By John Dorney
Catherine Sexton, the 60-year-old widow of a stonemason, was penned into her home in Quarry Lane, Garryowen, during fighting between pro- and anti-Treaty forces in Limerick city in July 1922. During a lull in the fighting, she ventured outside for water and was hit in the arm by a stray bullet. Evacuated to St John’s Hospital, she developed blood poisoning and died of her wounds on 28 July.
She was one of 1,485 fatalities logged by the Irish Civil War Fatalities project at University College Cork (UCC), headed by Andy Bielenberg, which was formally launched on 29 April 2024. It is now searchable on the UCC website, where users can browse the list of those who died, as well as an excellent interactive map put together by Mike Murphy and the Geography Department of UCC. The project systematically counts the dead of the conflict between 28 June 1922 (bombardment of the Four Courts) and 24 May 1923 (IRA ‘dump arms’ order). It continues the work of the Dead of the Irish Revolution project by Eunan O’Halpin and Daithí Ó Corráin, which logged the 2,850 fatal victims of conflict in Ireland from 1916 up to December 1921. Counting those who died in between, particularly in Northern Ireland, we can now say with a fair degree of confidence that the total who died in the Irish revolutionary period of 1916–23 was just short of 5,000 people.
Research into the fatalities of the Civil War has thrown up some surprising findings. First of all, the emotional impact of the conflict on Irish nationalist society has led to repeated claims that it was much bloodier than the preceding War of Independence. In fact, it claimed significantly fewer victims. Moreover, unlike the Anglo-Irish conflict, well over three quarters of those killed in the Civil War were combatants. There was no widespread deliberate killing of civilians by either side.
Imprisonment, with over 12,000 anti-Treatyites interned, massively outnumbered deaths in the Civil War. Heavy weapons such as artillery and explosives were used, but relatively rarely. Over 90% of deaths were due to bullet wounds. These findings show us that the Irish Civil War was a low-intensity conflict, in terms of both the scale and scope of the fighting and the levels of violence used. The conflict was also heavily localised, with most deaths taking place in Dublin and south Munster, particularly counties Cork, Kerry, Limerick and Tipperary. There were secondary concentrations in the west around Sligo and Mayo and in the east in counties such as Louth, Kildare and Wexford, but many countries saw very few Civil War deaths.
Thirdly, while generally in a civil war the losing side is killed disproportionately, this was not the case in Ireland. Deaths among pro-Treaty forces, 648, were nearly a third higher than among anti-Treaty forces, 438. National Army or other Free State forces were far more likely to be killed in combat or, in surprisingly large numbers, in accidents than anti-Treaty combatants. However, nearly half of IRA or other republican fatalities were either executed or killed in custody, a fact that meant that the republican memory of the Civil War was one of ‘murder’ and ‘terror’.
Our research also calls into question several long-held tropes about the Civil War. Anti-Treaty republicans always maintained that they represented the ‘men of no property’ but, among fatalities at least, IRA members tended to be of a higher social class than National Army recruits. The former were typically skilled workers, lower middle-class or from a farming background, while the latter were far more likely to be unskilled workers or labourers. This tells us more about military recruitment patterns among the urban poor than it does about the class basis of the pro- and anti-Treaty political movements, but it does recall republican invective of the time, which portrayed their enemy’s army as being filled with slum-dwellers and British Army veterans, recruited for the pay.
British Army veterans were indeed far more common among pro-Treaty fatalities than in anti-Treaty casualties, but another surprising finding was that they were outnumbered by those pro-Treaty soldiers who had served in the IRA before the split. Nor do our data support the pro-Treaty charge that the anti-Treatyites or ‘Irregulars’ were ‘trucileers’ who had not fought against the British before the truce of 1921. In fact, well over three quarters of IRA deaths in the Civil War were of those who had also served in the War of Independence.
Raw numbers and statistics do not tell us the full story. They do not tell us of the climate of fear and disruption endured by people alive at the time, or of the deadening impact of factional bitterness that it left on subsequent generations, but they are an essential component of what can finally aspire to be a more detached and objective history of the period.
John Dorney was a researcher on the Irish Civil War Fatalities project at UCC, is the editor of ‘The Irish Story’ website and is the author of The Civil War in Dublin (Irish Academic Press, 2017).