Abstract
With few exceptions, historical narratives of the Irish Civil War tend to be devoted almost exclusively to political developments and/or to the military contest between pro- and anti-treaty parties. While obviously critical for understanding the conflict, this focus on the more clearly delineated political and military arenas has obscured additional lines of fracture and deeper clashes of material interest in Irish society that also exercised an influence over the course and character of the civil war. These fractures and conflicts were manifested in a kaleidoscopic welter of popular agitations, social unrest, communal violence, anti-state activities, and localized ‘lawlessness’ that was ultimately as constitutive of the country’s experience of civil war as was the military and political contest between formal pro- and anti-treaty actors.1 The ‘varieties of social conflict’ that flourished in 1922–3 included agrarian unrest like land grabbing, livestock theft, cattle driving, intimidation, and property destruction; strikes, workers’ ‘soviets’, industrial sabotage, and other forms of labour militancy; sundry forms of opportunistic criminality, including looting, armed robberies, and attacks on private property; sectarian violence; and low-level anti-state activities like poitín [illicit spirits] manufacture, resistance to paying rates, and non-cooperation with the police and legal system.
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Notes
Charles Townshend (1983) Political Violence in Ireland: Government and Resistance since 1848 (Oxford), pp. 366, 376, 371.
Emmet O’Connor (1988) Syndicalism in Ireland, 1917–23 (Cork), Chapter V passim.
David Fitzpatrick (1998 edn) Politics and Irish Life 1913–1921: Provincial Experience of War and Revolution (Cork), p. 191.
Gemma Clark (2014) Everyday Violence in the Irish Civil War (Cambridge).
T. Varley (1988) ‘Agrarian Crime and Social Control: Sinn Féin and the Land Question in the West of Ireland in 1920’, in M. Tomlinson et al. (eds) Whose Law and Order? Aspects of Crime and Social Control in Irish Society (Belfast), pp. 54–75. Fergus Campbell (2004) ‘The Social Dynamics of Nationalist Politics in the West of Ireland 1898–1918’, Past and Present, No. 182, 175–209
and Campbell (2005) Land and Revolution: Nationalist Politics in the West of Ireland (Oxford).
Terence Dooley (2004) The Land for the People: the Land Question in Independent Ireland (Dublin).
P. Bew (1988) ‘Sinn Féin, Agrarian Radicalism and the War of Independence, 1919–1921’, in D. G. Boyce (ed.) The Revolution in Ireland, 1879–1923 (Dublin), pp. 217–34,
and P. Bew et al. (1989) The Dynamics of Irish Politics (London), Chapter 1. Fitzpatrick, Politics and Irish Life 1913–1921.
E. O’Connor (1992) A Labour History of Ireland 1824–1960 (Dublin), pp. 56, 90–1, 109–15, 125.
Conor Kostick (1996) Revolution in Ireland: Popular Militancy 1917 to 1923 (London and Chicago), pp. 1–3, 166, 182.
Richard English (1994) Radicals and the Republic: Socialist Republicanism in the Irish Free State 1925–1937 (Oxford), p. 60.
See also Eunan O’Halpin (1999) Defending Ireland: the Irish State and its Enemies since 1922 (Oxford), p. 39.
Extensive evidence of these tactics can be found in ‘Attacks on Garda Síochána (1922–23), Pt 1’, JUS/H99/109, NAI. The sole police fatality in the IRA’s campaign in 1922–3 was a sergeant killed in Kerry. In the ensuing years, however, several more police were killed by the IRA. See O’Halpin, Defending Ireland, p. 64, and D. Fitzpatrick (1998) The Two Irelands 1912–1939 (Oxford), p. 168.
Tom Garvin (1996) 1922: the Birth of Irish Democracy (Dublin), p. 93.
Anthony Kinsella (1997) ‘The Special Infantry Corps’, The Irish Sword: the Journal of the Military History Society of Ireland, XX, No. 82, 331–45. O’Connor, Syndicalism in Ireland, pp. 162–3. Dooley, The Land for the People, p. 51. Detailed returns and administrative files relating to the SIC are held in SIC Box 1 and SIC Box 2, MA.
For a like-minded assessment of ‘irregularism’ see Memorandum from Kevin O’Higgins for January 1923 conference, P7b/194(3–6), Mulcahy Papers, UCDA. See also John McCarthy (2006) Kevin O’Higgins: Builder of the Irish Free State (Dublin), p. 107.
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© 2015 Gavin Maxwell Foster
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Foster, G.M. (2015). The Varieties of Social Conflict in the Civil War. In: The Irish Civil War and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137425706_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137425706_5
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