‘the crisis that we are now well over’ -  Ireland’s civil war memory and commemoration

Dr. Anne Dolan

Edward Devitt had his share of revolution; a Volunteer since February 1918, training, parading, ‘obeying all orders’, orders which, on Bloody Sunday morning 1920 involved him in the killing of two men.  Interned in Ballykinlar in 1921, he took, when the time came, the anti-Treaty side.¹ In 1936 he summed up his civil war: ‘there were two armies in 1922 and apparently I chose the wrong one’.²   In the 1930s Edward Devitt found himself living in one tenement room, a room much the same as the one he had been born and brought up in, only now he had a wife and five children of his own.  With a heart weakened, he believed, by the strain of his time in the IRA, he had come to regret that ‘During the years 1918-1923 I gave all my attention and time to the cause of the Republic. The most important years of a man’s life, between the age of 21 & 26, I let slip without thinking of my future, depending on my country to look after me in case of need.’ Left, as he believed, to ‘rot in the gutter’ he had little time for solemn words and commemoration; there was too much at stake for him and so many other veterans for that.³  After the death of a former comrade in 1935 he let the minister of defence, Frank Aiken, know exactly how he felt:

A few weeks ago Mr Irwin attended a funeral of an old member of my company. He died in poverty. The state sends a representative of the Minister of Defence, and the man’s old comrades have to pay for his internment [sic]. What a farce.I don’t want the same thing to happen to me.  If I cannot get the sympathy of the State when it is actually needed, I won’t require it when I am dead.⁴ 

Devitt wanted more than gestures and commemorations; hungry children would not feed themselves on the fine words and commiserations of old men.

Edward Devitt’s blunt letters to Frank Aiken, his sharp correspondence with the Military Service Pensions Board as he looked for a pension to support himself and his family, say a lot about the desperation of his financial circumstances in the mid-1930s, but they also push us beyond the obvious reasons why the Irish Civil War was so difficult to commemorate. Though the obvious reasons do still hold – it would always be harder to commemorate civil war than other forms of conflict because the losses, the lives taken, could be blamed on no one but ourselves – but someone like Devitt suggests there might be more complicated reasons why or that there might be factors that have been overlooked. In understanding the commemoration of the Irish Civil War we have relied perhaps too long on the records of those who had most to win and lose in those contests for political power and advantage, in those struggles for notoriety and reputation in the wake of the Civil War.  We have looked too eagerly at what was possible or too problematic for a government at any given time to commemorate, and in a system dominated for so long by the two political parties that emerged from the Civil War, it is certainly easy to find the memory of the Civil War ‘burnished and polished…the fires of hatred stoked’ at convenient and obvious moments across much of the twentieth century.⁵   Which begs the question of who we have been listening to when it comes to understanding how deep and how pervasive the Civil War divides were and continued to be. If we look for the politicisation of division we will find it and hear what we expect to hear; political speeches at civil war anniversaries tell their own tales of political preoccupations as the decades passed. But the scepticism of someone like Devitt, his reservations about commemoration, came from personal need more than political expediency. Yes, he had taken a side in 1922, but the young man who had made that decision was now older, ill, a married man with children, a man with pressing needs that were more important in 1935 and 1936 than who had won and who had lost in 1923; feeding his children, getting out of that tenement room mattered more than promises about posterity and being remembered forever. If he needed the past remembered it was because it helped him to secure a pension of £13 1s. 1d. a year; commemoration was an extravagance in a family arithmetic as precarious as that.⁶  

Edward Devitt’s military service pension application, MSP34REF2211 (Image: Military Archives)

Devitt’s contempt for commemoration as an empty public gesture, his playing the private act of a few friends against an official doing the minimum of what might be expected to be done, suggests an obvious, but an important point: that the memory of civil war was more easily and more readily addressed in private than in public, official, formal ways. All sorts of examples suggest private negotiations with the Civil War that challenge assumptions about the nature and perseverance of the divide. That is not to say that divisions were not serious nor heartfelt, but rather those feelings had to navigate their ways through the practicalities of getting on and getting by.  Frank O’Connor weighed it up as worth only a half-sentence in his memoir, and that brevity itself is telling. After his release from an internment camp at the end of the civil war he took up lodgings ‘in the house of an ex-officer in the Free State Army’ in Sligo.⁷  At twenty-seven shillings and sixpence a week the rent was just about all he could afford, but the old soldier seemed to have no qualms about having an anti-Treatyite living in his house. O’Connor’s civil war had been a matter of weeks, all just a few months before. 

