Dr Anne Dolan (Trinity College Dublin)
Divisions and divisions and divisions

Shortly before leaving office in 2010 Brian Cowen encouraged us to “take the opportunities commemorations afford us to reflect on and better understand our shared identities2. But what happens to the bits that just don’t fit; the parts that just aren’t shared? This paper will consider the place of hatred, sectarianism, and perhaps indifference; consider the divisions we might find in the past as well as the divisions we perhaps too readily seek there. Is there a certain historical sleight of hand about the search for a “shared history”, not so much because there are divisions there to find but perhaps because the divisions are far more complex, far less black and white than many assume? Are divisions conceived too simply; are the convenient ones caricatured and cultivated and the more awkward ones overlooked? Why do we slip so easily into “Catholic”, “Protestant”, “Nationalist”, “Unionist”, and so many other phrases that mark apart too readily a society that was far more complex than that? This raises a number of issues not least the extent to which division has been exaggerated or overstated or at least used to political advantage across the twentieth century.

Ireland is a remarkably peaceful place; it has small revolutions, small civil wars by European standards and we forget that at our peril. However, the default to black and white interpretations, the easy assumptions about sides that civil war or civil wars bring have hidden the complexity of divisions within the various camps, the divisions that were perhaps solved by dirty deeds late at night and have no part in anyone’s commemorative agenda. How does recent research that really challenges the kind of divisions that people have assumed existed between the Old and the New IRA in terms of the violence they engaged in fit into a public narrative that maybe still wants heroes and villains, that wants a story to tell and a past to be proud of?

Where does local rivalry and the baser instincts that perhaps explain some of the violence and the division, the hunger for land, the greed for place and position that feeds and consumes and is maybe an integral part or layered onto traditional sectarianism fit? Why has it taken so long for certain divisions to be acknowledged within the historiography – the existence of sectarianism in the South as a case in point? And why are some of these issues so potentially divisive still? Why is it difficult for some of our divisions to have been born from base and brutal principles and not from honourable notions or ideals?

Sacrificing Irish exceptionalism, the thought of placing the Irish story in a wider European narrative seems still frightening for some at this point, and we have to consider why. Arguably, from the road to war, the arming, the obsession with militarism, through the Great War, through the troubles that followed, it is arguable that Ireland was rarely so European. From the trenches dug in Stephen’s Green in the Rising, to the appeal to Versailles for recognition, to the Treaty that placed the Irish Free State at the heart of the Commonwealth, defined and defining itself according to the status of Canada and Australia, even to the South’s constitution drafted with an eye to every constitution in the world that its authors could find, Ireland was part of a European story. Why few have chosen to read it in that way for so long is another kind of division that has to be tackled – a highly artificial division that has marked the historiography for so long.

There are divisions heeded and unheeded, and perhaps one of the most striking in this period is the extent to which class divisions have been left standing idly by. Whose wars were they when what divided rich from poor still divided them in 1924 just as they did in 1912? Is the most basic division between those who benefited and those who lost in the decade of the Great War? And why is that division not such a pressing concern when perhaps greed and land hunger had as much to do with following whichever army, creed or code that promised a more dependable way to live and survive? Do we miss the division between the ardent and the indifferent? Because what will happen to those who did not follow any flag when flags come to be half-masted in 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2021?

Prof John Horne (Trinity College Dublin)
The Wars after the War: 1917-1923

It is both true and false that the First World War ended on 11th November 1918. In much of eastern Europe it had effectively ended up to a year earlier. Yet both there and in parts of central and western Europe, conflicts broke out which prolonged the violence of the war until the early 1920s. Only in 1923-24 did the wave of political violence and war that had begun in 1912 (the arming of Ireland, the first Balkan War) finally subside. In this sense, the theme of a “stillness heard around the world” on Armistice Day 1918 might be understood as an artificial closure born of the need to assign completeness and meaning to a war whose violence in reality spilled over into the “post-war” years and whose indirect effects were to prove uncontainable.

This paper considered how extending the chronology of the First World War to 1923 alters our evaluation of the conflict. In particular, it briefly considered the range and nature of violent conflicts that marked 1917-23, commented on whether they should be seen primarily as an aspect of the First World War or as the product of other, longer-term processes, and raised the question of how such a perspective affects our view of the Irish wars in this same period.

To be continued