CCBS Annual Talk at the John Hewitt Summer School – 27 July 2016
“How have we remembered 1916?”
Catriona Crowe, Head of Special Projects at the National Archives of Ireland
(Numbers in bold, highlighted text refer to Catriona Crowe’s slides, [to be on website soon].)
The Decade of Centenaries lasts from 2012 to 2023, from the anniversary of the third Home Rule Bill
and the Ulster Covenant to the end of the Civil War. We are now four years into it, and arguably just
past the high point for a lot of people – the 1916 Rising. It seems like a good time to take stock of
where we are and how it all has gone so far.
In 2012 I said,
“The decade of commemorations upon which we have embarked is capable of all kinds
of uses, abuses, interpretations, misinterpretations, illuminations, mischiefs, sublime
new understandings and ancient bad tempers.”
And all of these have been in play over the last four years, but on balance we have had more
sublime new understandings than ancient bad tempers. Let’s remind ourselves broadly what
happened during these years:
On our small island on the edge of a powerful continent, and next door to a large imperial power, we
embarked in 1912 on a decade of diverse thought processes, activities and interactions, often
diametrically opposed to one another, which resulted in outcomes as varied as the establishment of
a modern highly defensive Unionism in the northern part of the country, the birth of a modern trade
union movement, mass participation in the most murderous war yet seen in the world, the
achievement of the franchise for some women, the creation of a founding myth for the southern
state, involving heroism, hopelessness, high ideals and self-sacrifice, the elimination of the political
party which had enjoyed overwhelming nationalist support for three decades, the creation of a new
nationalist party whose roots spread in many different directions, the partition of the island into two
separate states, a vicious civil war, and most importantly, the deaths of around 40,000 people, and
injuries, often seriously disabling, to many more.
So, a lot of stuff to deal with. The delivery of public history, in a way that would engage, interest and
enlighten people, was to be crucial to how we dealt with it. Complicating the narrative seemed to be
both an historical imperative and the right thing to do in other terms too. We were lucky to have a
number of books newly available to us in advance of 2016, which used some of the new sources
which have transformed the history of the period. Charles Townshend, an eminent historian of
political violence in Ireland, published Easter 1916; the Irish Rebellion, 2 in 2005, making the first
extensive use of the Bureau of Military History statements released two years before. That book has
been complemented by Fearghal McGarry’s The Rising: Ireland, Easter 1916, 3 published in 2010,
which made even more extensive use of the witness statements. In 2013, Senia Paseta published
Irish Nationalist Women, 4 a new study of female involvement in the different kinds of nationalism
prevalent at the time.
2015 brought two important books, Roy Foster’s Vivid Faces, The Revolutionary Generation in
Ireland, 1890-1923, 5 and Diarmaid Ferriter’s A Nation and not a Rabble: The Irish Revolution 191323, 6 both of which gave us new perspectives: in Foster’s case, the fascinating intergenerational
conflicts, intense relationships and feverish cultural activity in which the revolutionary generation
was involved; in Ferriter’s case, a detailed exploration of the historiography of the period – how it
was seen at different times, by whom, and based on what evidence. A very important newcomer to
the scene was Joe Duffy’s Children of the Rising, 7 also published last year, and a runaway bestseller.
And this year we got Lucy McDiarmid’s At Home in the Revolution, 8 a beautifully researched and
written book on some of the women who were involved in or who witnessed the Easter Rising.
These books were possible because new primary sources have opened up the field of investigative
and interpretative operations for this most extraordinary decade. Many records have been released
for the first time over the last 20 years, and a good proportion of them have been placed free-toaccess online. The 1911 Census gives us a baseline demographic snapshot of what the country was
like at the beginning of the decade. How nice it would be to be able to scrutinise the 1926 Census to
see how it all worked out. Alas, not in prospect at present.
