The historiography of the Irish revolutionary era has been transformed in recent decades. As with the developing historiography of any major historical event or episode, new sources, fresh growth-areas of historical enquiry and changing perspectives have been the decisive factors in the transformation. In the case of Ireland, it might also be worth noting the remarkable increase since the 1970s in the number of professional historians conducting research and writing on modern Irish history.
Much of the earlier historiography of the turbulent decade 1913-23 had, inevitably, been sharply partisan: oscillating between the valorising and the denunciatory, depending on the ‘side’ taken by the author. Contradictions, contested accounts and recriminations were a predictable outcome of the publication of several early accounts of heroic service and famous actions; accounts that focused on the rebels of 1916, the flying columns and daring ambushes of the war of independence, the oppression and brutality inflicted on a supportive nationalist population by crown forces. There were exceptions, works that succeeded in striking a more reflective note; but they were few.
Profiles of the executed leaders of the 1916 Rising (notably the virtual canonisation of Patrick Pearse) – and writings on others who had 'died for Ireland', in combat, by execution or on hunger-strike – were overwhelmingly admiring. Little was written on the Civil War – certainly it did not feature in the 'official' history taught in schools. However, popular memory was unforgiving in the parts of the country where the division was most poisonous; and the political rivalry between the two main parties in the Irish State was firmly anchored in the split on the Treaty of 1921 and on the Civil War that followed. But for several decades after 1922 there was broad consensus across the political establishment in the Irish State, that the 1916 Rising and the War of Independence of 1919-21 constituted a heroic episode in Irish history and was a worthy 'foundation act' for a sovereign national state. The leaders of all the main political parties in the State competed in laying claim to the mantle of the 1916 martyrs: Labour had Connolly, Cumann na nGaedheal, Sinn Féin and Fianna Fáil had strong personal as well as ideological pedigree on which to proclaim themselves the heirs of the revolutionary generation. There was no great rush, however, to claim the legacy of John Redmond. More remarkably, the massive Irish involvement in the first World War was gradually elided from official public acknowledgement in the independent Irish State, a process later described as an act of national amnesia. The contrast with the historiography of recent decades could not be greater.
A revolution?
The nature and extent of the changes that occurred in Ireland in the decade after 1913 have been a preoccupation of scholars for the past 20 or so years. Specifically, there is debate as to whether we are at all justified in speaking of an Irish ‘revolution’. Some historians question the appropriateness of the adjective ‘revolutionary’ to characterise what actually changed in Ireland (and by what means) during the decade. Others contend that only the years after 1916 have valid claims to being described as a revolutionary interlude. On the latter point, it is difficult to see how the 1916 Rising and the political-military conflict that followed it – with the War of Independence, Partition, the Civil War and the establishment of an Irish Free State – can be convincingly divorced from the crisis of constitutionalism and the rise of militias and militancy that accompanied the introduction of the third Home Rule Bill, the early mobilisation of the Ulster and later Irish Volunteers, and the establishment of an Irish Citizen Army as part of intense class conflict in Dublin in 1913.
Nevertheless, one can understand the case made by those who point to the elements of continuity (as distinct from revolutionary ‘rupture’) between the Ireland awaiting limited Home Rule in 1912 and the Irish national state of the mid-1920s: with its bicameral parliamentary system on the British model (albeit with new nomenclature); a largely undisturbed judicial system (after the innovative Sinn Féin courts had been dropped); generally cautious economic, financial and fiscal policies; the continued dominance by established elites of most of the commercial, financial, professional and business heights of Irish society. Indeed, the case has been plausibly made that the thrust of the policies of the first governments of the Irish Free State merits the label ‘counter-revolutionary’
However, perhaps the most radical new direction in recent decades in historical research on the revolutionary period has been the shift of focus from leadership rivalries and elite politics to the rank and file of movements and organisations and to the wider associational life of the communities in which such organisations operated. This focus on narratives of ‘history from below’ reflected wider international currents of historical scholarship from the middle of the twentieth century. For the revolutionary period, the 1960s saw the early signs of a changing historiography, with the publication of primary documents and a definite move towards reassessment (and, in various senses, revision) of hitherto dominant accounts, interpretations and verdicts on events and key actors of the ‘years of struggle’. Some of the revisionist writing was intentionally iconoclastic, and as the conflict in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s raised a host of difficult issues – relating, for example, to the sanction provided by 1916 for the continuing use of force, the issue of majority-minority relations in a divided community, mandates and the rule of law – writings on the revolutionary decade 1913-23 were inevitably inflected by ideological and moral positions on the conflict in the North.
