Atlas of the Irish Civil War: The cultural perspectives in the new book on the awful conflict
The cover of the Atlas of the Irish Civil War; along with a cartoon of the era. Donal Ó Drisceoil is one of the editors of the book.
The newly-published Atlas of the Irish Civil War: New perspectives contains a wealth of new material on multiple aspects of that terrible conflict. For example, it identifies all the fatalities for the first time, gives the most detailed treatment yet of the crucial propaganda war, explores British perspectives and broader international dimensions, addresses the hidden history of sexual and gendered violence, and outlines the impact on children and on the lives of ordinary people.
The book also features much of interest in the area of arts and culture. As with the Atlas of the Irish Revolution (2017), we on the editorial team set out to make this complementary volume as accessible and visually attractive as possible. Along with a series of newly created maps, previously unpublished photographs and original documents, many works of visual art are reproduced.
The striking cover image is An Allegory (1924) by Seán Keating, whose Men of the South was the cover image for the Atlas of the Irish Revolution. Central to it is the digging of a grave for a tricolour-draped coffin by two soldiers from either side of the Civil-War divide, with the ruins of a Big House in the background. As art historian Éimear O’Connor explains in the book, Keating’s aim was "to paint an image that visually called a halt to the violence. It was now time to move on, and to begin to build the state that had been imagined for so long".
The book also presents work by acclaimed living artists such as Hughie O’Donoghue and Mick O’Dea. The latter adapts historical photographs to provide the viewer with new ways of comprehending the tragic events of the period. An Post commissioned a number of works by O’Dea to mark the centenary of the Civil War.
Two are featured in the book: Commencement of Hostilities, which depicts the shelling of the Four Courts in June 1922, marking the start of the Civil War, and The Intelligence Man, a portrait of the enigmatic revolutionary and author of The Riddle of the Sands Erskine Childers, a supremo of anti-Treaty propaganda who was executed by the Free State in November 1922.
Work by younger and emerging artists is also featured, such as former MTU Kerry art student Joshua Griffith’s Elizabeth Dunne (2023), which depicts the trauma of a Kerry woman of that name who was attacked by National Army soldiers in September 1922. The trauma of her violent humiliation and a subsequent cerebral haemorrhage left her mute. The work represents her with her mouth just below the surface of the water, while her body languishes underneath.
A series of distinctive portraits by the great Harry Kernoff offered a chance to explore the links of prominent creative figures like Liam O’Flaherty and Peadar O’Donnell to the Civil-War story: both took the anti-Treaty side and subsequently addressed the conflict in their writings. His most recent biographer Paul O’Brien looks at Seán O’Casey’s creative connections to the war, most especially Juno and the Paycock (1924), where the playwright "portrays the tension between the desires of ordinary people to live in peace and the real world of civil war and strife intruding into their lives".
Cork writers Frank O’Connor and Seán O’Faoláin both took the anti-Treaty side as young men and played important roles in the propaganda war thar raged throughout the conflict. Some of their subsequent writings reflected the disillusionment of many former revolutionaries whose hopes for a transformation of Ireland had been dashed.
In his autobiography, O’Faoláin discusses the idea that the Civil-War divide was between pro-Treaty ‘realists’ and anti-Treaty ‘idealists’: "Our realists said goodbye to too many of their feelings. I cannot say that we idealists said goodbye to our sense of realism, because, alas, if we had any worthy of the name I saw but little sign of it in those disheartening days of civil war."
The book also features the brilliant mural by Garreth Joyce, based on Austin Clarke’s 1936 poem ‘The Lost Heifer’, which adorns Croppy Park in Clonakilty. The poem follows the elusive heifer, symbolic of the unattainable ideal of Irish sovereignty, lost in the mists of the countryside. It emerges briefly into the optimistic sunshine of the early revolutionary period before disappearing again into the dark rain of civil war.
Other poets also make appearances: Theo Dorgan reflects on WB Yeats’s Mediations in Time of Civil War, while Ailbhe McDaid examines at length the theme of time, especially temporal disruption, in Irish Civil-War-related poetry.
Síobhra Aiken challenges the conventional notion that silence was the default response to the Civil War in Irish culture by uncovering popular and oral forms of remembrance that have been previously neglected or ignored.
In his case study of the songs of the Civil War, Terry Moylan shows that the anti-Treaty side was by far the more prolific in terms of lyrical responses to the conflict. The book features many of these songs, some of which were issued as ballad sheets such as ‘A Four Courts Ditty’ and ‘Harry Boland, TD’. Mick McGinley’s ‘The Martyrs of Drumboe’, written on the day of the execution of four anti-Treaty prisoners in County Donegal in March 1923, is illustrated by the handwritten version by a Donegal schoolchild from 1938, part of the Irish Folklore Commission’s School’s Collection. The raw emotion is writ large: "No mercy was asked / From their pitiless foe / And no mercy was shown / By the thugs at Drumboe."
As Moylan concludes, ballads capture, as no other cultural form can, ‘the relationship between people and place and the immediacy of events that unfolded during a period as tragic as the Civil War.’
Multiple other aspects of the cultural dimensions of the Civil War and its aftermath are also contained in the volume, such as graffiti in Mountjoy Gaol, illustrated autograph books from internment camps, election and propaganda posters, cartoons (see panel) and the material culture of objects such as the shirt worn by Stephen Fuller, survivor of the Ballyseedy massacre of March 1923, when eight anti-treaty prisoners were killed by being tied to a landmine.
Together they represent an exciting strand of the burgeoning scholarship that is complicating the narrative of the Irish Civil War and leading us away from the ‘great man’ interpretations, militaristic narratives and tired old binaries that have dominated the presentation and popular understanding of the conflict for far too long.
- Donal Ó Drisceoil lectures in History at UCC. Atlas of the Irish Civil War: New Perspectives, edited by Helene O’Keeffe, John Crowley, Donal Ó Drisceoil, John Borgonovo and Mike Murphy, is published on September 12 by Cork University Press
A war of words raged between the pro- and anti-Treaty sides from the moment the document was signed in December 1921, but also a war of images, especially cartoons.
Cartoons were utilised by both sides in the propaganda war, principally to ridicule and denigrate the other side. However, pro-Treaty cartoonists had a much greater tendency to boost their own side through valorising and glorifying the Free State and its apparent benefits.
While the cartoons were sometimes humorous, they often functioned as straightforward political statements. They mainly featured in the press but were also used in handbills and posters.
Cartoons essentialised and summarised the core themes of both sides’ propaganda. For pro-Treatyites, this mainly meant depicting the Treaty and Free State as symbolic of freedom, progress, stability and prosperity, and counterposing this with the anti-Treaty alternative of chaos, terrorism and destruction.
The principal anti-Treaty cartoonist was Grace Plunkett, widow of 1916 martyr Joseph Plunkett and subject of the popular ballad ‘Grace’. Her work appeared in several republican papers and reflected the central tropes of republican propaganda: Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins had sold out the republic, the Free State was a British creation, and its supporters were British puppets.
