“Irish History Unidealised”: The Politics of Republican Memoir and Narratives of the Defeated and Defiant

Abstract

This chapter examines some of the recent memoir-writing of Irish republican ‘dissenters’, and compares these accounts, their motivations and purposes, with memoirs from an earlier generation of ‘defeated’ republicans; namely, those who fought on the losing side in the Irish civil war of 1922–1923. Specifically, the focus will be upon the memoir-writing of Richard O’Rawe and Ernie O’Malley. The argument pursued here is not that the situation facing the contemporary divided Irish republican ‘family’ is precisely comparable with the civil war generation of the early 1920s. But, for the defeated in both cases, the bitter legacies of conflict and alienation from the ‘post-conflict’ political dispensation were long-lasting, and they have subsequently been transmitted from one generation to the next. The chapter argues that memoir-writing may be understood as a continuation of the ‘discursive war’ in a post-civil war environment.

The quotation is taken from a letter by Ernie O’Malley to Sheila Humphreys, written whilst he was in Mountjoy jail in April 1923, in which he laments the Irish people’s “very mistaken idea” of their resistance to England. O’Malley argues that “really since’98 [the 1798 United Irishmen rebellion] there has been nothing done worth talking about, much less writing about.” He envisages that “our contemplated book, Irish History Unidealised, will bring our people to a sense of reality.” See R. English and C.O’Malley (eds.), Prisoners, pp. 36–37.