Between Two Hells: The Irish Civil War

BETWEEN TWO HELLS

ALSO BY DIARMAID FERRITER

The Border: The Legacy of a Century of Anglo-Irish Politics

On the Edge: Ireland’s Offshore Islands: A Modern History

A Nation Not a Rabble: The Irish Revolution, 1913–23

Ambiguous Republic: Ireland in the 1970s

Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland

Judging Dev: A Reassessment of the Life and Legacy of Eamon de Valera

The Transformation of Ireland 1900–2000

BETWEEN TWO HELLS

THE IRISH CIVIL WAR

DIARMAID FERRITER

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by

Profile Books Ltd

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Copyright © Diarmaid Ferriter, 2021

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ISBN 978 1 78816 174 9

eISBN 978 1 78283 510 3

Dedicated with love to my parents, Vera and Nollaig

CONTENTS

Introduction: Faith, Reason and Betrayal

Part One: The Course and Nature of the War

1 ‘No one has ever defined a Republic’

2 The Ulster Rock

3 ‘Only putting off the evil way’

4 The Call to Arms

5 Lost Leaders

6 Raw Lads and the New Black and Tans

7 Escape Tunnels and Shit Buckets

8 God’s Law and Joans of Arc

9 Public Safety

10 The Peasant Mind

11 Giving It to the Bastards

12 The Mind’s Exhilaration

13 Fizzling Out

Part Two: Afterlife and Legacy

14 Potatoes, Water and Pensions

15 The Price of a Lost Life

16 Insulting the Dead

17 Broken Lives

18 The Uncertainty of a Soldier’s Life

19 Ideal Specimens of Womanhood

20 Two Teeth

21 Poachers Turned Gamekeepers

22 Virtue and Erin, Saxon and Guilt

23 Sidestepping Differences

24 Codology

25 Blind Loyalty Eroded

26 Not Caring Who Did What

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION: FAITH, REASON AND BETRAYAL

In September 1922, at the height of the Irish Civil War, Eamon de Valera sought to explain to a confidante, Mary MacSwiney, why he could not share her uncompromising republicanism:

Reason rather than faith has been my master … I have felt for some time that this doctrine of mine ill fitted me to be leader of the republican party … nature never fashioned me to be a partisan leader … For the sake of the cause I allowed myself to be put into a position which it is impossible for one of my outlook and personal bias to fill with effect for the party … every instinct of mine would indicate that I was meant to be a dyed-in-the-wool Tory, or even a Bishop, rather than the leader of a revolution.

De Valera was the president of Sinn Féin and the most high-profile figure to oppose the acceptance of a compromise Anglo-Irish Treaty with Britain that brought an end to the War of Independence and created a twenty-six-county free-state dominion rather than the desired Irish Republic. Yet he was clearly struggling to make common cause with those on the same side of the Treaty divide as him, but who ‘keep on the plane of Faith and Unreason and maintain that position consciously’.¹

As a conflict, the civil war was small-scale, but the rhetoric it generated was grandiose. Fought between two blocs of the republican movement over a treaty that had fairly broad public support, it was coloured by regional disparities, the creation of a new National Army by the leaders of the new pro-Treaty provisional government, and a recalcitrant Irish Republican Army (IRA), particularly strong in Munster and labelled the ‘Irregulars’ by its opponents, who were increasingly forced to rely on guerrilla tactics. As a military contest it was almost over by the end of 1922. Resulting in the region of 1,300 fatalities, it has garnered the labels ‘Brother Against Brother’ and ‘Green Against Green’.² A century on from the war, however, those labels are inadequate; there were numerous shades of colour and men had no monopoly on the division. Neither is the faith/reason dichotomy satisfactory. While civil war opponents did much to contrive narratives that emphasised these contrasts, in reality the war was never as clear-cut as either side pretended or came to believe. In the words of writer George Russell (AE), both sides embraced ‘the one-dimensional mind … beaten by the hammer of Thor into some mould or shape when they cling to one idea’.³ The challenge at its centenary is to discard that hammer to do justice to its various contours and colours.

