The Silence and the Silence Breakers of the Irish Civil War, 1922–2022

Abstract

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 The idea that the destruction of centuries of historical documents could offer a symbolic ending to the commemorations also reflects the long-standing characterization of the Irish Civil War as an absence within the historical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...