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The Dead of the Irish Revolution
Eunan O’Halpin and Daithí Ó Corráin
New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 2020 Hardcover.
xvii+705 p. ISBN 978-0300123821. £50
Reviewed
by Stephen Hopkins University
of Leicester This is an absolutely
indispensable volume for any historian of the violent process by which Ireland
(or the bulk of it) achieved its independence from the United Kingdom a century
ago. It should also be read by interested citizens, both in the Republic of
Ireland, Northern Ireland and (importantly) in Britain. Readers will have many
diverse ways of approaching this epic work, which chronicles in painstaking
detail the almost three thousand deaths of the period from the Easter Rising of
April 1916 until the end of the War of Independence (or Anglo-Irish
War) in 1921. The authors set
themselves the Herculean task of researching the details of every death
attributable to the political violence which gripped Ireland in this era,
presenting as close to a comprehensive picture of the human costs of this
complex violence as we are ever likely to have. It is a work of reference more
than of interpretation. In some respects, it forms a natural companion volume
to the thousand-page Atlas of the Irish Revolution (edited by John
Crowley, Donal Ó Drisceoil, Mike Murphy and John Borgonovo, published by Cork
University Press, 2017). However, it will provide the raw historiographical
materials for a renewal of debates, both scholarly and popular, concerning
questions such as revisionism, sectarianism and the balance between military
and political evaluations of the period. Through the late
winter and spring of 2021, this reviewer spent a short period each day reading
the entry for that precise date one hundred years earlier. There was a powerful
poignancy to this litany of names, locations and circumstances of death for
those unfortunate souls who had lost their lives in the violence of exactly a
century before. On some days, though only very few, there might be no entry to
read. On other days, the individual lives extinguished numbered in the tens.
Over several months, this served to build a picture of the character of the
victims and perpetrators of this warfare, as well as to understand the daily
rhythms and lived experience of this kind of violent confrontation, shaped by (inter)national
and local forces alike. Inevitably, some stories are better known than others,
and some entries have more depth and contextual background than others. But,
with more than a hundred pages of endnotes, the authors have provided us with a
richly researched mosaic of sources that will enhance our understanding of this
conflict for decades to come. It is hard to envisage the book ever being
surpassed as a work of reference. The sheer detail and
complexity of the stories recorded here helps to break down and undermine
simplistic historical narratives of this period. As with much violent conflict
across time and space, there are stories of both heroism and abjection,
virtuous behaviour and rank cowardice. There are also several diverse ways in
which the scale and intensity of this violence can be put into context, and
O’Halpin provides a very helpful introduction to guide the reader in this task.
In addition, there is a useful statistical appendix, delineating the
geographical location of the violence and providing a typology of those killed.
In terms of scale, it is noted straight away that the 2,846 casualties the book
records amount to less than 10% of those Irish ‘who died serving in the Great
war’ [1-2]. O’Halpin categorises the protagonists of the conflict(s) in four
main groups: civilians; ‘rebels’ or Irish military forces; police (Royal Irish
Constabulary and Auxiliaries); and British Army. The bald statistics tell us
that there were 504 deaths attributable to the violence in 1916, the
overwhelming majority in late April and early May, during and immediately after
the Easter Rising of that year. Of these, 55% are classified as civilians, with
84 Irish military or ‘rebel’ dead and 127 British military personnel (with a
relatively low figure of 17 police officers). O’Halpin makes the point that
this was almost exclusively urban violence in Dublin city, and it is striking
how many of those civilians killed were hit by crossfire (sometimes within
their own homes, or in the immediate vicinity as they sought food and basic
supplies). The argument here is
that the violence of 1916 was qualitatively distinct from that of 1919-1921 in
several important respects: O’Halpin argues there is ‘no evidence’ of a policy
of targeted killing by either British or Irish military forces [8], excepting
the judicial executions meted out to the rebellion’s leaders after the Rising
had been crushed. On some infamous occasions, individuals were killed by the
British military in a summary fashion; for example, the shooting of journalists
Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, Thomas Dickson and Patrick McIntyre by order of
Captain Bowen-Colthurst in Portobello barracks [42-43]; or, the killing of 13
civilians ‘in cold blood’ by soldiers of the South Staffordshire regiment in
North King Street on 29 April [75-78]. During 1920 and 1921, there was a more
explicit use of the method of ‘out-terrorizing the terrorists’ (in the words of