But there were always limits to civil war’s reach. V.S. Pritchett came as a journalist to Ireland to explain to his readers what life was like in the middle of a civil war. Finding Dublin dull in early 1923 he followed the war to Cork, and while the sounds of shots told him danger wasn’t far away, it didn’t stop him going to the theatre ‘where Doran’s…touring company were playing a different Shakespeare tragedy’ to packed houses every night.  His first sights of Macbeth and Hamlet and Othello were shared with the commercial travellers who stayed with him in the same hotel; he remembered Shakespeare in Kerry voices shortening the road back to his bed. He wrote up a vivid mix of life: the world of a former Auxiliary who stayed on in Ireland to marry a local woman, making a life in the middle of Tipperary in civil war. ‘You picknicked’, Pritchett wrote, ‘in the Dublin mountains, but you passed the rough wooden cross – as it was then – that marked the place where Lemass…was “killed”’, but ‘you picknicked’ all the same. He did nothing to hide the man who killed himself, tormented by the beating he received during the Civil War, nothing to hide the squalor, the fleas, the lice, the savage poverty he found many people living in. But called back by his editor, his explanation for his departure should give pause for thought: ‘by the end of 1923 Ireland, which had attracted the newspapers of the world since 1916, had ceased to be interesting. No one wanted to read about Ireland any more.’ ⁸  And so he left; off to chase a coup in Spain instead.

By 1926 Padraig Colum was able to write of the Civil War as ‘the crisis that we are now well over’.⁹ By then other divisions seemed to matter more: the division between the haves and the have nots, between the toil of farms and the drudgery of towns, between lives lived easy on two hundred acres, and those endured hungry and hard on twelve. He saw divisions between generations, youngsters wanting jazz records and shop-bought clothes, their elders baffled, trying to fathom what had changed and what was changing still.  What he marked out most as he walked round mid-1920s Ireland was the divide between those who wanted to stay and those with pictures of New York on their walls restless to go. Pro- and anti-Treaty was one division amongst more: the social, economic, the cultural divisions were the ones that seemed to Colum to hit hardest home. The ‘crisis that we are now well over’ had to him already given way to so many other things. 

Cover of H.V. Morton’s ‘In Search of Ireland’, published in 1930 (Image: Internet Archive)

The British travel writer H.V. Morton published his travelogue In search of Ireland in 1930. As he toured round Dublin in a ‘jaunting car’ the jarvey pointed out the sights. When they came to O’Connell Street and the ‘line of shattered buildings’ the jarvey explained the cause of the destruction had been ‘the “crossness”’. To Morton this explanation was ‘quite the kindest and most generous I had ever heard’; it was quite a way to describe a civil war.¹⁰ It was civil war remembered but not in a way we might expect it to be said. 

By focusing on the memory of the Civil War and the shapes its commemoration took it is tempting to forget how places that experienced civil war did mend, because people did mend, at least enough to get by. For all that was lost, for all the positions that were profoundly held, that which puts a place back together, at least together enough to function is the thing we still know least about. The stitching back together is as worthy of commemoration as the tear.  There is an extraordinary history still to be written about how people cope, and though we can count out each civil war execution, each lost life, there is more for us to do to understand how a place, however hardened by its hatreds, put itself together again. 

Dr. Anne Dolan is an Associate Professor of modern Irish history at Trinity College Dublin. Her most recent book (with William Murphy) is, Days in the life: reading the Michael Collins diaries 1918-1922, published by the Royal Irish Academy, 2022.