Remembering and un-remembering
During the revolution in Ireland the inherent tendency for formative national events to be interpreted from profoundly local perspectives cannot be underestimated. In April 1966, a small plaque, erected to the memory of Liam Mellows and his comrades who took part in the 1916 Rising, was destroyed in an explosion at Limepark, south Galway.1 It is unclear who was responsible for the explosion, just days before the plaque was due to be unveiled by a Fianna Fail veteran of the Rebellion. The destruction of the monument served as a stark reminder that even with the passing of half a century, the revolution remained a contentious topic. Earlier in the year, the Connacht Tribune published a series of vitriolic letters questioning the patriotic merits of the insurgents.2 The reputation of one local leader, in particular, was attacked, and in turn vigorously defended, with claims and counter claims of fascist and communist sympathies on the part of nationalists and republicans respectively.
Philosopher Paul Ricoeur has explored the reciprocal relationship between remembering and forgetting that can profoundly alter the perception of historical experience and the production of historical narrative.3 At times of great historical moment, an excess of remembering of some events, at the expense of an excess of forgetting about others can greatly influence the collective consciousness of a nation. In the years following the foundation of the Irish State, the need to forget aspects of the revolutionary era became paramount to the evolution of an imagined, functional and collective historical narrative. In this respect, Ella O’Dwyer has argued that the irony of the historiographical debates that have surrounded the narrative of violent republicanism ‘lie in the realisation that the suppression of the historical narrative which fostered the annihilation of the rebel voice also facilitates the death of the conservative response’.4 While subsequent generations superimposed a retrospective romance onto the independence struggle, the hostility that the growth of the physical force movement generated within the nationalist community was jettisoned from popular and historical memory. The period began as an era of great hope for the nationalist community, yet, ended in the disappointment, acrimony and retribution of the Civil War. The intense hatreds the Civil War engendered blighted politics for decades and compounded mutual antagonisms, lingering suspicions and deep resentments that the War of Independence had nurtured. With the coming of independence, nationalists were faced with the task of accommodating a level of antagonism towards republicanism with the collective demand for a heroic national ethno-genesis. The only adequate solution was communal silence that permitted the complexities of the revolution to be quietly jettisoned.
Historian Heather Laird has highlighted the problems non-nationalist organisations, such as groups of rural poor who coveted their neighbours’ land, present for the historiography of post-colonial states when the activities of such groups have not been absorbed into the logic of the new state.5 The experience of broadly defined social groups, such as the southern Protestant minority, frequently fall out of the domain of conventional history as the problematic questions they present for consolatory interpretations of national history negate the value of objective remembering. There are many facets to historical ‘un-remembering’; however, it is the Volunteers’ path from perceived delinquency to local heroes that presents fundamental questions about how the period has been re-interpreted in the popular consciousness.
While official memory became constrained and manipulated by an imperviousness to historical reality, the inauthentic can still be punctured by historical investigation. In this respect, local and familial memory of the period was frequently more critical, nuanced and sophisticated than historians might acknowledge. Most families who played central roles in the revolution continued to remember the past, but all too frequently, it was within tightly knit circles based on familial bonds and shared experience. The caricature of the national revolution that emerged in official history, however, should not be replaced with an equally simplistic interpretation fixated upon the legitimacy of political violence in modern Ireland.6 Republicanism during the revolutionary period was not an expression of irrationalism or a conduit for anarchy and the Volunteers did not live their lives as if they were works of art or feel compelled to construct a consoling image of themselves as the emancipators of an ancient civilisation.7 Their goals were infinitely rational and their campaign reflective of the dynamics of an impatient generation of idealists for whom the Ireland of their parents was no longer enough.
In comparison to more active republican areas in Munster, the Volunteers in Galway were often disorganised and frequently incompetent; nonetheless, they succeeded in posing a significant threat to the Crown Forces in rural districts due to the commitment of a hard-core of young rural men and women. Although their attempts to attack the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) were frequently unsuccessful, they could not have survived without the support of considerable sections of the rural community. One of the principal tasks the revolutionaries faced during the independence struggle was persuading their community to turn away from their long-standing political institutions and take a potentially disastrous chance on a younger and unproven political leadership. Republicans were never entirely successful in winning over rural communities to all aspects of their campaign and only in retrospect were they deemed ‘the army of the people’. In reality, they remained the army of some of the people, some of the time. As Brian Hughes has noted, defiance of the republican campaign from within the nationalist community was far more widespread during the period than traditionally depicted: ‘defiance also came in a wide range of acts of independent informing: denouncing the IRA, refusal to pay a levy, refusal to pay rates to a republican collector, refusal to obey a boycott, attending British institutions and so forth’.8
The independence struggle was a war of young rural men and women and Stephen Gwynn, MP for Galway town, observed at first hand the generational dimension to the revolution:
Such men as these [veterans of the original Land War] who had been in jail half a dozen times for their part in the fight, were incapable of believing that the country would ever turn from them, or refuse to accept their guidance. Yet, already, in 1905, there was a generation, to whom the story of the Land War of the eighties and their whole tradition was only a story, of which they were tired. They were weary also of being put down by their elders, who told them that they had never known what it was to do a hard day’s work for Ireland.9
Despite their overwhelming success in the 1918 General Election and the rise of the Volunteers, republicans were not accepted as a legitimate political force by many nationalists and the three main nationalist newspapers in Galway remained implacably opposed to Sinn Féin throughout the period. Writing in his political memoir in 1919, William O’Malley, former MP for West Galway, described the results of the 1918 General Election as ‘the treachery and ingratitude of a people’.10 O’Malley was adamant that many republicans sprang from ‘the English garrison – that is the parties that got all the government jobs, from a judgeship to a police inspector, they were the sons of policemen, land agents, grass farmers or land grabbers’.11 While O’Malley’s recollections were indelibly coloured by his personal bitterness, he was far from a lone voice in his contempt for the new political establishment.
