was that of getting and keeping the land, a problem that was becoming steadily more serious in the years after the Napoleonic Wars as a result of overpopulation and the deterioration of the Irish economy. But did this violence represent a collective assault by the Irish peasantry on the landowning class? The answer very clearly is that it did not. Much of this violence was a struggle by small farmers and labourers against large farmers.”

I believe that David Fitzpatrick’s work, including his insistence on the stem family having prevailed before the Famine, and the consequences that flowed from a sub-division where perhaps one member had a sustainable habitation and others did not, was a valuable contribution. With life expectancy low, as some historians have put it, young people snatched from life what they could and sought shelter in the corners of fields. Fitzpatrick’s account of Cloone in 19th-century Leitrim describes conflicts in Cloone as follows:

“…intensive conflict both within and between a wide range of social strata, conflict so pervasive that concepts such as ‘community’ or class ‘collectivity’ carry little conviction. Conflict between members of different social strata cannot always be interpreted as the struggle of the downtrodden against their oppressors, despite the numerous intimidatory notices and more violent ‘outrages’ which were executed by labourers against farmers, or by tenants against landlords and their agents. Other outrages manifest the relentless but less familiar struggle of the oppressor against the insufficiently downtrodden. In 1839, for example, two attempts were made to burn down the cabin of Bryan Monaghan of Edenbawn: the first by his nephew (who subsequently fled the country), the second ‘at the instance of his (Monaghan’s) Brother who is wealthy and occupies the entire Farm, with the exception of the Cabin in Question, and if the Cabin could be destroyed, the poor Man who occupies it would then have no claim to the lands.”

It is important not to ever forget the experience of those at the bottom of the class hierarchy, as Clarke or Fitzpatrick have written of. Wherever one is on the island of Ireland, there are examples. The cottier who had only his labour to deliver, in pre-Famine times, paid for access to his shelter and a plot that could produce his daily seven pounds of potatoes, with about 200 days of labour per year. While the English land-holding system carried, and carries, its inherited traces of feudalism, and that Ireland did not, it is hard to regard the experience of such a cottier as being substantially different from that of a serf.

When one speaks of this, the sheer contrast with what would be described as the seminal anthropological account of rural life in County Clare in 1934 by Conrad Arensberg and Solon Kimball, is astonishing. Within a decade of a civil war, surrounded by land conflict, in an atmosphere of clerical prohibition, of banned crossroad dancing, pastorals on the sinfulness of the body and the dangers of losing the faith in a suggested Godless city to which all might emigrate, the authors found a system that was neat in its reproduction of itself. This was as the authors’ model prescribed, carrying as it did the structural-functionalist elements that would dominate sociology for decades.

Yes, they did identify the harshness of country reactions where the property transition model had been disturbed, be it “the barren wife” or “a young widow without issue”. In accordance with social custom, they were required to accept repayment of their dowry and to return to their families.

Where a husband had married into land (cliamhain isteach), he, too, was expected to return to his people on being refunded his dowry if no children were born of the marriage after a reasonable period of time. Such situations still pertained elsewhere in Ireland into the late 1950s. Arensberg and Kimball state the matter succinctly:

“The country districts recognize only vaguely the right of a woman to hold property. The patrilineal identification of family and land is incompatible with it. Whatever farm a woman works or controls is regarded as a trust for a son or brother of her husband or father”.

Such a relationship to the economy as was possible to the married woman might include having produce to sell at the local market, be it eggs, butter, poultry, vegetables, fruits or flowers. This was possible while a railway system existed, and as a source of income it effectively disappeared with the closure of the railways. The buses that were offered as a substitute did not facilitate the carrying of such produce to the market, and together with a meagre income of such women the markets themselves withered.

Until the 1960s the Irish Census, we must remember, had a category headed “Relatives Assisting”. This referred, among others, to those members of the family, who had not, as Arensberg and Kimball put it, “travelled”. An examination of wills of the period shows, too, how limited was their life world. They were offered “a room in the house and a seat in the car to Mass”. That, as I wrote elsewhere, in my poem ‘Relatives Assisting’ had to be their consolation together with “their High Nellie bicycle and their prayers”.

Violence takes many forms and is not limited to the use of physical force. It can be sourced and expressed in a variety of ways in structures. The patriarchy of land ownership that existed in Ireland, the remnants of which perhaps remain with us, was one form of economic and cultural control, in a society whose institutional sources of power were in a collusion with what amounted to little less than a land-based patriarchal violence that served to maintain men’s power and dominance.

Gender-based physical and sexual violence was also inflicted with cruelty, and is an aspect of the revolutionary period that has been suppressed and denied, until recently by some pioneering and fine historians. It is a neglect that has gone on for too long. The assumptions regarding what was to be the role of women in Irish society was to become a slow-burning issue that would reveal so much of what was exclusionary. It lasted well into modern times. While the present generation may experience some of the gains made in terms of rights, generations of women had just the experience of the struggle, often cruel and frequently harsh.

Violence was unleashed on women in several forms and from all backgrounds. Gradations of such violence included the control of women over their bodies, the legacy of which lingered on shamefully into modern times, manifesting in the form of Mother and Baby Homes, forced adoptions, ‘marriage bars’ and unequal participation in many aspects of society, including participation in juries in the courts.

We must now face up to all of the aspects of the period as part of our process of ethical recall. Such a commitment will help the ongoing shaping of a more compassionate and equal society. This necessitates an understanding of women’s complex role as activists, the detrimental impact of violence and social and political divisions on them, and their part in the foundation of the new State, a State that would ultimately ignore the feminist and socialist ideals of the rhetoric of the early revolution, leaving women to live essentially as second-class citizens in a conservative, clerically dominated nation.

What I have outlined are sources of violence that were still in the ether of the period of the War of Independence and the tragic Civil War. These are events about which now there can be no equivocation. Reading recently of, for example, the manner of the shooting of Mary Lindsay who, on identifying preparations for an ambush on her land, sought to have it cancelled before reporting it, I was made to recognise again how important it is to be unequivocal in condemnation of such horrific violence, of not allowing a particle or any strut of heroism to be attached to such a perpetration of not only the ending of a life, but the doing so in a way of exceptional cruelty, one that included the denial of a place of burial.

In shining a light on the contested and divisive narratives of the past, including the sources and consequences of the gradations of violences, the linkages between land, social class and the experience of women in early and more contemporary times in Ireland, we engage in a process of inclusive ethical commemoration in a manner that promotes tolerance, healing, and prompts consideration of the often conflicting senses of identity in contemporary Ireland, north and south. With a multiplicity of narratives being given public space, an emerging spirit of humility, maturity and tolerance is a prize worth seeking.

May we achieve it. Together.

Beir Beannacht.

Margaret O’ Callaghan: Recovering Imagined Futures

Thursday 27th May, 2021

I have been asked by the President to reflect upon the idea of Recovering Imagined Futures in the Irish independence struggle and its historiography from the perspective of the summer of 1921. We know what happened after that summer of the Truce then, but the protagonists at the time did not.

My colleagues will reflect on hope, class, and gender, on Labour, land and longing, and on freedom as personal for women’s participation and purpose. I am going to look backwards from that crucial summer of 1921and to reflect on some futures imagined in the decades before it.

In June 1921 King George V opened the parliament of Northern Ireland and a month later the military Truce of July 1921 opened the way for the end of the British Irish war of the previous two years. Settlement talks between Britain and Dail representatives were anticipated all through that summer. What possible futures beckoned?

Looking back at that summer of 1921 the key shape to see here is that British policy had already put in place an entity called Northern Ireland prior to any ceasefire, talks or future agenda with the rest of Ireland. Eamon De Valera and Michael Collins, Arthur Griffith and William T. Cosgrave, countless volunteers in the field, are preoccupied by the hope of an imminent all-Ireland settlement; but British policy has already put in place the reality of a new six county Northern Ireland. It would take a very brave man, Carson said to Bonar Law, to take away Ulster’s parliament. At the British cabinet table the discussion is of a ‘war to the death’ in Ireland, or a limited settlement.

As Ronan Fanning quotes 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’. That was the nub of it. 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 reprisals in Ireland was unendurable, but if a coherent narrative of respective self- determinations on the island of Ireland could be told by Britain, then the later choice articulated by the Lord Lieutenant Fitz Alan- ‘now it must be peace or real war and no fooling’ could be made.

De Valera’s push for the assault on the Customs House in May 1921 was part of his expectation of imminent talks – a costly one. It reflected his desire not to be presented in peace talks as guerrilla gunmen as depicted by the British. (p255) Ernie O’ Malley and other fighting men and women in pursuit of the Republic failed to see the scale of the meaning of the border until some of them fought on the ground in what became the territory of Northern Ireland.

This year, the State and others are commemorating aspects of the Irish past of one hundred years ago, but we must 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 their historiography.

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 government and by President today.