There is a lot of material already in the public domain which has added greatly to our understanding
of the separatist struggle, the First World War, the development of the labour movement, the
campaign for female suffrage, the Ulster Unionist campaign against Home Rule and independence,
cultural life at the time, and social conditions (it can be easy to forget that the Spanish flu epidemic
of 1918 killed 21,000 people, and that an average of 8,000 people per year died of TB during the
decade). But a lot more remains to be explored.
In 2003, the records of the Bureau of Military History were released to the public after a long
struggle to make them accessible. The Bureau was established in the late 1940s with the purpose of
collecting statements and documents from participants in the events of Ireland’s revolutionary
period, 1913-1921. Participants included people like Ernest Blythe, Kathleen Lynn, Louise Gavan
Duffy, Sean McEntee, Dan Breen, Robert Brennan, and the widows, sons and daughters of many of
the key players who died during the period. Because the statements are in their own words, they are
vibrant and immediate in a way that official documents cannot be. There are 1770 statements in all,
running to 35,000 typed pages. There are also 300 collections of contemporary documents, 600
photographs, and 12 sound recordings, including one of Maud Gonne sounding impossibly
aristocratic. Incidentally, the prime mover of this valuable project, Eamonn De Valera, never made a
statement himself to the Bureau, an omission which has led to all kinds of speculation as to the
reasons for his restraint.
The collection has transformed the study of the period. Charles Townshend, author of Easter 1916;
The Irish Rebellion, writes about the statements in his preface to the book: “The biggest change in
recent years has been the final release of the participants’ accounts assembled by the Bureau of
Military History…suddenly, instead of a few dozen accounts, we have many hundreds.”
Because the statements dealt with peoples’ recollections of their actions quite a while after they
happened, they are relaxed and give a flavour of the writers’ personalities, so we get, for example,
Louise Gavan Duffy’s account of confronting Patrick Pearse in the GPO in 1916: 9, 10
“I said to him that I wanted to be in the field but that I felt that the Rebellion was a
frightful mistake, that it could not possibly succeed and it was, therefore, wrong. I
forget whether he said anything to that or whether he simply let it go. He certainly did
not start to justify himself. I told him that I would rather not do any active work; I
suppose what I meant was that I would not like to be sent with dispatches or anything
like that, because I felt that I would not be justified. He asked me would I like to go to
the kitchen. I could not object to that, and I went up to the kitchen at the top of the
back of the building.”
Or Vinnie Byrne, one of the key members of Collins’s Squad, describing in chilling detail his many
activities, using phrases like “we plugged him” or “we let him have it”, 75 pages of violence or
thwarted violence, under-laid with the classic soldier’s unquestioning belief in the rectitude of his
orders. Byrne didn’t waste time with moral questions, and forty years later he is as cheerful and
unrepentant about the deaths he caused as he says he was when doing what he was ordered to do.
Here he is describing the shooting of two British Intelligence officers on Bloody Sunday, 1920. 11
“As we were entering the back of the hall, I heard the hell of a row going on somewhere
outside – very heavy revolver fire. My next surprise was hearing a ring on the door. The
man covering the door looked at me, but did not speak a word. I said to him: ‘Open the
door’, and in walked a British Tommy, a dispatch rider. Ordering him to put up his
hands, which he did, I left him under guard in the hall. I marched my officer down to the
back room where the other officer was. He was standing up in the bed, facing the wall. I
ordered mine to do likewise. When the two of them were together, I said to myself ‘The
Lord have mercy on your souls!’. I then opened fire with my Peter. They both fell dead.”
Here is the front cover and one of the pages of Michael Hayes' statement, 12, 13 recounting Thomas
McDonagh's final decision to surrender. McDonagh was the officer in command of the garrison at
Jacob's biscuit factory, the site of the present National Archives. Hayes later became Professor of
Irish at UCD.
