Sean Sheehan writes: Traumas cause deep wounds and leave scars, so it is understandable that some veterans of Ireland’s civil war might want it best forgotten. I recall being advised, on the eve of a family occasion to which a survivor from the building of the Thai-Burma railway in Thailand was coming, that it would be best not to bring up that aspect of his past. His ordeal as a prisoner of the Japanese, it seems, was something he never talked about or wanted to be reminded of in a conversation. Regarding Ireland, a particular reason for not dwelling on its civil war was the inglorious knowledge that after centuries of valiant resistance to colonial rule – successfully fighting an empire which at the time controlled nearly a quarter of the world’s population – the most immediate result of driving out imperial governance from most of the country was a fratricidal conflict that liberated no one; like cutting off a finger of your hand and then severing the other four just for good measure.
An unnecessary act of self-mutilation is not something to be readily remembered even though the common notion of a deep silence shrouding memories of this episode in Ireland’s history was well corrected by Síobhra Aiken in Spiritual Wounds: Trauma, Testimony & The Irish Civil War (2022). On the first page of that book, Aiken wrote of opening up an ‘alternative archive of veteran testimony’ and, as one of the contributors to Atlas of the Irish Civil War, her informed chapter in that book returns to the legacy of silence associated with the civil war.
The book’s introduction lists how Ireland’s civil war was unlike many others: it was not a proxy battlefield in a geopolitical power play; it was not an ethnic or religious conflict; it was not protracted or inordinately bloodthirsty; there were no massacres or forced expulsions of non-combatants. Nor, it is claimed, was it a war ‘fought over property or capitalism, though there was a class dimension at work’. In the Atlas as a whole, the class aspect to the conflict is touched on but rarely directly analysed beyond the level of the observational, as in the foreword by Michael D Higgins, where he notes how the photographs reveal class differences in dress. Developments which are revealing of vested class interests at work emerge in a piecemeal fashion, as with the mention of the armed Special Infantry Corps, recruited to help put down the farm strikes but not appearing in the uniforms of an army or constabulary.
As to why the civil war was actually fought, the introduction reminds readers that the coming into being of Northern Ireland was not the bone of contention; it was generally assumed that the border would prove only temporary. What did rankle with many was a treaty that kept Ireland within the British empire and maintained fidelity, if only formally, to a foreign monarch. As the cause of the civil war this level of explanation does not go much further than saying the First World War was caused by a Bosnian Serb nationalist assassinating the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria; something to do with nationalist allegiances, hardly worth dignifying with the term ideology.
Relevant here is Lévi-Strauss’s analysis in his Structural Anthropology of how villagers describe the layout of their buildings in one of the Great Lakes tribes. The villagers draw very different maps of their community’s ground space – one group pictures a circular arrangement of houses, the other a vertical arrangement by separating the circle with a dividing line – which cannot have a common form because any content is riven by incompatible social relations that shape the form. This incompatibility is a constant, a kernel of antagonism that the villagers could not stabilise into an agreed symbolic form, and this cannot be reduced to cultural relativism. The solution is not drone photography showing the village’s ‘real’ layout. What is needed is the inscription into the form of the ways in which subjective positions relate to what is non-integrable. In relation to the Irish civil war, we see form reflected back into content in the films The Wind That Shakes the Barley and The Banshees of Inisherin.
What can be questioned is whether class was a dimension to the conflict or the dimension, the underlying antagonism that fuelled the division that resulted in civil strife. This is not to transform those who opposed the Treaty into class warriors and those who defended it die-hard conservatives – this is clearly not the case – but it is to spotlight an imbalance in the social order that underlay the conflict. This would go some way in explaining why certain interests, seeking to safeguard their concerns, were so keen to see the ratification of the January 1922 treaty. The keenness was rooted in a desire to wrap up a conflict that had the potential of destabilising the priorities of ‘property and capitalism’ and the violence between June 28th, 1922 and May 24th, 1923 could be viewed as a consequence of this principal struggle between classes. What is looked for in Atlas of the Irish Civil War but not found is the kind of perspective that Ken Loach brings to a scene from The Wind That Shakes the Barley when a shopkeeper and an impoverished customer in debt to him are at odds in a Republican Court run by members of the Cumann na mBan. The court, recognising a social crime, finds against the shopkeeper, whose exorbitant rate of interest makes him little better than a loan shark, but the IRA overrules the decision because they need his financial contribution, which could be used for purchasing weapons.