Shaped by what those over a certain age have lived through and the historical cultural wars about commemoration since the 1970s, much of this is really not apparent for most people under a certain age in this society. Commemorations are easy for societies where the outcome of the past is not contested. But here, because of the fall-out from partition’s legacies, history is and has been the raw meat of politics and of our recent conflict. It all relates back to the architectures put in place in that summer of 1921when partition took place and a Truce beckoned to a settlement.

The shape that commemorations take tells us more about contemporary society than it does about the past it seeks to evoke. The revelations about the treatment of women and the children born to them outside marriage over the past decades , the ‘Waking the Feminists’ movement arising out of rage at the Abbey Theatre’s marginalisation of women in commissioning plays in 2016, international developments - this Decade of Centenaries has had a focus unprecedented in previous commemorations on the role of 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 take from the present, in commemoration, was particularly evident in the 2019 RTÉ TV series Resistance that dwelt, at some length, on the role of women in the revolution. Apart from placing women at the centre of the action it addressed the pregnancy of one the key figures while not married. It is inconceivable that the Irish media in 1966 – the 50th anniversary of the Rising – would have wanted such then controversial coverage. In the 1960’s James Connolly was the figure the republican left wished to focus upon, while more pious forces focussed on a treacled, rather saintly, version of Padraig Pearse. From an historian’s point of view – trying to work out what actually happened at the time – Tom and Kathleen Clarke might be more captivating (and revealing) figures to focus upon.

As we know from the Bureau of Military History and Pensions archives 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 another revolutionary period, 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 a consequence of famine trauma. The extraordinary rate of emigration, the social cessation of formerly common subdivision of rented land and changed inheritance patterns, all combined to create a highly class-stratified rural community.

The 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, particularly 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, who believed that the Liberal government had no intention of introducing a Home Rule Bill unless forced to do so, mocked the time John Redmond spent in the House of Commons negotiating the exclusion of certain ‘conventual establishments’ from British state inspections. The Catholic Church was well structurally embedded with the prevailing structures of power before independence.

The seemingly endless pause on Home Rule, and the Unionist pause in resistance to it, in the years after Gladstone- from 1893, created a new, more radicalised and impatient generation in Ireland. I teach a course in Queen’s University in Belfast called the The Politics of Irish literature and we read all the radical writers of these years – journalists, poets, novelists, historians, polemicists – Many of that generation were politicised during anti-Boer War, anti-imperial protests and commemorations of the 1798 rebellion in 1898.

The point is that 1916 was shaped by a small dedicated group who had a wider sympathetic cohort derived from those a decade 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, fear of successful total absorption into a British imperial project, cultural no less than political, drove many of the key figures to revolution. 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 and 1907 that he was convinced the Liberals never intended to facilitate Home Rule. Eamon De Valera when asked, years later, to recommend a history of Ireland suggested hers. Her books were best-selling in Ireland in the early 1910s. 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 engaged politics at the time.

Stopford Green, funded the School of Irish Studies in Dublin and paid for most of the guns in the Howth gunrunning. At a commemorative event for Casement in Casement Aerodrome in 2016 a speaker regretted Casement’s involvement in Irish revolutionary politics – He felt that it undermined Casement’s work in Africa and South America and his efficacy as a model for NGO’s in independent Ireland. I could not resist pointing out that there might not have been an independent Irish State but for him. 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 First World War.

By the summer of 1921 as the new parliament was opened in Belfast, many of those who had reacted to the prospect of some kind 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 whom he had consorted in Belfast with Bulmer Hobson. All the signatories of the Rising were dead: so the Truce came, in the summer of 1921, to a new leadership cadre who had emerged. The radical impulse that lead to revolution had been started, arguably, by the young women Alice Milligan and Ethna Carbery in their Belfast popular newspaper publication The Shan ban Bhocht. All of the focus on history that so drove the analysis of the revolutionaries was inscribed in their journal. Arthur Griffith took over the subscription list for The United Irishman newspaper, the popular print in which almost every active revolutionary was involved. Maud Gonne part financed it. Everyone with radical politics in Ireland read Griffith’s papers before the First World War.

Futures were imagined for Ireland before the First World War, but the imagined Home Rule future had been a receding reality until the Parliament Act of 1911. Liberals did not wish to introduce a Home Rule Bill for Ireland, as they made clear when they won power in 1906. They 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 Redmond’s votes to stay in power.

Redmond got an unworkable bill only because Liberals needed his votes. That was not the fault of Redmond or the Irish party. It was, simply, the limit of their leverage. The scale of Ulster resistance and British support for it from the Covenant onwards made it clear that some accommodation for Ulster would be found. This is clear from the interventions of Churchill and Lloyd George from within the cabinet and from the actions of all levels of the Conservative party and the British Army from the Curragh episode onwards. The Buckingham Palace conferences around the pre-war Home Rule situation make it clear the small limited scale of the Home Rule proposals in any case. But the he summer of 1921 was when that Unionist resistance came to fruition in the opening of a northern parliament with the King’s speech.

Revolution is a process, not a single event. Yeats in September 1916 asks ‘was it needless death after all’. He reassumes his role as the national poet at Maud Gonne’s prompting, in the crucial use of the term ‘our’: ‘our part to murmur name after name as a mother names her child, when sleep at last has come to limbs that have run wild’. In a sequence of poems he reflects uneasily upon the transformative power of their actions. Images of Mac Donagh’s bony thumb, the image of watering the rose tree are presented as politically dynamic.

Yeats was a political genius of a kind. He was not sure that he liked it, but he understood the politically transformative power of the action of the rebel leaders and their executions and the politicisation of a new generation through those actions. Modern Ireland has difficulty with all of this but the historical record does show that a vanguard of public opinion was decisively shifted, and this is reflected in the results of the 1918 election.

Why did the Irish revolution return to the gun in 1919? A series of British cabinet and Dublin Castle political decisions had 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 Sulva or Sud el Bar’. The Irish public was a spectrum from committed unionists through liberal home rulers and Redmonite home rulers to committed advocates of complete independence. The Irish convention of 1917 had shown that while southern Unionists wanted a compromise in an all-Ireland frame, northern Unionists had dug in on the demand for separate treatment.

Though Lloyd George had offered an immediate form of very limited Home Rule to 26 counties after the Rising of 1916, 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 in the war was just that – an imagined future, never to be. The Marquis of Londonderry, who later became 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 astonished him. The so-called German plot in late summer of 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.

That Walter Long, a political anachronism even before the war, was given the chairing of the imperial cabinet 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 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. The extraordinary number of diaries and memoirs from Dublin Castle officials – Mark Sturgis’s, Ormond de Winter, versions of the activities of Andy Cope, 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. That was the Government of Ireland Act of 1920. The time line 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 by Walter Long. Called the fourth Home Rule Bill it had negated the premises of all three earlier Home Rule Bills and is better described as an act for the division of Ireland. The imagined Unionist future of remaining in an all-Ireland within the United Kingdom that Edward Carson had sought was recognised as impossible, as it was clear by the summer of 1921 that Britain had made its choice.

Extraordinarily, Arthur Balfour who had fought Parnellism in the 1880s and built Carson’s career in that process, was still core to British cabinet decision making at this time. His 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’.

Women pervaded 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 hEireann, those who had been in the Gaelic League, in Cumann na mBan, the Stopford women, Albina Broderick 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 collection of funds in Tralee shows the names of countless local Kerry women who had emigrated to the US and subscribed from there. Dulcibella Barton, cousin of Erskine Childers wa,s like her brother Robert Barton 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. Alice Milligan had no money and was forced to return to the support of her brother in the north. She described being in a partitioned Ireland as like being in a prison.

But as the Truce beckoned a new jockeying for position was now in place. Mary MacSwiney was very close to De Valera, as were some other revolutionary women; but as the Truce settled it was the so-called fighting men who moved into the front line of politics.

Outside church and state, free and on their own march, many of these men closed the door on their former female comrades.

The fact that women now had the vote did not mean the addition of a large number of active female candidates to the selection lists of candidates for election in 1921. The names of male candidates crowded the nomination spaces. A tenth of the BMH witness statements are from women. Alice Stopford Green sold her house in London and moved to Dublin after Casement’s execution. She wrote anti-partition propaganda and travelled to Belfast to retain contact with FJ Bigger. Her house on St Stephen’s Green was a hub of revolutionary activity. Arthur Griffith came to her for advice. Maire Comerford as her secretary was incredibly active. Alice Green’s nieces in Foxrock provided a safe houses for the Dáil cabinet to meet at this time – she describes Collins stacking his bicycle outside it. Numerous other women in the city were similarly engaged. In Unionist Ulster we can see political strategy revealed most clearly through the diaries and letters of women who were close to the power brokers, and drove much of the politics but had no public role.

Who could imagine in the summer of 1921 that within a year Griffith and Collins would be dead? That a whole 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 32 county entity.

Conor Cruise O’ Brien has documented the class wound to the families of those like his own. Hannah Sheehy Skeffington did carve out a future for herself but Mary Sheehy who had married Tom Kettle had a future she saw as denied. Some of the revolutionaries in due course produced their own elite – often Irish speaking, respectable and comfortable. Class change was real from those educated by the Jesuits and Holy Ghost fathers to Christian brothers boys. But of course 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 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.

