With the centenary of Ireland’s Easter Rising now past, and the anniversaries of the War of Independence, partition, Anglo–Irish Treaty, and Civil War fast approaching, publishers are churning out a stream of titles designed to cover every aspect of the revolutionary era. The five works reviewed here run from general studies of the period to others that focus on a couple of years or, in the case of Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc’s Truce, just a few days.

Both Marie Coleman’s Irish Revolution and Robert Lynch’s Revolutionary Ireland serve as useful introductions to what Lynch calls ‘the great foundation myth’ of the modern Irish state (p. 1). Aimed primarily at students, these two books include chronologies, a ‘who’s who’ of Irish leaders north and south, a selection of primary source documents, and ‘further reading’ suggestions at the end of each chapter. In addition, Lynch rounds out his chapters with brief sample essay and examination questions, while Coleman includes a glossary of terms that would benefit anyone coming to this subject for the first time.

While Coleman narrows her study of events from the 1916 Easter Rising to the end of the Irish Civil War in 1923, Lynch views the revolutionary period more broadly, beginning with the 1912–1914 home rule crisis and only ending with the Boundary Commission debacle at the end of 1925. That makes for an inevitable overlap of the events that are covered and, often, a shared consensus about their meaning. Both agree, for instance, that the Easter Rising left a legacy that, in Lynch’s words, ‘could hardly have been imagined by its perpetrators’, not the least of which was the demise of the Irish Parliamentary Party and the rise of Sinn Féin (p. 43). Both also complement one another in their conclusions about the War of Independence, the creation of Dáil Éireann, and Sinn Féin’s alternative government to the British administration in Ireland, what became known as the counter-state.

In their concise analyses of the four documents issued by the Dáil at its first session (a ‘Declaration of Independence’, ‘Constitution’, ‘Democratic Programme’, and ‘Address to the Free Nations of the World’), Coleman and Lynch conclude that the Irish revolution was a conservative enterprise from the start. Nowhere was this more evident than in the genesis of the Democratic Programme. Despite echoes of the radical Easter Rising Proclamation, the Democratic Programme was a dramatically watered-down version of a draft written by Labour Party leader Thomas Johnson. Its aspirations for equality between men and women and that the ‘right to private property must be subordinated to the public right and welfare’ were, as Coleman points out, quickly abandoned once independence was achieved; indeed, she thinks it is ‘questionable’ whether members of the first Dáil were ever serious about the programme’s implementation (pp 46–7).

Despite efforts to paper over differences in Irish society, Coleman argues that ‘there was a strong undercurrent of social tension’ – whether over land agitation, especially in the west of Ireland, or labour strife in the cities – that continued during the independence struggle (pp 63–5). That raises a question: was the Irish revolution a revolution at all? According to Lynch, it was. But it was ‘overwhelmingly a revolution about constitutional symbols and the origins of political authority’; it had ‘little directly to do with social and economic change’. More immediately, republican leaders avoided demands for reform by arguing that nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of national self-determination, a strategy summed up as ‘Freedom first, everything else after’ (pp 3, 62).

Coleman devotes a separate chapter to the independence movement’s other legacy, what she calls the ‘military campaign’, the two-and-a-half year struggle that, according to Lynch, ‘has been painted variously as both a war of colonial liberation and a squalid civil war tinged with sectarianism’. Perhaps, Lynch further suggests, this inability to come to terms with what, precisely, this struggle was all about explains why it has been given several different names: the ‘Anglo–Irish War’, the ‘Tan War’ or, simply, the ‘Troubles’ (p. 64).

What can be said for certain is that responsibility for introducing the gun into modern Irish politics rests squarely with Ulster unionists in their earlier battle against home rule. Strangely, though, nationalists have had a harder time coming to terms with this inheritance. The roots of their difficulty lead back at least to the War of Independence and what Coleman calls the military wing’s ‘ambivalent relationship’ with those who pursued the revolutionary struggle in the Dáil and in creating the counter-state (p. 84). Lynch agrees but takes the revolution’s original sin back to the Easter Rising itself. From that point, he writes, many in the Irish Republican Army saw themselves as part of an ‘unreconstructed militarist movement’ (p. 65). It should have surprised no one, least of all men like Michael Collins who straddled both worlds, that a break of some kind was unavoidable once it was clear that a separate Irish republic would have to be sacrificed, at least for the time being, in return for practical independence. The resulting Civil War, more violent and more costly than the War of Independence itself, left an impoverished Irish Free State in the south and copper-fastened the partition of the six counties of Northern Ireland for the next century.

