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Recently, a debate has begun among Irish historians as to the nature of the Irish revolution, and Peter Hart has provided a useful definition of what is meant by the term the ‘Irish revolution’. Hart suggests that the Irish revolution was a period during which two distinct blocs made competing claims to the state (beginning with the Easter Rising), resulting in a period of multiple sovereignty which was only concluded in May 1923, when the anti-Treaty republicans gave up their attempt to dispute the existence of the southern state. This chapter examines the broader social dynamics of the Irish revolution in the west of Ireland between the general election of December 1918 and the Truce of July 1921, and considers the extent to which Irish society was transformed between these years.

This chapter focuses on the strong attraction that Ireland held for Afro-Caribbean and African American intellectuals and activists such as Marcus Garvey, Cyril Briggs, Claude McKay, Hubert Harrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, and A. Philip Randolph. The Afro-Caribbean activists, in particular, took inspiration from the “Irish Revolution.” References to the Irish Parliamentary Party, Sinn Féin, and the Irish Republican Brotherhood dotted their newspapers and broadsides, as did the names of Irish revolutionary heroes such as Terence MacSwiney and Eamon de Valera. Insofar as they embraced black nationalism, they pointed to the Irish preoccupation with “Ourselves,” which they translated as “Race First.” Some African American intellectuals, above all Du Bois, were more circumspect about the Irish. They were keenly aware of the antagonism that for generations had marked the relationships between blacks and Irish immigrants in the United States. And yet even for Du Bois “Bleeding Ireland” became an irresistible symbol of the human capacity for suffering and regeneration.

The clash of temporal cultures implicit in modern imperial relationships is further evident in the next chapter, in which Eve Morrison asks how far ‘Irish time’ was irreplaceably lost through the processes of modernisation, war and revolution. In Ireland, the modern standard was often seen as a characteristic of English superiority. By turning attention to the expression of day-to-day existence in the Irish revolutionary movement, this chapter makes a fundamental connection between these high debates about the organisation of modern society and the experience of time in a period of violent upheaval. The clash between that lived existence and the increasing attempts of the British state to control daily life through time-measures such as the curfew was written into the politics of nationalist revolution. The quotidian experience of revolution gave Irish nationalism a sense of a living, albeit violently jarred, human present. Ironically, in the end, the independent state found Greenwich Time convenient and attempts to revive ‘Irish time’ tended to get nowhere – at least in Irish national political debate. The experience of the present was thus politicised; but the ordinary experience of time could also be mundanely local, in spite of those high debates in parliament and the early Dáils.

The chapter critically assesses the representation of the Irish revolution and its social context. It contrasts the modernist influences of both the labour movement and the women's movement with the growing ascendancy of nationalism in both its cultural and political forms. Ultimately, the political set the revolutionary agenda, producing a conservative state and society, shaped by capitalism (mainly based on land ownership), religion, and nationalism. However, other key events in the Irish revolution point to a much more complex narrative. These include the 1913 Lockout of unionised workers in Dublin, the Limerick Soviet in 1919, and the organisation of the women's movement in a variety of forms. The Irish revolutionary narrative was undoubtedly a contested space, even if its memorialisation has largely focused on the 1916 Rising and the nationalist narrative. The chapter argues that there were competing narratives of the Irish revolution that need to be fully acknowledged in its analysis and memorialisation.

This book explores the role and fate of the civil service in the process of State-building. It also questions whether the new government did simply retain the same civil service, given that every other institution of the British State in Ireland was abolished: parliament, executive, judiciary, police and the military. The civil service was bound to the State as a discipline of policy advice and policy execution. The State is usually treated as the empty stage on which the struggle for power is enacted. In order to facilitate Home Rule, the British government proposed to empower the Irish government to dismiss the entire civil service in Ireland and appoint a new one. Home Rule represented a profound breach of the good faith that had bound the civil service to the British State. The book then presents a fresh perspective on the civil service, the State and the Irish revolution.