A narrow focus on the republican military campaign obscures the significance of the movement’s broader achievements. The acceptance by a significant section of the people, grudging or otherwise, of the republican counter-state involving republican policing, arbitration courts, active service units and public representation in a society where violence over land was an enduring phenomenon represented the movement’s greatest achievement. Agrarian violence ultimately gave both republicans and their nationalist opponents an opportunity to reconcile themselves with the mass of ordinary people. The land arbitration courts and the republican police provided an opportunity for more conservative groups to play a moderating role in the new movement. Without losing face, former United Irish League (UIL) members could support the new forces of ‘law and order’ in early 1918 and again in 1920. From being abruptly shut out of the rapidly evolving political discourse, nationalist representatives, such as former MP William Duffy, attended arbitration courts and made favourable comments on their findings. One of Sinn Féin’s greatest opponents, Thomas Kenny of the Connacht Tribune, gave ample coverage to the court’s findings and highlighted their effectiveness in quelling agrarian violence.
Republicans’ defence of the rights of property reflected their commitment to preserving the political achievements of the revolution, and in this respect, Sinn Féin became increasingly indistinguishable from their predecessors in the UIL. The republican boycott of the police and court system became so successful that the Volunteers were able to present themselves as the legitimate upholders of law and order, assuring conservative nationalists that the revolution would not involve radical social change. To condemn the political direction of the revolution as a missed opportunity for social revolution, however, represents a misunderstanding of the essentially conservative nature of rural Ireland and an over-estimation of the capacity and desire to affect fundamental change among ordinary republicans.
Revolution and banditry
Resistance to the state during the period 1913–22 did not run solely along the lines of republicanism and historian David Fitzpatrick has highlighted the continuity between the IPP’s harnessing of agrarian violence and the manipulation of the same phenomenon by Sinn Féin, who effectively assumed the role of broker between the state and the people in April 1918. The small tenant agitations, though viewed by elites as typical of an anarchic peasantry, represented a continuum of struggle against the social inequality inherent in the dominant land tenure system in areas where the grazing system predominated. A range of unsavoury incidents sheltered under the cloak of agrarian emancipation; nonetheless, the campaigns against petty landlordism were also a claim to nationhood, albeit masked in under-articulated social grievance.
If subsequent generations of historians have failed to agree on the intersection between land hunger and political mobilisation, the authorities in Galway were similarly divided on the consequences of land purchase. RIC District Inspector Clayton believed the policy of the Congested Districts Board (CDB) was directly responsible for rural unrest in the county as ‘some of the most worthless and disloyal have received farms from the CDB in preference to the worthy and loyal. This policy has had a bad affect.’12 In contrast, District Inspector Ruttledge believed the redistribution of large estates had a positive effect in terms of unrest as ‘when a man gets his land, he settles down and there is no one more conservative than an Irish small farmer. The day of the paid politician and agitator in this country will be over when the people have the land in their hands.’13 When questioned about larger farmers and their lack of participation in the 1916 Rising in Galway, District Inspector Ruttledge told the Rebellion Commission, ‘they don’t care to lose money. I don’t think the farmers were ever better off. They are not too willing to be disturbed, that is so, the farming classes are never too willing to be disturbed.’14
The police inspectors’ seemingly rival analyses, however, were not necessarily contradictory and the sheer scale of land transferred by the state from landlord to tenant in Galway was both a result of, and a stimulus for, agrarian violence. In the countryside, violence worked but this should not be extrapolated into a particular potential for violence among the land-hungry rural poor, as in Galway both the urban and rural poor ultimately became a brake on revolution. The rural agrarian collectivities’ compulsion towards violence, their essentially diffuse and individualistic struggles, their impenetrability and localism all militated against the formation of broader, co-ordinated, disciplined, associational movement such as the Volunteers. These disparate struggles could not ultimately be welded to a national movement encompassing broad social support, and in this regard, historian Eric Hobsbawm has noted the problems rural proletarian movements face in forming national movements and concluded that such agitations inevitably remain scattered and regional.15 Thus, for the rural poor during the revolutionary era, political confrontation could be quite non-revolutionary and many rejected joining the Volunteers, endeavouring to achieve their economic independence by engaging in violent agrarianism.