De Valera’s despondent words in 1922 seemed to suggest a vindication of the assertion earlier that year of his nemesis in London, Winston Churchill, secretary of state for the colonies and one of the negotiators of the Treaty, that ‘Mr de Valera may gradually come to personify not a cause but a catastrophe’. He added ominously that the provisional government seeking to implement the Treaty ‘must assert itself or perish and be replaced by some other form of control’.⁴ It was a typical Churchillian bullying flourish communicated to Michael Collins, chair of the provisional government, the IRA intelligence master turned Anglo-Irish negotiator who had signed the Treaty with reluctance. It was also a reminder of the British shadow that hung over Ireland in 1922; that the civil war was not just an internal Irish matter. With the British-assisted attack on anti-Treaty IRA members in Dublin in June 1922 that began the civil war, was it Churchill’s policy rather than an Irish policy that ‘had effectively triumphed’?⁵ And could the Irish general election that same month, during which pro-Treaty candidates prevailed, be seen as fair and free, given the lingering British pressure?

De Valera, Churchill and Collins were central to the gestation of Ireland’s civil war; two of them not only survived this turbulent period but went on to achieve iconic status, seen by their supporters twenty years later when ensconced in power as representing the destiny of their respective nations. Collins, killed during the civil war at the age of thirty-one, became its most high-profile victim.

As Collins came into his own in the aftermath of the signing of the Treaty, de Valera experienced disdain both from anti-Treaty militants, who distrusted what they regarded as his moderation, and from his pro-Treaty opponents, who regarded him as dangerously subversive. It was this falling between stools that created the greatest dilemma of his sixty-year career in politics. While he could not or would not accept the Treaty, he was also, as evidenced by the MacSwiney letter, uncomfortable with the republican purists and was floundering. Ronan Fanning has suggested this was because, having been ‘swaddled in the comfort blanket of four years of deference and obedience, de Valera tried to chart a course too subtle [suggesting, not Irish membership of the Commonwealth, but an ‘external association’ with it] to be understood by those less intellectually astute than he was’.⁶

Contemporaries were much less kind, seeing his opposition as solely about personal ambition and power rather than principle, placing the burden of compromise ‘on his opponent’s shoulders’ – an unforgivable act with deadly consequences. It was deemed especially egregious from someone who had not even deigned to be involved, as the senior Sinn Féin leader, in the Treaty negotiations.⁷

Fanning’s dismissal of de Valera’s opponents is, however, too sweeping, implying a lack of depth and engagement with issues that most were deeply sincere about. Nor did anti-Treatyites have a monopoly on expressions of faith; the pro-Treaty IRA officer Michael Rynne recorded in his diary ‘I support the Treaty from conviction … I cannot retract my faith.’ And that came at a personal cost: ‘I stand to lose 50% of my friendships and 70% or so of my acquaintanceships.’ At a dance in the Mansion House in March 1922, ‘Cathal Brugha was there and I had to cut him [off] in no uncertain manner.’⁸ Rynne grew weary of the sternness of those who ‘adopt an air and tone of moral superiority to all lesser men’.⁹ Brugha, who had been Sinn Féin minister for defence, was shortly to lie dead. But that both sides were still dancing, if awkwardly, in early 1922 is a reminder that the first half of that year still held out the possibility of avoiding war.

The reasons put forward for accepting the Treaty – that it offered substantive independence and could be a pathway to even greater autonomy in the future, or was a pragmatic compromise in the face of a much more powerful Britain and an alternative to renewed war – were persuasive to many. Others, however, were adamant that Ireland’s plight could not be addressed through contemporary realpolitik. Frank Gallagher, a trenchant opponent of the Treaty and an IRA Volunteer in Dublin, who spent decades after the civil war justifying the anti-Treaty side, insisted Ireland was not land or people: ‘Ireland is something else … Ireland is the dead and the things the dead would have done … Ireland is spirit.’¹⁰ Likewise, it was asserted by Todd Andrews, who fought with the anti-Treaty IRA as a teenager, that ‘our Ireland had in fact become a political abstraction’.¹¹

Todd’s son, David, who went on to have a successful career with the political party Fianna Fáil, founded by anti-Treatyites in 1926, argued decades later that ‘the civil war had little to do with ideology. The choice of sides in the war had, in most cases, little to do with politics. Often it had more to do with personality clashes, the manoeuvrings of cliques and the readiness of troops to follow individual leaders.’ This assessment too, seems to place the participants outside of their time, as if they were automatons, but they felt deeply; Andrews quoted the Belfast Catholic Sinn Féiner and subsequent Fianna Fáil stalwart Seán MacEntee: ‘this was one of those periods when emotion overthrows reason’.¹²