“On Sunday morning MacDonagh left in a British Military car to meet General Lee. He
returned subsequently and at a meeting of officers announced that he had seen Pearse
and intended to surrender. He was quite calm and spoke in simple serious language. I
remember that he seemed to be quite a different man from usual and he excited in me,
at any rate, great admiration. It was put to him by I think, Seamus O'hAodha that he
was himself going to his death. He said quite calmly that that might be so but he had to
think of others. Seamus made a passionate speech against surrender but was overruled.
I accompanied the Commandant with John MacDonagh to the Peter Street Gate, where
a British Army car was awaiting him. He told us that those who had no uniforms had
permission to get away if they could. I left immediately after him with Edward Byrne
and Michael Cavanagh (now, I think, in the Board of Works), walked up Bride Street,
Heytesbury Street to Lower Clanbrassil Street, where I lived. I was not interrogated or
arrested subsequently.”
Four years ago, the Bureau statements, photographs, sound recordings and sample contemporary
documents were made available online free to access, at www.bureauofmilitaryhistory.ie 14 and the
statements can be searched by person, place, subject, or browsed.
A more reliable and much larger archive for the period is currently being released to the public. The
single biggest archival project related to the nationalist side of the decade of centenaries is the
Military Service Pensions Project. 15 The collection comprises ca. 285,000 files dealing with
applications for pensions from survivors and dependants of those killed during the period 19161923, under various Army Pensions and Military Service Pensions Acts, 1924-1949. They provide
hitherto unavailable and verifiable information about the conduct of the 1916 Rising, the War of
Independence and the civil war. These applications are much closer in time to the events they
describe than the Bureau records, and required a very high level of verification, in the form of
references from three superior officers. Many people who should have got pensions didn’t, because
of this high standard of proof.
The Boards of Assessors who adjudicated as to who should be granted pensions gathered together
supporting information as to activities during the period, resulting in Brigade Activity Reports on
military actions and rolls of IRA membership at different times during the War of Independence. As
well as the pension files, there are files relating to the 50,000 people who got medals. Some of these
medals are now to be found fetching high prices at Adams’s Auction Rooms.
The first release of the collection, which will be released in phases up to 2023, consists of ca. 2500
files, accompanied by contextual administrative material, brigade activities reports and membership
rolls, and a detailed archival catalogue. It was launched in 2014; there have been three further
launches since, and they have already led to new perspectives on issues of the time.
The latest launch took place on 26 April this year, that of almost 48,000 applications for service
medals for action in 1916 or the War of Independence. Here is the 1916 medal 16 and here is an
example of a successful application for such a medal, from Eamonn Dore of Limerick, having had his
1916 service verified. 17 Here is the home page for the medals collection. 18 There is an online
catalogue to these files, but people will have to come into the archives to see them.
And now there is somewhere to see them in comfort. The brand new Military Archives building at
Cathal Brugha Barracks was launched by President Michael D. Higgins on 26 April. 19 It is a beautiful
and functional building, designed by one of our most eminent architectural practices, McCullough
Mulvin. It contains 21.6 kilometres of shelving, currently holding 35,000 boxes of archives, with
plenty of room for more to come. It has a lovely reading room with over three times the amount of
space for readers compared to the old building. The Archives has over 1000 private collections, and
all of the surviving departmental records and those of our armed forces, plus the most significant
collections from the revolutionary period.
With regard to the Pensions files, while other material may come to light relating to the nationalist
participants during the decade, none is likely to be of the scope and importance of the Military
Service Pensions files, and it is imperative that the project to process them continues to its
conclusion.
William O’Brien, general secretary of the ITGWU, writing to the Minister for Defence, Richard
Mulcahy in 1924, about the delay in dealing with Lily Connolly’s application for a pension. 20
Mulcahy’s irate instruction to his dept. to get on with it. 21 Margaret Skinnider's account of being
wounded as a member of the Citizen Army in 1916. 22 Skinnider was a Scottish-born member of
Cumann na mBan who was active in the College of Surgeons garrison in 1916 under Michael Mallin.