We look back now on that summer of 1921 and find it hard to understand that most nationalists at the time refused to countenance the idea that the partition effected in that summer could be permanent. Those who had run the Dungannon Clubs in 1907 and the revolutionaries in Belfast around Ard Righ, on the Antrim Road in Belfast, did not believe that the Tyrone of George Sigerson and Patrick Mc Cartan 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 their fears.

Once the Truce was put in place all conservative forces in the country were anxious to maintain it at any cost. 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. All of this 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.

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. After over a decade in prison Clarke, years older than her, known in prison as Wilson, amnestied and returned to recover with 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 succeeded in print.

What appears to matter in that 1921 summer of the Truce is who will negotiate on the Irish side 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 Fein seats in the May 1921elections 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 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 time frame we can make sense of the summer of 1921 and all of that which it presages.

 

Thank you.

Caitriona Clear: Everyday Working Life in The Revolutionary Era; Two Case Studies.

Thursday 27th May, 2021

A Uachtaráin, a chairde,

It is a great honour for me to be here, participating in Machnamh, and to hear the inspiring talks that have gone before us.

Margaret O’Callaghan has pointed out that people living 100 years ago in Ireland didn’t know what was to come after, and that we cannot evaluate their experiences as if they had this knowledge. But neither did they look backward and see themselves as inhabiting a depressed and gloomy ‘post-Famine Ireland’.

The people who came of age in Ireland in the years 1891 to 1921 experienced dramatic transformation in all aspects of everyday life. The numbers of men and women working in shops, offices, factories, workshops, transport and communication, schools and hospitals - increased by thousands, at a time when population was falling.

These are raw numbers, not proportions. For example, there were over 7,000 more clerks in Ireland in 1911 than there had been 20 years earlier, and over 10,000 more teachers. And over 16,000 workers in the new field of telecommunications in 1911, and these numbers continued to grow.

All these workers, and others like them, had to present themselves for public view every day, and the resulting need for respectable and hard-wearing clothing and footwear created an unprecedented countrywide demand for dressmakers, tailors, cobblers, and drapery shops; more jobs, in other words. And however poor their working conditions – and we have been hearing about how poor some of those working conditions were - waged and salaried workers had set time off. And therefore you had seamstresses, shop assistants, factory workers and railway guards, clerks, teachers and telegraphists learning Irish, or first-aid, rowing on rivers, kicking footballs, making novenas, playing in bands, and of course, as we now know well, joining trade unions and other organisations.

Irish people were still on the move out of Ireland – emigration figures remained high in this 20 year, 1891-1911, this period – but the young and the single of both sexes were in a state of perpetual motion. By 1900, almost the entire country was criss-crossed by railway lines, big and small, which enabled people to cover not only long, but also comparatively short everyday distances for work and for leisure, all over Leinster, Munster, Ulster and in southern and eastern Connacht. Gaps in transport provision were made up by the bicycle, increasingly affordable to people of all classes.

The two people whose lives I am going to use to illustrate the social changes of this period were writers: The novelist Annie M.P.Smithson and the poet Francis Ledwidge. They were different from each other in almost every way – gender, religious background, social class, occupation, geographical origin, even length of years – Smithson lived into old age, Ledwidge died young. I am not being flippant when I say that there were some distinct advantages to being female in the first two decades of the 20th century, anywhere in the Western world. You had less chance of being killed in combat, although I know Linda is going to talk about a different aspect of that.  

But both Smithson and Ledwige were active adults in the decade of war and revolution. Both were nationalists, both were trade unionists and crucially, both developed the confidence to express themselves creatively.

And by the way, I am not making any literary judgements on either of them, even though they are writers, both of whom I enjoy in different ways. I’m interested in them, today, as exemplars of their time.

Annie Smithson was the older of the two. Born in 1873 in Dublin, into a middle-class Protestant family which gradually fell on hard times, by the age of 21 she was that familiar figure, the non-earning daughter helping her overwhelmed mother to rear a young family. A sympathetic aunt helped her to get away to train as a nurse in London and in Edinburgh. Smithson returned to Ireland in 1900 to become a Jubilee nurse, one of those key apostles of public health, and over the next three decades worked on the district in Down, Clare, Offaly, Donegal, Mayo, Waterford and Dublin city. She became a Catholic around 1907, and around 1916 became an Irish nationalist, joining Cumann na mBan during the War of Independence.

Her first best-selling novel, entitled Her Irish Heritage, was published in 1917, and it was directly about the female revolutionary experience. Smithson went on to write 19 more best-selling novels, many with women as their central character, many about the revolutionary experience.

Always a fighter for nurses’ working rights, in 1929 she became Secretary of the Irish Nurses Union (later the INO), and she more than quadrupled the membership between then, 1929 and 1942 when she stepped down. She died in 1948.

Francis Ledwidge was born in Slane, Co.Meath in 1887, the eighth of nine children. His father was an agricultural labourer who died when Francis was 5, and all through Francis’s childhood his mother Anne worked as an agricultural labourer; sometimes the fatherless family lived through hardship so severe that as Ledwidge later put it: ‘It was as though God forgot us.’

Francis left school at 14, and held various jobs until he became a road-mender employed by the county council, eventually rising to the position of ganger. From his schooldays he was always writing, and his first poem was published in 1910 in the Drogheda Independent. After publishing some more poems he came to the attention of Lord Dunsany, a writer and poet whose help was of great significance.

Ledwidge’s first book of poems Songs of the Fields was published in 1914. As well as being involved in various literary and cultural organisations, Ledwidge founded the Slane branch of the Meath Labour Union, and in 1913 got a clerical job as secretary of this union. A founder member of the Irish Volunteers in Slane, Ledwidge chose to follow John Redmond, and joined the British Army, serving in Serbia and on the Western Front. He continued to write until his death at Ypres, in Belgium, in 1917.

So - two very different people, both of whose lives, though, reflected the changing times. Nursing and road-mending were responsibilities taken on by the public authorities at the turn of the 20th century. Both were extremely demanding jobs physically - the demands of road-mending are obvious, but nursing at that stage involved an awful lot of pulling and dragging, not to mention the risk of infection. Smithson contracted tubercolosis in 1912-13, as she put it, her ‘health broke down’, and she recovered in a sanatorium. District nursing, of course, also involved travel, on bicycles, over long distances, on call seven days a week in all weathers.

The bicycle was crucial to Ledwidge, too. At one stage he was covering 40 miles a day going to and from work. He, too, had several bouts of illness.

But Smithson and Ledwige were lucky in the sense that jobs were relatively secure, and permanent. In other ways both writers benefitted from the very real improvements in social provisions in late nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Ireland; the Ledwidges, poor though they were, had moved into a solid three-bed brick house built by the rural district council when Francis was a baby. So at least they had that comfort and dignity. And as John Cunningham has pointed out, they were not exceptional; the Irish rural labouring class was the best-housed rural labouring class in Europe on the eve of the First World War.

And although Ledwidge left school at 14 he had up to then the advantage not only of free National schooling but also of a teacher famed for learning and dedication – Master Thomas Madden, who encouraged his poetry and encouraged his literary ambitions.

Smithson had a very patchy early education, as a lot of girls from her background did. She eventually got to school, in Bray, in her early teens and did honours in her Junior Grade Intermediate Certificate. These state exams – again, this was another social benefit – were introduced in 1878, and they were open to girls as well as to boys, on an equal level.

However, just as Ledwidge had to leave school at 14 to support his mother and younger brother, Smithson had to leave school at 16 to help her mother with a new baby. For working-class boys and girls, and for lower middle-class girls as well, family needs always came before individual fulfilment. Smithson felt guilty all her life for having seized her independence when it was offered to her.

As far as social mobility was concerned Ledwidge moved from manual work to a clerical position - had he survived the war, he probably would not have gone back labouring again. For Smithson it’s a bit more complicated - nursing was at that time seen by some snobs as socially ‘below’ teaching, and one could say therefore that Smithson moved ‘down’ the social scale from her origins in Dublin’s solid middle class - yet there can be no doubt whatever that for her and others like her, earning her livelihood in a skilled and respected profession was a vast improvement on staying at home as a mother’s unpaid helper.

Neither Smithson nor Ledwidge married. Smithson fell in love with a married doctor in Co.Down when she was in her early 30s, but gave him up and does not seem to have considered marriage again. Like the growing numbers of single female teachers, nurses, office workers and shop assistants in Ireland up to the 1960s, she probably did not want to give up her financial independence. But she made good friends wherever she went, and she became involved in Cumann na mBan during the War of Independence and the Civil War. After an unhappy first experience of love, Ledwidge probably would have married Lizzie Healy, a teacher’s sister from Kells, to whom he was writing all through the war and whom he met when he came home on leave. And if not her, somebody else - he had no shortage of female friends and acquaintances in the lively social scene he inhabited in rural and small-town Meath and Louth at that time, a social environment replicated all over Ireland in those energetic and effervescent years.

