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CCBS Annual Talk at the John Hewitt Summer School – 27 July 2016 “How have we remembered 1916?” Catriona Crowe, Head of Special Projects at the National Archives of Ireland (Numbers in bold, highlighted text refer to Catriona Crowe’s slides, [to be on website soon].) The Decade of Centenaries lasts from 2012 to 2023, from the anniversary of the third Home Rule Bill and the Ulster Covenant to the end of the Civil War. We are now four years into it, and arguably just past the high point for a lot of people – the 1916 Rising. It seems like a good time to take stock of where we are and how it all has gone so far. In 2012 I said, “The decade of commemorations upon which we have embarked is capable of all kinds of uses, abuses, interpretations, misinterpretations, illuminations, mischiefs, sublime new understandings and ancient bad tempers.” And all of these have been in play over the last four years, but on balance we have had more sublime new understandings than ancient bad tempers. Let’s remind ourselves broadly what happened during these years: On our small island on the edge of a powerful continent, and next door to a large imperial power, we embarked in 1912 on a decade of diverse thought processes, activities and interactions, often diametrically opposed to one another, which resulted in outcomes as varied as the establishment of a modern highly defensive Unionism in the northern part of the country, the birth of a modern trade union movement, mass participation in the most murderous war yet seen in the world, the achievement of the franchise for some women, the creation of a founding myth for the southern state, involving heroism, hopelessness, high ideals and self-sacrifice, the elimination of the political party which had enjoyed overwhelming nationalist support for three decades, the creation of a new nationalist party whose roots spread in many different directions, the partition of the island into two separate states, a vicious civil war, and most importantly, the deaths of around 40,000 people, and injuries, often seriously disabling, to many more. So, a lot of stuff to deal with. The delivery of public history, in a way that would engage, interest and enlighten people, was to be crucial to how we dealt with it. Complicating the narrative seemed to be both an historical imperative and the right thing to do in other terms too. We were lucky to have a number of books newly available to us in advance of 2016, which used some of the new sources which have transformed the history of the period. Charles Townshend, an eminent historian of political violence in Ireland, published Easter 1916; the Irish Rebellion, 2 in 2005, making the first extensive use of the Bureau of Military History statements released two years before. That book has been complemented by Fearghal McGarry’s The Rising: Ireland, Easter 1916, 3 published in 2010, which made even more extensive use of the witness statements. In 2013, Senia Paseta published Irish Nationalist Women, 4 a new study of female involvement in the different kinds of nationalism prevalent at the time. 2015 brought two important books, Roy Foster’s Vivid Faces, The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890-1923, 5 and Diarmaid Ferriter’s A Nation and not a Rabble: The Irish Revolution 1913- 23, 6 both of which gave us new perspectives: in Foster’s case, the fascinating intergenerational conflicts, intense relationships and feverish cultural activity in which the revolutionary generation was involved; in Ferriter’s case, a detailed exploration of the historiography of the period – how it was seen at different times, by whom, and based on what evidence. A very important newcomer to the scene was Joe Duffy’s Children of the Rising, 7 also published last year, and a runaway bestseller. And this year we got Lucy McDiarmid’s At Home in the Revolution, 8 a beautifully researched and written book on some of the women who were involved in or who witnessed the Easter Rising. These books were possible because new primary sources have opened up the field of investigative and interpretative operations for this most extraordinary decade. Many records have been released for the first time over the last 20 years, and a good proportion of them have been placed free-to- access online. The 1911 Census gives us a baseline demographic snapshot of what the country was like at the beginning of the decade. How nice it would be to be able to scrutinise the 1926 Census to see how it all worked out. Alas, not in prospect at present. There is a lot of material already in the public domain which has added greatly to our understanding of the separatist struggle, the First World War, the development of the labour movement, the campaign for female suffrage, the Ulster Unionist campaign against Home Rule and independence, cultural life at the time, and social conditions (it can be easy to forget that the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 killed 21,000 people, and that an average of 8,000 people per year died of TB during the decade). But a lot more remains to be explored. In 2003, the records of the Bureau of Military History were released to the public after a long struggle to make them accessible. The Bureau was established in the late 1940s with the purpose of collecting statements and documents from participants in the events of Ireland’s revolutionary period, 1913-1921. Participants included people like Ernest Blythe, Kathleen Lynn, Louise Gavan Duffy, Sean McEntee, Dan Breen, Robert Brennan, and the widows, sons and daughters of many of the key players who died during the period. Because the statements are in their own words, they are vibrant and immediate in a way that official documents cannot be. There are 1770 statements in all, running to 35,000 typed pages. There are also 300 collections of contemporary documents, 600 photographs, and 12 sound recordings, including one of Maud Gonne sounding impossibly aristocratic. Incidentally, the prime mover of this valuable project, Eamonn De Valera, never made a statement himself to the Bureau, an omission which has led to all kinds of speculation as to the reasons for his restraint. The collection has transformed the study of the period. Charles Townshend, author of Easter 1916; The Irish Rebellion, writes about the statements in his preface to the book: “The biggest change in recent years has been the final release of the participants’ accounts assembled by the Bureau of Military History…suddenly, instead of a few dozen accounts, we have many hundreds.” Because the statements dealt with peoples’ recollections of their actions quite a while after they happened, they are relaxed and give a flavour of the writers’ personalities, so we get, for example, Louise Gavan Duffy’s account of confronting Patrick Pearse in the GPO in 1916: 9, 10 “I said to him that I wanted to be in the field but that I felt that the Rebellion was a frightful mistake, that it could not possibly succeed and it was, therefore, wrong. I forget whether he said anything to that or whether he simply let it go. He certainly did not start to justify himself. I told him that I would rather not do any active work; I suppose what I meant was that I would not like to be sent with dispatches or anything like that, because I felt that I would not be justified. He asked me would I like to go to the kitchen. I could not object to that, and I went up to the kitchen at the top of the back of the building.” Or Vinnie Byrne, one of the key members of Collins’s Squad, describing in chilling detail his many activities, using phrases like “we plugged him” or “we let him have it”, 75 pages of violence or thwarted violence, under-laid with the classic soldier’s unquestioning belief in the rectitude of his orders. Byrne didn’t waste time with moral questions, and forty years later he is as cheerful and unrepentant about the deaths he caused as he says he was when doing what he was ordered to do. Here he is describing the shooting of two British Intelligence officers on Bloody Sunday, 1920. 11 “As we were entering the back of the hall, I heard the hell of a row going on somewhere outside – very heavy revolver fire. My next surprise was hearing a ring on the door. The man covering the door looked at me, but did not speak a word. I said to him: ‘Open the door’, and in walked a British Tommy, a dispatch rider. Ordering him to put up his hands, which he did, I left him under guard in the hall. I marched my officer down to the back room where the other officer was. He was standing up in the bed, facing the wall. I ordered mine to do likewise. When the two of them were together, I said to myself ‘The Lord have mercy on your souls!’. I then opened fire with my Peter. They both fell dead.” Here is the front cover and one of the pages of Michael Hayes' statement, 12, 13 recounting Thomas McDonagh's final decision to surrender. McDonagh was the officer in command of the garrison at Jacob's biscuit factory, the site of the present National Archives. Hayes later became Professor of Irish at UCD. “On Sunday morning MacDonagh left in a British Military car to meet General Lee. He returned subsequently and at a meeting of officers announced that he had seen Pearse and intended to surrender.

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