Reason, it seems, also became ruthless for those running the pro-Treaty government. Just over two weeks after de Valera wrote his letter to MacSwiney, the provisional government introduced a public safety bill making the bearing of arms against the state punishable by execution, to show, according to William T. Cosgrave, who replaced Collins as leader of the government, ‘that there is a government prepared to take the responsibility of governing … although I have always objected to the death penalty, there is no other way’.¹³ The first executions took place on 17 November and there were to be seventy-seven by the end of the civil war, or eighty-three, if four men executed for armed robbery and two summarily shot by firing squad in Cork and Kerry before the legislation was passed, are included.¹⁴

Pro-Treaty political leaders articulated justification for this policy by reference to the existential crisis the fledgling state faced and the insistence that they were protectors of democracy. It is a contention that has proved convincing to some historians, but others are more sceptical; if 1922 was essentially about the ‘birth of democracy’, why was there such failure to find a political solution in 1922? In any case, Irish democratic culture predated the Treaty, ‘so the vista of a heroic elite forcing democratic values down the throat of a recalcitrant society should not be taken at face value’.¹⁵

The battle to control the labelling and narrative of the war began during it. Cosgrave was adamant as he faced into 1923 that the Irish civil war was no such thing: ‘I may say to call this civil war is a libel on civil war.’¹⁶ It was, as he saw it, about defeating criminals, not soldiers. Those passionately opposed to him also dismissed the civil war label for different reasons. Muriel MacSwiney, whose husband Terence was one of the best known martyrs of the Irish War of Independence, was in Washington in September 1922 to push the anti-Treaty case and insisted ‘the fight in Ireland is not in reality a civil war. England has only persuaded some Irish to help her.’¹⁷

But civil war it was, given that it involved armed conflict between Irish citizens and within their communities, parishes and even families, and the ‘rhetorical battles’ regarding the concept of civil war should not overshadow that. True, civil war experiences can be self-servingly shaped and distorted ‘through language and memory’ and by the ‘conceptual heritage of civil war’, but they are ‘first and foremost a category of experience’.¹⁸ Nor can the violence of civil wars be reduced to irrationality or pre-existing cleavages; rather it carries its own logic and amounts to ‘a joint process created by the actions of both political actors and civilians’, while non-combatants are not always just pawns trapped between rebels and the state.¹⁹ The violence of the Irish civil war was, however, small in scale compared with other contemporary civil wars. There was little balance of power from 1922 to 1923; the provisional government had the backing of vested and ‘moral interests’; republicans were beaten quickly because they had no proper military plan or enough public support. Partition, a reality since 1921 and which had created a six-county Northern Ireland to satisfy the demands of Ulster unionists opposed to an all-island Anglo-Irish settlement, ‘saved the south from the most explosive internal problems subverting new states’.²⁰ But violence also marred the birth of Northern Ireland, and with one-third of its population nationalist and opposed to its creation, the northern backdrop to the civil war was not just a sideshow but a parallel and deadly conflict: over 500 people were killed there between 1920 and 1922.

In 2007 Charles Townshend argued, ‘Ireland’s violence was constrained by social mechanisms we do not yet fully understand.’²¹ The Finnish civil war, fought from January to May 1918, killed up to 36,000; the Estonian War of Independence from late 1918 to early 1920 killed just under 12,000; the parallel Latvian equivalent resulted in 13,000 fatalities and the 1919–21 Hungarian ‘red and white’ terror caused about 5,000 deaths. Ireland was well down the fatality league table.²² As elucidated by Anne Dolan, however, such figures are only one measurement (‘a blunt and awkward instrument’); we need to be conscious of the nature as well as the extent of violence and also what Ireland had in common with other conflict zones as ‘Ireland’s wars came of the same mess of reasons found in every other place’. Perhaps also relevant was that Ireland was in a different ‘zone of violence’ and not part of the ‘culture of defeat’ after the First World War that prompted ‘ultra violence’ born of ethnic and religious tensions in other parts of Europe at that time.²³

It might seem perverse to stress the need to factor in restraint in an analysis of the Irish civil war, given that we have got so used to quietly shaking our heads at its perceived viciousness, but a wider, comparative context suggests that might be required. Unlike in Ireland, a central question in the Finnish civil war was whether social justice should be prioritised over independence. In both countries,

divisions emerged over who could further the nation’s interests, but in Finland, these divisions had profound social dimensions. The victors interpreted their civil war in national terms, as a war of liberation (Vapaussota) against leftist forces contaminated by their exposure to the Soviet Union. The left, in contrast, interpreted the war in social terms.

Finland was also more vulnerable geopolitically considering Russia, which made reintegration of the losers imperative.²⁴ Ireland was perhaps not in as much danger of reoccupation by Britain, but when that was deemed a possibility during the Second World War, it was an emergency that generated consensus among civil war opponents.

