In recent years there has been a growing body of work that has set out to address Louth's role in the revolutionary era. One of the first to do so was Joseph Gavin and Harold O'Sullivan's, Dundalk: a military history (Dundalk, 1987). Local historian Stephen O'Donnell went on to focus on the activities of the crown forces in his book, The Royal Irish Constabulary and the Black and Tans in County Louth (Dundalk, 2004). Kevin McMahon and Éamonn Ó hUallacháin more recently published a printed guide to local newspapers’ treatment of the period, entitled Time of the trouble: a chronology of the Anglo-Irish and Civil Wars in Armagh, south Down and north Louth (2014). To coincide with the decade of centenaries, the witness statements given by Louth men to the Bureau of Military History were re-produced in the Louth Volunteers, 1916 (Dundalk, 2016).
This work is a culmination of a Masters, Ph.D., four books and twenty years of research on the part of Dr Donal Hall who was first introduced to the period through his interest in Louth's First World War casualties. Hall utilises a wide array of primary sources including newspaper reports, police records, private collections and government records, with the Military Archives collections taking centre stage. One of the rich highlights is the diary of Vera Bellingham, who was a member of the landed gentry with family seats in Dunany and Castlebellingham, and who had first-hand experience of events during Easter week and the First World War in France. The book was completed before the release of the I.R.A. Brigade Activity Reports and the eighth instalment of the Military Service Pensions Collection. However, it has deservingly established itself as the first comprehensive account of Louth's experience of the revolutionary period.
One of the many interesting theories that Hall puts forward is that pre-existing socio-economic tensions, petty jealousies and personal animosities wove themselves into the very fabric of every political split in Louth between 1912 and 1923, and that parallels may be drawn between the population's response to the Parnellite split of the 1890s and the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. Hall also demonstrates that the First World War had more of an impact on the population of Louth than the War of Independence. One I.R.A. contemporary labelled the county's population as ‘sneeringly hostile’ to the republican movement and observed that many households had a least one family member recruited into the British forces.
The title of Hall's fifth chapter is taken from the witness statement of vice-commandant of the Newry Brigade, Patrick J. Casey: ‘The men of north Louth took little if any part in the fight for independence’. This statement raises all kinds of questions around the definition of active service, and forces Hall to examine peripheral and internal factors to explain the reasons by which Louth men did not fulfil Casey's pre-conceived notions of participation. Each county's experience of revolution was unique. Louth's struggle for independence was characterised by twenty-six violent deaths but as Hall notes, the commitment to a revolution should not be measured in fatalities. It could be argued that Munster and Dublin's experience of the Irish Revolution was in fact extraordinary, whereas counties such as Louth may have epitomised the everyman's journey through the period.
During the later stages of the War of Independence, the I.R.A. implemented a structural reorganisation of its units nationwide. Under this new strategy, north Louth, south Armagh and south Down were subsumed into the Fourth Northern Division under Frank Aiken, while south Louth was allocated to the First Eastern Division under Seán Boylan. By 1923, the north Louth republican community was largely predisposed towards Aiken's neutral and later anti-Treaty stance. Similarly, south Louth was bound to Seán Boylan's pro-Treaty leanings. These case-studies add to the growing volume of microstudies suggesting that the Treaty stance taken by the provincial I.R.A. leadership had a strong influence on the republicans in their respective brigade areas.
The book's narrative is focused predominantly towards Dundalk and the Fourth Northern Divisional area. As far as Louth goes, the Dundalk I.R.A. was exponentially more active and recorded far more fatalities and instances of violence than their Drogheda counterparts, whose role was nonetheless significant. This is a seminal piece of work by an established historian whose dedication to the subject matter is as apparent as his accessible writing style and ability to draw in the audience.
