Graffiti Revelations and the Changing Meanings of Kilmainham Gaol in (Post)Colonial Ireland

In 1921 the international conference of the Red Cross movement passed a resolution expanding its remit to encompass humanitarian intervention in civil wars on behalf of detainees. Buoyed by successes in post-war Eastern Europe, delegates hoped that Red Cross expertise could override state sovereignty and uphold international conventions in the interest of the individual. These efforts were met with resistance and the resolution has been viewed as part of a learning curve, paving the way for Common Article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Less attention has been paid to how this shift in the activities of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was received on the ground, the impact of ICRC inspections on imprisoned individuals, and the reception of the 1921 resolution by insurgents engaged in civil wars—both men and women. Between December 1922 and August 1923 multiple delegations of Irish women travelled to Geneva advocating for humanitarian intervention in the Irish civil war. This article traces their efforts and the response of the ICRC, which resulted in a visit to prisons in Ireland in spring 1923. Through a granular perspective of the grass-roots deployment of ideas of rights and humanity in civil war, it highlights the limited ability of the ICRC to intervene in internal conflicts, its dismissal of bodily suffering and torture and the efforts of both the ICRC and insurgents to grapple with the anomalous position of women detained as combatants under international humanitarian law.

The Silence and the Silence Breakers of the Irish Civil War, 1922–2022 Síobhra Aiken (bio) The original timeline proposed for the Decade of Commemorations (2012–22) omitted the latter half of the Irish Civil War. The June 2022 centenary of the burning of the Public Record Office during the battle of the Four Courts was considered as a possible "capstone to the decade of centenaries."1 Following public criticism, however, the chronology of the "decade" was extended until 2023 to cover the final months of the Civil War. But this initial reluctance is highly revealing in terms of official attitudes toward the period of civil conflict. It speaks to a long-established tendency to shy away from the realities of Irish-on-Irish violence and particularly the contentious events of June 1922 to May 1923. The idea that the destruction of centuries of historical documents could offer a symbolic ending to the commemorations also reflects the long-standing characterization of the Irish Civil War as an absence within the historical narrative: memoirs mysteriously end with the truce of July 1921; statements in the Bureau of Military History (BMH) stop suddenly before the Civil War; history textbooks were characterized for decades by "oblivion after 1922."2 This type of socially validated silence is often a feature of the commemoration of war, mimicking perhaps the liturgical practices of mourning.3 But silence takes on even greater political significance in post–civil war society, as calls for amnesty in the name of the common good often translate into "amnesia" or "commanded forgetting" [End Page 260] (to use Paul Ricœur's term).4 From as early as Roman times, orator and historian Titus Labienus professed that "forgetting" was "the best defence against civil war."5 As David Armitage outlines, this connection between civil war and "historical amnesia" intensified from the late eighteenth century, as distinctions were drawn between the "blighting and collapse of the human spirit" associated with civil war and the "revelation and self-realization" offered by revolution.6 This celebrated fight for freedom versus traumatic civil-war binary is arguably the defining feature of the commemorative narrative of Ireland's revolutionary period. For example, when speaking in 1942, the Capuchin friar Fr. Aloysius Travers promised not to dwell on the "sad days of civil war and bitter strife," calling instead on his audience to "try to forget what is painful—let us remember what is heartening and inspiring."7 As Anne Dolan argues in her study of the "troubled" memory of the Free State side, the Irish Civil War produced "a will to forget, a retreat to a type of silence that erased all but the victory."8 This article is not just concerned with the silence, however. Rather, this article draws attention to the many voices that pushed against it. For just as there were objections in 2016 to the omission of the latter half of the Irish Civil War in state commemorations, so too the codes of silence surrounding the events of 1922–23—and, indeed, the many "unacknowledged" sites of civil war which characterized the revolutionary period more broadly—have been repeatedly contested over the past century.9 Fr. Travers's call to "try to forget" (my [End Page 261] emphasis) epitomizes what Guy Beiner refers to as the "paradox of intentional forgetting," a paradox that "effectively" ensures that the event supposedly condemned to oblivion "will be remembered in an obscure form."10 As historian Jay Winter observes in his consideration of twentieth-century postwar silence, "agents of silencing," who are "intent on keeping the lid on certain topics or words," nearly always have to contend with "memory agents" "equally dedicated to blowing the lid off."11 My earlier research in Spiritual Wounds: Trauma, Testimony, and the Irish Civil War (2022) investigated the silence-breaking projects of veterans of the conflict.12 This article widens the time frame of analysis by mapping the publication of popular civil-war narratives, decade by decade, from the 1920s to the present day. Despite the persistent belief, most recently expressed by R. F. Foster, that "creative literature inspired by the Civil War … remains scanty,"13 the supposed silence surrounding...