What also needs to be remembered is that in ways other than violence ‘the Irish civil war was fully as destructive as most of its kind’.²⁵ Liam de Róiste, Cork Sinn Féin TD (MP) and pro-Treaty, decried that its opponents did not rely upon ‘moral weapons’ but the republicans did claim a monopoly of moral right, complicated in October 1922 by a pastoral from the Irish Catholic Bishops that denounced violent anti-Treaty republicans and justified their excommunication.²⁶ Given that some republicans based their opposition to the Treaty on the notion of ‘faith’, interpreting their movement religiously as guardians of the ‘soul’ of the Irish nation, and were intent on claiming a spiritual authority for their movement that transcended episcopal authority, the Bishops’ move created serious tension, resulting in an acrimonious battle of words.

What is indisputable is that (from the perspective of the government) the pastoral ‘gave a cloak of moral authority’ to the executions that followed.²⁷ But there was little moral consistency. As Cork writer Seán O’Faoláin, who was a member of the anti-Treaty IRA, characterised it, the ‘slick slogan’ of some clergy that civil war outrages were perpetrated by those who forgot God ‘was to be mocked at by Catholic murder, Catholic gun-fire and Catholic torch setting flames to the houses of Catholic people’.²⁸

The resort to hunger strikes by interned republicans was another notable development that defined the civil war. They were also spiritual for some; as Ernie O’Malley, the IRA’s assistant chief of staff who endured a forty-one-day hunger strike, put it in November 1923, ‘the country has not as yet had sufficient voluntary sacrifice and suffering and not until suffering fluctuates will she get back her real soul … There is not enough of spirituality in our movement.’²⁹ Yet for all his ardent piety, O’Malley seemed incapable of or disinterested in defining ‘people’ or ‘nation’ or ‘republic’.³⁰

We need, nonetheless, to give sufficient weight to the emotional charge of 1922–3 and to ‘bring the war back’ to those who fought it, recognising that, in the words of Brian Hanley, ‘any balanced discussion of terror in twentieth-century Ireland must identify all of its origins and agencies, not just those which conform to our own opinions and prejudices’.³¹ Due to transformations in archival access, a growing interest in the depths of personal history and a weakening of the suffocation the more recent Troubles in Northern Ireland placed history writing under, we are much better placed to do emotion justice and be less judgemental. It is not the duty of the historian to ‘lecture the people of the past on how they should have done better’.³² The quest should be to understand and contextualise their positions, the lights that guided them and to humanise their dilemmas and the deadly consequences of their decisions, an approach that has been more apparent in some recent studies. David Fitzpatrick, the biographer of Harry Boland, killed in 1922 as an opponent of the Treaty, concluded Boland was ‘at once a dictator, an elitist, a populist and a democrat … whether we consider that he was driven by a laudable conviction in the inalienable rights of nations or a grotesque delusion, the sincerity of his struggle cannot be impugned.’³³

Calton Younger did lecture the civil war’s participants to an extent in his 1968 book Ireland’s Civil War, in which he noted just how difficult it was to be specific about the causes of the war but was nonetheless clear that ‘the Irish civil war ought to have been fought with words on the floor of the Dáil [the Irish Parliament] and it could have been’.³⁴ Perhaps it could have been in a fantasy post-Treaty Ireland, where the Dáil was the prime national and final arbiter, but that regard did not exist in 1922. Younger’s account was regarded as favouring the pro-Treaty side. Eoin Neeson, too, in 1966, though clearly sympathetic to the anti-Treatyites, was of the view that nothing was achieved by the civil war that could not have been achieved by negotiation, though his book was at its strongest in describing the military engagements.³⁵

Michael Hopkinson observed in his book Green Against Green in 1988 that ‘it is hardly surprising that a bitter incestuous conflict in a small country, which saw neither compromise nor reconciliation at its end, has been extremely difficult for Irish historians to write about in a detached manner’.³⁶ Hopkinson also wrote of the difficulty of describing ‘chaos. The war had an ill-defined beginning and end; the fighting was erratic, extremely confusing and highly regionalised.’³⁷ I have left the intense minutiae of military combat to others better equipped, but chaos had many forms in Ireland in 1922–3, and for far too many the civil war’s afterlife was also cruelly disordered, a fracturing discussed in detail in the second half of this book. The conflict also spawned an acerbic civil war politics, ‘that infused every part of it with such intensity that some parts of the country are uncomfortable with the memory of it still. Without taking full account of its bitterness it is questionable whether one can begin to understand the Irish civil war at all.’³⁸

It is difficult to dispute the assertion of Charles Townshend that republicans during the civil war had a view of public opinion that ‘was and remained generally dismissive’. While some gloried in it, the anti-Treaty republicans were faced with stark impediments; not just public opinion, but also the fact that ‘there was no plan of campaign’.³⁹ But those who opposed them were well capable too of contemptuous disregard for the depth and sincerity of anti-Treaty sentiment.