It has become a staple among some historians, such as Joseph McKenna, that the Irish revolution not only ‘became the model for the overthrow of British imperialism in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere’ but also that ‘the Irish method of guerrilla warfare’ inspired those who followed, whether Mao Zedong in China, Menachem Begin in Palestine/Israel, or Fidel Castro in Cuba (p. 271). That is quite a legacy – if it is true. The problem is that, like others who have staked this claim, he fails to give any evidence for it in his analysis of the 1919–1921 guerrilla campaign. Provocatively, McKenna also calls the War of Independence ‘an unnecessary and often brutal little war’, one that he follows relentlessly from village to village, town to town, and county to county, along with separate chapters on the republican movement’s post-Rising political and military reorganisation, the evolution of passive resistance, and the development of urban warfare. He also devotes a chapter to the roles played by women in the nationalist cause, a subject Coleman highlights only in a section of her chapter on the war and that Lynch hardly touches on at all. According to McKenna, at any rate, the Irish conflict was ‘perhaps the first war of the twentieth century in which women played an active role’ (p. 109). Again, that is quite a claim, one likely to be disputed by other historians.

No single event of the struggle for independence has received more attention, or been the source of more controversy, than what McKenna dubs the ‘intelligence war’. That certainly has been true in the roughly twenty-five years since Collins has, for many, supplanted Éamon de Valera as the dynamic figure of the nationalist movement. As the I.R.A.’s director of intelligence, Collins’s ‘ambition’, McKenna writes, ‘was to have at least one person working in every government department’ to provide current information. Amazingly, this included Collins’s own cousin, Nancy O’Brien, who, until then, had been living in England and was thought by British authorities to be above suspicion (pp 74–5). Like Coleman and Lynch, McKenna shows that political and military intelligence were the most effective weapons that the I.R.A. had for neutralising Britain’s other, overwhelming advantages. This also explains why the intelligence war was especially brutal, a brutality epitomised by ‘Bloody Sunday’, Collins’s order to assassinate British spies in Dublin in November 1920 followed by reprisal killings carried out by crown forces at a Gaelic football match later that same day. Both incidents remain controversial; without distinguishing between the two, Coleman calls them the ‘most infamous deaths of the War of Independence’ (p. 71). Given all that has been written about Bloody Sunday, it is surprising that disagreement continues over how many people actually lost their lives, a disagreement reflected in these books. The number of British military personnel executed by the I.R.A. (there is also disagreement over how many were actually undercover agents) range from twelve (McKenna) to thirteen (Coleman) to fourteen (Lynch). The same is true of the number of those killed at the Croke Park match, with the numbers given as eleven (Lynch), twelve (McKenna), and thirteen (Coleman).

But to suggest, as McKenna does, that by July 1921, Britain’s counter-insurgency campaign in Ireland ‘ceased to be intelligence led’ is simply not supported by the evidence (p. 96). Despite setbacks like Bloody Sunday, British forces were gaining ground in the early months of 1921, not least in Dublin after the I.R.A.’s attack on the Customs House in May. Ordered by de Valera to convince the outside world, especially America, that the I.R.A. was a real army, this was a return to the tactics of the Easter Rising and, militarily, about as successful. For all intents and purposes, after the Customs House battle, the I.R.A.’s Dublin Brigade ceased to exist. ‘The reality’, Lynch points out, was that the war had ‘reached a military stalemate and any kind of full military victory was impossible for either side’ (p. 79). Added to that, there was a mounting sense of revulsion among both the British and Irish people at the continued violence; this made a truce followed by peace talks finally acceptable to both sides. The cessation of hostilities was announced on 8 July; but it did not come into effect until noon the following Monday, 11 July. In between the country experienced a spasm of hideous violence, much of it, according to historians, directed at southern Ireland’s minority Protestant community. These incidents included the ‘botched execution’ of two Protestant landowners, Abraham and Richard Pearson. According to Coleman, the brothers were killed by members of the I.R.A.’s Offaly Brigade who were anxious to ‘record a success before the truce’ (p. 94). The problem is that the Pearsons were killed a full week before the truce was even announced and ten days before it went into effect.

That is just one of many stories demolished by Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc in his iconoclastic account of what he calls the ‘myths’ that surround the end of the War of Independence. Ó Ruairc argues that while some stories about I.R.A. violence in the days leading up to the truce ‘have a grain of truth’, others ‘are entirely fictional or are genuine killings taken out of context’ (p. 11). On the other side of the ledger, he detects a curious silence when it comes to atrocities carried out by the forces of the crown in the hours separating war from peace.

Ó Ruairc argues that this distortion was deliberate, appearing first in histories written by British military figures keen to explain away their inability to defeat the I.R.A.. For different reasons, during the Civil War backers of the Irish Free State laid responsibility for the pre-truce killings squarely at the feet of their opponents in the anti-Treaty I.R.A.. Both the stories and the accusations stuck and became a staple in the telling and re-telling of the pre-truce interlude by writers as varied as Conor Cruise O’Brien, Maryann Valiulis, and Peter Hart. Like Coleman’s account of the Pearson brothers’ execution, these stories fail to stand up when subject to Ó Ruairc’s forensic examination.

One such example is the death of twenty-year-old Alfred Needham, a member of the Royal Irish Constabulary. According to some recent accounts, Needham, knowing that peace was ‘just hours away’, married his ‘teenage bride’ only to be ‘shot dead in front of her’ on the steps of a county registry office. Ó Ruairc shows that most of these ‘facts’ are simply wrong. Needham, who belonged to the Black and Tans, was killed standing in front of a stable before the truce was even announced. There was no wedding; there was no grieving bride. Thanks to those who who prefer a romantic tragedy, the story persists (pp 142–5).

