Sir,—In reply to Stephen Brown’s letter (HI 29.5, Sept./Oct. 2021), there has indeed been a ‘trend to dismiss the Civil War and to downplay it’. However, this is a trend in which Mr Brown himself appears also somewhat complicit. In restricting his criticism to the treatment of the Civil War within the ‘decade of centenaries’ commemorations he is already overlooking a long-standing and consistent tradition within social and academic discourse of downplaying the conflict. Liam Deasy, an IRA commander in Cork during the conflict, claimed that ‘few of the Republican leaders had any mind for the killing of former comrades and … did not encourage … offensive tactics of any serious … value’. In 1968 Calton Younger’s Ireland’s Civil War argued that ‘there was among many Republicans a lack … of heart in the fight. They … did not want to take life … and neither did most of the Provisional Government troops.’ Fast forward to 1996 and Tom Garvin (1922: The birth of Irish democracy) could sum up the conflict as ‘half-hearted … rather like a large riot’, while as recently as 2014 Gemma Clarke (Everyday violence in the Irish Civil War) called it a ‘limited war … certainly not … as bloody as was once proclaimed’. This tendency to ‘dismiss’ the Civil War existed long before the ‘decade of centenaries’ and has permeated and influenced debate on the conflict throughout its history.
Mr Brown then goes on to defend the categorisation of the conflict against detractors using the Uppsala conflict definition, which requires at least 25 battle deaths per calendar year, a somewhat moderate figure for almost any intra-state conflict. In doing so he again underplays the conflict, neglecting to analyse it upon the more exacting terms of the Correlates of War Project, which defines civil war as conflict ‘involv[ing] the government of the state against a non-state entity [with] … sustained combat … involving organized armed forces, resulting in a minimum of 1,000 battle related combatant fatalities within a twelve-month period’. While there is a lack of absolute clarity about the numbers killed, recent research by Eunan O’Halpin and Michael Laffan, amongst others, suggests that the ‘butcher’s list’ will comfortably exceed the required threshold.
However, by far the most conspicuous way in which Mr Brown’s letter is also complicit in downplaying the Civil War is his argument that ‘[t]he war was not just about killing’. While correctly drawing attention to such important consequential effects of the conflict as enduring partition with the North, the loss of a whole cohort of leadership figures on both sides and the exclusion of female political influence post-conflict, he all too casually dismisses that most essential essence of any armed conflict—the actual violence. As Joanna Bourke (An intimate history of killing: face to face killing in twentieth-century warfare) has argued, for ‘politicians … and … historians war may be about the conquest of territory or the struggle to recover a sense of national honour but for the man on active service [it] is concerned with the … killing of other people’. While the Civil War, or indeed any war, may not be ‘just about killing’, neither should this intrinsic aspect be downplayed and relegated to the periphery.
Rather it needs to be front and centre, a point somewhat grasped by Diarmuid Ferriter in a recent article in the Irish Times (30 April 2021) in which, describing the barbarity of the land-mine atrocities in Kerry in March 1923, he states that ‘[w]e know these kinds of details now … and we need to confront and absorb many more of them … While there is trepidation about the coming centenaries … there is also an opportunity to confront the reality of our civil war by focussing on those who took its brunt or lived through its traumatic aftermath.’ But even in this Ferriter, too, is guilty of underplaying the Civil War, relying, as he does, on only the most high-profile and well known of all the Civil War controversies, allowing those like Joe Coy (HI 29.4, July/August 2021, Letters) to claim that these incidents are remembered only ‘because they were exceptional’. They weren’t. Shocking as the land-mine killings that Ferriter describes undoubtedly were, are they any less shocking than the revelation that extra-judicial killings were the National Army’s primary means of waging war in Kerry, with the majority of IRA deaths in the county during the conflict coming in this manner? Or any less shocking than knowing that from the very beginning of the conflict in Kerry the IRA willingly employed controversial methods, killing Red Cross personnel, unarmed and off-duty soldiers, often using land-mines and exploding bullets, and not from some sense of desperation or accumulated grievance but from the very outset, when they were in the ascendancy and imagined a positive military outlook in Kerry?
What of stories like the IRA’s Daniel Robert McCarthy, taken prisoner by the National Army near Dingle in 1923 and given an ‘awful death’ over three days, beaten, stoned by crowds of National Army soldiers and then dragged behind a lorry before finally being shot? Or Private James Byrne, shot in the head with exploding bullets at point-blank range by the IRA, so brutally disfigured that the newspapers reported him as ‘beyond recognition (his face … swollen twice its ordinary size and … quite black)’? Incidents such as these are numerous and no less illustrative of the barbarity of the Civil War. They speak to the character and substance of a conflict that should no longer be downplayed or dismissed but must be explored and analysed sympathetically, objectively and thoroughly. As Stathis Kalyvas (‘Does warfare matter? Severity, duration, and outcomes of civil wars’ in the Journal of Conflict Resolution) correctly argues, ‘how civil wars are fought ought to be as consequential as to why they are fought’, and a thoroughgoing analysis of the violence that constituted the Irish Civil War is surely a difficult but long overdue and necessary first step.—Yours etc.,
ORSON McMAHON
Leiden University