Some young minds swayed during the conflict. Another Cork writer, Frank O’Connor, initially trenchant, became disgusted by the end of it and came to decry those who insisted ‘the Irish Republic was still in existence and would remain so, despite what its citizens might think’.⁴⁰ Others, like the playwright Lady Gregory, found themselves with a foot in both camps; she told a priest after the end of the civil war: ‘one should not be more angry with government or Republicans than with different sections of one’s own mind, tilting to good or bad on one or the other side’.⁴¹ Patriotism was both an expensive currency and a contested, confused concept in Ireland in 1922, and no side had a monopoly of it.

Female republicans generated some of the most heated rhetoric and ferocious responses during the conflict. Attitudes to republican women who endured great harshness dripped with contempt as the ‘Furies’ provoked a barely concealed misogyny.⁴² These women were ‘the women in men’s clothing’, as J. J. Walsh, a pro-Treaty minister, characterised them.⁴³ Warming to the culture of disparagement, the minister for home affairs (later justice), Kevin O’Higgins, referred to ‘hysterical young women who ought to be playing five fingered exercises or helping their mothers with the brasses’.⁴⁴ While the Catholic Bishops decried ‘decent’ Irish boys who had ‘degenerated’ by taking up arms against the new state, the women who rejected that state were frequently dehumanised.

Yet others were neutral or indifferent, and some sympathies were kept secret or quiet amidst the cacophony of polarising rhetoric. Consider, for example, veterans of the 1916 Rising; of 572 people identified as active with the General Post Office garrison, where the rebels had their headquarters, the largest single portion, 41 per cent, were neutral during the civil war.⁴⁵ Liam de Róiste recorded in his diary in November 1922 that ‘for the one person who is actively engaged in politics there are a hundred more who are only passively interested’.⁴⁶ There were numerous civil society organisations active in peace efforts and a Neutral IRA association established in December 1922, but there was also much evidence of tortured minds. Speaking in the Dáil in December 1921, P. J. Moloney, a Tipperary Sinn Féin TD and pharmacist who had come through a twenty-three-day hunger strike, the death of one of his IRA sons and the destruction of his home and business during the War of Independence, said simply ‘we have been manoeuvred into a position where we have to choose between two hells’.⁴⁷

Moloney opposed the Treaty and was to endure more hell – his two surviving sons continued to fight with the IRA and one of them was badly wounded – but then he opted out of politics in 1923, a move that ‘most likely reflected not profound disillusionment, but the need to concentrate on rebuilding his life and business’.⁴⁸ Many, of course, had no commercial life to return to, yet while there were class dimensions to the polarisations of this period, and land hunger was a constant, there was no definite pattern relating support for the Treaty to class. Analysis of the TDs elected to the Dáil in 1918 or 1921 ‘disclose no significant distinguishing economic, social or familial factor that might explain the Treaty stance of individual TDs’.⁴⁹ There was still much tuppence halfpenny looking down on tuppence, however, and while some rebels liked to boast of their ‘practical socialism … poverty was only a political virtue when it was respectable’, and the ‘most glaring omission from the Dáil’s membership was unskilled workers’. There were few references to class issues in the Treaty debate and the TDs were ‘broadly representative of the upwardly mobile Catholic middle class but not of the mass of the population’.⁵⁰

Many responses to post civil-war Ireland were ‘both scathing and despairing’. As he faced death in the 1950s, Ernie O’Malley recorded that the British were no longer his enemies: ‘each man finds his enemy within himself ’.⁵¹ This underlines that freedom had different meanings. The new state did not enshrine many of the ideals or objectives of the revolution but what did that mean in practice for the civil war generation and the afterlives of the rank-and-file soldiers who fought? We have more information than ever before on what they did and endured during the civil war and for those who survived it, how they fared in its aftermath, particularly because of the opening of the Military Service Pensions archive and the extensively documented post-war battles for status, recognition and material survival. There is a raw and exceptional intimacy on display in many of these files relating to claims for pensions, and historians are now in a position to investigate one of the underwritten themes of the civil war: personal trauma, both internalised and externalised, and its long, long reach.

