Patterns of Irish Civil War Memory in Later-Generation Oral Histories

Abstract

No phase of Ireland's 1913–23 revolution has proven as challenging for social remembrance as the 1922–3 civil war. While the conflict structured party politics and fuelled political agendas for decades, its toxic memory was widely regarded as best forgotten. Yet, as Beiner has argued, even ‘when communities try . . . to forget discomfiting historical episodes’, they still ‘retain muted recollections’. Drawing on oral history interviews, this article examines civil war silences and selective memories transmitted across generations among families and communities impacted by the conflict. Themes to be touched on include silence; memories of incidents of violence and other traumatic experiences; partisan animosities and political reverberations of the period; and the material and physical manifestations of civil war memory. Consideration of these patterns illuminates complexities in nationalist memory in Ireland, while it suggests broader insights into how societies and communities make sense of divisive historical episodes.