In November 1926 twenty-seven-year-old Kathleen Kavanagh was sentenced to six months in prison. Kavanagh, along with accomplices, had stormed into a shop selling the Flanders poppy for Armistice Day, doused everything in gasoline, and set fire to a Union Jack flag in the hopes of destroying these symbols of the British Empire.1 Kavanagh was quickly apprehended and refused to apologize for her actions. Though the fire was intended to burn both the flag and the poppies, the flag was not completely destroyed and in response she stated, “I am sorry it wasn’t burned to ashes. I am not sorry for what I have done. I would do it again and burn the house.”2 Kavanagh’s trial was attended by a large audience according to the Fermanagh Herald and her steadfast refusal to renounce her actions was welcomed by those who felt similarly angry toward what they perceived as residual symbols of the British Empire in the independent Irish Free State.
Kavanagh’s attempt to burn the Flanders poppy, an international symbol of the Western Front experience, alongside the Union Jack is indicative of the potency of the Great War in the Irish Free State. Had the war and its symbols failed to retain significance, Kavanagh and her accomplices would not have felt the desire to burn down a building housing them. Though Ireland was often left out of Great War historiography in favor of the more dramatic roles of Britain, France, and Germany, the war had a significant impact on the Irish population that lasted well into the Free State. Not only did it facilitate a successful attempt for independence, but Irish contributions to the war effort were substantial for such a small island. While Britain, France, and Germany immediately acted to commemorate the “war to end all wars”, though not without their own difficulties, Ireland took six years to begin public large-scale commemorations and these were fraught with debate over the war’s meaning in the context of the newly independent Irish state.
This book combines the previously disparate strands of memory, empire, Irish, and Great War historiography to analyze the use of war memory in the construction of Irish identity and the politics of the Irish Free State between 1914 and 1937. For decades both the Irish public and historians of Ireland ignored Irish involvement in World War I (WWI),3 but in recent years debate over the importance of the war and its lingering impacts has gained traction. Not only did the Irish participate in the war but their postwar discussions of it were integral to the creation of national identity and narrative in postcolonial Ireland. While recent work has re-emphasized Irish participation, the influence of the war in postwar politics has received less study. Far from being irrelevant, the Great War was present in early Free State rhetoric, public discussions, and homes. In truth, the war was far more impactful on these decades of Irish history than the traditional historiography has allowed. While the violence of the 1920s and 1930s has received significant study, republican violence toward Great War ex-servicemen, symbols, and events has not. Though veterans persistently attempted to situate the war and their service in mainstream politics, republicans consistently strove to suppress the interpretation of war memory with post-revolutionary politics.
Official, popular, and personal remembrances are key to understanding how the war’s memory was constantly re-forged in the Irish Free State, sometimes in an attempt to create unity, sometimes to exclude, but always in conversation with the evolving understanding of Irish identity. Consideration of the war was deeply influenced by discussions about national identity and empire. For the Irish government this meant a stony silence toward the war; for the public it meant that the war was hotly debated and violently contested by many. As nationalists emphasized the difference between Irish and British identities, the Great War was increasingly considered a British war rather than an Irish one. This association gave it little credence for many independence-minded Irish. This prevented a convenient mode of public remembrance, as such events and their participants were denounced as anti-Irish and pro-Empire. Even as ex-servicemen were defined or ignored by government officials and members of the public, they attempted to create a positive meaning for the wartime experience within the hyper-nationalist context. There were a multiplicity of veteran and family attitudes toward commemorating the Great War. Some attempted to de-politicize the war, others cast it as part of the Irish nationalist struggle, while still others turned away from any public discussion and chose private acts instead. Each such attempt by veterans and families was an effort to give meaning to the war experience in an increasingly hostile political climate. The space for ex-soldiers to negotiate this meaning altered over the following years as the British government, Free State government, republicans, unionists, and ex-servicemen weighed in on the meaning of the Great War experience. Ex-soldiers attempted to make their experience meaningful, but changing attitudes toward Britain, the Empire, and the definition of soldiering in the Empire, coupled with dissenting republican voices that attempted to de-legitimize the war experience, made this increasingly difficult. As the Great War and its veterans were gradually identified as imperial by official and public entities, the grief and trauma of tens of thousands was steadily the focus of republican anger. The continued conversation over the role of the war, whether on official, public, or private levels, demonstrates that, far from being irrelevant in the new state, the war was an integral part of the discussion about the new Irish identity.
The Great War left a tattered European continent in its wake. Out of this destruction empires fell, and new nations emerged. One of latter was the Irish Free State. While the Irish had intermittently attempted to gain self-government from the British Empire for centuries, it was not until after the Great War that such independence was possible, although it came at the price of further violence. This study focuses on the Great War and the Irish Free State from 1914 to 1937 in order to demonstrate that the war and its participants remained powerful potential symbols, be that for imperialism or Irishness, and the consistent conversation about their role in the 1920s and 1930s shows that the transition of Irish identity in the new state was a complicated one. While Northern Ireland’s war memory is equally important, it will not feature in this discussion. The questions about national identity in a post-imperial Ireland were experienced differently in the North and thus require a separate discussion. Focusing solely on the Free State allows for a more in-depth study of how postcolonial concerns over identity impacted the dialogue about Great War remembrance.
