County Louth and the Irish Revolution, 1912–1923 explores the local activism of the IRA and how revolution was experienced by rural and urban labourers, RIC men, republican women, cultural activists, and Big House families. Events were increasingly shaped for all these groups by the developing reality of partition, transforming a marginal county into a borderland and creating a zone of new violence and banditry. The expert contributors to the first-ever local history of the county during this period bring to light a wealth of fascinating stories that will appeal to the general public and historians alike. Critically, these stories reveal new findings about the early military skirmishes in County Louth by republican figures such as Seán MacEntee and Frank Aiken; the controversial sectarian massacre at Altnaveigh; and how the Civil War made a fiery battlefield of Dundalk and Drogheda. County Louth and the Irish Revolution, 1912–1923 documents the complexity of the local experience as the national revolution merged with long-established antagonisms and traditions, the effects of which have shaped the county ever since.

This is the first comprehensive account of County Louth's experience of the revolutionary period (1912-23), revealing a county with a strong industrial and agricultural base that faced serious challenges stemming from declining population, large-scale unemployment and extensive poverty. Although overwhelmingly nationalist, Louth's political activists were bitterly divided until the foundation of the Irish Volunteers in 1913. The First World War split the Volunteers. The majority sided with Redmond and, in late summer 1914, these volunteers, with bands playing and flags flying, saw off many of their comrades to fight in the First World War. The Irish Volunteers, which opposed the war, remained few in number but took part in the 1916 Rising. As the militancy of 1916 faded, the IRA in Louth was widely criticized for its relative inactivity during the War of Independence while Sinn Fein struggled to gain political control in the face of strong nationalist opposition. By 1922, the county was central to the Provisional government's campaign to destabilize Northern Ireland, which witnessed many atrocities. During the Civil War, Louth experienced extensive violence, including streetfighting, ambushes, assassinations, executions and house burnings. When peace was restored, Louth emerged from a decade of instability more divided than ever, cut off by partition from its natural hinterland in Ulster, and facing an uncertain future.

In 1912, a bloodless revolution had already taken place in Monaghan that resulted in the overthrow of one ruling elite, which was replaced by another. What began in 1912 with the signing of the Ulster Solemn League and Covenant, followed the next year by the founding of the Ulster Volunteer Force, might be considered from the Protestant perspective as an attempted counter-revolution. It was, at the very least, a determined effort to remain part of the British empire, the spiritual and ancestral home of Monaghan Protestants. But constitutional nationalists were not prepared to give up the gains they had made. Separatist nationalists wanted more, and so for them the 1916 Rising represented the beginning of unfinished business. In this political maelstrom there were agrarian agitators who sought the final solution to the land question; 2,500 young men who went to war, one-fifth of whom never returned and the others who did returned to a very changed country; and paramilitaries who divided along sectarian lines. Thus, between 1912 and 1923, Monaghan politics and society were transformed for a second time, not least of all by the imposition of the border with all the attendant social and economic problems partition brought. Because of Monaghan's socio-religious demographic and its borderlands location, this book offers an intriguing insight to how the period 1912-23 played itself out at local level. (Series: Irish Revolution 1912-23) [Subject: Irish Revolution, Easter 1916, Monaghan, Irish History, Irish Studies]

The first comprehensive and meticulously researched study of Co. Tyrone during the Irish Revolution (1912-23) during which Tyrone was at the centre of the conflict between nationalism and unionism, the evolution of partition and the emergence of two Irish states.

Veteran IRA leader Ernie O’Malley criticised County Kilkenny as being ‘slack’ during the War of Independence, but this fascinating new study of the period, by historian Eoin Swithin Walsh, challenges that view and reveals that Kilkenny was truly at the forefront of the struggle for Irish freedom. No Kilkenny citizen escaped the revolutionary era untouched, especially during the turmoil that followed the Easter Rising of 1916, the upheaval of the War of Independence and the tumultuous Civil War. Key personalities, revolutionary organisations and dramatic events in Kilkenny illuminate the country-wide struggle. Not to be forgotten, the lives of the ‘ordinary’ men and women of the county are explored, emphasising a life beyond politics and conflict. The listing of Kilkenny fatalities during the War of Independence is examined and, for the first time, combatants and civilians who died during the Truce and the Civil War are recorded, revealing an even more deadly conflict than previously believed. Presenting a complete history of the county in the opening decades of the twentieth century – including the use of previously unseen archival material – Kilkenny: In Times of Revolution, 1900–1923 is an indispensable contribution to the literature on the turbulent birth of the Irish nation.

Everyday Violence in the Irish Civil War presents an innovative study of violence perpetrated by and against non-combatants during the Irish Civil War, 1922–3. Drawing from victim accounts of wartime injury as recorded in compensation claims, Dr Gemma Clark sheds new light on hundreds of previously neglected episodes of violence and intimidation - ranging from arson, boycott and animal maiming to assault, murder and sexual violence - that transpired amongst soldiers, civilians and revolutionaries throughout the period of conflict. The author shows us how these micro-level acts, particularly in the counties of Limerick, Tipperary and Waterford, served as an attempt to persecute and purge religious and political minorities, and to force redistribution of land. Clark also assesses the international significance of the war, comparing the cruel yet arguably restrained violence that occurred in Ireland with the brutality unleashed in other European conflict zones.

The Men Will Talk to Me is a collection of interviews conducted and recorded by famed Irish republican revolutionary Ernie O’Malley during the 1940s and 1950s. The interviews were carried out with survivors of the four Northern Divisions of the IRA, chief among them Frank Aiken, Peadar O’Donnell and Paddy McLogan, who offer fascinating insights into Ulster’s centrality in the War of Independence and the slide towards Civil War. The title refers to the implicit trust that shadows these interviews, earned through Ernie O’Malley’s reputation as a fearsome military commander in the revolutionary movement – the veterans interviewed divulge details to O’Malley which they wouldn’t have disclosed to even their closest family members. Startlingly direct, the issues covered include the mobilization of the Dundalk Volunteers for the 1916 Rising, the events of Bloody Sunday (1920), the Belfast Pogroms, and the planning of historical escapes from the Curragh and Kilkenny Gaol. The Men Will Talk to Me is an insightful and painstaking reflection of the horror of the Irish War of Independence and Civil War; in words resolute and faltering, the physical and psychological debts of the revolutionary mindset – those of hardened Pro- and Anti-Treaty veterans – are fiercely apparent.