Despite having benefitted from the wave of agrarian agitation in early 1918, Sinn Féin leaders came to perceive agrarianism as the lawlessness of a greedy tenantry and the language of republican condemnation in the summer of 1920 mimicked that of the authorities. Many small farmers had nothing to lose and everything to gain by agrarian violence, and unlike their urban counterparts, were keenly aware of the transforming potential of violence. While agrarianism played a key role in the initial appeal of Sinn Féin, there was little popular ideological identification with, or even a general cognisance of socialist ideology among rural republicans. The Sinn Féin newspaper, the Galway Express, consistently presented the republican cause in pragmatic, rather than ideological terms. In this respect, declaring support for the co-operative and labour movements, while condemning the merchant classes in general, represented a populist appeal for support from the mass of ordinary people who could be roused by an appeal to perennial class resentments.
Eric Hobsbawm has noted that social and economic banditry in a revolutionary scenario ultimately ‘become ambiguous, doubtful and short’.16 Agrarianism challenged the established order and became a potential incubator of revolt, yet such activity ultimately came into conflict with the broader associational demands of political revolution.17 In this respect, the ‘little world’ of the poor with its overlapping kinship bonds conforms to models of peasant organisation worldwide, with the poor, as Hobsbawm has noted, belonging primarily to the local, rather than the national.18
Winners and losers
Revolutions, like all periods of social and political upheaval inevitably generate winners and losers. The Civil War was to cast the Volunteers into a scenario they never envisaged and it was a disaster for the young men and women who had led the revolution. Some former republican fighters inevitably made lucrative political careers on both sides of the political divide that defined the Free State; however, for every fighter that became a TD, there were hundreds more veterans who had to emigrate to Boston, New York or Chicago. Galway’s old political elite, routed so thoroughly by their republican opponents in 1918, made a significant electoral comeback in the 1920s. The republican movement’s most implacable opponent, Máirtín Mór McDonogh, was elected to Dáil Éireann in June 1927. Re-elected again in September 1927, he lost his seat in 1932 but regained it again in 1933. William Duffy and James Cosgrave, both of whom were defeated by republicans in the 1918 General Election, were among the small number of IPP members to be successfully elected as both MPs and TDs. Cosgrave, who had been MP for South Galway, was returned as an independent in the 1923 General Election but lost his seat in 1927. He later became a local representative for Fianna Fail. Duffy was returned to Dáil Éireann for the Irish Centre Party in 1927.19 Shortly before his death in December 1948, he wrote with characteristic flourish to the Irish Times of the indignity that he and many of his old political colleagues were exposed to following the ascendency of Sinn Féin:
For the past twenty years, the priceless work of the Party is scarcely mentioned, except with scoff or jibe … It is well that there is a home, a beautiful and lasting home, where quantities and qualities are accurately measured, that poor ex-members of parliament can aspire to after leaving this world of unreality, for then they will be judged on merit.20
The 1916 Rising remained one of few episodes that Galway veterans could recall with some degree of unity, yet, the fate of the Galway leadership told its own story. Liam Mellows, whose attempt to foment revolt in Galway in 1916 was thwarted by a combination of bad luck and inexperience, was executed by the Free State on 8 December 1922. In the General Election held earlier in the year, he garnered just over 10 per cent of the vote in Galway, finishing last of eight candidates standing in the county. His execution was a reprisal for an earlier shooting by the anti-Treaty IRA in which Galway TD, Pádraic Ó Máille, was shot in the spine and his comrade Sean Hales killed. In 1949, Mellows’ mother, Sarah, wrote to Fr Tom Burke of Castlegar asking for financial help. She had suffered a breakdown in health and requested ‘the loan of a few pounds for a month or so’, as her burial insurance had lapsed and she was concerned she would lose her cover. She was struggling to get by on her state pension and a small group of old comrades were helping with her rent. ‘Few are my friends and visitors these days,’ she wrote, ‘so this sickness is a poor thing and an added expense.’ The letter signed off ‘very lonely without anyone to speak to ...’21
The fate of the Galway leader of Cumann na mBan, Julia Mary Morrissey, was equally tragic. Morrissey, like most of her Cumann na mBan comrades, rejected the Treaty and supported the anti-Treaty IRA. She subsequently suffered chronic ill-health and was confined to an asylum for several decades before her death in 1974. The Military Service Pension Board sent pension forms on three occasions; however, when they were not returned correctly, she received no compensation, and without close family, she died in obscurity and her grave was unmarked.
The absence of obvious glory characterised the experience of the men and women who fought for independence in the west of Ireland and the realities of revolution left families divided by emigration, ill-health and imprisonment. In this respect, their experience mirrored that of many veterans of the First World War. Both sides of this seeming divide were motivated by positive intentions and endured hardship and grief; however, both groups believed they were building a new Ireland that would be fundamentally better. Young people gave their lives for a vision of the future without a precise definition of exactly what that new Ireland would look like. They were led on by others, and in most cases, did their best to fulfil the dream of an Ireland they believed to be worth struggling for. A small number of prominent figures made political careers from their involvement and many more were genuinely appreciated by their communities; however, in many cases, casualties and veterans of both the War and the independence struggle were not remembered beyond their own families and the ideas they fought for were forgotten.