Ledwidge’s works went into several editions and his poems were included in many anthologies; I learned some of them at school. Smithson’s novels were republished regularly by Talbot Press; I read them avidly as a young teenager in the 1970s. Working-class men and women in general may have ‘lost the peace’ after 1922, as Mgt O’Callaghan has just said, but this road-mender’s lyrical descriptions of rural life and his meditations on human nature, and this nurse’s vigorous stories about strong independent women choosing their own paths, remained enduringly popular. I wonder what that tells us about both the Irish revolutionary period and the first four decades of independence

Catriona Crowe: Recovering Imagined Futures

Thursday 27th May, 2021

My thanks to the President for inviting me to be part of Machnamh, a thoughtful, reflective set of explorations of vital issues during our Decade of Centenaries, valuable in so many ways, particularly when an unnatural pause for thought has been imposed by Covid 19 and the attendant closure of archives and libraries.

The theme for this session of Machnamh is “recovering imagined futures”. We are living out, at present, a fundamental disruption to our various imagined futures by a world-historical event, a global pandemic, which has wiped out the actual futures of millions of people around the world, and created futures dogged by ill-health, unemployment and poverty for millions more. It gives us some idea of how a war-weary Europe must have felt in 1918 when the flu pandemic arrived to destroy so many fragile imagined futures.

I have been an archivist for most of my working life. Archivists deal with the imagined futures of documents, many of them now electronic and in some peril. We have to imagine the potential futures of these documents in terms of their usefulness to scholars, genealogists and increasingly, to the general public. These emphases have changed over time to include new disciplines like social, gender, cultural and labour history, and archivists have to try to keep pace with these disciplines, and to remember that the material we deem worthy of preservation now may have many uses in the future that we cannot now imagine.

The raw materials of huge statistical record sets like census records have become much more important over the last forty years, as family history has become an absorbing study for many individuals and scholars; the records were created to provide a statistical base for understanding trends in population, occupation, household composition, living conditions and education. These findings were and are, theoretically at least, supposed to provide a solid basis for national and local planning strategies, for educational provision and for fair distribution of electoral rights, among other things. The statistics generated by analysis of the forms we all fill out every 10 years is sufficient to provide that information.

However, the huge interest in genealogy and family history which has grown over the last forty years has produced a new focus on the actual household returns made for each census, and a concerted effort by archivists to make them available, often through mass digitisation projects. The success of our own digitised 1901 and 1911 censuses bears testimony to the public embrace of records which shed light on their family pasts, and to the new tool of digitisation as a transformational aid to dissemination of archives to the broadest possible readership, what has been called “the democratisation of archives.”

Margaret O’Callaghan has given us a scintillating overview of 1921, that crucial year in defining the futures of both parts of this island. I want to respond to her thought-provoking paper by amplifying the story of the archives which allow us to understand the period. All historical scholarship depends on the availability and accessibility of archives, the raw materials which allow us to know what we know about the past. The President as asked me to talk about archives relevant to the period, and to the issues being discussed at this session of Machnamh. So I’ll be stepping away from 1921 and into the period before and after that turbulent year.

The two biggest archival collections which have recently shaped our understanding of the revolutionary period are the Bureau of Military History collection and the Military Service Pensions files. The Bureau is the oral history of the period from 1913 to 1921; the Pensions files are the record of those who applied for pensions for active service in the various conflicts from 1916 to 1923. The release of the Bureau papers in 2003, and the online release of the Witness Statements in 2012, meant that the voices of 1773 people who played a part in 1916 and the War of Independence were available for the first time, and they were used by historians like Fearghal McGarry, Lucy MacDiarmaid, Roy Foster, Diarmaid Ferriter and Charles Townshend to really good effect.

The Military Service Pensions files began to be released online in 2014, and their ongoing release continues, bringing us not just a comprehensive account of various engagements during the conflicts, but a kind of shadow history of poverty, ill-health and disappointment in the first decades of the new independent State, as people wrote heart-breaking letters seeking even small sums of money in recognition of their service.

As Margaret has said, Ireland has one of the best-documented revolutions in the world. It was very important, as we approached the Decade of Centenaries, that this documentation would be available to inform our understanding of the anniversaries we would be marking. And now that it is in the public domain, this material provides rich sources for the period which can be mined well into the future. The wonderful Military Archives website has the digitised versions of both collections available online, free to access.

One of the interesting features of this round of commemorations, which as Margaret says, always reflect society’s current preoccupations, is a new interest in victims of conflict. For example, Joe Duffy’s work on children killed during the 1916 Rising brought us a new lens through which to view that event – one that focused on the collateral damage inflicted on non-combatants. Many of us wanted to complicate the narrative of these years, and that has been done successfully, often due to the availability of the new archives I’ve mentioned. Because we now have the pensions files, we can discover the story of 16 year-old Bridget McKane, accidentally shot dead through her front door, off Moore St., by rebels fleeing the burning GPO in 1916. Her father, Thomas, put in a claim for compensation 20 years later, when such claims became possible. He got £100, about €5000 in today’s values.

This session of Machnamh focuses on the issues of gender, land and class. Gender and women’s history is thriving here in Ireland, particularly relating to women in the revolutionary period. The two major archives I’ve mentioned have plenty of material relating to individual women, like Grace Gifford, Louise Gavan Duffy, Constance Markievicz and Rosie Hackett. But they also shed light on women who were not well-known, like mothers and sisters applying for pensions on foot of the loss or disability of husbands, brothers and fathers, laying out pitiful stories of poverty, sickness and resentment at the resolute determination of the State not to give money to those whose loved ones had given their lives or their health to the struggle for independence.

When considering archives relating to women, we should remember the records of the religious orders who ran health, education and welfare services here well before 1922, and with added power and control thereafter. The recent report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes has reminded us that congregational archives contain vital information about tens of thousands of women and children who passed through these homes, as well as Magdalen laundries and industrial schools. They also contain records of the nuns who ran these institutions, nearly all of whom came from Irish families and communities. The fact that these essential archives are largely closed to researchers is unacceptable, considering the close relationship between church and State for most of the twentieth century. They should be public records, in acknowledgment of the congregations’ almost total control over essential State services, and their close and oppressive relationship with large numbers of our citizens.

In this regard, the testimonies of survivors of Mother and Baby Homes, given to the recent Commission, form an extremely valuable sample of the experiences of tens of thousands of women and children who went through these homes, and whose lives are still being adversely impacted by those experiences. It is to be hoped that the backup tapes of their testimony, luckily discovered to be viable after the destruction of the originals, can form the nucleus of an archive, in consultation with the survivors themselves, which can be used for scholarship and for the education of our young citizens in former practices of our State and churches which may seem unimaginable today.

Margaret referred to the land question, as did the President, which from the 1880s on, changed the ownership and class composition of rural Ireland. We have to remember that between 1890 and 1922, 75% of the land of Ireland was transferred from landlord to tenant, a quiet revolution which followed a noisy and successful Land War. Land was always the big issue, from the huge dispossessions of the 17th century onwards. The fact that the problem was, partially, solved so quickly at the beginning of the twentieth century is both fascinating and problematic. The Land Acts created a rural society of conservative Catholic small-holders with a new-found interest in respectability and sexual probity, both of which bore down most heavily on women, and had a lot to do with the establishment and maintenance of Mother and Baby Homes.

The records of the Irish Land Commission, a vast collection spanning the 16th to the 20th century, are still, inexplicably, not available to the public. Their absence means that we cannot fully understand the creation of the modern State; these records, as well as the archives of the Registry of Deeds and the Land Registry, are the last piece of the archival jigsaw relating to the revolutionary period, and what went before and came after it. The collection also contains vast amounts of genealogical material, in the Fair Rent registers from the 1880s and 90s, which are a partial replacement for the 1881 and 1891 census records, destroyed during world war 1, because of a paper shortage. The original deeds to the transferred estates, some going back to the 16th century, and a wonderful collection of leases from the Church Temporalities Commission, dating to the 18th century, are two other constituent parts of this enormous collection, which merited its own custom-built archival repository at the back of the Land Commission offices on Merrion Sq., in what is now the Merrion Hotel. When the Land Commission offices were sold in the 1990s, a rescue operation for the records had to be mounted to prevent them from being destroyed. They were preserved, only to be made inaccessible.

The Land Commission records should, under the terms of the National Archives Act, be available to the public. Perhaps the Decade of Centenaries may provide a reason to insist on their release. There are decades of scholarship to be fruitfully carried out on these vital records. And while we’re at it, it would be wonderful to have a slightly early release of the 1926 census, the first held by the new Irish State, and currently closed until 2026.

Class is an underexplored issue in Irish historiography. Labour historians, like Emmet O’Connor, Francis Devine, Padraig Yeates and Therese Moriarty have valiantly tried to illuminate our ambiguous and elided past with regard to class. The Irish Labour History Museum and Archive is the repository for many collections of trade union records and the private papers of individuals active in the labour movement. This is a very important archive of material which reflects the aspirations and activities of large numbers of our citizens. The trade union movement was, and to a sadly dwindling extent still is, the biggest and most effective civic society organisation in history, where working people could choose their own leadership and advance their legitimate interests. Yet the Labour History Archive receives minuscule funding from the State.