“No ‘Wild Geese’ this time”? IRA Emigration after the Irish Civil War* Gavin Foster (bio) In July 1923, two months after the Irish Republican Army abandoned its armed campaign against the Free State government, Éamon de Valera issued a defiant statement on behalf of the anti-Treaty cause. “There will be no ‘Wild Geese’ . . . this time,” he vowed. “The soldiers of the Republic have been ordered to live and die in Ireland, and they will obey. Living or dead, we mean to establish the right of Irish Republicans to live and work openly for the complete liberation of our country.”1 By referencing the Wild Geese—the folk term for Jacobite soldiers exiled from Ireland after their defeat in the Williamite War—de Valera was telegraphing a deeper historical truth that was on many people’s minds in the aftermath of Ireland’s Civil War.2 Well-versed in Irish history, the “revolutionary generation” knew that failed nationalist risings tended to produce “mini-diasporas” of exiles.3 Along with the Wild Geese, there had been the earlier Flight of the Earls, [End Page 94] thousands of United Irishmen who fled government repression in the 1790s, the scattered remnants of the Young Ireland Rising of 1848, and a stream of Fenian émigrés in the postfamine period. De Valera was optimistic that by maintaining discipline and redirecting energies into the political arena, the republican movement could arrest this historical cycle. Nevertheless, emigration took a heavy toll on the losers of the Civil War. The members of this “Lost Legion”4 primarily ended up in the United States5 where, among other things, they shaped labor history through their sizable presence in New York City’s powerful Transport Workers’ Union.6 Republican émigrés even entered American popular culture by way of Raymond Chandler’s classic detective novel, The Big Sleep, whose menagerie of underworld Los Angeleans includes Terence “Rusty” Regan, an ex-IRA officer turned bootlegger and bodyguard. It has even been suggested that Irish-American support for the IRA during the recent “Troubles” owes a great deal to Civil War exiles who passed their militant republicanism on to their children and grandchildren.7 An episode recalled with great bitterness by the generation of republicans who lived through it, and a significant revolutionary outcome [End Page 95] in its own right, the flight of the republican “Wild Geese” has been all but ignored by historians.8 Several factors have contributed to the scholarly neglect of this episode. For one, political historians tend to pass quickly over the messy aftermath of the Civil War, focusing instead on state formation and the emergence of a viable two-party system from the mid- and late 1920s. A similar lacuna exists within the subfield of Irish migration studies, which has treated transatlantic emigration in the 1920s as an afterthought.9 It might also be argued that as simultaneously a political and a demographic phenomenon, the republican exodus falls between the cracks of political and migration history as each is typically conceived. Although a small body of literature bridges this divide by examining the demographic consequences of revolutionary violence, most of these studies are concerned with the departure of southern Unionists, ex-service men, members of the disbanded Royal Irish Constabulary, and others tainted by their association with British rule.10 Of course, republican activists were merely one current in a much larger outflow of emigrants from Ireland in the 1920s. But given their experience of internment and defeat and their continued fraught relationship with the new state, republicans faced unique pressures and conditions that shaped their collective identity as exiles rather than as emigrants per se. These push factors included police harassment and government repression, poor employment prospects and poverty [End Page 96] due to blacklisting, and a broader sense of postrevolutionary disillusionment.11 Yet given the minimal research on the subject, the relative importance of political, economic, and other catalysts to republican emigration remains unclear. What follows is the first sustained analysis of the IRA’s emigration problem following the Civil War. Volunteers (as members of the IRA were known) were joined overseas by thousands of republican noncombatants, but strictly speaking the...

