Ireland 1922: confronting our troubled past 100 years on

Ireland 1922, Independence, Partition, Civil War

Author: Eds. Darragh Gannon & Fearghal McGarry

ISBN-13: 9781911479796

Publisher: Royal Irish Academy

Guideline Price: €30

In the epilogue to Ireland 1922: Independence, Partition, Civil War, Prof Guy Beiner, the historian of memory, describes 1922 as a “worthy candidate for the most undeservedly forgotten year in contemporary Irish history”. It has none of the cachet of 1798, 1848, 1867 or 1916 as he put it (all years punctuated by armed rebellion).

Both political entities in Ireland had reason to remember 1922, but better reasons to forget the year, given the explosion of fratricidal violence which occurred in both jurisdictions.

It was the year the State came into being (not 1921 as often stated), Northern Ireland opted out of a 32-county parliament, and the Civil War began.

The alacrity with which Northern premier James Craig sailed to Britain to present King George V with his notice to quit any all-Ireland arrangement just a day after the Irish Free State came into existence on December 6th, 1922 is the subject of a chapter in this book of essays.

Sadly, 1922 is mostly a chronicle of violence. The McMahon family were slaughtered in March 1922 in the worst episode of the Belfast pogroms; Frank Aiken, later a minister for foreign affairs of some standing, was responsible for the Altnaveigh massacre of June 17th, in which six Protestants were killed; and five days later Sir Henry Wilson MP was shot dead on the doorstep of his home in London. This shocking event was Ireland’s Sarajevo and led to the start of the Civil War six days later.

At the same time, the Irish Constitution – the subject of a chapter – came into being, setting up the Irish Free State as the independent State we know today.

Ireland 1922 is a collection of 50 essays assembled in chronological order, covering the year from the Treaty debates of January 4th to a little-remembered incident on December 27th, when Laurence Ginnell, a former Irish Party MP turned anti-Treaty TD, seized the Irish consulate in New York in the name of the Irish Republic.

The book is edited by historians Darragh Gannon and Fearghal McGarry, both specialists in the diaspora and the Irish revolution’s place in the world at the time. There are several essays devoted to the Irish abroad.

Ireland 1922 is as much a social and cultural history of a year when the whole world was recovering from the trauma of the first World War. There are essays on the release of James Joyce’s Ulysses and the reopening of Clerys department store in Dublin after its destruction during the Easter Rising. There is even a section on blackface minstrel shows, which were popular in Ireland at the time and sought to downplay the evils of slavery. “Blackface shows, plantation melodies and soft-shoe shuffles rendered black experience safe and harmless and as an object of comic regard, even fondness, for Irish audiences,” Dr Elaine Sisson observes.

The book is as beautifully produced as one would expect from the Royal Irish Academy (RIA), which specialises in such publications. The many photographs, murals, cartoons and extracts from letters not only complement but embellish our understanding of the text. For all our myriad advances in communication, our ancestors 100 years ago were equally adept at producing powerful images that could tell a story.

In the opening essay, The Politics of Emotions, Dr Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid observes that it was love of Ireland, not hatred of opponents, which chiefly animated the Treaty debates. The outbreak of the Civil War curdled that love into hatred, as Prof Roy Foster writes in his essay about WB Yeats, who was an eyewitness to much of the turmoil and wrote about it in his poem, A Stare’s Nest by my Window:

"We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love"

The book is not intended as a comprehensive chronicle; there are significant omissions. There is a chapter on the death of Arthur Griffith on August 12th, but none on the assassination of Michael Collins at Béal na Bláth on August 22nd, surely the one date from that year that everybody remembers. Instead, the death of Collins is covered rather idiosyncratically through the deathbed painting by John Lavery. Curious readers will find no shortage of source material on Béal na Bláth elsewhere.

More significant, in my view, is the absence of a chapter on the Free State’s first general election on June 16th, when pro-Treaty candidates won by a margin of four to one over anti-Treaty candidates. The editors accurately surmise that the result meant the “people had spoken in favour of the Treaty and the return of everyday socio-economic issues to Irish politics”. It gave the Provisional Government a mandate and emboldened it to take on the anti-Treaty rebels in the Four Courts, thus precipitating the Civil War.

The election was critical in ensuring that democracy had a successful start in the new State and deserved greater billing than it receives in this book. It is mentioned in passing in the chapter on Éamon de Valera, written by his biographer and RTÉ journalist David McCullagh.

This was truly an annus horribilis for de Valera who paid the price for his self-serving decision to stay away from the Anglo-Irish Treaty talks in London. He lost three critical votes in 1922, the first on the Treaty in the Dáil, then in his failed bid to be re-elected as president of Dáil Éireann, and finally in the general election.

“He was under no illusion that the people favoured the Treaty as they demonstrated in the election,” McCullagh concludes. De Valera lost control over the anti-Treaty side in 1922, his authority superseded by militants such as Rory O’Connor and Liam Lynch.

Though the public was largely on the side of the pro-Treaty government, that government was not on the side of the angels. Two essays reveal the brutal and arbitrary nature of State violence during the Civil War. On the day Michael Collins was buried (August 26th), three anti-Treaty volunteers, one just 19, were shot by National Army forces. “Terror, official and unofficial, played an important role in the victory of the Irish Free State over its republican enemies,” the historian Brian Hanley concludes.

Worse was to follow after the Government introduced the Army (Special Powers) Act in September in response to republican violence. On December 8th, four prisoners captured after the surrender of the Four Courts garrison at the beginning of the Civil War (Rory O’Connor, Joe McKelvey, Liam Mellows and Richard Barrett) were summarily executed without even the pretence of a trial. It was in revenge for the death of Sean Hales TD a day previously.

“It marked a pivotal moment in the abandonment of the rule of law,” writes Sean Enright, a legal historian and former Circuit Court judge.

The two essays buttress the widely held view that the State, in whose name the killings were carried out, needs to confront these brutal deeds done in our name even at the remove of 100 years.

While pro- and anti-Treaty forces killed each other, people lived their lives as best they could. Ireland was a poor country in 1922. For most people a change of sovereignty meant no change in circumstances. In one poignant essay, Prof Lindsey Earner-Byrne writes of Anne Lalor, a mother of seven whose husband had to emigrate to England because of a building strike in Dublin. Lalor wrote to the archbishop of Dublin in her distress.

Earner-Byrne concludes: “Mrs Lalor’s letter provides barely a hint of the violence and uncertainty swirling around the country, for she presents the continuity of human experience which does not always beat to the rhythm of historical periodisation. The challenge of feeding a family changed little for women like her.”

The centenary commemorations have gone quiet, too quiet – and it’s not all because of Covid-19. Too many people have lost their nerve. There has been a marked reluctance to challenge the dark and difficult legacies of the past. It is a pity that a fine publication like this could not have been produced for previous years of the decade of centenaries, but it is acutely needed now more than ever.

Ireland 1922 is a good starting point for people to re-engage with the commemorations, and is to be commended to all who are interested in Irish history.
Ronan McGreevy is an Irish Times journalist. His book Great Hatred: The Assassination of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson MP will be published in May by Faber & Faber. Centenary: Ireland Remembers 1916, a book he edited in 2017, was produced and published by the RIA