After civil war, can the winners commemorate their victory, hailing their conquering heroes with the blood of their former comrades still fresh on their boots? Or should they cover themselves in shame and hope that the nation soon forgets? In this book, Anne Dolan explores the tensions between memory and forgetting in twentieth-century Ireland. By examining the memory of winning the Irish Civil War, she discusses the extent to which it has been used to serve party political ends, where private grief finds consolation when the dead have fallen from political favour, and how the dead are remembered when no one wanted to fight the war. The book addresses the Irish Civil War at its most public point: at the statues and crosses, and in the ritual and rhetoric of commemoration. It will be of central interest to all students and scholars of European history and politics.

Nuala C. Johnson explores the complex relationship between social memory and space in the representation of war in Ireland. The Irish experience of the Great War, and its commemoration, is the location of Dr Johnson's sustained and pioneering examination of the development of memorial landscapes, and her study represents a major contribution both to cultural geography and to the historiography of remembrance. Attractively illustrated, this book combines theoretical perspectives with original primary research showing how memory literally took place in post-1918 Ireland, and the various conflicts and struggles that were both a cause and effect of this process. Of interest to scholars in a number of disciplines, Ireland, The Great War and The Geography of Remembrance shows powerfully how Irish efforts to collectively remember the Great War were constantly in dialogue with issues surrounding the national question, and the memorials themselves bore witness to these tensions and ambiguities.

On the eve of the American Civil War, 1.6 million Irish-born people were living in the United States. The majority had emigrated to the major industrialised cities of the North; New York alone was home to more than 200,000 Irish, one in four of the total population. As a result, thousands of Irish emigrants fought for the Union between 1861 and 1865. The research for this book has its origins in the widows and dependent pension records of that conflict, which often included not only letters and private correspondence between family members, but unparalleled accounts of their lives in both Ireland and America. The treasure trove of material made available comes, however, at a cost. In every instance, the file only exists due to the death of a soldier or sailor. From that as its starting point, coloured by sadness, the author has crafted the stories of thirty-five Irish families whose lives were emblematic of the nature of the Irish nineteenth-century emigrant experience.

This text is an in-depth look at the Irish Civil War in the Donegal part of the country. It tells how Donegal became the scene of the last stand up fight between the IRA and British military with the latter using heavy artillery for the first time in Ireland since 1916.

Along with his close comrades Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera, Harry Boland (1887-1922) was probably the most influential Irish revolutionary between 1917 and 1922. His sway extended to almost every aspect of republican activity. Already prominent as a hurler before 1916, he was convicted and imprisoned after an energetic Easter Week. He subsequently became Honorary Secretary of Sinn Fein, T.D. for South Roscommon in the First Dail, President of the Irish Republican Brotherhood's Supreme Council, and a republican envoy in the United States between May 1919 and December 1921. He broke with Collins over the Treaty, but became the chief intermediary between the factions. Early in the Civil War, however, he was killed by National army officers in the Grand Hotel, Skerries. Boland's influence was the product of charm, gregariousness, wit, and ruthlessness. After his rebel father's early death, Boland's mother raised him in a spirit of intransigent hostility to Britain. Yet he was also stylish, cosmopolitan, and humane. His celebrated contest with Collins for the love of Kitty Kiernan is perhaps the most intriguing of all Irish political romances. Attractive yet elusive, his personality helped shape the Irish revolution. David Fitzpatrick's biography draws upon documents in Irish, British, and American archives, including his American diaries and thousands of letters to, from, and about Boland. Extensive use has been made of family papers and de Valera's vast archive on the Irish campaign in America. These and other recently released documents illuminate the inner workings of Irish republicanism, and the critical importance of brotherhood in the revolution. As an old-fashioned republican and advocate of 'physical force', Boland is still venerated as a martyr by revolutionary republicans. Yet, in his conduct, he practised the ambiguities associated with Sinn Fein in today's Northern Ireland. Doctrine was subordinated to the twin quests for republican unity and political supremacy, entailing reiterated compromise, systematic duplicity, and mastery of propagandist techniques. If his outlook seems archaic, his practice was astonishingly modern. Harry Boland was a forerunner for Adams and McGuinness. -- Publisher description.

The Irish Civil War and Society sheds new light on the social currents shaping the Irish Civil War, from the 'politics of respectability' behind animosities and discourses; to the intersection of social conflicts with political violence; to the social dimensions of the war's messy aftermath.

This book provides a detailed account of the origins, course, and aftermath of the Irish civil war, 1922-3. Based on much recently released material, including the papers of Eamon de Valera, each chapter is devoted to a particular aspect of war, and political aspects of the civil war are systematically discussed.