Sir Henry Wilson, chief of the Imperial General Staff). Also, there was no effort on the part of the
Irish military forces to eliminate those who were alleged to be informers; in
contrast, this was to be a significant element in the IRA violence of
1919-1921. O’Halpin recognises that the questions surrounding the killing by
the IRA of alleged ‘spies’ or informers has been ‘a difficult topic, shrouded
in confusion’ [14]. The book identifies 184 civilians who were ‘definitely
killed as spies’, 20% of all civilian casualties. However, it is by no means
clear that all those targeted were, in fact, ‘involved in intentional passing
of information to Crown forces’ [15]. This subject is inevitably highly
controversial; on occasion, ‘spying’ was viewed as a ‘tattered excuse’ (see the
case of Robert Stone, an 18 year-old [384]); sometimes, even if there was
reliable evidence, the killing of informers could bring local revulsion against
the IRA (see the case of Kitty Carroll in Co. Monaghan [386-387]. Because of
the nature of the violence in 1916, there was no ‘hint of any sectarian background
to any of the deaths’ [9]. By contrast, the issue of a potential sectarian
motivation for some violence in 1919-1921 has been the subject of protracted but
inconclusive debate among historians. O’Halpin doesn’t seek to resolve this
thorny question, but he does dip a toe in these murky waters: ‘The question of
the motivation for killings of Protestant civilians by the IRA, particularly in
Cork, has become caught up in the wider war of words and innuendo about
“revisionism”, by which is meant in Irish discourse the alleged distortion of
evidence and analysis relating to the independence struggle undertaken to
discredit contemporary Irish republicanism’ [14]. However, O’Halpin is surely
correct that the communities that suffered such killings and disappearances
‘may naturally have interpreted them through a denominational and ethnic prism’
[14]. Finally, women were considerably more likely to die in 1916 (11% of
fatalities) than in 1919-1921 (4%), as the violence took place in densely
populated streets where crossfire was a regular danger. In terms of sources,
O’Halpin makes the significant point that scholarship has received a huge boost
in the twenty-first century with the release of two major collections of Irish
state records: the Bureau of Military History (BMH) interviews with Irish
nationalist / republican veterans; and the Military Service Pensions Collection
(MSPC), which gathered large amounts of information with regard to personal
involvement with the war. The picture of Irish military personnel and their
actions that has been revealed has, in O’Halpin’s estimation, ‘rebalanced
research on the era’ [4], which had hitherto been focused on the British state
forces and their archival sources. The sheer breadth of primary sources
utilised, not to mention the exhaustive mining of already existing academic literature,
demonstrates a superb command of the historiographical field. O’Halpin makes
the interesting observation that the memoir literature of this violent upheaval
is heavily weighted towards the nationalist / republican fighters, with very
few personal reminiscences by Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), Auxiliaries or
other British personnel: ‘If many of them reflected on their experiences, and
on the rights and wrongs of the killings, destruction and looting in which they
were involved, I have yet to find anything substantial’ [5]. In Ulster,
loyalists and Special Constabulary (USC) members were similarly reticent. Thus, there is an
important distinction in the mnemonic repertoires employed by nationalists / republicans
and British or unionist combatants: ‘the many IRA personal accounts of fatal
political violence, however flawed, partial, partisan, self-justifying and
self-glorifying some may be, are of far greater value than the eerie personal
silence that generally surrounds killing not only by the military and regular
police forces, but by the USC and loyalist civilians’ [20]. As with several
other dimensions of the violent conflict of a century ago, those readers with
an interest in the more contemporary violence (largely restricted to Northern
Ireland, though with significant ‘spillover’ into the Republic and Great
Britain) will note parallels, but also contrasts. For example, in the published
memoirs of the ‘Troubles’ of the 1970s-1990s, some Loyalists and British Army
personnel have been willing to publish their accounts, even if republicans are
still ahead of the game in terms of seeking to shape the historical
narrative. The introduction
makes a further interesting point that this recent scholarship has strengthened
the concentration upon the Irish county as the unit of reference. One of the
intriguing aspects of The Dead of the Irish Revolution resides in the
effort to compare the experience and intensity of violence across the
territory; one problem of using the county as the unit of measurement is that
it ‘obscures the concentration of violence within urban centres: in Antrim,
Dublin and Derry fatalities were overwhelmingly in the respective cities of
Belfast, Dublin and Derry’ [7]. Another significant geographical element to the
violence can be discerned in the distinct dynamics of violence in the
north-east of Ireland; O’Halpin notes that 195 civilians were killed in
inter-communal violence in 1920 and 1921, the great majority in Belfast [18].