But revisionist writings on the revolutionary era were not all driven or coloured by ideological considerations. New sources became available and, combined with new approaches drawing on comparisons with other countries, began to generate an impressive body of publications.
A particularly original aspect of the new directions in research emerged in substantial local studies – the forensic examination of the impact of the revolutionary decade on specific areas and local communities, beginning with David Fitzpatrick’s pioneering study (1977) of Co Clare. Later studies on other counties have been indebted to Fitzpatrick’s industry and example, even where their findings differ from his. What is emerging is a more complex picture of the impact of successive phases of the revolutionary interlude of 1916-1923 on different localities and communities. Close analysis of issues of social class, age, education and occupational profile, family tradition and strong bonding among cadres of young men, has illuminated the importance of local realities and local rivalries in determining the variable levels and intensity of political and of military activity in different parts of the country and at different times during the years of conflict.
Consistent with the widening of the arc of enquiry beyond the familiar leadership cohort of the revolutionary movements, and reflecting one of the most fruitful new directions in historical scholarship, the role of women in the revolutionary period has been reassessed in the past three decades in an impressive body of scholarly publications. This research constitutes a major act of recovery (in certain areas, discovery) of the experience of women in Ireland in the revolutionary era.
A striking feature of much recent writing on the revolution by younger scholars has been the tendency to de-heroicise and render more complex and problematic the narrative of the military aspects – the violent dimension – of the struggle, notably in the years of the War of Independence and the Civil War. The human cost of the conflict – including the non-combatant, civilian victims – is a central preoccupation, even if, in comparative terms, the actual casualty count (fatalities and injuries) of Ireland’s experience of military struggle and violence in the years 1916-1923 is relatively low. This new emphasis on the murkier aspects and general human cost of the revolutionary era has not been without controversy. Anxieties have arisen not only from contention and controversy regarding the use of problematic oral evidence from contemporary witnesses with an axe to grind, but also from an unease that the shadow of more recent violence in the Northern Ireland conflict lies too heavily across the moral and ideological positions from which the 1916-23 struggle is being reassessed.
If the recent historiography of the Irish independence struggle has generally darkened the roseate canvas of earlier accounts, the revival of scholarly research and writing, and of general public interest in Ireland’s role in the Great War of 1914-18 has been marked, for the most part, by general empathy towards the motivation and idealism of those who joined the colours to fight in Flanders and along the fighting line, and also by a strong sense of the tragedy and pathos of the horrific slaughter – death, maiming, an abiding legacy of trauma – as experienced by individual soldiers, their families and their local communities.
Those seeking an understanding of the attitudes of the rank and file activists involved in different aspects of the military campaign for independence were dependent for many years on the published accounts and memoirs of a handful of local leaders, on occasional newspaper exchanges and controversies, and on the personal reminiscences transmitted orally – and frequently only to intimates – by veterans. A more concerted effort to collect testimony from veterans, initially in the form of newspaper articles, resulted in a series of ‘fighting story’ volumes in the late 1940s on the struggle for independence during 1916-21, in counties Limerick, Kerry, Cork and Dublin.
However, the major project for recording the testimony of rank and file participants was the setting up of the Bureau of Military History in 1947. In the following decade the Bureau collected statements from some 1,773 witnesses who were active in various aspects of the struggle for independence from the founding of the Irish Volunteers in November 1913 to the Truce in the Anglo-Irish war in July 1921 (the contentious episode of the Civil War was excluded). Remarkably, this huge body of primary source material (some 36,000 pages of evidence) was then locked away in 1959 and remained closed to researchers until 2003. Access to this invaluable evidence – allowing for the fact that it was committed to paper more than thirty years after the events being recounted – has transformed historical writing on the Irish revolution.
Moreover, a still more abundant harvest is in prospect with the recent opening of the files of the Military Service Pensions Collection, the first tranche of which became accessible to researchers in 2014. This collection – comprising applications, with supporting documentation, made from the 1920s to the 1950s for military pensions relating to claimed active service (or compensation for losses suffered) in the years between 1916 and the end of the Civil War – amounts to almost 300,000 files. Clearly, our understanding of the mind and motivation, attitudes and actions of participants in the independence struggle (even if recounted in retrospect), will be immensely enriched when this new source material becomes fully available. Already, however, the access to the BMH files enjoyed by researchers for more than a decade has had a significant impact on the emerging historiography of the revolutionary period.