In the events that were to come, one suspects the shopkeeper would be on the pro-Treaty side and welcome the suppression of radical courts by the Free State government. Business owners, the journalism in nearly every newspaper and the Catholic church all supported the Treaty and it is not surprising that most of Leinster was pro-Treaty compared to Connacht and Munster, where the IRA’s democratic structure allowed unit members to vote against it. The forces that propelled the Provisional Government into civil war were vested interests happy to see the colour of post boxes changed but not the organisation of the economy. The two political parties that emerged to rule Ireland for the following hundred years could present their differences in terms of insoluble links with opposing sides in the civil war but they were united in their economic interests. While this has been rendered transparent by their willingness to now work together as one government, there is a risk in revealing the fiction behind a choice that had always been a false one. The unspoken principle that maintained consistency of the governing class –‘Divided We Stand, United We Fall’ – is now the elephant in the room.
The scene from Loach’s movie impresses into cinematic form a class perspective and it stands as an alternative to representing form as structure and content as simply the material it works with. When the form models itself as an atlas, independent of its content, it encourages a confinement to data and documents that occludes questions of class conflict. The notion of an atlas could be used in a more radical way, deploying it to represent – to map – the contours of class in the social and economic landscapes of the civil war. There is an informative graph in the book that goes in this direction – a breakdown of the occupations of those who died in the conflict on each side and as civilians – showing how, like most wars in this respect, business owners and professionals (‘like doctors, solicitors and higher civil servants’) made up a tiny percentage of those whose lives were lost. Occupationally, the highest numbers of those who died were unskilled workers.
In ‘The Executions Policy’ case study, a full page has the names of eighty-one men whose executions were carried out by the Provisional / Free State Government between November 1922 and May 1923, appearing on a map at the locations where they died. This is necessary information but what it might reveal about the exercise of state power by a particular government is sadly missing and an aetiology of the policy that led to their deaths is attenuated. The first paragraph of this case study states that the policy was implemented with a view to ending a war that some feared might exhaust the state’s resources but goes no further than this. As to how far the policy was successful, we are told ‘historians disagree on this, and any conclusion is probably speculative’.
Speculation, though, is precisely what is needed when looking at the Irish civil war. Speculation is meant here in the Hegelian sense of the word. Speculation as a conjecture or a risky investment is raised by Hegel only for him to bracket these ordinary senses of the word and retain the idea of a going beyond, a bold venturing that surpasses what at first appears to be the only case. Speculation does this, he explains by keeping opposites together in a dialectical approach that releases a creative way of reading what on the face of it has an obvious and unilateral meaning. The last executions were of two eighteen-year-olds who had no political motive for their bank robbery and this is noted in the case study but not as a contradiction that needs to be grasped, not as what Hegel calls, when explaining the nature of speculative truths, the ‘unrest of simultaneous incompatibilities’.
At another level, speculation is what Walter Benjamin is pointing to in ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, bringing into the light utopian potentials betrayed in the unfolding of a revolution that fails to deliver what was being sought. The British government had their own reasons for supporting the Provisional Government (the subject of one of the chapters in the Atlas) but they were at one with pro-Treaty concerns when Churchill condemned the ‘Bolsheviks of the IRA’ for interrupting a smooth, post-War-of-Independence transition. The radical potential in the Irish government’s own Sinn Féin legacy, elements of socialist and feminist thought that contributed to the struggle for national independence, were summarily dismissed. Savage inequalities in the provision of health would be maintained and old age pensions would be cut. Behind the sound of the executions that are heard from afar in ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’ is the pared-down and cruelly neo-theocratic capitalist state being ushered into actuality, into the being of the Free State.
None of this should detract from a celebration of the Atlas: over 500 pages consisting of thirteen chapters divided into ten sections, twenty case studies and a treasure of illustrative material amounting to some 400 photographs, archival material and paintings plus more than forty maps (some with captions that amount in length to mini-essays). The section titles indicate an ambitious ambit, from ‘Propaganda and Legitimation’, to ‘Imprisonment’, ‘Global Connections’ and ‘Legacies’. The range of illustrations is wonderfully impressive and while, inevitably, there is some overlap with the earlier Atlas of the Irish Revolution (2017) – some maps are updated version of ones from the earlier Atlas – there is much new or rarely seen material.
This is a book to look into as well as read. One of the illustrations is a two-piece composition by Joshua Griffith that depicts Elizabeth Dunne, one of six women from Kerry who were attacked by masked National Army soldiers in 1922 for their support of the IRA. Dragged from their beds, stripped and painted green, they were not the only victims of sexual and gendered aggression and one of the book’s case studies, devoted to violence against women, makes up part of a superb chapter focusing on family life and gender. It seems odd that Griffith’s composition is placed not in this chapter but in a later one looking at Irish Civil War poetry; but this is mere carping: Atlas of the Irish Civil War is a book that needs to remain on a shelf close at hand because readers will want to dip into it again and again.
4/3/2025
Atlas of the Irish Civil War, edited by Hélène O’Keeffe, John Crowley, Donal Ó Drisceoil, John Borgonovo and Mike Murphy, and with a foreword by President Michael D Higgins, was published in 2024 by Cork University Press.
