Donal Hall and Martin Maguire's edited volume is the first dedicated study of County Louth during the Irish Revolution. Louth is not unique in suffering such neglect but makes for a fascinating subject as a case study. Ireland's smallest county was not like west Cork, or Dublin, or Belfast, but was still relatively – and perhaps surprisingly – violent, as the burning of three premises in Dundalk and resulting death of three young dressmakers makes clear.
The local branch of the Ulster Bank, Thomas Craig's department store, and McGorisk's grocery and wine merchants were all destroyed. The three victims were Protestants, as was their employer, Craig. Conor McNamara's chapter in this volume must, therefore, engage with the nature of violence and sectarianism during the revolution in Louth. While nothing on the scale of the rioting, burning, and shooting in Belfast ever took hold in Louth, for McNamara the Dáil-authorised boycott of Belfast goods allowed for the expression of ‘popular resentment’ (p. 210) against Protestants to emerge; the burning in Dundalk was an extreme, if unusual, example of this.
Louth is of additional interest – particularly in the current climate – as a southern border county. McNamara and others go beyond the traditional county boundary to emphasise the impact of sectarian conflict in south Armagh on the revolution in Louth. Border or no border, north Louth in particular could not hope to remain totally detached from tit-for-tat violence occurring a relatively short distance away. Indeed, the commandant of the I.R.A.’s Fourth Northern Division, Frank Aiken, appears regularly throughout the book. The formation of the Ulster Special Constabulary and the formalisation of the border forced militants like Aiken to use Louth as a base for cross-border attacks aimed at destabilising the new northern government. The Great Northern Railway, serving Dublin and Belfast with workshops in Dundalk, crossed the border seventeen times. The company was disrupted and financially impacted by strikes and attacks on staff and infrastructure, but it was, interestingly, as Peter Rigney suggests, the advance of road transportation that ultimately served as the rail network's biggest threat.
The county study remains a popular approach for scholars of this period and there is plenty of reason for this, particularly given the range and depth of available source material (this is, after all, a remarkably well-documented revolution). But it also has its weaknesses. Contributors to this volume work hard to address one of these weaknesses and succeed in avoiding a narrow study devoid of the wider, national context. In many respects, Louth emerges here as unremarkable in comparison to other parts of the country. The balance between the local and the national is, however, a difficult one to get right. At times, the national narrative dominates a little too much, leaving the reader yearning for more of the intimate, the local, and the unique.
Another potential pitfall is avoided with a pleasingly wide range of contributions going beyond burnings, ambushes, and assassinations. Donal Hall opens the volume with a survey of local and national politics. Fiona Fearon demonstrates how in a place like Dundalk, where an impressive range and diversity of theatrical performances were on offer to local enthusiasts, the stage served as a vehicle to convey nationalist sentiment or to condemn perceived challenges to it. Ailbhe Rogers documents the efforts of republican women in the county, while women from the unionist tradition feature in Jean Young's chapter on the occupants of Louth's big houses. The fascinating diary of Vera Bellingham, who lived in Dunany House on the Bellingham estate, is a fine example of the treasures lying in private collections around the country. Those who might, to varying degrees, be considered losers of the revolution are found in Martin Maguire's study of labour and Brendan McAvinue's chapter on the Royal Irish Constabulary. William McQuillan, the subject of a chapter by his relative John McCullen, might be seen as another. Having been seemingly incorrectly incarcerated after the Easter Rising in 1916, McQuillan left Ireland and his family for Australia in 1922 after an altercation with two sons who had been, as it was put, away for a few days ‘on manoeuvres’ (p. 188).
In comparison to the earlier War of Independence (1919–21), the historiography of the Civil War that followed the Anglo–Irish Treaty remains underdeveloped. This volume offers valuable local studies of that conflict for Drogheda by Mal Martin and Dundalk by Don Johnston. Johnston's chapter is appended by the intriguing case of Charles Gyles, unusual as a Protestant, ex-serviceman and recruit to the provisional government's National Army in 1922. Gyles was shot dead on 30 November 1922. The letters sent by his family to government and military authorities seeking the identification and prosecution of the killers serve as another reminder of the traumatic personal and familial consequences of violence in this period.
The final two chapters are the result of diligent local research. Lorraine McCann outlines how the careful use of recently released military service pension applications and other sources has allowed for the compilation of a roll of honour for the Louth volunteers who mobilised during the Easter Rising (one of the few places outside of Dublin where a mobilization took place). Seamus Bellew offers a broad survey of commemorative plaques and monuments located in the county, including two plaques offered in thanksgiving to the successful efforts to resist conscription in 1918. Hall and Maguire have put together an interesting and valuable contribution to the historiography that will be of interest to natives of Louth and scholars alike. This reader looks forward to the publication of more work on the county by its contributors.
