The Silence and the Silence Breakers of the Irish Civil War, 1922–2022

Abstract

The original timeline proposed for the Decade of Commemorations (2012–22) omitted the latter half of the Irish Civil War. The June 2022 centenary of the burning of the Public Record Office during the battle of the Four Courts was considered as a possible “capstone to the decade of centenaries.”1 Following public criticism, however, the chronology of the “decade” was extended until 2023 to cover the final months of the Civil War. But this initial reluctance is highly revealing in terms of official attitudes toward the period of civil conflict. It speaks to a long-established tendency to shy away from the realities of Irish-on-Irish violence and particularly the contentious events of June 1922 to May 1923. The idea that the destruction of centuries of historical documents could offer a symbolic ending to the commemorations also reflects the long-standing characterization of the Irish Civil War as an absence within the historical narrative: memoirs mysteriously end with the truce of July 1921; statements in the Bureau of Military History (BMH) stop suddenly before the Civil War; history textbooks were characterized for decades by “oblivion after 1922.”2 This type of socially validated silence is often a feature of the commemoration of war, mimicking perhaps the liturgical practices of mourning.3 But silence takes on even greater political significance in post–civil war society, as calls for amnesty in the name of the common good often translate into “amnesia” or “commanded forgetting”