This article takes a comparative approach to gendered legacies of civil war and militant women’s post-war memory activism in Ireland and Spain, and highlights a shared practice of photographic memory-keeping as a means of constructing counter-narratives of war. It focuses specifically on the testimonial memoirs “Blaze Away with your Little Gun” (1968–69) by Siobhán and Mairead de Paor and Cárcel de Mujeres (Vol. 1 and 2, 1985) and Mujeres en la Resistencia (1968) by Tomasa Cuevas, which commemorated women’s experiences of activism and imprisonment in the Irish Civil War and Spanish Civil War respectively. This article unpacks how militant women on the losing side of civil war navigated the gendered repression and enforced erasure of the post-war Irish Free State and Francoist dictatorship and uses the two case studies to demonstrate that women’s photographic practices enabled them to contest national narratives of war. It thus highlights how women’s testimonial photographic practices, the ways in which they created, re-defined, and circulated images within written memoirs, allowed them to reclaim agency over their experiences of activism and imprisonment and commemorate women who were otherwise erased from official remembrance.

The state executions of 81 IRA men during the Irish civil war have long been a bitter, almost taboo subject in Irish society. This article provides a geographical perspective on these executions. While the origins of the policy can be traced to elite divisions, the geographical spread of the executions, especially in 1923, reflected the geography of the civil war, and the need to broadcast state power at the local level during its guerrilla phase. The article maps the geographical spread of the executions and analyzes their diffusion in terms of a number of general and Irish-specific theories of civil war violence. Because the civil war originated in elite differences over a treaty, and because the two sides of the conflict had been so personally close at the elite level, historians have tended to explain the executions in terms of elite psychology. Yet while the initial development of the policy reflected the centralization of power by the protreaty elite, in terms of timing, strategic rationale, and location territorial perspectives on civil war explain much more about their diffusion in 1923.

Gerald Boland, a militant revolutionary, politician and statesman, has until now ranked amongst the relatively neglected figures of the Irish Revolution, including the Irish Civil War (1922-1923) and the nascent years of the Irish Free State. This article addresses this anomaly. Based on a chronological framework covering the outbreak of the Irish Civil War in June 1922 to Boland’s release from prison in the summer of 1924, it provides a unique insight into his hitherto overlooked Civil War experiences. It argues that despite his participation in key events Boland detested the Civil War. Boland’s Civil War experiences confirmed his preference for pragmatism over idealism from a military standpoint, and at the same time revealed a nascent politician (albeit vastly inexperienced) driven by a sense of realism. As such, the essential elements of Boland’s republicanism comprised pragmatic realism rather than doctrinaire idealism.

During the 17th century the British Isles were trapped in a 23-year-long state of turmoil through civil war, continued rebellion, and revolutions. King Charles I wanted to instill a new uniform religious policy throughout the British Isles, and this caused a massive uproar over the King's policies toward the diverse people in his kingdom, the English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh. Through a concise historical chronology and comprehensive overview, users of the Historical Dictionary of the British and Irish Civil Wars will find a very insightful explanation of the people, places, and events that indelibly shaped the United Kingdom's 17th-century history. The cross-listed dictionary entries offer a complete explanation of each important aspect of the Civil Wars and their effect on the kingdom. Also includes maps and a bibliography.