23 She was shot while trying to set some houses in Harcourt St. on fire to cut off the Army’s
advance. Her autobiography, written in 1917, a bit early, is fetchingly titled Doing My Bit For Ireland.
She died in 1971. Prisoners leaving Enniscorthy Co. Wexford in 1916 24 Front page of Guide 25
All of the records relating to 1916 participants, survivors and dependants, and also including Brigade
Activity Reports, Nominal Rolls, and administrative material dealing with how the Pensions Boards
operated, are now online, free-to-access. Further releases will proceed until the project is
completed.
Many of our cultural institutions and universities have chosen to mark the centenary of 1916 by
placing archival resources online. The National Library has given us the Signatories 26 and Easter
Rising sites, 27 as well as a fuller Signatories exhibition in their main building. The National Museum
has created a significant comprehensive exhibition at Collins Barracks, 28 and has digitised its
extensive photographic collections for the period. Maynooth University hosts the Letters of 1916
Project, 29 which digitises and transcribes letters on every subject from that year. Trinity College has
created a taster site for many of its treasures from the period, Changed Utterly.30 UCD’s History Hub
31 has a plethora of podcasts and other resources relating to the decade.
RTE has pushed the boat out both in terms of its day-to-day coverage, its online offerings and its
phenomenally successful Easter Monday events last year and this year, which attracted hundreds of
thousands of people into the city for a dizzying variety of events, talks, performances, installations
and fun of various kinds. There were hundreds of Countesses in uniform on the day; obviously she is
a glamourous figure to women of our generation, although not quite so universally admired during
her lifetime. Markievicz selfie 32. Yetti Redmond, producer of the History Show, deserves huge credit
for this achievement. RTE also has a suite of sites which display their own archival material, much of
it witness accounts from the mid-twentieth century. 33
Also to be found on the RTE website is Century Ireland, 34 a collaborative project between Boston
College and RTE, a fortnightly online newspaper which follows events exactly 100 years ago, and will
be one of the great legacy projects of this decade. The Irish Times website, Century 35, brings
together modern commentary and archival material, including the excellent supplements they have
produced since 2012.
The State’s response got off to a rocky start with an inappropriate video which somehow managed
not to mention the Rising. This was quickly repaired, and an enormous and ambitious programme of
events announced, 36 from a capital programme which includes the refurbishment of Kilmainham
Courthouse and the new Military Archives building, to the schools flag and Proclamation initiative, to
funding for myriad projects all over the country. The centre of the ceremonial events was the
military parade on Easter Sunday, 37 which was accomplished with all the dignity of which the real
Irish army, Oglaigh na hEireann, is possessed. The tone was just right, solemn but not sentimental,
elegiac rather than triumphalist, and it is a great pity that representatives of the Ulster Unionist
tradition chose not to attend.
The cultural programme included a stellar performance, on Easter Sunday afternoon in very bad
weather, of Paul Muldoon’s marvellous text, 100 Years a Nation, 38 with an orchestra and choirs of
thousands playing and singing Sean Davey’s music behind him. It was a moment when the authority
of the poet took over for half an hour, to remind us that there are things to be proud of and things
to be ashamed of in our history, and in that we are no different to any other country. 39, 40
The National Concert Hall ran an astonishing series of events. Imagining Home, 41 over seven nights,
featuring traditional, classical and popular music, and performances and reflections from some of
our own great writers, but also writers from countries which have experienced revolution, like
Ahdab Souif from Egypt, and Adam Zagajewski from Poland. Illuminating in every sense.
There were many other events, both state-sponsored and privately arranged, which by and large
succeeded in providing people with an accurate, engaging narrative of events in 1916. And not much
insistence on the old exclusivist, solely heroic narrative which left everyone else out of the picture
except the rebels and their supporters. We were well prepared for other perspectives by the Trade
Union movement’s excellent programme for the centenary of the 1913 Lockout, 42 and the various
state and other events devoted to the outbreak of World War One in 1914.Trinity Roadshow 43
One event which caused some controversy was the recent opening of the Remembrance Wall at
Glasnevin Cemetery. 44 The fact that all casualties of the Rising, almost 500 people, the majority of
them civilians, are listed in alphabetical order by day 45 incensed some people who felt the only
names included should have been those of the rebels. Liveline lit up, and one heard a lot of pious
outrage at the fact that Crown forces and DMP men were included in the list.
