History

How many people died violent deaths in the Irish Civil War?

Two historians have come up with as definitive a figure as can be estimated

A funeral procession for a victim of the Irish Civil War makes its way along a street crowded with mourners around 1922. Photograph: Sean Sexton/Getty Images)
A funeral procession for a victim of the Irish Civil War makes its way along a street crowded with mourners around 1922. Photograph: Sean Sexton/Getty Images)
Ronan McGreevy
Mon Apr 29 2024 - 06:00

How many people were killed in the Irish Civil War? More than 100 years have passed since that conflict ended, but we may finally have a near definitive figure thanks to the first systematic calculation.

According to Prof Andy Bielenberg of University College Cork (UCC) and independent historian John Dorney of the website The Irish Story, the figure for the Irish Free Stare is 1,426.

That is the number of combatant and civilian fatalities in the Irish Free State from the opening day of the war, which began with the bombardment of the Four Courts on June 28th, 1922, to the ‘dump arms’ order by anti-Treaty commander Frank Aiken on May 24th, 1923.

This is between the 1,300 and 1,500 fatalities usually estimated by historians to have occurred in that period.

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In the same time frame there were 59 deaths in communal violence in the newly created Northern Ireland.

The Irish Civil War Fatalities Project was supported with funding from the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media and is part of the Decade of Centenaries programme.

University College Cork (UCC) has researched and mapped the dead as part of its follow-up to the bestselling Atlas of the Irish Revolution published in 2017. The new book will concentrate on the Civil War. It will be published later this year.

It is the third piece of research to ascertain, with as much certainty as is possible at this remove, how many people died violent deaths at particular periods during the Irish Revolution.

Glasnevin cemetery has calculated that 485 people were killed in the Easter Rising, while historians Eunan O’Halpin and Daithí Ó Corráin, in their book, The Dead of the Irish Revolution, estimate that 2,850 people were killed between 1917 and the end of the War of Independence in July 1921. Combining the three works gives a figure of 4,850 people who can be confirmedto have been killed during the Irish Revolution between 1916 and the end of 1923.

[ Betrayal on the Border? Frank Aiken and the joint IRA offensive ]

A significant omission from the figures is the 300 or so people who died in the communal violence in the North from July 1921 to June 28th, 1922. In addition, several murders were not included, most notably those committed during the Bandon Valley massacre of April 1922, when 12 Protestants were killed. Similarly, revenge killings after the Civil War, the best known one being Noel Lemass who died in November 1923 fell outside the scope of the Irish Civil War dead project.

[ Who killed Noel Lemass, the brother of former taoiseach Seán Lemass, in 1923? ]

Of the 1,426 violent deaths in the Free State within the time frame studied for the project, 648 were pro-Treaty, 438 were anti-Treaty, 336 were civilians and four were members of the Crown forces.

It was something of a surprise for the authors to find that deaths on the pro-Treaty dead were significantly more than on the anti-Treaty side. Because of the State executions of 81 men during the Civil War, the anti-Treaty dead are much better known.

Mr Dorney said the smaller number of civilians who died in the Civil Warm compared with during the War of Independence, was because both sides tried to avoid killing them. Dublin, where the Civil War started, had the most number of dead (281), followed by Cork with 150 and, unsurprisingly, Kerry, where the series of tit-for-tat killings was particularly vicious, with 124 deaths. Kerry had the highest pro-rata level of deaths in the country.

The research also suggests a new chronology of the Civil War, contradicting the idea that major combat was over after the first month of the war. The study of fatalities shows that deaths spiked not only in the opening “conventional” phase of the war, but also in the peak of the guerrilla war in autumn 1922 and again in March 1923, with a concerted series of reprisal killings.

The numbers killed in the Irish Civil War were small relative to civil wars in other European countries during the 20th century. A short but extremely bloody civil war in 1918 in Finland, a country with a comparable population to Ireland, saw 38,000 dead in just three months. The Russian civil war saw the deaths of an estimated eight million people and the Spanish civil war (1936-1939) led to the deaths of an estimated 500,000.

“On the other hand, if you compare it to what was going on in western Europe at the time after the first World War, it was one of the bloodiest conflicts. Per capita it is similar to what happened in Germany after the war,” Mr Dorney added.

The project will be launched on Monday by the Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media Catherine Martin.

She said the research will “deepen our appreciation of the challenges faced and sacrifices made by the individuals and families that made those communities – and the university has done so with a very thorough, engaging, innovative and accessible new resource.”

Ronan McGreevy

Ronan McGreevy

Ronan McGreevy is a news reporter with The Irish Times