During the 17th century the British Isles were trapped in a 23-year-long state of turmoil through civil war, continued rebellion, and revolutions. King Charles I wanted to instill a new uniform religious policy throughout the British Isles, and this caused a massive uproar over the King's policies toward the diverse people in his kingdom, the English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh. Through a concise historical chronology and comprehensive overview, users of the Historical Dictionary of the British and Irish Civil Wars will find a very insightful explanation of the people, places, and events that indelibly shaped the United Kingdom's 17th-century history. The cross-listed dictionary entries offer a complete explanation of each important aspect of the Civil Wars and their effect on the kingdom. Also includes maps and a bibliography.

Since the 1990s, in the wake of the wars and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, violence against women in wartime has become a matter of international concern. This article, on gender-based violence (G.B.V.) during the Irish Civil War, draws on research from scholars and activists around the globe, and newly accessible archival sources, to highlight the relatively humane treatment of women in Ireland – even during the bitter final stages of the Irish Revolution, c.1912–23. Records of the Irish Free State's Compensation (Personal Injuries) Committee show that women suffered some serious and traumatising interpersonal violence during 1922–3 – often on account of their gender (as guardians of the domestic space). Women's interactions with the Civil War were thus distinctive from men's because of the prevalence in Ireland of forms of aggression and intimidation, including crimes against property, which transgressed public/private boundaries. However, I argue that it did not serve the strategy nor ideology of either warring side to denigrate women en masse. The genocidal aims underlying conflict-related G.B.V. elsewhere in the world were absent in Ireland, where gendered power structures, shored up by Catholic authority, remained largely unshaken by the revolution – despite the great efforts of many radical females. Revolutionary Ireland was not a safe place for many Irishwomen (nor indeed for some men); however, for pro- and anti-Treaty forces, maintaining propriety militated against the need for sexual violence as warfare.

This article argues that one of Ireland’s literary greats Frank O’Connor (1903–1966) utilized the Irish War of Independence (WOI) as a backdrop for “Guests of the Nation,” one of the most famous works about the Irish revolutionary period. The 1931 short story is set during the Irish WOI (1919–1921). This essay, however, wishes to explore the notion that a subsequent but separate conflict—the Irish Civil War (1922–1923)—was at the forefront of O’Connor’s mind at the time of writing, with concepts of duty, brotherhood, and the questioning of hegemonic military codes suggesting the Civil War undercurrent throughout. Although the cast of characters presented in the story includes two captured English soldiers, Belcher and Hawkins (as well as their Irish captors Bonaparte—the narrator—Noble, and Jeremiah Donovan), the cottage and its inhabitants function, for the writer, as a literary prop that acts as a free landscape to create a “better world.” This, it is argued here, allowed O’Connor to articulate his primary thoughts around the societal influences formed during the Civil War, a conflict of which, in contrast to the WOI, the writer had direct experience.

