Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd

Commemorating the Irish Civil War: History and Memory, 1923-2000 by Anne DolanReview by: Mary E. DalyIrish Historical Studies, Vol. 34, No. 133 (May, 2004), pp. 107-108Published by: Irish Historical Studies Publications LtdStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30008663 .

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Reviews and short notices 107

COMMEMORATING THE IRISH CIVIL WAR: HISTORY AND MEMORY, 1923-2000. By Anne Dolan. Pp xii, 238, illus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2003. £45.

ACCORDING to Anne Dolan, 'The memory of the Irish Civil War has been assumed, distorted, misunderstood. It has been manipulated, underestimated, but most of all, ignored' (p. 2). However, this book offers only partial redress for this neglect, because it concentrates on how the victors of the Civil War remembered their dead. There are chapters on the Cenotaph on Leinster Lawn, on Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith, and the rank-and-file soldiers of the Irish Free State who died in the Civil War, but only passing references to Harry Boland, Erskine Childers, Liam Lynch, Ballyseedy, and how the losing side in the Civil War commemorated their dead. Dr Dolan claims that they were better served by the National Graves Association than their victorious former comrades were by the Irish state, for which they had died, but we have to take this on trust because we are given almost no supporting evidence.

One of the most arresting pieces of information in this challenging work is that the Irish Free State contributed £50,000 towards the cost of the Irish National War Memorial at Islandbridge (which commemorates Irish soldiers who died in the 1914-18 war), but spent only £5,000 on the Cenotaph erected on Leinster Lawn to the memory of Collins and Griffith. This sorry memorial - a rather ungainly Celtic cross made of wood and plaster and covered in cement, with medallions showing profiles of Griffith and Collins - was unveiled on 11 August 1923; by the following December it was already showing signs of decay. In 1927 the annual Cenotaph ceremony was expanded to include the assassinated Kevin O'Higgins, and an O'Higgins medallion was added in 1928. Although the Cenotaph was intended only as a temporary monument, the Cumann na nGaedheal government lacked either the will or the finances to replace it with a more permanent memorial, yet in 1929 they voted £50,000 for the war memorial at Islandbridge. When Fianna Fail came to office in 1932 the official commemoration was abandoned, but the temporary Cenotaph remained in place, though becoming increasingly decrepit. In 1939 de Valera approved the design for a modest replacement, costing £2,700, but the Department of Defence vetoed work on the memorial during the Emergency, and in 1947 de Valera's government determined to change the design from a Celtic cross to an obelisk. The sixty-foot granite obelisk, erected on Leinster Lawn in 1950, follows the model of its predecessor in having medallions commemorating Griffith, Collins and O'Higgins, but as it is railed off from the public, few people have ever seen these, and I suspect that most passers-by are unaware of its origins.

Anne Dolan puts the story of the Cenotaph at the centre of her book. It is an appropriate example of the ambiguities and contradictions in the commemoration (or non- commemoration) of the Civil War: Cumann na nGaedheal's unwillingness to sanction a permanent cenotaph; the abandonment of the annual ceremony by Fianna Fail, yet their sanctioning of a permanent memorial to those who had defeated them; the refusal of the widow of Arthur Griffith to take part in the ceremony; John A. Costello's efforts to link the unveiling of the obelisk in 1950 with the declaration of a republic, reuniting Griffith and Collins with the republican tradition.

One of the reasons for the pro-treaty unease with the commemoration of the Civil War, according to Dr Dolan, is the fact that these men 'had not died for the republic and so the doors of the republican pantheon remained closed'; 'they were perceived as fighting to compromise the republic' (p. 145). She asks: 'Does civil war, by its very nature demand silence?' (p. 4). In 1925 Richard Mulcahy tried to persuade demobilised members of the national army in Wexford to erect a planned memorial to fallen comrades in a local cemetery, rather than at the roadside in Ferrycarrig where they had died: 'Personally, I very much dislike the idea ... erecting a monument at the site of an ambush between Irishmen'; he suggested that the memorial 'should be made a purely religious matter' (pp 122-3). This is one of many examples cited in the book where the wishes of veterans of the national army or the families of soldiers who had died during the Civil War were

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108 Irish Historical Studies

overridden by the Cumann na nGaedheal government. Dr Dolan's sympathies are with the common soldiers and their families. She excoriates the Cumann na nGaedheal leadership for their rejection of these men, suggesting that it was a major factor in the formation of the Army Comrades' Association in 1932 and the association's efforts to present those who died on the pro-treaty side as part of the republican tradition dating back to the Fenians or 1798.

In many ways the underlying topic of this book is not the Civil War, but the Anglo-Irish treaty and the subsequent evolution of the Irish Free State. This is especially evident in the discussion of the memory of Arthur Griffith, described by Dolan as 'the forgotten President'. Although Griffith died during the Civil War, he died as a result of illness, not in battle, and his posthumous commemoration whether by Cumann na nGaedheal or Fianna Fdil was closely bound up with economic policies and constitutional developments; this is even truer of Kevin O'Higgins, the third person commemorated by the Cenotaph: 'because in many ways his death was an act of civil war. It was a threat from within.' (p. 33)

This book makes considerable demands on its readers; it presumes, for example, that they are familiar with what is meant by 'the notorious Kerry Command', or with the career of Tom Kehoe, or Ballyseedy, and many details in the history of independent Ireland. I also suspect that the story told in these pages will become more intelligible when it is complemented by studies of the commemoration of other landmark events in the history of twentieth-century Ireland: the Easter Rising, the Anglo-Irish War, and the republican endeavour in the Civil War. Anne Dolan has opened up a new historical debate; it is now up to others to follow.

MARY E. DALY School of History, University College Dublin

THE BIRTH OF SOCIAL WELFARE m IRELAND, 1922-1952. By Mel Cousins. Pp 214. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 2003. £55.

THE publication of this survey marks the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of a unified system of social welfare under the Social Welfare Act, 1952. Marks, rather than celebrates, since the author argues that the act, while providing a basis for the future expansion of the social services, represented a 'failure of politics', necessitated by public demand following the introduction of the British welfare state, but in itself pleasing no one. It also marked a landmark in the ongoing contraction of debate on social policy from the relatively inclusive consultation process favoured by Cumann na nGaedheal, through Fianna Fiil's preference for interdepartmental committees, to reliance on intradepartmental processes with the establishment of the Department of Social Welfare in 1947.

The 1952 act, as the basis for the current Irish social welfare system, is the central focus of the study, but its main purpose is to provide a survey of the gestation of the act. Beginning with an overview of the income maintenance systems inherited by the new state, it proceeds to chart the administration of these schemes under Cumann na nGaedheal, Fianna Fdil and the inter-party governments, and the evolution of such new developments as the introduction of children's allowances in 1944. Based mainly on archival research, The birth of social welfare in Ireland offers a valuable insight into the process of policy-making and the interaction between party politics, socio-economic constraints and interdepartmental rivalry.

The absence of a comprehensive survey of income maintenance schemes, comparable to Ruth Barrington's treatment of health policy in Health, medicine and politics in Ireland, 1900-1970 (1987) or Mary E. Daly's study of local government in The buffer state: the historical roots of the Department of the Environment (1997) has been a grievous

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