Analysis: as the decade of remembering Ireland's revolutionary years draws to a close, there is much to reflect on from the centenary events
One hundred years ago, Ireland's identity, society, politics and global position were completely reshaped during what was broadly defined as the Revolutionary Period of 1913 to 1923. A century on from those events, we are still looking at that past, understanding, remembering and crucially acknowledging many facets for the first time. As we look forward beyond 2023, what will be the legacies of the Decade of Centenaries?
A decade-long programme of national and local events explored and engaged with various aspects of the political and social events of 1913 to 1923. The work of historians, archivists, librarians, curators, artists, and others across communities, all working on dedicated projects and research in the last ten years, is arguably one of the largest prolonged and focused periods of engagement and introspection with the nation’s history since the foundation of the state.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Today With Claire Byrne, Prof Diarmuid Ferriter from UCD on what we've learnt from looking back over the course of the Decade of Centenaries
Numerous commemorative and centenary events connected the public to the events, people, sources, and experiences of a century ago. These ranged from the largescale (the 1916 commemoration on Dublin’s O’Connell Street in April 2016) to the controversial (the proposal to commemorate the members of the Royal Irish Constabulary and the Dublin Metropolitan Police, which also encompassed the recruitment of the Black and Tans and Axillaries), to the unexpected (Michael Collins’ wolf slippers).
The Beyond 2022 project was a landmark achievement within the Decade of Centenaries and was a largescale collaborative project to create Ireland’s Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland. The original record treasury was located at the Four Courts in Dublin, and was destroyed under shelling in one of the first acts of the Civil War in June 1922.
The treasury was digitally reconstructed using 3-D modelling, with many of the related documents still bearing the scars of explosion a century ago. While losing so much of our sense of our past was a cruel opening salvo of a bitter civil war, consolidating a record of what was lost as well as what survived the Four Courts shelling means a greater sense of our nation’s archival heritage is now apparent today.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Arena, how the Beyond 2022 project recreated the lost records from the Four Courts
A pivot-point event within the Decade is best recognised by the name of the document it produced: the Treaty. Signed on December 6th 1921, the Anglo-Irish Treaty (or 'Articles of Association’) established a new state, the Irish Free State, in line with the many new European states which emerged in the wake of World War I.
The document was the centrepiece final exhibit item of The Treaty, 1921: Records from the Archives, part of a major exhibition hosted at Dublin Castle by the National Archives of Ireland. The exhibition later toured to a number of locations around Ireland, telling the story of the events, talks, and negotiations leading up to the signing of the Treaty in 1921.
The Machnamh 100 series of seminars was an initiative of President Michael D. Higgins which brought together leading scholars and thinkers to examine and reflect on the events, contexts, concepts, and legacies of key events of the period. Events held by local authority libraries, archives, museums and others showcased the public interest and local legacies of the centenaries. Community-led projects, such as oral history projects and writers, historians and artists-in-residence, brought events to local schools and communities around the country.
The Decade of Centenaries on stage
In 2022, ANU Productions staged a performance of the Treaty debates as part of Staging the Treaty which was live-broadcast online and also before a live audience at Earlsfort Terrace. DruidO'Casey directed by Garry Hynes and staged by Druid Theatre Company, presented an epic staging of Sean O'Casey’s Dublin Trilogy, through its critique of war and of social depravation of the working classes during the revolutionary period.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Arena, a special show to mark Druid Theatre's production of Sean O'Casey's Dublin trilogy of plays
The often haggard life of the city’s tenement poor is mirrored starkly in the failure of both pre- and post-Independence Ireland to care for the most vulnerable in society. Mollser, the young consumptive girl, pale in the throes of death that we meet in The Plough and the Stars, asks perhaps the most pressing question from that time: "Is there anybody goin’, Mrs. Clitheroe, with a titther o’ sense?".
One of the most important legacies of this period will be the writing into history and recovering of the record and extent of violence perpetrated against women during the revolutionary period. Mary McAuliffe, Lindsey Earner-Byrne, Linda Connolly and others have published in recent years on the use of hair cropping and targeted sexual violence against women.
As Connolly has outlined, "serious and destructive forms of violence perpetrated against women during this phase of Ireland’s revolution certainly disappeared from public discourse for decades after the Civil War ended". Research by Síobhra Aiken has also taken the myth of silence around the Civil War to task in investigating the ‘spiritual wounds’, trauma and written memory and testimony of the civil war period.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's History Show, Commandant Daniel Ayiotis talks about his book The Military Archives: A History.
The mass digitisation of records from the Irish Military Archives and the Bureau of Military History Collection, comprising over 1,700 witness statements, and the Military Service Pensions Collection ensures that the archives of Ireland’s revolution are one of the most documented and most freely accessible revolutionary archives in the world.
But key questions still linger about memory in the Irish state. What is remembered? How are archives made accessible and what gaps in the national record still remain? As recent reports and investigations have shown, there are important records to which there is still no access by the general public.
Records associated with Commissions of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes and Magdalene Laundries, for example, are sealed to the public. Legislation such as the Retention of Records Bill 2019, with the remit to close records of the Ryan Commission and related redress boards, was quickly drafted but equally as quickly paused and lapsed. As archivist and historian Catriona Crowe has argued, there needs to be greater transparency and access by Religious orders pertaining to the records they hold.
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A new issue of Irish Archives journal, published by the Irish Society for Archives, includes a series of new essays, articles, and reviews by historians, archivists and librarians, reflecting on the work undertaken into our national records and memory over the past ten years.
As is outlined in the journal, if a singular legacy is possible to identify from the Decade then let it be what can be achieved when investment, resources, ambition, and collaboration are allocated to our national history and in preventing another ‘Four Courts’ of loss to our documented records. We need not wait for a centenary anniversary in order to act in defence of our archives, history, and national memory.
Sources and Legacies of the Decade of Centenaries, Volume 28 of Irish Archives journal, edited by Dr. Barry Houlihan, is published by the Irish Society for Archives and supported by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media under the Decade of Centenaries Programme 2012-2023.
Ireland 100: An Old Song Resung takes place at Dublin's RDS on October 7th to mark 100 years of the Irish State as part of the Decade of Centenaries Programme 2012-2023. The concert will be broadcast on RTÉ One, RTÉ Radio 1 and RTÉ Player on Bank Holiday Monday, October 30th.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
