Viewing the past, and reviewing history, through a different lens

The story of how we gained independence can be best understood when we listen to the voices of the people who were there

ANYONE WITH an interest in Irish history, the War of Independence period or, to be frank, adventure (and misadventure) is going to be spending a lot of time at the Bureau of Military History’s website, militaryarchives.ie, this year. Its publication of documents will include the trove of oral histories – plus photographs – from witnesses and participants in the Easter Rising and War of Independence.

This is the latest example of how online has transformed archiving and the public's access to it. Even in its current state – a selection of plans for barracks – offers riches to those of us with an unashamed fetish for primary sources; who thrill to such scans as "Proposed Reconstruction [of] Drainage – Details of Manholes [multiple views]" at Beggars Bush Barracks". If you want an early idea of what's in store from the publication of the Independence interviews, there is a small selection of scans available at nationalarchives.ie. They reveal the clipped language of the account. It helps them hold back somewhat on any rip-roaring narrative even when the reader hopes for more, but also reflects the several accounts from 1916 which describe it as a week of waitingfor something to happen.

They were also retold some three decades after events, so they can be forgiven for skipping over much of the detail, yet these testimonies are compelling and alive. Even in the standard, monotonous type of the documents, each has its own personality.

They have been available widely for some time, although few have read them in their raw state. Historian Annie Ryan was first to them for her book Witnesses. In 2006, for the 90th anniversary The Irish Timesproduced a supplement in which we detailed the week of the Rising, day by day, using eyewitness accounts – a book followed, which included extra first-hand accounts from Irish and British witnesses.

Their appeal came in part because these were not definitive histories, but impressions. They were subjective slivers of the Rising, so an antidote to the traditional histories most of us grew up with, which gave the retrospective overview, and concentrated on political and military events rather than the human experience. The Rising after all had taken place, almost entirely, in a city that is still recognisable, and to people within a generation’s reach.

The story may seem distant from an Irish schoolchild, until you tell the story as seen through the eyes of a teenage boy given a weapon for the first time and told to shoot at British teenagers so fresh from training that when they arrived in the Dún Laoghaire sunshine they presumed they were in France.

Away from the archives, take James Stephens's The Insurrection in Dublin, published in 1916 (and which we also drew from for our supplement). Dublin had hardly finished smouldering when it was published later in 1916, and no account better captures the confusion in Dublin during that week. Its unreliability is part of its appeal. Here was a writer in a city in flames, filled with fighters, lurkers, looters and rumours. He doesn't know what is happening any more than anyone else, and his ignorance is what makes it so insightful.

Much of this is echoed in the Bureau of Military History material. In fact, they are intriguing not just because of what they contain but because of what they are missing. Oral histories tend to come with caveats – especially those told after 30 years. Details change, stories are fashioned through retelling, a consistent narrative emerges. They can be led by an interviewer, or pander to an idea of what people want to hear – that’s most obvious, for instance, in the accounts from elderly veterans of the first World War, whose accounts concentrated so much on the horrors in part because that’s what modern generations were so fixated on.

In the eyewitness accounts from the Independence period, two things stood out very clearly to me. One was the attitude to Éamon de Valera. He was taoiseach during the period during which the interviews began, and a mythology had grown about his role in the Rising almost from the moment the final shot was fired.

He is now known to have been a poor commander of Boland’s Bakery, neurotic and restless. He was given praise for the fierce resistance put up by a handful of fighters against waves of British troops nearby at Mount Street Bridge, but which he had nothing to do with. Yet, in these accounts, such criticism hardly features.

Most obvious, though, is how they finish at 1921. The Civil War isn’t covered. It was too raw, too soon. The grand project is incomplete because of that. It is the glowering silence among an otherwise compelling cacophony of voices.

shegarty@irishtimes.com

Twitter: @shanehegarty