Review: A City in Civil War: Dublin 1921-4

A City in Civil War: Dublin 1921-4

Author: Padraig Yeates

ISBN-13: 978-0717167265

Publisher: Gill and Macmillan

Guideline Price: €27.99

Poor old Dublin city. O’Connell Street wrecked three times from 1916 to 1922; its major public buildings – the GPO, the Custom House and the Four Courts – destroyed during the same period; its citizens forced to endure violence, death, injury, curfew and shortages, as well as the ongoing issues of appalling slum housing, poverty, and, towards the end of the period, rising unemployment.

Joyce’s Victorian/Georgian city was a very different place at the end of this conflict than it had been in 1904.

Ireland is currently focused on the centenary of the 1916 Rising, which will involve many ceremonial events and a number of interesting and useful initiatives on the part of the State, such as a new museum of the Rising in the GPO, a new military archives building in Cathal Brugha Barracks; the refurbishment of Kilmainham courthouse and Richmond Barracks (where the 1916 courts martial took place); a long- overdue tenement museum in Henrietta Street; and continued funding of the invaluable military service pensions files project, by far the biggest archival collection for the period.

All of this is laudable and important, and will result in a genuinely useful legacy of this decade of centenaries.

But what happens after 2016? There are still seven years to go to the end of the extraordinary events that shaped our independence, unfortunately including a bitter and divisive civil war.

The ghosts of the War of Independence and the Civil War are a lot harder to lay to rest than those of 1916, but they are an essential part of the complicated unfolding of actions and experiences that made such ambiguous marks on our new State, our memories and our historiography.

Dublin was at the centre of these events, and Pádraig Yeates has given us an unparalleled account of the years from 1913 to 1924, in the city and county, in four books: Lockout, A City in Wartime; Dublin 1914-18, A City in Turmoil; Dublin 1919-21; and now A City in Civil War: Dublin 1921-4.

Lockout, Yeates's masterwork on Ireland's biggest labour dispute, was first published in 2000, but was reprinted in 2013. The other books have appeared like clockwork between 2011 and now. Together, they give us a vivid picture of a capital city making extraordinary transitions during a decade marked by death and loss for many of its inhabitants.

Yeates probably knows more about the city’s infrastructure during this period than anyone else: Dublin Corporation, the workhouses and lunatic asylums, the fire service, housing, institutions for women and children, hotels, shops, businesses, the transport system, the docks, the prisons, the police and the armies.

He brings us through the salient events, from the Treaty vote to the pact between Collins and de Valera, to the election in June 1922, the occupation and destruction of the Four Courts, the battles in O’Connell Street, and the many ambushes and attacks carried out until the conflict shivered to a halt in April 1923.

He also provides a full account of the Army mutiny in 1924, a crucial event that could have had incalculable consequences.

He favours individual stories, like that of Angela Bridgeman, a waitress in the Mont Clare hotel killed in crossfire on a tram in Harcourt Street; or Annie Hole, a unionist landlady in Mount Street, who behaved “like a mother” to the British intelligence officers who were her lodgers during the War of Independence; who saw one of them shot dead on Bloody Sunday; and who lost everything because her boarding house became a target for the IRA.

The death of Collins in August 1922 resulted in increased bitterness among his supporters, who were among the most brutal members of the National Army, and some of whom ran the infamous CID in Oriel House and the intelligence services based at Wellington Barracks, both places notorious for the torture and execution of prisoners.

Christy Ferguson, an apprentice boilermaker at the Inchicore railway works, was arrested in August 1922 for shouting “Up the Republic” on the job. His interrogator at Wellington Barracks told him “I’ll give you Up the ******* Republic, you ******* little Robert Emmet”, and then proceeded to bang his head off the wall, discharge his gun beside his head and threaten him with instant execution.

Figure of opprobrium

It’s interesting that Robert Emmet had become a figure of opprobrium for the National Army. You’d wonder where they stood on Wolfe Tone, Michael Davitt or indeed Pádraig Pearse!

Meanwhile, the city had to try to function, and the corporation, led by the intrepid and skilful lord mayor, Laurence O’Neill, was under fire for incompetence and corruption, as was the South Dublin Union, where egregious examples of pocket-lining were discovered among the staff and the board of guardians.

The corporation was dissolved in 1924, and a commissioner appointed to oversee the city’s affairs. One can discern the growing authoritarianism of the new regime as regards local democracy, and its centralisation in the hands of government.

The issue of prisoners, both in relation to their conditions (there were several hunger strikes), the infamous State reprisal executions, and the vicious goings-on in Oriel House and Wellington Barracks, was a constant preoccupation of the authorities, and Yeates does the subject full justice. Women political prisoners were waited on by “ordinary” women prisoners, who were regarded with contempt by some of their “betters” (Margaret Buckley of Cumann na mBan referred to their “animal feelings”).

As you would expect, Yeates is superb on the history of the trade union movement and the Labour party, using the valuable Irish Trade Union Congress reports as a basic source for what the key players had to say.

He recounts Larkin’s turbulent return to Ireland in 1923, and the subsequent split in the One Big Union that took seven decades to heal. He gives William O’Brien and Tom Foran their due for rebuilding the union in Larkin’s absence, bringing its membership to undreamed of numbers. He charts the downward spiral of wages after the war boom ends, and the end of war bonuses, which were considerable additions to the weekly wage.

This is an important book for reasons other than the impeccable archival research that underlies the narrative. The Civil War was one of the worst episodes in Irish history, and as we approach its centenary, we will need intelligent guides to what happened.

Because it is a history that remained unspoken for many years, with people involved understandably preferring to repress it than to explore it, it has a kind of toxic freshness that has to be handled very carefully.

We need to know the full extent of atrocity and stupidity on both sides, but also the idealism and passion that caused people to take those sides.

Pádraig Yeates has done us a great favour by capturing a crucial and chaotic time in the history of the city, and completing his quartet of magnificent books on Dublin in conflict.

Catriona Crowe is head of special projects at the National Archives of Ireland, and an honorary president of the Irish Labour History Society