Had this work included consideration of violent deaths in 1922, the figure
would be significantly higher, perhaps doubled. In many cases, it is hard to be
certain where responsibility for individual deaths lay, but the killing of
police officers by the IRA in Belfast was relatively rare (eighteen in 1920 and
1921), certainly in comparison with some areas in the south and west. But this
did not placate unionists, who in several cases ‘responded ferociously to
isolated IRA assassinations of police’. There is, argues O’Halpin, an
‘important historiographical gap’ in terms of the mechanisms by which
‘anti-nationalist violence was planned, led and contained from 1919 to 1923,
and was later recalled, explained and commemorated within loyalist communities’
[19]. It is also interesting that the violence was almost exclusively confined
to Ireland. Unlike other periods of nationalist / republican rebellion such as
the Fenian movement or the Provisional IRA campaign, the Irish rebel activity
in Britain was generally concentrated on providing logistical and financial
support and materiel. Gerard Noonan (The IRA in Britain, 1919-1923
[Liverpool, 2014]) has calculated that five volunteers died in Britain, whilst
the IRA were responsible for six deaths.
With respect to use
of lethal force by the British military, O’Halpin underlines the significance
of the categories often used in inquests and military courts of inquiry, such
as ‘shot while attempting to escape’ or ‘shot for failing to halt when
ordered’. At least 75 Irish military personnel and 124 civilians were killed in
this fashion, demonstrating that ‘Crown forces were operating with
extraordinarily lax rules of engagement’ [19]. Two elements of this record are
noteworthy: first, the surprising number (32%) of Crown forces casualties which
were self-inflicted (either death by misadventure or suicide); second, more
than half (52%) of fatalities inflicted by Crown forces could be interpreted as
‘dubious’ – from reckless disregard for civilians to intentional cold-blooded
killings [19]. Readers may reflect that ‘dubious’ is a rather under-stated
description of some of these practices. However, the authors are willing to
criticise in unequivocal terms some of the ‘explanations’ which were offered by
the British Army for fatal violence meted out to civilians (see, for example,
the case of Owen Rice [397]). Although it seems
invidious to pick out specific incidents from such a litany of tragic events
nonetheless it is inevitable. Certain deaths and dates are well-known and
(in)famous; others have hitherto been obscure. For instance, many Irish people,
perhaps most, will be familiar with the death of Cork Lord Mayor and Commandant
of the IRA’s Cork No.1 Brigade, Terence MacSwiney in Brixton jail on October 25,
1920 after a prolonged hunger strike. Irish republicans with an historical
interest may well know that fellow IRA Volunteer Joseph Murphy died in Cork
prison on the same day, after seventy-six days without food (two days longer
than MacSwiney). But how many, aside from immediate family members, will
remember the ten other deaths, four IRA and four RIC men, as well as two
civilians, who also died on this day? From Belfast to Sligo, from Fermanagh to
Tipperary, individual lives were cut short and many others irreparably
blighted. Four women were left as widows and 18 children left without a father
on this one, not atypical day [200-203]. A century on, we can only imagine the
legacies of pain and loss that reverberated down the years from such violent
death. In much of Ireland, inter-generational memories of this era have been
passed on, with closely guarded family ‘secrets’ and local stories still spoken
of, loudly or quietly as the case may be (for discussion of this mnemonic
dimension, see Ciara Boylan, Sarah-Anne Buckley and Pat Dolan [eds.], Family
Histories of the Irish Revolution, 2017). In some cases, the records
revealed in The Dead of the Irish Revolution may shed new light on long-held
understandings of the whys and wherefores of specific killings. It may even
puncture some deeply ingrained myths. Professional historians will find this
satisfying, but for amateur or family historians the process may be more
problematic. The authors recognise the influence of the volume dedicated to the
dead of the more recent ‘Troubles’, Lost Lives (edited by David
McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney, Chris Thornton and David McVea, 1999),
which has had a remarkable impact on both academic and ‘communal’ historical
understanding of the recent violent conflict [1]. As we approach the centenary
of the civil war in Ireland in 2022-2023, it remains to be seen whether a
similar effort to chronicle the dead of that internecine conflict will permit
us to have a more complete picture of the history of twentieth-century political
violence in Ireland. The sensitivities surrounding such an endeavour are, if
anything, even more profound than for The Dead of the Irish Revolution.
Yet, the need for a detailed and factual treatment of this short, but bitter
period is stark.
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