The labour movement played a crucial part in the revolutionary period, from James Connolly’s writings and actions, to the Citizen Army’s involvement in the 1916 Rising, to the anti-conscription strike of 1918, to Tom Johnson’s draft of the Democratic Programme for the first Dáil, to the fascinating Limerick Soviet of early 1919. The tension between nationalism and socialism was one which continued after the establishment of the new State. Labour’s long wait to achieve some political power in government is a story we all know. But we don’t know enough about the ordinary men and women who drove the Trade Union movement on the ground.

The State gives a richly deserved annual subsidy to the Irish Architectural Archive, a splendid organisation with an appropriately beautiful building on Merrion Square. But the Archive which holds the records of thousands of people, engaged in democratic pursuit of economic equality and badly needed protection for the rights of working people, gets no such subsidy. Labour, it seems, must wait, even when it comes to its valuable history.

We are now in the middle of the period reflecting on the most turbulent aspects of the War of Independence, laid out so concisely and clearly for us by Margaret’s keynote paper. The establishment of the state of Northern Ireland, the burning of the Custom House, the Truce, the Treaty negotiations and debates: these will be our preoccupations in 2021. Questions of violent opposition to Britain, its destructive response, the cessation of both one hundred years ago, the copper-fastening of partition, the Treaty debates, perhaps the most consequential debates on the shape of the country that we’ve ever had, and the looming prospect of civil war, will keep us all busy for the next while.

There is value in anniversaries; without significant State support and funding for the decade of centenaries, and in particular for the release and accessibility of crucial archives, we would not have got to this point with an excellent record on events like the State commemoration of the Easter Rising, numerous valuable academic conferences, publications which have exceeded expectations, informative and accessible TV documentaries, and arts events like Paul Muldoon’s 100 Years A Nation or Anu Productions’ These Rooms, which used poetry, music, drama and dance to illuminate, respectively, the entire history of Ireland, and the North King Street massacre of 1916. The Expert Advisory Group to the government, composed of historians and archivists, has offered creative and constructive advice on the course to be taken during these years. Its members have also staunchly promoted the archival project.

Fintan O’Toole said in 1916 that the Irish people now only trusted the Army and the Arts, because of the exemplary behaviour of both in the 1916 commemoration events. I think he would concede that others also deserve trust – our historians, archivists, museum curators, teachers and local committees who have played a significant role in commemorations of specific events. For example, the commemoration of the Soloheadbeg ambush in early 1919 involved descendants of the two policemen killed in that ambush, and was impressive in its solemnity and dignity.

The Machnamh 100 initiative is a valuable part of our intricate, many-layered, illuminating response to the events of 100 years ago. The pause in our lives inflicted by Covid 19 has given us a chance to interrogate and reflect on those events, and Machnamh has provided a welcome space for the fruits of those reflections.   

John Cunningham:

Thursday 27th May, 2021

A Uachtaráin, a chomhleacaithe, agus a chairde. Is onóir dom a bheith páirteach san ocáid tábhactach seo. Beidh mé ag caint faoi ghluaiseachtaí lucht oibre le linn na tréimhse réabhlóideacha.

In 1967, Martin O’Sullivan, a retired Athlone train driver, contributed two articles to the Irish Independent. Martin was originally from Galway, and he grew up in a railway family in the shadow of the Augustinian church in Middle Street – a place President Higgins knows very well. In the articles, he discussed his part in the munitions embargo, a trade union action which impeded the movement of British military equipment between May and December 1920 and which, for that reason, loomed large in the calculations of Michael Collins and his colleagues.

That it involved large numbers is established by the figures for those dismissed or suspended for taking part – 1,000 railway workers and 500 dockers.

If the trade union embargo had a major impact on the conflict in 1920, it did not have the same impact on historical narratives, and nearly fifty years later Martin O’Sullivan concluded his account in the Independent by expressing his bewilderment that “those important events were not recorded in any recent history of Ireland”.

The embargo is the subject of a recent publication by railway historian Peter Rigney and it features obliquely in the opening scene of Ken Loach’s The Wind that Shakes the Barley, but it would be fair to say that it remains part of the hidden history of the period. The same might be said, more or less, about other contemporary labour mobilisations. To give two examples: the Irish Trade Union Congress’s anti-conscription strike in April 1918 played a large part in changing the course of events during that fateful year; while the general strike of April 1920 forced the British government to release hunger-striking prisoners within two days.

Martin O’Sullivan’s indignant disappointment has relevance to the Machnamh theme of ‘imagined futures’. Defying the military, he and unarmed comrades risked their lives as well as their livelihoods in defence of the incipient republic. They had the reasonable expectation of having this acknowledged, but in the dominant narrative of the struggle, their contribution was ignored – relegated by the drama of ambushes and elections, but also by the state-making imperatives of a conservative polity.

Social remembering and commemoration, as Margaret O’Callaghan reminds us, has involved selective forgetting. Some of the forgotten things, one hopes, may be recovered in contexts like the present one.

Behind the mobilisations I’ve mentioned lay other imagined futures. Trade unions could put boots on the ground because of the increase in their membership, itself a reflection of a widespread determination to fight for a better life. The most remarkable growth was in the ITGWU, founded by the absent Jim Larkin, which grew from 5,000 in 1916 to 100,000 in 1920.

Of the 100,000, approximately half were farm labourers, and their embrace of the ITGWU represented the impulse of a marginalised group to exert some control over their working lives. Strikes, workplace seizures, ‘soviets’, were among the weapons they used. As scholars including Emmet O’Connor, Pamela Horn and Fintan Lane have shown, rural labourers had fitfully organised in previous decades in bodies like the Irish Land and Labour Association.

They had exerted pressure, especially after labourers won the right to vote in local elections in 1898. The key achievement of the earlier collectivities was a transformation in housing. In the thirty years before the First World War, under the Labourers’ Acts, almost 50,000 labouring families had swapped their unsanitary hovels for council houses with tillage plots. The process is treated informatively and engagingly by the Loughrea writer, Séumas O’Kelly, in his one act play Meadowsweet. O’Kelly was familiar with the arcane workings of the Labourers’ Acts from his day job as editor of the Leinster Leader.

But if labourers’ secured decent houses, wages and conditions were a different matter – in those respects, labourers had remained at the mercy of farmers and landlords. War would change the balance of forces in the countryside.

Wartime demand brought price inflation – good for those like farmers with something to sell; bad for those dependent on wages. Other developments, though, gave workers a bargaining position. With military enlistment reducing the numbers available, compulsory tillage increased the demand for labour. An Agricultural Wages Board was established in 1917 to guarantee the wartime food supply by encouraging labourers to remain on the land.

However, it was necessary for labourers to become unionised to claim their new entitlements and their share in agricultural prosperity. Initially there was something of a resurgence of the older Associations, but most were soon absorbed by the burgeoning ITGWU, which mushroomed in those parts of Leinster and Munster where farm labourers were most numerous.

Even for a county like Mayo, with relatively few labourers, Francis Devine lists 19 ITGWU branches in 1918-19, including Achill Sound, Belmullet, Ballycastle, Kilkelly, and Shrule. The story in Ulster was rather different, with complexities that I can’t do justice to here. It merits separate treatment – perhaps in a future Machnamh.

The ITGWU, of course, promised more than wage increases. In its periodicals and in the rhetoric of its organisers, it also promulgated an imagined future of its own, encompassed in the idea of the Workers’ Republic. It was an idea formulated by James Connolly, and that union laid claim to its martyred leader and his legacy, increasing its authority throughout nationalist Ireland, while pointing frequently to the Russian revolutions as current manifestations of the Workers’ Republic. The Manchester Guardian reported in May 1920:

“The ITGWU, Connolly’s body, is particularly active all over the country and penetrates to such remote spots as Clifden the far end of the desert of Connemara … It brings with it into the towns of the West an entirely new magazine of ideas; it proclaims that patriotism is not enough and that though Sinn Féin may be all very well in its way, the republic will be no good unless it is a Workers’ Republic…”

While Guardian readers were digesting all this, another wave of unrest was sweeping from the west, this one involving small farmers – so-called ‘congests’ – anxious to add to their uneconomic holdings while there was still the chance. Land held by graziers was targeted, and the repertoire of agitation – cattle-drives, land seizures – was drawn from decades of agrarian struggle.

The context is well analysed in works by Heather Laird, Fergus Campbell, Tony Varley, Michael D. Higgins and others. Of many dramatic episodes, I’ll mention one where J.G. Alcorn, high sheriff of Co. Galway and landholder at Kilroe, Corrandulla, was dipped in Lough Corrib, and threatened with drowning if he refused to sign over his grazing land. He didn’t refuse.