War is arguably the most destructive and heart-wrenching event of the human experience and, as John Keegan notes, “War’s rancours are quick to bite and slow to heal.”4 This is a study of war, but more importantly it is a study of mourning, remembrance, empire, and identity. When speaking of terms like remembrance and empire, it is essential to define what those terms mean. Given Ireland’s complex role in the British Empire as both colonizer and colonized, the Irish relationship with the imperial agenda was far from straightforward. This relationship shifted over the centuries of English control and the Irish “often [saw] no contradiction between benefiting from empire while despising or rejecting it in part or in whole”.5 While this allowed nationalist-minded Irishmen to enlist in the British military and thus partake in the imperial program, they could also retain nationalist sentiments. Irish society, until the 1916 Easter Rising, saw no contradiction in these dueling allegiances; an Irish person could simultaneously participate in the Empire while denigrating it. During the revolution, this became an untenable position, as discussed in subsequent chapters. The desire by many Irish to extract the island from British and imperial control after the Rising meant that all aspects of the Empire were no longer acceptable to republicans. Republicans used the terms British, Empire, and imperialism interchangeably to express the sentiment that anything related to Britain was no longer acceptable in the emerging independent state.
Though scholars of memory studies generally use the term memory, this book adopts Jay Winter’s use of the term remembrance. Winter argues that memories can alter, blur, and distort with time but remembrance is generated by action.6 The term remembrance more clearly defines the acts being discussed in this study. Rather than focusing on the monolithic collective memory of Maurice Halbwachs,7 this study analyzes the relationship of official, popular, and personal remembrance of war to national identity and the development of the Free State to illustrate how discussion of identity, imperialism, and war remembrance converged. Official remembrance is how governments portray and convey an event. Ashplant, Dawson, and Roper define it as “the dominant or hegemonic narratives which underpin and help to organize the remembrance and commemoration of war at the level of the nation-state”.8 Following a conflict, official remembrance is reconfigured in order to provide a usable past that suits the needs of the state and is most often articulated through permanent monuments, memorials, and ceremonies that mediate the meaning of the conflict.9 This realm of remembrance can be contested, supported, or even ignored by popular or personal remembrance. Popular remembrance, sometimes called public memory, reflects the views of various social groups. It can find expression in newspapers, public speeches, and songs. While John Bodnar touched on this in The “Good War” in American Memory and Nuala Johnson discussed the role of propaganda in Ireland, the Great War and the Geography of Remembrance, neither illustrates how this aspect of war memory interacts with official or personal remembrance nor how discussions of empire and identity impact such remembrance.10 Personal war memory is often expressed through cloistered acts of remembrance like the creation of rituals within a family, personal documents, memoirs, or private acts. These personal acts can function as escapes from the dominant official or popular spheres or can complement them. Just as with official and popular remembrance, personal remembrance can alter over time in exchange with the public sphere. What is underemphasized by historians of war commemoration is the exchange between these aspects of remembrance. They do not develop in a vacuum; they are in constant conversation with each other and that is what this study seeks to elucidate in the Irish context.
While the study of war memory has expanded over the past twenty years, much of the available scholarship focuses on high-profile aspects such as parades, monuments, cemeteries, or war literature. This focus, while important to understanding war and remembrance, omits less visible commemorations as well as how various narratives of remembrance impact the formation of national identity. Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory set the tone for studies of war memory by focusing on soldiers’ poetry and memoirs in determining the impact of World War I.11 Fussell’s work, while groundbreaking, did not account for the experiences of the enlisted men or families of the ex-soldiers, as his focus was exclusively on officers, specifically those who produced bodies of writing or how postwar official and public dialogues impacted the war’s narrative. George Mosse and Jay Winter also addressed traditional indicators of war memory like monuments and memorials.12 While this book discusses the political significance of monuments and memorials as points of discussion of the war, these are not the only aspects of remembrance to receive consideration. Concentrating solely on large-scale, public aspects of memory or only the literary works from elites overshadows the subtler methods of remembrance as well as its role in identity formation. Such a narrow focus also omits how parades and monuments impacted people’s personal interpretations and understandings of the war as well as the interactions between different forms of remembrance. This book aims to reorient the discussion of war remembrance to focus on how such remembrance is cultivated, how veterans used remembrance to redefine their service in the new state, and how discussions of remembering World War I show the crisis of Irish identity in the Free State.
A key work on which this book builds is John Bodnar’s The “Good War” in American Memory. Bodnar argues that American understandings of World War II were far from homogenous and that America...