But, of course, those who were militarily active, in any way, during the independence struggle were a minority within their local communities: indeed, apart from the act of voting, those actively involved in political organisation were likewise a minority. What the majority thought of these stirring historical events, how their everyday lives were affected by them: these are questions that must also concern historians and that require attention to different areas of life and different kinds of evidence. The closer study in recent years of the plenitude of social, cultural and political varieties of civic activism in this period has revealed how porous were the boundaries between different national movements and projects, how miscellaneous and promiscuous were the enthusiasms of a wide range of people and groups of cultural evangelists. Of course, different enthusiasts were more fervent about certain projects than about others, and the surviving evidence is more abundant for some than for others. Vigorous debate and argument, and competing opinions relating to history and identity, language, literature and artistic standards, were the order of the day in the surge of late Victorian and Edwardian Irish revivalism.
Political differences did not operate as impregnable barriers between participants in this broad movement of cultural and civic revivalism. In certain projects of social and political progress (the co-operative movement, arts and crafts, the women's rights movement), 'constructive' Irish unionists worked closely with nationalists of various stripes. Certainly, within the broad church of Irish nationalist sentiment, there were no impregnable barriers between separatists and Home Rulers, constitutionalists and physical force nationalists, when it came to giving general support to such cultural causes as the Gaelic League. It is undeniable that the breach between the Redmondite mainstream and the clandestine republican separatists of the IRB, on the issue of the participation of the Irish Volunteers in the Great War, was ultimately decisive in sharply dividing nationalist opinion in late summer 1914. And the later Rising of 1916 would further polarise political opinions in ways that affected a wide spectrum of cultural nationalist organisations and activities – including the Gaelic League. But, for all that, there remained a broad constituency of Irish nationalists, active in different areas of Irish national life, that resisted for as long as possible being driven into 'splits' or exclusive camps.
GAA refused to split
The GAA was, par excellence, the major national organisation that refused to split during the years of division and increased political polarisation after 1914. This was a more considerable achievement, perhaps, than is commonly recognised; it is also an achievement that requires some qualification. The various ‘bans’ adopted by the GAA – against members playing foreign games, excluding from membership those serving the crown in uniform, in the army and police – were inherently divisive, even if understandable in the circumstances of the time. However fervent the leadership cadre of the Association may have been in defending and implementing these bans, they were not universally approved of within the broad nationalist community. Indeed, even as the independence struggle intensified after the establishment of the Dáil and the outbreak of military action from January 1919, the extension of a ‘ban’ to civil servants taking an oath of allegiance to the crown as a condition of their employment caused division and difficulty within the GAA. Yet, remarkably, in the multiple schisms that opened up in Ireland in the decade after 1913 – notably in the face of Partition and a bitter Civil War – the GAA did not experience a split.
The continuing deployment of new evidence (diaries, letters, newly-released official documentation) has contributed enormously to our awareness and understanding of the totality of the Irish experience of conflict, whether in the trenches and battlefields of the Great War or in the valleys, villages and streets of Ireland during the years of the Anglo-Irish war and the Civil War. Close examination of key domains of social life – the routines and rituals of daily life – may facilitate closer consideration of how the impact of these multiple conflicts affected ordinary people going about their daily lives: participation in religious worship, children attending schools, adults doing their shopping at the local shops, and, of course, participation in sports and leisure pursuits. Indeed, a major aspect of the associational culture of any community is the world of sport and leisure.
Scholarly research and writing on sport has been a particularly rich seam of the new social history that has achieved a strong presence in the historiography of modern Irish history during the past 30 years. The growing interest of professional historians in the importance of sport in Ireland owed much to the advances in academic interest in Britain and in other countries in sport in the Victorian and Edwardian periods. The emergence of organised sport (with rules, regulations, clubs, competitions, discipline) has been assessed in the context of key social and cultural structures and patterns of collective behaviour – with scholars increasingly concerned with issues of geography, social class and, more recently, gender, as determinants of participation (actively or as spectators) in various sports and leisure pursuits. The ideological dimensions of sport as character-formation have been scrutinised in the context of late-Victorian imperialism.