The archive is also a reminder of luck and station in life: ‘some of us were willing to throw up our employment when the call for recruits to the National Army came; they are now to be allowed to walk about without a penny to earn. Others were lucky to get back to their previous employment.’⁵² The assertion of Fianna Fáil TD Oscar Traynor in 1935 that ‘the man with the right [pension] claim will justify it and the other people will be unable to justify it’ was far too neat and dismissive.⁵³ Michael D. Higgins, elected president of Ireland in 2011 and again in 2018, was far from alone in articulating a sense of betrayal. His father John applied unsuccessfully for a pension in 1934 and had to wait until a 1949 Act for an appeal process before being awarded a pension in 1956. Interned for almost all of 1923, he had been employed as a grocer’s assistant earning £180 a year but on his release his employer refused to accept him back ‘with the result that I was idle until 1 August 1924 when I got a position as junior assistant … at a salary of £50 per year indoor. At the time very few people would employ an ex-internee.’⁵⁴ The indignity was compounded by the pension delay, just part of a disillusionment that led to his son angrily decrying in poetry

all that had in recent years

Befallen you.

All week I waited to visit you

But when I called, you had been moved

To where those dying too slowly

Were sent,

A poorhouse, no longer known by that name …

Long before that, you had slept,

In ditches and dug-outs,

Prayed in terror at ambushes

With others who later debated

Whether De Valera was lucky or brilliant …

Your eyes when you looked at me

Were a thousand miles away.

Now totally broken,

Unlike those times even

Of rejection, when you went at sixty

For jobs you never got …

And all these things have been scraped

In my heart,

And I can never hope to forget

What was, after all,

A betrayal.⁵⁵

As W. B. Yeats had recognised in 1923 ‘the country will not always be an uncomfortable place for a country gentleman to live in’.⁵⁶ But for those without a stake since they had ‘taken the loser’s side’, a bleakness expanded and calcified.

Emigration was an inevitable consequence. Correspondence in 1935 in relation to a civil war Cork IRA brigade, for example, reveals that of thirty-five Volunteers who had been involved in an attack in Skibbereen in July 1922, eight were in the USA.⁵⁷ The widow of Patrick Doyle, a National Army soldier who fell from a lorry and developed fatal pneumonia in August 1923, told the military pensions administrators in 1928 that she was leaving the country for New York: ‘I am leaving my child in charge of my mother.’⁵⁸

Silence was also a legacy, and it was not necessarily ignoble. Despite his unashamedly tribal approach to civil war politics Seán Lemass, a young anti-Treaty IRA member in 1922 who eventually became Taoiseach in 1959, was determinedly mute about what had happened, including the sordid killing and mutilation of his brother Noel after the end of the civil war. Wary about commemorative flag waving, when asked about the civil war by journalist Michael Mills in 1969, he uncharacteristically welled up: ‘Terrible things were done by both sides,’ he finally said; ‘I’d prefer not to talk about it.’⁵⁹ He was certainly correct in his assertion about joint responsibilities and as for the preference for silence, that was shared by many of his generation. But it is a conversation that should be opened up with the centenary of the civil war. It is also possible now to look at another controversial civil war legacy, the threatened mutiny in the army in 1924, as in 2019 the Department of Defence opened the files relating to the resultant inquiry that had been locked up for ninety-five years.

In 1924 Kevin O’Higgins, the Free State’s minister for justice, addressing an audience at Oxford University, asked them to ‘remember what a weird composite of idealism, neurosis, megalomania and criminality is apt to be thrown to the surface in even the best regulated revolution’.⁶⁰ His words underlined how skewed or selective versions of the civil war were being shaped from the outset, as were caricatures. O’Higgins was correct about the cocktail of vanity and brutality, but there were many other ingredients in the ‘weird composite’ – if it was weird at all – including sincerity, devoutness, despair, crushing sadness and poverty, elements elided in O’Higgins’s determination to dehumanise his opponents by referring to their supposed ‘savage, primitive passion’. William O’Brien, the austere labour leader and trade unionist, a TD in 1922–3 who accepted the Treaty, was also moved to melodramatic pronouncement in the aftermath of the civil war: ‘the lack of magnanimity on the winning side and the criminal desperation of the losers constitutes a page of history which no unbiased Irishman can read without aching eyes and cheeks of shame’.⁶¹ Such a regretful tone was understandable and deeply felt, but what mattered to the participants, and what should matter