On Easter Monday, 24 April 1916, over one thousand Irish rebels occupied prominent buildings across Dublin, triggering a battle for control of what was then a major UK city. Confronted by over twenty thousand British soldiers, many of Irish nationality, the rebels had little chance of military success. The insurrection collapsed within six days, resulting in some five hundred fatalities and destroying much of the commercial heart of the city. Over the next days and weeks, the British authorities executed fifteen ringleaders and arrested over three thousand suspects. Organized by the Irish Republican Brotherhood and carried out by members of the Irish Volunteers, Irish Citizen Army, and Cumann na mBan, the insurrection was a minor military episode in the context of the First World War. But as a symbolic act of armed propaganda, centered on the proclamation of an Irish republic, Easter 1916 transformed Ireland. Although the uprising was initially unpopular with many nationalists, it undermined the Irish Parliamentary Party and derailed its moderate goal of Home Rule (political devolution within the UK state). The success of Sinn Féin in the 1918 UK general election and Britain’s refusal to concede its demand for an Irish republic led to the War of Independence (1919–1921) and Irish Civil War (1922–1923). For sources on the latter, see the separate Oxford Bibliographies article Irish Civil War. After independence, popular accounts of the Easter Rising presented its organizers as heroic patriots who embraced martyrdom to secure Irish independence. From the early 1960s, nationalist interpretations were challenged by more scholarly revisionist accounts, which questioned the justification, rationale, and effectiveness of the rebellion. The outbreak of the Northern Irish Troubles in 1969 ensured that historiographical reevaluations of the Easter Rising and broader Irish Revolution became the subject of public controversy. For the literature on the wider Irish Revolution, see the separate Oxford Bibliographies article The Irish Revolution, 1911–1923. In recent years, the success of the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement has taken the heat out of these debates, with post-revisionist historiography shifting the focus from the morality of republican violence to overlooked aspects of the rebellion, such as the role played by women and the experiences of people from ordinary backgrounds. Despite the decline of Catholicism and nationalism as markers of Irish identity in recent decades, social memory of the independence struggle continues to inform ideas of Irish statehood. The centenary of the Easter Rising in 2016 saw its commemoration take on renewed significance, albeit with post-nationalist pluralist interpretations, which emphasized progressive emancipatory impulses, overlapping with more traditional narratives of the fight for Irish freedom.

Narrative identity is one of the very controversial concepts in literature. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the question is still the same as it has been since it was discovered or since its invention in literature and philosophy: What is a narrative? What’s the basis of a self identity? The authors selected in this essay have each in his own manner, first Paul Ricœur, by means of a philosophical discourse, and then Claude Simon, in terms of a fictional discourse, have explored the notion of narrative identity in both practical and theoretical terms. Some may say that the narrative identity is a concept that lays beneath the experiences that can be verify. Others may say that the narrative identity is what takes place inside every living person: thus, the way I define myself is my narrative identity. The confrontation between those who believe in life and facts and those who think that life and experience are not always in what you can see, but they exist rather in what you say. We must accept that facts or fantasies cannot be expressed without the power of the language and our ability to use words. The concept of identity is an empty concept without the support of the narration. Although language supports the meaning of identity, it still makes no sense without clearly understanding of the concept of time. It is time that gives a sense to the story that one tells about him or her self. We have tried to sort out the relationship between factual and fictional discourse in selections from Paul Ricœur’s philosophical writings about narrative identity and in Claude Simon’s novel, La Route des Flandres.

The cultural formation of citizens and the hegemony of the ‘ethical state’ in England emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, a period when capitalist social relations were consolidating, operating through the processes of bourgeois institutional differentiation and the regulation of culture and social space from above. This paper employs the methods of historical ethnography to address the historical vertities of these cultural processes in colonial Ireland. It focuses on one institution—education—in one north of Ireland parish to explore how class and gender mediated the process and experience of the institutional separation of education in the second half of the nineteenth century. The rigid ‘culture of control’ orchestrating gender roles and material survival in working-class households framed distinctions in the attainment of schooled knowledges and created divergent uses and functions for such knowledge in the broader social context.

This article investigates how the role of archival texts as agents of memory requires memory scholars to expand the concept of agency beyond human agency. Revisiting Aguilar’s and Budrytė’s concept of human individuals as ‘agents of memory’, it draws on actor–network theory, colonial archive studies and book history to track the shifting ‘memory capital’ of forgotten archival texts. Taking as its case study the jail writings created by female prisoners during the Irish Civil War, the article contends that taking into account archival texts – as well as their creators – as agents of memory can provide a richer understanding of how cultural memory is created, stored, forgotten and – sometimes – reanimated in the wake of national conflict.

The Easter Rising in 1916 began a period of conflict and turmoil in Ireland that did not end until 1923, and even then it was not clear for some time that active conflict had ended. The period encompasses the Easter Rising and its immediate aftermath as well as the Irish War for Independence and the Irish Civil War – three discrete, if closely connected, historical events.