Many of the questions and insights generated by this flowering of historical research in Britain had a relevance to Ireland that would engage the interest of a rising cohort of scholars. However, the particular circumstances of Ireland were inevitably reflected in the historiography of sport as an emerging branch of Irish social and cultural history. Thus, in Ireland the establishment of organised sport and dedicated sports organisations in the later nineteenth century was linked at key junctions with political developments, notably with the strong currents of political nationalism and with various strands of a cultural nationalist movement driven by anti-colonialist and nativist impulses. The new wave of sports history would engage these specific Irish themes within the wider framework of considering sport as part of the social history of a particular period and people. The role and influence of the GAA in Irish society would inevitably be a central concern of this emerging social history, which encompassed historical sociology and cultural geography as well as conventional documentary history.
The emergence of a cohort of younger researchers soon began to register in academic writings on sport in Ireland in general and in specific studies of Gaelic games and the GAA. The Sports History Ireland Society, founded after an inaugural conference in Dublin in spring 2005, was a significant new departure.
New sources – including the meticulous mining of local newspapers – and sharply focused local studies gradually began to fill out the history of sport in Ireland in a much more complex and multi-layered narrative than had been previously available. Research-based studies of a range of sporting codes and organisations became more numerous and permitted informed comparison and a confident overview of the place of sport in the wider narrative of Irish social and political history. In the case of the GAA, the fruits of the new approaches being adopted and the advances being made were well represented in several dedicated publications during the past decade. Moreover, institutional attention to preserving records and to general archival care has also improved. Here the GAA itself has adopted an enlightened approach, with Croke Park itself, through its Museum and Archive facility, setting the good example.
Commemorations, official or otherwise, may take many forms. They sometimes arouse controversy, usually because of the ‘meaning’ that is being attached to the event or episode being commemorated by those doing the commemorating. Because commemorations invariably meet the needs of the living rather than those of the dead they are frequently contentious.
While historians are not immune to the hazard of present-centred views of the past, their professional training requires and prompts them to subordinate these views to the surviving evidence about past events and to seek to explain historical events in terms of the ideas, attitudes and expectations of those who lived through these events, in so far as that surviving evidence allows us to do so. In short, what we owe to the past, more than anything else, is the obligation to study it with an open mind and to seek to understand the actors of earlier times in the context of their own time and with a scruple for the evidence that has survived.
It is this spirit that informs this volume of essays. Its purpose is to contribute to an understanding of the decade of revolution in Ireland during 1913-23, by viewing the events of that decade through the prism, as it were, of an organisation central to the associational culture of Ireland at the time. Three principal strands bind the collection: what was the role of the GAA (its leaders, players, units of organisation) in the main events/episodes of the revolutionary decade; what impact did these seminal events have on the activities, organisation and operational effectiveness of the GAA as a sporting organisation; what was the ‘internal’ story of the GAA itself during this fateful decade. It is hoped that the exploration of these themes by the authors will lead readers to an enhanced understanding of how a major voluntary body in Irish national life functioned in a decade of extraordinary disruption and conflict, and how even the most heightened ideological and political consciousness and commitment had to come to terms with the complex realities of everyday life and the needs of ordinary people.
There is no single conclusion that can encapsulate the findings of these individual chapters. But the abiding sense of the collection as a whole is of the extraordinary high value that the national ‘community’ of the GAA – players, administrators, spectators – attached to the Gaelic games themselves. At a time of prolonged and divisive conflict in Ireland, with a rebellion against the established state (and security apparatus), the eclipse of a long-established nationalist Home Rule elite by a rising Sinn Féin collective, a guerilla war followed by a bitter Civil War, and the partition of the island of Ireland, the GAA did not split. It took the strain and trauma of the years of disruption, and it held together. Shrewd leadership played its part in this achievement. But the value that ordinary people attached to the games – as spectacle, as affirmation of local identity, as social event – is the key to understanding why the GAA held firm in a time of upheaval.
Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh is Professor Emeritus in History at NUI Galway. The GAA & Revolution in Ireland 1913-1923, edited by Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh, is published by The Collins Press, price €29.99. This is an abridged version of his introduction. The complete text as published contains all relevant references. It will be launched on Wednesday, October 21st, at 6.30pm in Croke Park by GAA President Aogán Ó Fearghail with Seán O’Rourke as MC. www.collinspress.ie