So alongside military engagements, separatist victories in elections, and the creation of Dáil courts, these social struggles were taking place. The overlapping and intersecting phenomena have been collectively characterised in recent decades as the Irish revolution.

But was there really a revolution? The question is posed by Marc Mulholland who identifies features associated with revolutions, including a fundamental change in the social order, and found most of them lacking. If there was an Irish revolution, he suggests, it started in 1879 and one of its key achievements was the wresting of control of the land from the landlords.

And if the process was protracted, the context was also very broad. In March 1919, Prime Minister Lloyd George, wrote in confidence to the Paris Peace Conference:

“The whole of Europe is filled with the spirit of revolution… In some countries … the unrest takes the form of open rebellion; in others … it takes the shape of strikes and of a general disinclination to settle down to work — symptoms … just as much concerned with the desire for political and social change as with wage demands.”

Whether we conclude that there was in fact an Irish revolution, Lloyd George’s ‘spirit of revolution’ was certainly at large in the years around 1919. In addition to the examples I’ve given, there are many others in an imminent publication of that title, “Spirit of Revolution”, that Terry Dunne and I have been putting together. And thanks to Terry for bringing the Lloyd George document to my attention.

Frequently we see IRA Volunteers involved in contemporary labour and agrarian struggles, but this was discouraged by IRA and Sinn Féin leaders. Sinn Féin courts and dedicated land courts quickly clamped down on agrarian agitators, and from the period of the Truce, there was less tolerance of labour militancy. By the early Free State period, strikes were being labelled ‘labour irregularism’.

The servants of the embryo state generally saw social agitation that was outside their control as opportunistic, destabilising, and illegitimate. Vigorous interventions to stamp out agrarian militancy in 1920 were followed by similar stands against labour unrest – ‘soviets’ early in 1922; farm labourer strikes in Kildare and Waterford in 1922-23. Research for the ‘Spirit of Revolution’ suggests that there was little to distinguish between the attitudes of pro- and anti-Treaty camps in this regard.

The historiography has often echoed the architects of the state in treating social agitation as opportunistic and largely peripheral, which is puzzling insofar as influential social science writings, notably Charles Tilly’s, have recognised ‘popular contention’ or mass mobilisation as key markers of revolution. It is to be hoped that a more holistic view will be a legacy of Decade of Centenaries research.

However, there is the risk that over-reliance on newly-available sources such as Bureau of Military History witness statements and military pensions’ application — exciting and informative as they are — will tend to give even more attention to ambushes at the expense of creamery soviets and land seizures. Contemporary newspapers and police reports tend to have more on popular contention.

My paper has focused on male manual workers, but their success in greatly increasing their wages drew others to trade unionism. There was an influx of women, and of professionals who would not hitherto have identified with labour. There was the Irish Nurses Union, which was established in 1919, there was a new Irish Bank Officials Association which went on strike in the same year. Established bodies, including the important INTO, treated definitively by Niamh Puirséil, affiliated with the trade union congress. In May 1920, at the peak of the cattle drives, the ASTI placed pickets on Christian Brothers schools, outraging the religious employers, some of whom would victimise the teachers involved when things settled a few years later. Other clergy, it should be said, were supportive of labour, acting as intermediaries and arbitrators.

Through all the ferment, some were looking forward to putting the spirit of revolution back in the bottle, and we can see this, inter alia, in debates on social issues in the Irish Ecclesiastical Record. I’ll mention one that is topical, drawing on research I’ve been doing with Sarah-Anne Buckley.

An anonymous ‘Sagart’ writing in the Record in 1922 on ‘How to Deal with the Unmarried Mother’, argued that any new scheme should shield ‘the girl in trouble’ from further ‘degrading and corrupting influences’ by placing her in care, and should also have a ‘deterrent effect on the girls of her neighbourhood’. Continuing, he suggested that if the new Mother and Baby institutions were …

“… brought into touch – quietly of course – with people throughout the country who would be likely to cooperate with them, people such as the clergy, nuns, members of the St Vincent de Paul Society, Catholic doctors, district nurses, social workers, etc., they would receive a much greater number of cases.”

That all came to pass; the Workers’ Republic did not. The fact that radical visionaries were not as coherent or as cohesive in their vision was only part of the reason.

Concluding, I’ll return to Martin O’Sullivan, so irked by the version of events in the history books that he put pen to paper himself. Before going to the Independent with his account of the rail embargo, he had written to RTÉ and to the history departments of all Irish universities. He got no reply.

The theme of ‘imagined futures’ reminds us to be more attentive to stories like his.

Linda Connolly: Ethical Commemoration, Women and the Irish Revolution 1919-23

Thursday 27th May, 2021

I am very honoured to be present here today with Úachtarán na hÉireann and esteemed colleagues. 

My core task is to explore the ethical imperative of posing, in a moment of centennial commemoration, some of the more difficult and troubling questions about Irish women’s experience of war and revolution, in the period encompassing the Irish War of Independence, Partition and the Civil War and its aftermath.

As centennial Ireland approaches the commemoration of the Civil War and violent foundation of the new Irish State we might ask, who will be remembered? 

Irish society has in recent years, notably in light of inquiries into incarceral Magdalen Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes, become more acutely aware of the troubled and troubling place that women have occupied in Irish culture and history. One of our greatest poets on this island, the late Eavan Boland, recalled in 2007 that as a young poet she began to see a huge rift in Ireland between ‘the past’ and ‘history’. As time went on, she said, “it was plain to me that the past was a place of whispers and shadows and vanishings, and that history was a story of heroes.”

The gulf that has existed between official history writing and women’s historical experience was and is reinforced in Ireland by the longstanding persistence of gender inequality in society, still reflected in the composition of the senior professoriate in Irish universities in which c. 87% of history professors, for instance, are men.

It is a particular privilege to speak today at the final Machnamh seminar as a Professor of Sociology, engaging the concept of Machnamh by theoretically, methodologically and ethically addressing challenging aspects of women’s role and experience in the Irish Revolution.

In agreement with Francois Thébaud, looking at the history of women and developing gender-based approaches “changes and complicates our understanding of war, both of particular wars and of the general phenomenon of war.”

The Irish Revolution is no exception. Current themes in the study of women, gender and wars internationally, including the processes that accompany the exit from war, private life in wartime and gender-based and sexual violence, have the potential to enhance and further expand the scope of Irish revolutionary studies inclusively understood – “exploring the ways in which hidden, sometimes all-but-erased stories of women’s lives can powerfully revise our sense of the past” (as Boland argues in her post-humous collection ‘The Historians’).

It must of course be acknowledged that gender-based violence is a complicated and sensitive subject, whether in the past or present. Discussing gender-based violence, for instance, means discussing issues that are often considered ‘taboo,’ and talking publicly about intimate and distressing matters. This can be particularly challenging in countries where tradition and religion play an important role in everyday life. For these reasons, only women and cases widely reported on and documented in the public sphere, both at the time and in contemporary accessible archives, are discussed in this presentation.

Shying away from discussing this in the context of Ireland’s revolutionary history is not an ethical option in the context of truthful remembering and historical accountability – despite these difficulties. Women themselves inscribed on the archive their stories of war, trauma and violence – and their quests for accountability and justice. Their experience is an important and documentable part of the story.

The narrative of the Irish Revolution as a chronology of great men and male militarism, with women presumed to have either played either a very subsidiary role or no role at all, was the predominant framework in Irish historical writing for much of the last century. Feminist scholars in the last 40 years began to independently demonstrate how women in Ireland’s revolution could no longer be considered mere victims, stooges or protected by-standers in revolutions, steered by male political leaders, heroes or militants.

Women, it is clear, actively shaped the Irish Revolution while they were also profoundly impacted by it. In terms of contribution, the women’s movement, one of the most important social movements in the history of Irish society, was a constant and critical presence in both the revolutionary period and in independent Ireland. Ongoing campaigns for women’s social and political rights after votes for women was partially achieved in 1918 continued, and women’s role as combatants and militants in other republican and labour causes has been intensely recovered in women’s history in recent decades.

What Svetlana Alexievich has termed ‘the unwomanly face of war’ is a complex issue, however. Women were clearly crucial as republican activists and combatants during both the War of Independence and the Civil War in Ireland but not in any uniform way. For example, although the internecine Irish Civil War is described as a case of ‘brother against brother’, the conflict also had a ‘sister against sister’ dimension, with pro and anti-Treaty Cumann na mBan forces coming into conflict with one another as the revolution progressed.  Likewise, it was the women representatives who were notably recalcitrant in the Treaty debates in the Dáil in 1921-22.

The tension in prioritising feminist and/or nationalist objectives was a constant challenge and ongoing source of contention among female activists despite their evident comradeship and solidarities. In a different vein, over twenty years ago, Irish sociologist Professor Louise Ryan published an early, ground-breaking article – ‘Drunken Tans‘ – in the international journal Feminist Review on the completely unspoken about violence and terror women experienced in the War of Independence. As the Oxford historian Margaret Macmillan states in her recent book, ‘War: How Conflicts Shape Us,’ “women civilians fear a particular fate in war.”

