Gemma Clark’s monograph examines the ‘violence perpetrated by and against “non-combatants”’ during the Irish civil war (1922–3). Using compensation applications, Clark ably describes acts of commonplace so-called ‘everyday violence’ involving arson, boycotts, animal maiming, common assault, murder, and sexual violence in three adjoining Munster counties; Limerick, Tipperary, and Waterford. The violence, she argues, attempted to ‘purge religious and political minorities and force the redistribution of land’. Utilising new evidence, Clark adds to an impressive corpus of local studies addressing the ‘revolutionary period’ (c. 1912–1925).
Clark says that distinguishing her study from others is its engagement with ‘ethnic violence theory to fully understand the function of violence’. Rightly, Clark notes ‘intra-community conflicts over land and religion raged alongside the Treaty dispute’ during the civil war. Her multi-layered critique is influenced by Stathis Kalyvas’s seminal work, The logic of violence in civil wars (New Jersey, 2006).
As Clark concedes, her main sources are problematic. ‘The available evidence, as recorded in the compensation files’, Clark writes, ‘determines my focus on the so-called anti-state actions of “Irregulars” and “republicans”’. Compensation applications for financial redress submitted to the British and Irish governments, were conditioned by claimants proving their loyalty to the British crown or support for the Free State. Inevitably, these applications define ‘perpetrators’ and ‘victims’ in terms of financial claims made against the old and new regimes in Ireland. Because little effort is made to recover the so-called ‘Irregular’ perspective, the evidence selection presents difficulties answering questions about motivation. For example: ‘Were victims targeted because of their religion or politics?’ To her credit, Clark references memoirs by republicans Peadar O’Donnell, Ernie O’Malley, and Tom Barry, alongside other impressive research. Nevertheless, collections held by the Archives Department in U.C.D. (U.C.D.A.D.), among them Richard Mulcahy’s voluminous papers and Ernie O’Malley’s interviews with I.R.A. veterans, go ignored alongside the Bureau of Military History witness statements straying beyond 1922.
Kalyvas warns against ignoring victims’ histories because ‘such a view assumes (and further propagates) a dichotomous world populated only by victims and perpetrators, combined with a flawed perception that victimhood and guilt are mutually exclusive categories’ (Kalyvas, Logic, p. 21). Confining her study to 1922–3, the vicious struggles between the I.R.A. and crown forces of the earlier ‘war of independence’ is lost to Clark.
To take one example, ‘undisguised’ I.R.A. volunteers murdered ex-R.I.C. sergeant, John Walsh, in front of his family in Newport, County Tipperary, on 23 May 1922 (during the Truce). Walsh was targeted, Clark says, ‘because of the regime he represented’. On the evidence presented by Clark, we cannot know why Walsh was killed given that other local ex-policemen went unmolested. Clark adds, ‘there was no evidence of any personal or local vendettas’ against Walsh. Alternatively, submitting evidence for her compensation claim at Nenagh Quarter Sessions, the Nenagh Guardian (30 Sept. 1922) reports Walsh’s widow testifying her husband had received threats prior to his murder.
I.R.A. veterans interviewed by Ernie O’Malley implicated Walsh in the R.I.C.’s ‘dirty war’. They alleged Walsh was party to the burning of I.R.A. volunteer Paddy Ryan Lacken’s home (among others), near Newport in January 1921. Days earlier Ryan Lacken’s father, Matthew, a-dyed-in-the-wool Redmondite, was abducted by the R.I.C., beaten by Walsh, and then held hostage. (Paddy Ryan Lacken was an accessory to Walsh’s murder: O’Malley Interviews, U.C.D.A.D., P. O’Brien P17b/114, /125; H. Kennedy, P17b/119, /125.) Ex-sergeant Walsh was both ‘perpetrator’ and ‘victim’. He was targeted, not for reason of religion or politics, but because of the feud between himself, the Ryan Lackens, and Walsh’s other victims. This describes Kalyvas’ landscape of escalating reprisals, but in its Irish context this is likely unrecoverable from compensation applications alone.
Inspired by the late Peter Hart, in part, Clark characterises the ‘Irish Revolution’ as an ‘ethnic conflict’ fought between Roman Catholics and Protestants. This interpretation remains contested, more especially where sectarian violence in the revolutionary period is alleged to have accelerated the Protestant demographic decline of 33 per cent (106,456) between 1911 and 1926 in the twenty-six county area. In Clark’s schema, the burning of Protestant ‘Big Houses’ and other acts of ‘everyday violence’ are frequently explained as motivated by sectarianism. Far beyond anecdotal compensation claims (unsurprisingly including evidence of intimidation), ethnic conflict requires careful quantification. The essential questions here are: when and why did the Protestants leave? ‘Whilst the Protestant exodus from the twenty-six southern counties began before independence’, writes Clark, ‘violence and intimidation clearly accelerated the downward trend’. Although detailed church sources enumerating Protestant demographics are available, Clark offers no statistical analysis of her own to substantiate claims about accelerating Protestant decline. (Peter Hart claimed in excess of 53,000 Protestants left southern Ireland between 1920 and 1923.) Respectively, Clark cites Andy Bielenberg’s and Niamh Brennan’s estimates of up to 16,000 and 20,000 Protestants being forced to migrate from southern Ireland during the violence of 1920–3. Referencing Israeli ‘new historian’, Benny Morris, Clark argues ‘that intimidation was used deliberately in Munster, as allegedly it was in Palestine, to clear out a target group’. Controversially, Clark argues that her comparison of Irish Protestant experiences with 760,000 dispossessed Palestinians is justified ‘by the compensation evidence I have examined’. Published in I.H.S. in 2013, David Fitzpatrick’s article, ‘Protestant depopulation and the Irish Revolution’, drawing on annual Methodist church records concluded that the revolutionary triennium played no exaggerated part in the Protestants’ demographic decline. Pointedly, after 1920, Fitzpatrick reports no accelerated decline. Instead, he argues, Protestant depopulation was ‘self-inflicted’ by chronic decreasing levels of nuptiality and fertility.
Concluding, Clark restates that her aim was never to recount ‘the plight of Protestants’, but she adds ‘the unavoidable trend that emerges is one of minority persecution’. If the best evidence identifies neither forced nor accelerated migration in 1920–3, how accurate is the picture depicted by Clark’s analysis of the compensation applications? Her reading of the applications is premised by an understanding, first promoted by Hart, that a vicious ethnic conflict was waged in Munster. Unavailable to Clark, Fitzpatrick’s bold revision challenges that premise and the work accommodating it.
