Two bloodied uniforms share a corner of the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin. Each in a glass case, separated by a bland title, Lost Leaders, a photograph, and a brief biography. They belonged to Liam Lynch and Michael Collins, commanders-in-chief of the Irish Republican Army, the IRA, and the Irish Free State National Army during the Irish Civil War (1922-1923). Nothing showy, visitors hardly stop to look at them, but they are not just any suits.
The conflict between Lynch and Collins, once partners, has shaped politics on the island for almost a century. Until the present, in which a good part of the Irish and the parties that represent them have decided to overcome it. But not by hiding the past, but by encouraging historians to study it and divulge it thanks to the digitization of documents.
One hundred years ago, on June 28, 1922, the fight between the IRA and the Free State began. The former rejected the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which in December 1921 had put an end to the war of the Irish nationalists against the British Empire (1919-1921). They refused to accept the agreement: a semi-independence and, instead of a republic, the island became a British domain with King George V as head of state. And not all. Northern Ireland was still in the UK.
The Free State won after ten months and nearly 2,000 dead, only half a thousand less than the war of independence. In 1926, the charismatic and controversial Éamon de Valera founded Fianna Fáil from a split from the historic Sinn Féin. A centre-right, anti-Treaty party that has largely dominated Irish politics since the 1930s. In 1933, on the contrary, the political heirs of Michael Collins founded the liberal-conservative Fine Gael.
“The legacy of the civil war is still present in the Irish political system because its three main parties were involved or arose from the disagreements of that time,” explains Robert Gerwarth to La Vanguardia. “However, today the civil war policy has more representation than reality, and the proof is that both parties, which had refused to share an executive for a hundred years, govern together”, remarks the director of the Center for War Studies at University College from Dublin.
In 2016, Fianna Fáil allowed a minority government of Fine Gael. “That marked the beginning of the end of civil war politics. And when in 2020 these two parties formed the current Executive, together with the Greens, this end was covered with cement, ”says the prominent Irish historian Diarmaid Ferriter to this newspaper. “The civil war divide has long since ceased to influence the debate of the younger generation of politicians,” adds the author of the recent study Between two hells: the irish civil war. The deputy prime minister and leader of Fine Gael, Leo Varadkar, 43, is a clear example.
Both parties continue the Centennial Decade program (2012-2023), which covers the stages of achieving Irish statehood. It is not accidental. The Prime Minister of Fine Gael who launched it, Enda Kenny, was a teacher by profession before turning to politics. The taoiseach of the current government and leader of Fianna Fáil, Micheál Martin, was a high school history teacher.
The commemorations of the first stage, centered on the Easter Rising, were easier to face. The memory of the failed insurrection of a group of separatists put, although with nuances, the Irish before a common enemy: British repression. Of the events of 1916, the Museum and the National Library held two major exhibitions, which remain in virtual format. In 2016, an immersive museum about the uprising was opened in the Dublin Post Office building, then the insurgents’ headquarters. Around the Anglo-Irish treaty, the National Museum also organized a pictorial exhibition with the portraits of the protagonists, and the National Archives, another with its own documents.
No specific civil war exhibition has been organized in Dublin. To understand the episode you have to visit the aged room of the National Museum. Ferriter, however, judges that the commemoration is not hidden. On the contrary, “since it had a very local aspect, with its own dynamics, in many towns exhibitions, conferences or essay contests are held in schools, where academics go to give talks.”
In mid-June, a four-day conference was held at University College Cork in which 130 academics made new contributions on aspects related to the war, from the perspective of gender and memory on the agrarian issue or the international perspective. “We have never stopped talking about the civil war, but we have done little to understand it. We need less certainty and more debate”, said Micheál Martin at the inauguration.
“War has often been used to block deep discussion about our history.” To reverse it and, according to the Prime Minister, “break the cycle of division and build understanding”, the Government, advised by a committee of experts, has financed projects without imposing an agenda or ideology.
Its president, Maurice Manning, a former Fine Gael politician and academic, considers that in the last ten years the Irish have carried out an exercise in reconciliation and tells this newspaper that the Centenary Decade program “has helped them learn to respect the memories and traditions of others based on research and to debate points of view without the story being divisive”.
This desire to confront the facts and make them accessible to the public largely involves digitizing the archive material. On Monday, the most ambitious project in this area was presented. Beyond 2022: virtual record treasury of Ireland , led by Trinity College, has reconstructed Dublin’s Public Record Office building destroyed during the civil war in 3D. And, after six years of work, it makes available seven centuries of Irish history, more than 150,000 documents and 6,000 maps, from the collaboration of 70 archives from around the world.
Its director, Peter Crooks, assures this newspaper that “when the fire destroyed the Records Office, hundreds of thousands of documents related to aspects of Irish life were lost, apparently forever”, but that the association with other entities has allowed recover a significant part and, through the project, “democratize access to Ireland’s rich archival heritage and make shared history accessible to everyone”.
Irish Times journalist Ronan McGreevy, on the other hand, makes a more critical assessment. “There has been a lot of talk from the government about inclusive and respectful commemorations, but there is no will to recognize the 81 men executed during the war, often extrajudicially, or apologize.” The author of the recent study of the crime that sparked the war, Great Hatred: the assassination of field marshal Sir Henry Wilson, adds that “the centenary of the creation of the Irish Free State will not be commemorated either”. The program of commemorations will end next year. Before, however, on August 22, one of its culminating moments will arrive. The long-awaited opening of the restoration of Béal Bláth, the site in County Cork where Michael Collins was killed in an IRA ambush a hundred years ago. Martin and Varadkar will make their respective speeches. It will be the first time that a Fianna Fáil taoiseach has participated in the tribute.
The unknown is whether Sinn Féin (SF) will also attend, the most voted party in Ireland two years ago and that defies the will of reconciliation of the other two. The formation of Mary Lou McDonald, in the opposition, is presented as the heir to the republican tradition and, specifically, to the promoters of the Easter Rising and the demand for a united Ireland as a central aspect of her imaginary and ambition .
A claim that, in his reading, politicians like Collins negotiating the Anglo-Irish treaty betrayed. And it is that, as McGreevy points out to the leader of the SF, with a great-uncle executed during the civil war, he has suggested that the Free State government had given in to the “divide and rule” policy of the British.
That day in August 1922, the commander of the pro-Treaty forces wore the uniform that is now exhibited in the National Museum next to that of Liam Lynch, shot down on April 10, 1923 by the men of the Free State, who harassed him in the Tipperary mountains. It has been said that the bullet that killed the military chief of the anti-treaty ended the civil war: 20 days later the ceasefire came.
Neither commander wanted the war that divided the Irish. In 1935, the De Valera government erected an 18-meter tower on the spot where Lynch fell. In August, the party he founded will honor Collins, a politician whom he has for decades considered his adversary. The museum’s uniforms are not just two suits in a corner. They explain the last century of Irish history and are closer than ever. At the very least, says Gerwarth, “as long as Brexit and a referendum on the unification of the island do not bring new twists to the debate on the civil war and its legacy.”
