Ferriter dwells on complexity and empathy in Civil War talk

Complexity and empathy were stressed in Professor Diarmaid Ferriter’s captivating talk on the Irish Civil War last Thursday.

The newly freed up events room in Johnston Central Library was filled to capacity for this, the penultimate instalment in the Decade of Centenaries lecture series organised by Cavan Library Services and historian in residence Dr Brendan Scott.

The date coincided with the centenary of the execution by the state of four republicans by the state - the first of 81 such executions. In introducing the night, the council Cathaoirleach John Paul Feeley lamented the failure to afford these deaths a commemoration, nor the approaching anniversary of the execution of the famous author and republican Erskine Childers.

When Ferriter rose to speak, it was to explore the complexities of the war.

An interesting insight of how it may not be as black and white as we thought is provided by the following stat: there were 572 members of the GPO garrison who fought in the Easter Rising, and yet 41% of those volunteers “opted out of the Civil War or were neutral”.

He recalled how when he was a student there were “very trenchant” interpretations of the Civil War held by politicians, the public, and even historians which persisted even during the 75th anniversary of the conflict.

He notes that often the discussions suggest polarities - “Brother against brother, green against green” but he notes the shades of green, even within the anti-treaty side, noting Eamon deValera’s inability to identify with hunger-striker Mary McSweeney, a diehard republican.

It seems the polarities with which subsequent generations viewed the war wasn’t accidental as Ferriter says: ”No doubt narratives were developing during and near the end of the civil war about how to frame this particular event, even before the embers of the civil war had faded.”

He gives the example of the Minister for Justice Kevin O’Higgins’ gave an address to the Oxford Union where described he lauded the new government as State-builders with the other side cast as “wild men screaming through the keyhole”.

“We can see what he was doing, fashioning a narrative that would strip the other side of their humanity, of their rationality, of trying to polarise the divisions of 1922 in that way,” explained Ferriter.

He noted that Ireland didn’t resort to the “ultra-violence” of elsewhere in the world during that tumultuous period. 1,500 died in Ireland while in a country of a similar population size, Finland, their civil war claimed the lives of 36,000. Noting the work of historian Anthony Beever which highlighted “the hacking, the gouging, the boiling, the scalping, the freezing to death” in Finland, Prof Ferriter assures: “We were not in that zone of violence in 1922 or 1923”.

While acknowledging atrocities in Ireland, he raised the suggestion by some historians that perhaps the shared Catholicism of the each side led to a measure of restraint. Ferriter finds “that too not a satisfactory analysis”.

He says it demands a more empathetic approach.

“We have to bring the civil war back to those who fought it between 1922 and 1923. In the words of historian Richard Evans: ‘It is not our duty to lecture people of the past on how they should or could have done better’. It’s our job to try to understand them, to try to understand their mindsets, to try to understand their sometimes tortured positions.”

He adds: “We have to allow the space for that generation to exist as they existed in 1922 and 1923, with all of their shades and all of their contradictions, all of their fanaticism - as it might be seen - and all of their sincerity.”

A nuanced approach is required to understanding the civil war which Ferriter cited historian Michael Hopkinson in describing its “chaos”.

“A civil war that had an ill defined beginning and an ill defined end, fighting that was erratic, that was confused, that was highly regionalised.”

The recently opened Military Service Pension archives offers an insight into the “fractured”,“cruel” and disordered after life of the Civil War.

“And that’s where historians could open up a new space 100 years on.”

He delved into a litany of grim post civil war experiences, and mentioned detainee Andy O’Sullivan of Dennbawn who died after over 40 days of hunger-strike towards the end of in 1923.

He noted the Spanish “pact of forgetting” their Civil War and his belief that we can approach our conflict in a more mature fashion.

“And it is our Civil War, and that’s why we shouldn’t forget it, and that’s why we should confront it in as mature and as honest a way as we can.”