It doesn’t take that much of an effort to step out of our own patriotic preoccupations to look at the
grief felt by the families of very young Sherwood Foresters shot on Mount St. Bridge, 46 many of
whom thought they were going to France, or Constable James O’Brien, 47 the unarmed DMP man
from Limerick shot dead outside City Hall, or Sean Francis Foster, aged 2, shot in his pram in North
King St. 48 Shouts of “Traitor” from outside the gates of Glasnevin on the morning the wall was
unveiled sounded mean-spirited and way out of date. And those who were thus shouting obviously
never realised that the National Museum did the same thing many years ago, when it opened its
Soldiers and Chiefs exhibition – all the names of casualties are listed in alphabetical order. 49
One of the most interesting and effective ways to deliver good public history is site-specific theatre. I
have had the privilege of working with ANU Productions for the last few years, as they brilliantly
interpreted events like the 1913 Lockout and the disastrous Irish campaign in Gallipoli in 1915.
Laundry, produced in 2011, was a major site-specific production following the real stories of some of
the women who lived in the Magdalene laundry in Sean MacDermott St., only closed in the midnineties. It was an extraordinary experience for audiences, who were invited to participate in various
elements of the production, including helping a woman out of a lye bath, 50 dancing with another in
a confession box, and helping a third to escape.
In 2013, ANU produced The Tenement Experience, in no. 14 Henrietta St, which will become Dublin’s
Tenement Museum as another legacy of the state’s capital programme for this year. 51 This
production recreated the conditions which prevailed for the poor of Dublin at the time of the
Lockout, and animated a number of stories which brought the conflict to life, both in terms of its
basic issues and of the toll a prolonged lockout has on those involved and their families, particularly
women and children. Again, audiences were invited into the middle of the dilemmas facing the
characters; one of the actresses was contemplating selling the bed in which her children slept, as it
was her last remaining resource. 52 On a number of occasions, a member of the audience
intervened to offer to pay her for it and allow her to keep it. The production played for six weeks, all
of them booked out almost from the beginning.
Last year, in collaboration with the National Museum and the National Archives, ANU produced
PALS: The Irish at Gallipoli, a deeply researched study of four members of the so-called Pals company
53 of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, all rugby players who joined up in a body, and found themselves in a
horrific environment in Turkey, where half of their company was killed on their first day there. 54
The play was staged in the very dormitory in Collins Barracks, then the Royal Barracks, where these
young men would have lived during their training in early 1915. It packed out for its duration, and
won two Irish theatre awards, lighting design, and the all-important audience choice award, thus
copper-fastening its status as brilliant drama but also brilliant public history.
This year, a new work, Sunder, 55 opened in Moore St., dealing with the last two days of the Easter
Rising, when the rebels had to leave the GPO and take refuge in Moore St. This was where the final
surrender was written. The play reaches the past through the present, dealing with Moore St.’s
current multicultural character as well as its legacy as a street market.
Anu’s most recent outing for this year has been their exploration of the IRA bombing of Manchester
in 1996, produced in Manchester itself at the invitation of that city’s fabulous arts centre, Home.
