The Civil War formally ended a hundred years ago, but in truth it continued for a very long time. It cast a wicked spell over the birth of the State, baptising it in bloodshed. Until Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael went into government together after the 2020 general election, it condemned Irish party politics to an increasingly meaningless tribal division. It left a residue of support for violent republicanism that ultimately flowed into the conflict in Northern Ireland. It took a dreadful 30 years of violence to exorcise the demon of violent irredentist nationalism as a viable political project.
By the standards of the appalling conflicts that broke out in the aftermath of the first World War, as new European nations struggled to emerge from the rubble of empires, Ireland’s was a relatively minor affair.
Yet that does not diminish the suffering or banish the sense of shame that surrounds a country’s descent into violent self-harm. The primary victims of the war were the 2,000 or so dead, the thousands of injured and the tens of thousands of bereaved. The repair of physical destruction imposed heavy costs on the fledging Irish Free State. But there was a more abstract cost too: the loss of idealism.
The creation, after so many centuries of struggle, of an independent Irish state, ought to have unleashed great energies of innovation and imagination. It ought to have opened the way to a process of nation building in which new ideas about the creation of a more equal and just society were galvanised into action by an enthusiastic patriotism. Instead, the new state’s ideals were compromised by its use of often ruthless violence to repress rebellion and its energies were diverted into the imperative of mere survival. Much of its political talent was lost in the killings or diverted into bitter competition between erstwhile comrades.
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It is not possible to say with confidence that Ireland would have been a more creative, more socially decent and less repressive society if the civil war had not happened. What is certain, though, is that this unjustifiable and disillusioning conflict created for the new state a governing mindset that was defensive, conservative and inward-looking. Arguably, the overweening temporal power of the Catholic church was enabled by the loss of prestige of political nationalism. It was easier to look to the church for the apparently unified ideal of Irishness that politics had failed to sustain.
In that sense, recovery from the war is a continuing process. It remains potent as a warning about what happens when differences about the meaning of Irish political identity are not resolved democratically.
A century on, the best way to remember the Civil War is to restore the idealism about Ireland’s possibilities that it did so much to tarnish.