‘I Have Lost a Lot by Fighting for My Country’: Reckoning with the Irish Revolution

Abstract

Taking the lives of seven men with one act of violence in common, this article explores how the history of a whole life might reframe our sense of the ‘soldiers’ tale’. If violence stops being the only experience we seek, if, rather than isolated and sought out, it gets left in the muddle of getting older, of getting by, do we come closer to the marks that violence made, or begin to see them in the context of all the other things that shape a life? Do we find something of the perspective that those who lived with killing tried to put it in? Rather than see their lives through the prism of one episode of conflict, which is the position so many histories of killing begin from, this article proposes instead a history of seven individuals, who just happened to have been party to the killing of two men.