Macmillan cites examples of the pernicious nature of gender-based violence in civil wars internationally:

“You are allowed to rape,’ said the French commando leader to his men in Algeria during its war of independence, ‘just do it discreetly’.”

Did this likewise occur during Ireland’s revolution? If so, what was its scale and why was it ignored? And what is there to be gained by acknowledging this?

As Susan McKay has stated, everyone understood what the poet Seamus Heaney described this as “the exact/and tribal, intimate revenge.” The hidden and targeted violence that women are known to have experienced in other armed conflicts has only recently come to the attention of Irish historians, despite being written about in Irish sociology two decades ago.

The case for also reading across disciplines and international sources alongside archival documents to fully understand the gendered nature of violence in Ireland’s revolution is therefore compelling.

As Ireland commemorates the centennial anniversary of the foundation of the State, scholars, artists, and commentators are of course asking a range of new questions about trauma and memory in a range of spheres. A violent, and invariably traumatic, internal Civil War cast a long shadow after the State was established 1922. Yet public analysis and acknowledgement of several aspects of the trauma experienced in such a divisive conflict was met with silence for decades.

The impact of the Civil War on women was, for example, essentially ignored or dismissed as insignificant until very recently. The widespread use of forced hair cutting, in particular, a widespread form of sexual policing and gender-specific punishment practised internationally, was extensively meted out by all sides in the Irish case (crown forces and republicans). 

New cases of conflict-related sexual violence and gang rape and other violence are also being discovered. As President Higgins stated in 2019, in a speech at the commemoration of the 1st Dáil:

“Let us not look with any trepidation towards the commemorations of the coming years, lest we be tempted to avert our gaze, take refuge in evasion, or seek to ignore the difficult questions they shall raise for us all.”

A key but difficult question arising in this moment of national remembrance is - if violence cuts to the very heart of the State’s foundation, how and in what ways is this gendered? And why was the violence women experienced marginalised, minimised or negated in the official histories of this period for such a long time?

Any contention that serious sexual violence did not happen in the Irish Revolution is notably challenged by dissecting the evidence contained in women’s own personal testimonies recorded in trials, compensation claims, pension applications, personal letters, Bureau of Military History witness statements and in medical documents recording the undeniable type of internal injuries inflicted in such crimes.

There are many documented examples of forced hair cutting being implemented in several counties, in the period 1919-1923, both by crown forces and republicans during the War of Independence in particular. Newspapers reported such incidents extensively and they are also recorded in other archives, including the Military Services Pensions Collection and the Bureau of Military History Witness Statements.

Women who forged friendly or intimate relationships with British combatants or the Royal Irish constabulary were sexually policed and punished by republicans. The reasons for meting out this punishment were a combination of security concerns (passing on information to the enemy), assisting the enemy (provision of supplies, accommodation, services etc) and sexual policing (the social control of women’s intimate relationships and movements).

Women’s hair was usually cropped by groups of several masked men after she was taken to a secluded space. In May 1921, for instance, the IRA cropped the hair of Rose Logue from Menacladdy, Donegal after she laid a wreath on the grave of RIC Constable. The full report is in Belfast Telegraph 6th May 1921. Another attack on the 12th of February 1921 was more violent; it was reported in the Donegal Democrat on the 11th of September 1920, in Ballyshannon, Co. Donegal:

OTHER COMPENSATION CLAIMS AT BALLYSHANNON QUARTER SESSIONS.

WOMAN'S HAIR CUT.

At Ballyshannon Quarter Sessions, before Judge Cooke K.C., Ellen Gillen claimed compensation for the cutting of her hair by armed and masked men on the night of the 11th September, 1920…she was boarding in a house in Erne Street. On the night in question she was taking off her boots when a boy asked if she was in. The occupier of the house said she was, and about fifteen or twenty minutes afterwards four masked men came into the house. They covered the occupier of the house with revolvers, and then caught her and put something into her mouth and dragged her into the street. They then took her to a style and brought her into the big Meadow, and made her swear that she would not go back to the police again; they then cut off her hair with a scissors. One of them said she was a traitor to her country and religion, and she was kicked. They then allowed her to go back into the house. The occupier wanted to get her a drink, and one of its party said that water was too good for her. After the occurrence she lived in the police barracks for nine weeks…When she came back her lips were bleeding, they told her not to leave the house…Her hair was closely cropped and she was marked on the face and mouth. She appeared to be suffering from nervousness.

Crown forces also conducted hair cutting extensively, typically during frightening night raids on houses. Cumann na mBan activists, such as Kathleen’s Clarke’s sister Agnes Daly and Peg Broderick Nichols, were also subjected to this humiliating practice. Many more cases, involving varying degrees of force and violence, have been collated.

In some examples, defiance is conveyed. The Leitrim Observer reported on 4 September 1920: “Girls Hair Cut Off. Twelve armed and disguised men raided the house of a young woman in County Roscommon, says an official report from Dublin Castle, and asked her if it were true that she was keeping company with an RIC man. She replied that she was. She was then told that her hair would be cut off, and retorted ‘Cut away; this will not alter my mind.’ The raiders forced her on to a chair, and one of them held her hands while another cut off her hair. During this process the girl said – ‘Cut it nicely so that it will not be noticed.’ The constable concerned has made the necessary application to this authorities to marry the girl.”

As we engage with Dr Margaret O’Callaghan’s paper here today, including by reflecting on the history and legacy of Partition, we can also recall that women experienced life altering violence and trauma associated with the wider conflict in Ulster in this period.

In County Tyrone, for example, a member of Cumann na mBann (the women’s republican organisation formed in 1914), Eileen O’Doherty, was injured by B-Specials during a shooting spree in her village. Eileen was standing at her front door when she was shot in both legs. The military services pension application of Eileen O’Doherty details both a violent episode in Dromore village in general and the personal experience of a woman targeted by that violence. Prior to this attack, Eileen was a successful grocer in the town. She was also involved in despatches, hosted meetings of IRA members and hid artillery. After being shot, she spent 8 months in hospital, first in Omagh and then in the Richmond Hospital in Dublin. She clearly never recovered from her ordeal. A brother of Eileen, active in the IRA, was subsequently killed by British forces. Her pension application contains letters from her doctor outlining the catastrophic nature of her injuries. In an interview, also documented in the file, Eileen states that the wound she got ‘finished’ her. Eileen O’Doherty’s story remained hidden, unacknowledged and repressed in Irish military archives for years. The pension she applied for in light of her unstinting service to the cause of Irish independence and injuries suffered was declined. The designation ‘hero’ or economic provision for injuries inflicted was not extended to such women. Newspaper reports on the documented violence women in Belfast experienced in 1922 are likewise horrific and apparent – lest we ever forget.

On 2nd June 1922, the Irish Times reported “Fire. Diabolical Outrage in Belfast. Four More Deaths. The total number of deaths in Belfast yesterday was four and thirty-two people were injured, including seven of whom are suffering from burns. An inhuman outrage was committed at night when men called at a house pouring inflammable liquid over a woman and set it on fire. She was seriously burned... Shortly after nine o’clock a number of men called at the house of Dr McSorley, Donegal Pass…the servant Susan McCormack (40) was taken to hospital suffering from severe burns and shock.”

Shock and nervousness is consistently mentioned in such documentary sources including in relation to forced hair cutting and other assaults across several counties. A number of cases of wartime sexual violence, including ‘gang’ or multiple perpetrator rape, are also increasingly evident in the archives. Previously it was presumed this was not a feature of the Irish Revolution.

One of the most treacherous cases of transgressive violence associated with the conflict in the border region occurred in Dromitee as a precursor to what has been termed the Altnaveigh ‘massacre’ episode. The gang rape of the heavily pregnant publican, Mrs Unah McGuill, by three members of the B Specials, resident in a public house on the border in Dromitee near Newry, on 14 June 1922, and sexual assault of a servant Mary McKnight is submerged in local memory.

Robert Lynch (2010: 184-210) forensically detailed how this attack was embroiled in the cycle of violence in the region –women’s bodies and sexuality were targeted in the conflict. From a reconstruction of events in the early morning hours of 14 June, Lynch argues it appears that this latest visit by the Specials had as its purpose the killing of McGuill’s husband. They believed, not without justification, that McGuill had been involved in the shooting of a B Special comrade, Thomas Sheridan, in the area a week earlier, and when they arrived at the pub, they found that McGuill had already gone ‘on the run.’ His family, however, were still there, including his heavily pregnant wife Unah, her mother, and his two children (both under the age of three), joined by a female servant and a friend of the family named Mary McKnight. It is alleged that the Specials, enraged at McGuill's escape, began to smash up the pub and drank heavily after looting alcohol from behind the bar. They took cash from the till and then attempted to get the keys to the safe. When the women present resisted, McGuill's wife was dragged into a bedroom above the pub, thrown on the bed, and there subjected to a savage gang rape by three members of this group of Specials. Her ordeal ended only when the other women broke into the room. One of the servant girls, it is alleged, also suffered a serious sexual assault and a savage beating. A doctor who later examined her in Newry claimed that he had never seen so many bruises and cuts on one body before. She also had a fractured skull from repeated kicks in the head by her attackers. Mary McKnight managed to save herself from harm only by throwing herself through an upstairs window. After subjecting the family to this litany of horrors, the Specials proceeded to carry out a frenzied looting and ransacking of the pub before they left, drunk, screaming obscenities, and firing shots into the night air.

