Diarmaid Ferriter: Irish Civil War has its own contentious monuments

In the midst of controversies over the legacy of the American civil war and the fate of monuments to that conflict, it was reported last week that the memorial to five members of the National Army blown up in the booby-trap explosion at Knocknagoshel in Kerry in March 1923 was attacked earlier this month and badly damaged. It was the second assault on it in three years.

The day after the Knocknagoshel outrage, nine IRA prisoners were chained to a landmine at Ballyseedy where all but one, Stephen Fuller, were blown up. And on it went, during the last throes of the Civil War, demonstrating that hearts had turned to stone. There is also a memorial in Ballyseedy and the memory of it lived on in politics; the sole word "Ballyseedy" was still being flung across the Dáil chamber in the late 1960s as a taunt and an admonishment.

But silence was the preferred option of many. When he published his book The Victory of Sinn Féin in 1924, PS O'Hegarty, who took the pro-Treaty side, highlighted why that reticence was to become so pervasive. There would be no appetite to recall "that our deep-rooted belief that there was something in us finer than, more spiritual than, anything in any other people, was sheer illusion, and that we were really an uncivilised people with savage instincts. And the shock of that plunge from the heights to the depths staggered the whole nation." Seán Lemass, whose brother Noel was a victim of such savagery, killed and mutilated in the Dublin mountains in 1923, was more prosaic: "both sides had done terrible things and both sides knew it".

Memory vs forgetting

That is not just an Irish theme; it is universal, as is the competition between memory and forgetting. Commemorating any civil war is problematic. Europe has experienced numerous civil wars in the last 100 years including in Finland, Poland, Spain, Turkey, Greece, Cyprus and Bosnia and the problems of reconstruction and achieving consensus in the aftermath of such conflicts have been manifold. Greece and Spain ignored reconciliation for too long, with repressive measures to exclude the defeated from public life. Finland and Ireland fared better. Reconstruction, in the sense of a return to normal economic and state functions, was one thing in post-civil war societies, but reconciliation a very different thing, requiring the need, among other things, to confront the atrocities committed during the conflict

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There was nothing ignoble in the silence that followed the Irish Civil War. Stephen Fuller, after he survived the Ballyseedy mine, later served as a Fianna Fáil TD, lived to the age of 84 and shunned interviews about the conflict. According to his son Paudie, "He held no bitterness against those who tried to blow him up; in fact, he was full of forgiveness . . . My father once said to me that the Civil War divisions should not be passed on to the next generation."

Still, there are more monuments to the Irish Civil War than might be assumed, many of them erected quietly in the decades after and providing a focus for local rather than national remembrance. They should be left in peace. The problem with tearing down monuments and seeking to erase or deface the physical manifestations of commemoration is that such actions invite a simplistic, polarised narrative of the conflicts and their aftermaths, and create amnesia about how myths were fashioned at various stages.

Honouring dead

In his 2004 book, Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation, historian John Neff pointed out that northerners were just as active in myth-making after the American civil war, crafting a "Cause Victorious" myth that was "every bit as resonant and powerful as the much better-known 'Lost Cause' myth cherished by southerners . . . the North asserted through commemorations the existence of a loyal and reunified nation long before it was actually a fact." Honouring their respective dead, both sides revealed the limits of reconciliation between Union and Confederate veterans, whose mutual animosities lingered for decades after the end of the war. Neff argued that the process of reunion and reconciliation was exaggerated, neglecting the persistent reluctance to "forgive and forget" and he has been vindicated by recent events.

We face our own challenge about how to deal with the approaching centenary of the Civil War. But we do not have the added complication of a society divided by race and led by a man who spurns reconciliation and will boast of never having read a history book. It is fanciful to think that any Irish Civil War event can serve as a focus of reconciliation, but the cross-party condemnation of the smashing of the Knocknagoshel memorial last week does suggest there will be a broad consensus about not allowing the memorials to become sites to reignite the enmities of a century ago. Even still, the reality of the atrocities needs to be confronted as part of any meaningful commemoration.