This book explores Bernard Shaw's presence in the developmental progression of militant socialism in Ireland from the 1890s to nearly 1920. Shaw's participation was an integral presence in the key developments towards the time of the Irish revolution. His participation included the influence of his reputation, his direct contributions, and—perhaps key to the study—the effects they provoked from others. In other words, Shaw's presence in Irish radical debate was felt through not only his contributions, but also through the way he and his efforts were engaged by others. This book details Shaw's impact on the development and evolution of what became militant socialism in early twentieth-century Ireland. Shaw's participation in the radical debate in Ireland proved critically provocative, even when developments, that is, the militant road, disagreed with his approach and stance.

This chapter looks at the way McGahern represents the memory of the Irish revolution in Amongst Women, That They May Face the Rising Sun, and in his autobiographical writings. The disillusioned and often bitter reflections of his protagonists partly reflect his own family’s experience, but also echo a strong reaction among writers and ex-activists in the 1920s and 1930s, whose responses and regrets are traced through the writings of people such as P.S. O’Hegarty, Desmond Ryan, Ernie O’Malley and Bulmer Hobson, as well as private letters and reflections. It is suggested that McGahern is in a sense channelling a powerful theme in the history of independent Ireland, that of living with the memory of violence by means of evasion and suppression, and that this lends his fiction a historical dimension which has not been fully appreciated.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of how many people died as a consequence of Irish political violence between April of 1916 and December 31, 1921. While some of those who died during the Irish Revolution are well known, most are not even recalled in historical footnotes. This book identifies their backgrounds, why they died and who was directly responsible for their deaths. It focuses solely on fatalities in a conflict which involved four main sets of protagonists — civilians, rebels collectively termed 'Irish military', police, and the British army — but other forces were also involved in nine-county Ulster, where some of the violence was attributable to the partisan Ulster Special Constabulary (USC) formed in November of 1920, to loyalist paramilitaries and civilians, and to nationalists who were not republicans. What most distinguishes 1916 from later years are the high proportion of civilian casualties and, within that category, of female deaths; the absence of any sectarian element in killings; and the absence of targeted killings — other than by execution following courts martial of the leaders of the rebellion — by either Crown forces or the rebels. What also distinguishes 1916 from 1919–21 is the absence of Ulster loyalist action against the Catholic minority during and after the Rising, in contrast to the considerable violence from 1920 onwards of which the Catholic civilian population were the main targets and the community which lost most people.

This introduction outlines the author’s motivations in writing this study. It explores the historiography of imprisonment and of the Irish revolution and questions why such a study had not been written earlier. It outlines the range of primary material that underpins the study, assessing the opportunities and limits that these sources impose. It engages with the contested concept of political imprisonment and provides an overview of political imprisonment during the nineteenth century. In doing so, it identifies patterns that were established prior to the period explored in this study, while also emphasizing the changes that occurred over time.

The introduction sets out the book’s main arguments—assessing the Irish Party’s rise and fall, the Irish revolution and how members and supporters experienced it, and finally how its leaders and supporters have been remembered. Key findings such as the number of former Irish Party figures who emerged in the Free State and the percentage of them which joined Fine Gael are outlined along with reference to the major features of commemoration. The evolution of writing on the party is also analysed and common perceptions of the party and its leaders are identified alongside themes prevalent later in the book. In so doing, the introduction clearly situates the book within the historiography as well as pointing to the contributions it can make to knowledge in the areas of party politics, Irish political culture; Treatyite history; public memory and commemoration in the Irish state. Finally, the introduction establishes the range of primary sources used and the nature of each as well as the methodologies employed in the book and a brief outline of each chapter.

Chapter One provides the first statistical illustration of individuals from home rule backgrounds who entered representative politics in the early years of the Free State with the number of TDs with home rule heritage in each political grouping detailed in a number of tables. Given the historiographical attention drawn to the character of Cumann na nGaedheal, there is detailed attention devoted to comparisons between the government party and the Irish Party in personnel, policy and organisation. While the Farmers’ Party and Labour are also considered for continuities between membership of both parties and the earlier agrarian and labour associations of the home rule era, there is special assessment of former MPs who were elected as independent TDs such as Capt. William Redmond, Alfie Byrne and James Cosgrave and the persistence of the IPP’s methods. This chapter thus highlights the continuities between pre- and post-independence Ireland, helping to explain the party fragmentation experienced in the early 1920s.