Similarly the compensation claims for the loss of life that was to follow in Altnaveigh, South Armagh (a series of killings still commemorated to this day) outlines the horror Mrs Heslip experienced witnessing her husband, John Heslip, and son, Robert, being shot in front of her by the IRA. Elizabeth Crozier was also shot in front of her young family. Interlinked trauma on both and all sides has lived on a hundred years later and atrocities are still remembered on the hills and farms and lanes of the Irish border counties and in other communities impacted in this period. Intricate analysis of newspaper reports and archives, including military and legal trials, documenting such attacks on women suggest that the interconnection of gender, sexuality and power in military conflict cannot be easily ignored as a salient issue in understanding the overall nature of violence and ‘revolution’ in this period including on what became ‘the Irish border’.

Two other examples of gang rape in the archives of the Irish Civil War include the attack on Margaret Doherty at Curinarra in Foxford, a member of Cumann na mBan, by three National Army soldiers on 27th May 1923 (poignantly, exactly 98 years ago today) and of Eileen Mary Warburton Biggs, a Protestant woman, in Dromineer, Co. Tipperary by four local IRA members in June 1922. These incidents are documented in great detail in key archives – in newspapers, a compensation claim, a pension application, the official courts and a military court of inquiry. Alleged perpetrators are named and always acquitted.

The impact of sexual violence on these women from very different backgrounds is captured in detail. In Maggie Doherty’s case, the documentation includes medical evidence that charts the trauma inflicted as well as a groundswell of support from doctors, religious leaders and members of her community. Both of these women died in ‘mental homes’ or psychiatric institutions – Maggie in Castlebar in 1928 and Eileen in St. Pat’s, Dublin in 1950. Maggie was laid to rest under the shadow of the Ox Mountains in County Mayo and I recently found Eileen in an unmarked grave in Mount Jerome, which I hope to rectify as an act of quiet commemoration.

Commemoration and remembrance that the intergenerational families and associates of such women often engage in outside of the State’s official programme is mentioned here today as a reminder of the possibility and power of local acts and healing gestures.

The power of finding and opening closed archives documenting women’s experience of the revolution cannot be underestimated either. As a consequence of this work, the detailed file on the Court 6 of Enquiry held in what was the Ballina workhouse, concerning the rape of Maggie Doherty, was retrieved and viewed in the Military Archives in 2020.

All of the above are examples of the subaltern, hidden history of women impacted by the violence of the revolution, which received no official acknowledgement in the decades after the State was formed.

These women were not killed in battle but ultimately they did die from the trauma and hidden injuries, psychological and physical, of the revolution. Others lived on, burdened with unspoken and unforgotten atrocities of the past.

Conflict-related murders of women in this period are also evident including on the border. The military services pension application that relates to Kate Connolly’s unsuccessful application under the Army Pensions Acts in respect of the death of her daughter Mary (Minnie) Connolly who died from gunshot wounds on 23 July 1922 at Edenappa, Jonesboro, County Armagh is one such source. It is noted in the death certificate enclosed in the file that the cause of death was "bullet wounds...inflicted by members of his Majesty’s forces". The applicant claimed that the deceased was supplying milk and provisions to members of the IRA at Ravensdale camp, County Louth when she was shot by British forces. It is also mentioned that the deceased was returning with the Moore girls from the camp when shot. A Margaret Moore was also killed in the incident. Typically, no provisions under the Army Pensions Acts to consider the claim was awarded.

The killing of Kate Carroll, from Aughnameena, near Scotstown, Co. Monaghan by the IRA, also on the border, is documented in a Court of Inquiry Report, 8th September 1921. Likewise, Kate Maher died in Dundrum, County Tipperary in 1920 with injuries to her body that indicated sexual assault (allegedly at the hands of a member or members of the Lancashire regiment in a secret investigation, who she had been in the company of that evening).

Women clearly experienced threat and danger throughout this period, as Margaret Macmillan reiterated, but they also sought justice and prosecution or compensation. Other cases of gender-based violence, such as the Greetiagh robbery and Tankardstown assault case in County Meath, were pursued through the courts by women. The Meath Chronicle reported on the 16th of September 1922 “Robberies in Marty District. Lady’s Jewellery Taken” that during the early hours Saturday morning a raid was made by armed and masked men on the licensed premises of Mrs. Elizabeth Finegan. On the 7th of October 1922, Dr Gavin, who stated he examined Mary Doyle, a servant girl in the employment of Mrs. Elizabeth Finegan, Tankardstown gave evidence. A very detailed report on pages 1 and 2 of the Meath Chronicle on 13th January 1923 records a large crowd in attendance at a special court in Kells and how the court was cleared to allow for the testimony of Mary Doyle. A trial subsequently was heard in Trim Circuit court where the jury elected that there was not enough evidence to prove the identity of the four men who broke into the premises. The subsequent charge of rape against two men did not proceed in the court as a consequence.

Bridget Carolan, likewise age 17, appeared in a documented public trial in Longford in September 1923 and was interrogated following an indecent assault reported to be perpetrated by two senior National Army officers in the Officer’s mess, when she was visiting a prisoner in Longford barracks.

Conclusion

Gender-based violence is a horrific consequence and inconvenient truth of all warfare, however large or small a conflict is.

Women in Ireland’s revolution clearly experienced such transgressive violence that is documented in archives and which is in plain sight. The long term impact of the bodily and psychological trauma and injury caused is apparent in such sources that contain the testimony of individual women. These issues also arise in more recent history – including during ‘the Troubles’ in Northern Ireland.

Susan McKay in 2016 wrote that in December 1982, the Irish National Liberation Army bombed a bar during a disco, killing 17 people. Eleven of the dead were British soldiers, the primary target. However, what perhaps received less attention at the time as some of the others were young local women referred to as ‘consorts.’

In the 1970s republican paramilitaries used to tar and feather women deemed ‘soldier dolls’. The punishments inflicted and the language of ‘consorts,’ ‘collaborators’ and ‘dolls’ is not that different to the gendered assumptions about women in the revolution who engaged in ‘company keeping’ with members of the crown forces.

The IRA appear to have expended a great deal of energy policing women in the Irish War of Independence. During the Irish Revolution products like tar, dirty motor oil and paint were also doused over women considered disloyal, dangerous and of loose morals – the same method which was employed to attack two sisters in what became known as the Kenmare incident in 1922.

The nascent Irish State was fully aware of such crimes – they were interrogated by the Army Inquiry Committee of 1924 and they are reflected in Irish military archives.

Power, gender and sexuality are intertwined in all violent wars and conflicts with women’s bodies targeted to varying degrees in forgotten crimes of war. However large or small the scale of this is in a given conflict, the consequences for individual women are deleterious. As MacMillan argues: “Because women are seen as the progenitors of the nation, societies can react savagely to any hint that they might willingly consort with the enemy” (2020: 192).

In France, after the liberation women who had been in relationships with Germans also publicly had their heads shaved for ‘consorting’ sexually with the enemy. In many other contexts, women’s heads have been shaved by imperial forces or armies, as an attack on women in enemy groups.

‘Hair taking’ by States is an established weapon of war. Examples include the civil wars in Algeria, Greece and Spain and many other conflicts throughout time. The particular implementation of these practices in Ireland in the context of guerrilla warfare in the early 20th century is a further example.

Far less women than men died in the Irish revolution. Notable exceptions include the thirteen women killed in County Cork during the War of Independence, whose individual stories have been recovered by Dr Andy Bielenberg in recent research. Mary Hall, for instance, from Cork city was an only child, killed in crossfire in the Upton train ambush on 15 February 1921 on the way home to visit her parents in Castletownbere. The more common outcome for many other women touched by the violence revolution, however, was life altering injuries – psychological and physical.

Naming and recovering the lost experience of these women, that continued in the post-revolutionary period, is in itself a commemorative act of retrieval. Nervous breakdowns, mental illness, institutionalisation in asylums, emigration, loss of job opportunities and livelihoods feature prominently in numerous personal testimonies of revolutionary women and of the women named in this presentation today - Maggie Doherty, Eileen Biggs, Mary Doyle, Bridget Carolan, Unah McGuill, Mary McKnight, Mary Hall, Mrs Heslip, Elizabeth Crozier and Eileen O’Doherty.

However, it remains to be seen: will the official commemoration of the Civil War in 2022-23 find a way to ethically remember, understand and mutually honour these women, as an act of retrieval, one hundred years later? Or will the commemoration of the final stages of the revolution reproduce the gender hierarchy and power dynamic in Irish history that negated, diminished and excluded these women’s experience and contribution, in t