Among the revelations of the Atlas of the Irish Civil War, the latest in a sumptuously illustrated series from Cork University Press, is the extent to which the conflict was concentrated in Kerry.
In the league of proportional fatalities by county, at least, the “Kingdom” easily outranked its near neighbours in Munster, although they were also much troubled.
With 185 deaths, as the authors put it: “Kerry is revealed as by far the most violent county in Ireland under this rubric, followed some way behind by Tipperary and Limerick.”
Cork, surprisingly, ranked lower than the Munster average, its 215 fatalities diluted by a larger population.
Conflict of many colours – Frank McNally on a finely illustrated atlas of the Civil War
Lunar quest – Frank McNally on moon missions, misinformed quiz questions, and mountweazels
The Dromcollogher cinema fire disaster – Frank McNally on a fateful day in 1926
The spirit of 1965 – Kevin Rafter on Ireland’s first television election
On a colour-coded map, one of the book’s many visually striking illustrations, Kerry’s grim ratio of more than 10 deaths per 10,000 people is represented by a shade that looks like dried blood.
Limerick and Tipperary, meanwhile, are a vivid red. Other surprises of the map are that, joining them with that colour, are Sligo, Louth, and Kildare.
But the Atlas goes far beyond mere fatality lists. Its encyclopedic reach also includes, for example, a four-county west Munster survey of civilian compensation claims arising from the war, involving everything from arson to the theft of turf.
Somewhere in between those on the scale of atrocity, the punitive “cattle drive” seems to have been a Clare specialty, and the Burren in particular.
Sure enough, this merits a second map, zoning in on that county, the gloss for which notes a continuation through the Civil War years of 19th-century-style agrarian violence. One historian is quoted saying: “The reverberations of the ‘Land War’ were unusually persistent in Clare.”
Then there is the survey of broken bridges, a metaphor for civil war but also a measure of the practical difficulties of Irish rural life after a troubled decade.
At the end of 1924, in North Cork alone, there were 200 bridges awaiting repair or reconstruction, with vast inconvenience for the locals.
By way of (relatively) light relief, the Atlas includes a chapter on “Civil War songs”, prominent among which is a balled called “The Night Darrell Figgis Lost his Whiskers”
Writer, intellectual, and activist, Figgis was a famously dapper man, crucial to whose image was a well-kept red beard and moustache. That too is the subject of illustration, via a 1916 caricature depicting him, in prison uniform but with beard intact, at Reading Gaol.
But one night before the 1922 general election, three anti-Treaty IRA men including Bob Briscoe (father of a more recent Fianna Fáil TD, Ben) broke into Figgis’s house and gave him an enforced shave.
The attackers later called it “a bit of fun” at the expense of a man whose writings had stung republicans, although Briscoe also claimed the victim “squealed” so much, “he would have been happier had we just cut his throat”.
Maybe that wasn’t an exaggeration. The lyrics of the comic ballad share a page with details of Figgis’s subsequent life, which are far from light relief:
“He was embroiled in corruption allegations in 1924, the year his estranged wife Millie, who had reportedly not recovered from the trauma of the attack, died by suicide. Figgis had been in a public relationship with a young dance teacher, Rita North, who died of septicemia following a botched abortion in London in 1925. [He took his own life] two days later.”
As befits a production of such visual quality, the Atlas devotes space to one of the gorgeous designs from Art O’Murnaghan’s extraordinary Leabhar na hAiséirighe/Book of the Resurrection.
Begun in 1924, that was an illuminated manuscript, in the style of the Book of Kells, commemorating the independence struggle.
It was a project extraordinarily consuming of time and energy. But O’Murnaghan worked at it on and off until 1954, eventually producing 27 pages on vellum, including the one featured, commemorating the Treaty.
Another attempt at artistic reconciliation, also included, was Sean Keating’s propagandist masterpiece of 1929, Night’s Candles are Burnt Out.
Set against a background of the Ardnacrusha hydroelectric scheme, it depicts a new Ireland (represented by the artist and his young family) looking towards the future and trying to escape a past represented by drunks, gombeen men, priests, and even a hanged skeleton, which must symbolise old Ireland itself.
But the complications of a fledgling independence are perhaps more realistically delineated in the small print of Terry’s Dooley’s chapter on the 1923 Land Act.
This includes a map of Dooley’s Monaghan, illustrating the “quiet revolution” whereby, between 1880 and 1922, some 80 per cent of Irish land was transferred from landlord to tenant.
Such dramatic change created winners and losers, so that the early Free State was “seething with frustration, local jealousies, bitterness and anger”.
And as Caitríona Crowe adds in a footnote, there were other problems in the making too:
“The Land Acts created a rural society of conservative Catholic smallholders with a new-found interest in respectability and sexual probity, both of which bore down most heavily on women, and were ultimately connected to the establishment and maintenance of mother and baby homes.”