This was a really emotional moment for those who remembered the bomb, which injured 217
people, many of them very seriously, and devastated the centre of the city. 56 Anu interviewed
many of the survivors, and created a rich tapestry of remembrance of an extraordinary day,
including one of the bombers, who watched it all on TV in Dublin, and a woman going to her
wedding. 57
The academic world has taken the decade very seriously, with all of our major universities hosting
major conferences dealing with different aspects of events. Universities Ireland, the umbrella body
for all universities on the island of Ireland, has been to the fore in running successful public history
conferences every year since 2012, and continues to do so. Poster for first conference. 58
It would be wrong to finish without mentioning Commemoration kitsch, of which there is a lot,
ranging from the cake depicting the burning of the GPO, 59 the knitted GPO made by the skilful
ladies of Dunmanway in Co. Cork, 60 and best of all, the chocolate Proclamation, 61 which allows
you to munch your way through Irishmen and Irishwomen, the dead generations and our gallant
allies in Europe.
I want to breathe a sigh of relief that things have gone reasonably, sometimes spectacularly well so
far, particularly the ceremonial and cultural offerings, and hoping that the difficult remainder of the
decade of centenaries will go as smoothly, though I think we will have serious trouble with the civil
war, 62 still in some parts of the country a toxic presence. If we don’t interrogate it now, we never
will. The Four Courts ablaze 63.
I am hoping that we do not go through these years with a soft-centred aspiration to please everyone
– for example, the formation of the Ulster Volunteers in 1912 was a totally undemocratic, deeply
threatening event, and in many ways, so was the 1916 Rising. Every commemorative cycle reflects
contemporary political needs and perceptions, and there is certainly a temptation for our current
politicians to turn these years into an arm of the Northern peace process. This would not make for
good history. I am hoping that we can relate our violent origins as a state to the endemic violence in
our society, and interrogate both. And I am hoping that in spite of the hubris of certain
representatives of both the loyalist the nationalist communities in the North, that they too will take
part in some honest self-examination and really, truly repudiate violence as a means to any end.
We don’t have to elevate Home Rule above independence to recognise that a struggle for that
independence which started with the violent seizure of our capital city and ended with a bitter and
divisive Civil War might not have been the best way to proceed. Nor do we have to forget the victims
of thirty years of unmandated violence in the North in order to “move on”, or to forget that John
Hume and Seamus Mallon were the true self-sacrificers in the cause of peace.
Paul Muldoon has two lovely lines which are germane to this discussion:
“For history’s a twisted root,
And art its small translucent fruit.”
Part of the project for historians of the revolutionary period has, rightly, been to demythologise
these events, a task for which some of them have got into a lot of trouble over the last 40 years. I am
squarely with my good friend, Roy Foster, when he says that all good historians must be revisionists,
in the sense that they must modify their judgments in the light of new evidence. Perhaps the real
‘translucent fruit’ to aim at is a new understanding, well supported by good archival evidence, with
no concessions to sacred cows, of how we got to the point of achieving independence in 1922, and
how that objective shaped the lives of many people during this tumultuous decade, some of them
indifferent to it, some opposed to it, some wishing it to take a very different form to that which it
eventually did, and some willing to kill and die to make it happen.
I would like to finish with a paragraph from a recently published short story by Colm Toibin. Its title is
The Journey to Galway. Lady Augusta Gregory 64 has just received a telegram announcing the death
of her only child, Robert, in World War 1, and is travelling to Galway to tell his wife and children.
“And he had died in a British uniform, a uniform that had seemed more and more the
uniform of another country. In joining the British army, he had been his father’s son; he
had followed his cousins. He had not followed her, nor had she asked him to. She
wondered now if he and those like him, the others who had died for this dream of
empire, this large and abstract conflict between nations, would belong to the past, if
they would not be shadows fading into further and deeper shadows. Their class would
not hold sway in an Ireland of the future, she was sure of that. She began to imagine
what it would be like instead if she were going on a train to Dublin to be with him on
the night before his execution, if he had taken part in the Rebellion in Dublin. She
thought of how proud she would be on the train, how there would be some people
travelling with her who would feel exalted by her presence. But it would end in the
same way. It would end in death, it would end in three fatherless children, it would end
in a future in which Robert would only be a name and a memory. He would never come
into a room again. It hardly mattered what cause he had fought for, or what his impulse
to join had been. It was simple; he had been killed.”