According to Coleman, between 1920 and 1922 Belfast ‘was one of the most violent places’ in Ireland (p. 80). Ó Ruairc bears out this claim, noting that of the sixty-one people who died during the pre-truce interlude, twenty-two lost their lives during a spasm of sectarian rioting in Belfast climaxing with the city’s own ‘Bloody Sunday’ on 10 July. Remarkably, unlike the better known events that bear the same name (in Dublin in 1920 and in Londonderry in 1972), this ‘Bloody Sunday’ barely registers in the ‘public consciousness’ even though it is ‘the bloodiest day in the city’s very long and deeply troubled history’ (p. 260). Blame for Belfast’s Bloody Sunday is often laid at the feet of the I.R.A., beginning with the 9 July ‘Raglan Street ambush’. But ultimate responsibility for the violence is far from clear. The R.I.C. patrol attacked in Raglan Street, according to republicans, was part of a ‘murder gang’ and, according to Ó Ruairc, recent academic research ‘lends some support to these claims’ (pp 280–1). More broadly, the truce itself raised tensions among Ulster unionists fearful of what might come next. Unfortunately, the truce coincided with the annual Twelfth of July celebrations marking the Protestant victory at the 1690 Battle of the Boyne, celebrations often accompanied by sectarian strife. Finally, there was a new presence in the streets of Belfast: the Ulster Special Constabulary, a reserve police force composed of Protestants who feared that the coming of peace might mean the end of their new jobs and, equally important, the loss of their government-issued firearms.

While the Protestant and unionist dimension is vital to understanding Ireland’s history, it is noticeably absent when it comes to depictions of that history on film. This is one of a number of insights found in Mark Donnelly’s The I.R.A. on film and television, the most intriguing of the books reviewed here. By Donnelly’s count, the IRA has featured in more than eighty motion pictures and an equally large number of television shows. This is striking given that its struggle has had ‘few global ramifications’ unlike, say, the Palestine Liberation Organization’s role in Middle East politics. What has assured the I.R.A.’s larger presence on celluloid is Ireland’s connection to ‘the outside world because of the English language and its diaspora’. Donnelly points out that films about the Irish conflict ‘can easily star Irish, American, and British actors’ and attract audiences around the world as, for instance, a film about Basque separatists in Spain cannot (p. 1).

There is, of course, a price for this exposure. As often happens when history meets Hollywood, the facts of twentieth-century Ireland are at best a backdrop for stories whose real focus is personal conflict, action adventure and, even, romance. Interspersed with summaries of Ireland’s history, Donnelly discusses films ranging from classics such as John Ford’s The informer to David Lean’s Ryan’s daughter and Neil Jordan’s The crying game. At the other end of the spectrum are films such as Joseph Merhi’s Riot. In what Donnelly calls ‘a plot worthy of a computer game’, a ‘superhero’ from Britain’s elite Special Air Service must rescue the daughter of the British ambassador in the middle of a Los Angeles riot where he battles renegade I.R.A. bikers who have partnered with black gangs (pp 180–1).

One of Donnelly’s more telling observations is the way in which film makers have drawn a sharp distinction between the pre- and post-Treaty I.R.A.. Stories that take place up to 1922 generally ‘depict Republican militants as brave, rational patriots who use justified and measured violence against a brutal, heavily armed foreign occupier’ (p. 242). Stories that take place afterward, during the Second World War as well as during the 1969–98 conflict in Northern Ireland, take a different approach. In those films the historian Richard English, Donnelly writes, has identified ‘three prevailing cinematic archetypes of the IRA volunteer: the “unredeemed psychopath”, the “unblemished hero”, and the “dilemma-ridden, tortured and solitary individual”’ (p. 244). While one (or more) of these archetypes may make for tidy, easy-to-follow plots, they do little to explain the wider Irish conflict to audiences.

If Ireland’s Protestants and unionists have largely been missing from film depictions of the island’s history so, too, has one man: de Valera. The fact that Donnelly devotes an entire chapter to film depictions of Collins, while references to de Valera are scattered here and there, says a great deal about how the general public has come to view the two men who dominated the Irish revolution. Collins – the dashing, handsome yet ruthless figure; the leader of a spy ring and architect of urban guerrilla warfare; the peacemaker killed by his own people, leaving behind a grieving fiancée and nation – was bound to capture the imagination of film makers. De Valera – cold, calculating, austere – has not fared nearly as well.

Perhaps that is to be expected. Hollywood gives us the history we are willing to pay to see. For modern audiences, inside Ireland and out, the story of the nation’s independence struggle has become the story of Collins. His is the image they want to see. It is no coincidence that in a January 2000 survey Irish respondents voted Collins their ‘man of the century’. The paradox is that the Ireland that emerged from that revolution ultimately was the nation forged by de Valera.