The campaign of fire: Everyday Violence in the Irish Civil War, by Gemma Clark

If you cannot judge a book by its cover, sometimes you can get a clue. Gemma Clark’s book is wrapped in a volcanic sea of flames, and fire is her book’s central motif. “Fire compels and intrigues,” she writes, and, as Colm Tóibín has noted, Irish fiction has always been drawn to it – his own included.

She focuses on the spate of arson that erupted during the 1922-23 conflict between republican opponents of the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the newly established Irish Free State. In the 12 months following the signing of the treaty, in December 1921, 89 houses – most of them “big houses” – were burned, and in the next 15 weeks no fewer than 103 were turned into the blackened ruins that became part of the Irish rural landscape for many years – sometimes decades – afterwards.

This might seem odd, as the gentry houses were symbols not of the new Free State against which the IRA was fighting but of the British regime that had ended with the treaty. The burning of houses had begun during the war of independence, in retaliation against the British policy of “reprisals” following IRA ambushes. But notably fewer were destroyed – 77 up to the truce in July 1921 – than during the civil war.

Even so, the impact of what one claimants’ organisation labelled “the campaign of fire” was devastating. Irish landlords had always been under greater threat than those in Britain, but in many areas this felt like the end of a way of life. Clark sets this intense human experience in the context of what she calls “everyday violence”.

Normally this is the kind that occurs on the margins of political conflicts but is not itself political violence. The distinction is never straightforward, though, and her book suggests (unlike some other recent work on civil wars) that the political dimension of this “complex war” was far reaching.

Clark’s book, a study of counties Limerick, Tipperary and Waterford, is formally academic, with footnotes and numbered subsections carefully taking us from definition of terms to conclusion. But it contains a wealth of human interest. Local studies like this have significantly enriched our understanding of the Irish revolution, a complicated and sometimes contradictory process. This one rests on a particularly rich source: the claims submitted to the Irish and British governments for damage and dislocation at the hands of groups “engaged in armed resistance to the Provisional or Free State Governments”, or acting on behalf of “any unlawful or seditious organisation”.

The Irish Government's files relating to personal injuries seem to have gone missing, but those for damage to property survive, along with the British records of more than 2,000 claims made by people who ended up in Britain after fleeing Ireland during the conflict.

Violent undercurrent

They bring to light, as Clark writes, “thousands of previously unexplored episodes and experiences” showing that “within Munster’s local communities there lurked a violent undercurrent”.

Alongside arson, Clark examines intimidation, maiming of animals, and direct personal violence, as well as economic dislocation. (Dungarvan, for instance, was “thrown back almost to the middle ages”, as one local newspaper complained.) The list does not, mercifully, include sexual violence: Ireland, unlike so many places then and since, did not suffer the use of rape as a weapon of war.

But the rest was grim enough. A fuming stew of “disorder” created a murky and often demoralising atmosphere where authority was in meltdown and a host of local enmities were given free rein. Threatening letters might come from apparently official IRA sources, as when a former RIC sergeant was told by the commander of 4th Western Division (in April 1922, two months before the start of the civil war), “You and your family are to leave this divisional area within 24 hours.”

Or they came from more shadowy figures like the “Roary of the hill” who instructed people not to work on Lord Ashtown’s Woodlawn estate, “as the country wants the same for small tenants and means to fight for them to the bitter end”.

A different kind of social justice was aimed at the occupant of a Tipperary big house who was told, in an unsigned letter, “You bloody Protestant you needn’t think the staters are going to get Longfields back for you we will put decent Catholics in your place.”

Was a "political-military plan" operating alongside the "settling of local scores with an historic enemy"? The arson campaign in Ulster was certainly intended to cripple the new Northern Ireland state and undermine partition. Its intensification in spring 1922, with the burning of schools and picture houses as well as more traditional targets, had some early impact in this direction, even if its ultimate effect was the reverse.

Upsurge of arson

The surge of arson in Munster in 1922 followed the same pattern, although much of its logic has remained obscure. The compensation process tended to pull all damage into the political sphere: the Free State required proof that attacks were directed towards the “overthrow of the state”. British requirements were a little less stringent but still essentially political: claimants had to be targeted for loyalty to Crown. The tangle of motives reflected the blurring of boundaries in a complicated conflict.

Not many people were left unscarred by this conflict. The question of whether some – notably the Protestant minority outside Ulster – suffered significantly more, has been a contentious one. For many years it was difficult even to discuss the possibility that Protestants might have been deliberately targeted. Protestants themselves, in public, strove to minimise the issue. In April 1922 the Church of Ireland Gazette optimistically predicted the "welding together of those interests in Irish life which for a hundred years have been opposed to each other". But, as Clark notes, the reality "was somewhat different".

Between 1911 and 1925 Tipperary lost 46 per cent of its Protestant population; Limerick and Waterford lost almost as big a proportion. Although the abandonment of the 1921 census by the British government under the pressure of IRA insurgency makes it impossible to be sure, it seems likely that the great majority left after 1921.

Changing fertility and migration patterns can hardly account for such an exodus. If this was not, as some historians have suggested, “ethnic cleansing” – only the most isolated Protestant communities disappeared entirely – it was a process far from normal. Protestants’ own sense of persecution should not necessarily be taken at face value – insecurity is more a psychological than a physical state – but Clark’s level-headed assessment leaves little doubt that republican violence had a sectarian dimension.

This should not be surprising; it would hardly be the only case where, amid the dissolution of so many legal and social restraints, a historic sense of dispossession had led to direct action – or where a kind of collective amnesia soon shrouded such events. When the centenary comes around many will, no doubt, still contend that nothing of the kind happened. But people who want to get below the surface of the revolution’s final years will need books like this.