Colette Sheridan on a major record of the conflict and the often-forgotten role of women involved
The Atlas of the Irish Civil War is an impressive, physically heavy and intellectually interesting book, offering new perspectives on this tumultuous period in Ireland’s troubled history. It comprises fifty essays, only four of which are about women in the Civil War. But as a contributor to the book, Trinity College Dublin professor of contemporary Irish History, Lindsey Earner-Byrne points out, the four essays are specifically about women, but women’s activities during the Civil War are referred to throughout the book.
Whether it was as carers to those injured in the Civil War or those acting in intelligence and propaganda, women had a variety of roles.
Lindsey Earner-Byrne’s essay concentrates on family gender in the Civil War
In Lindsey’s essay, The Irish Civil War: Family life, gender and loss, the historian shines a light on matters such as applying for pensions and being judged whether fit or otherwise to receive State aid. For some women widowed in the Irish Civil War, looking for financial aid could be humiliating.
The Military Service Pensions Collection which emerged from the Irish Army Pension Acts from 1923 represented the paperwork of one of the most significant of these early bureaucratic exchanges between State and family, writes Lindsey. (It was also one of the State’s first welfare initiatives.) Some 180,000 files have been digitised.
‘The pension was actually quite modern,’ says Lindsey. ‘It borrowed a lot from pension schemes elsewhere. The State didn’t just give pensions to those that had been active. There was a separate pension for the dependents. Lots of states didn’t do that. On the face of it, it looks like it’s very clear as to what the rules were. But when you actually look at the files, you can see the way attitudes can scupper applications. A woman might apply. You look at the archive where you first of all see the decision. You’re perplexed as to why she didn’t get it. It’s quite clear her husband was killed as part of his activity in the Civil War. And she has nine children or whatever.
‘Then, when you read the files that came from the guards, the priest and the neighbours, you start to see a narrative around the women. She drinks or she’s getting some income from some other place or there’s a question mark over the way she is raising her children, whether they attend school. These things shouldn’t influence whether she gets the pension, but they do.’
Lindsey cites the unfortunate story of Catherine Byrne. In January 1923, she wrote to the minister for defence to intervene in her case. Her eldest son, Private James Byrne had been shot in County Kerry on October 13, 1922 and died later that night in hospital. He had been buried for over three months before Catherine was officially informed.
Catherine, who had been widowed eleven years previously, had to write to the priest who attended to her son. In his letter, the priest said
that James, ‘a most lovable character…gladly forgave those who had so foully done him to death.’ As Lindsey points out, Catherine would have been acutely aware of the biblical reference whereby Jesus forgave those who trespassed against him before being crucified. Was this a way of patronisingly placating the bereft mother?
‘I think people really believed this. These were very devout people. That letter from the priest breaks my heart. Anyone would be moved by it. As somebody who lost a sibling when they were young, I know that the last letter about my brother’s death was something my mother would take to the end.’
James, or ‘Jimmie’ as he was known, was a key support to the widowed Catherine when she was rearing her other three children. While she had worked in a local laundry prior to the death of Jimmie, grief had destroyed her health, and she was unable to work since his death.
Because of this previous employment, she wasn’t considered ‘wholly dependent’ on Jimmie for the purposes of the 1923 legislation. As a result, she didn’t qualify for a pension and only a £60 gratuity was approved. However, on appeal, the army reconsidered and in making its case to the finance department for an increased gratuity, revealed awareness that the grief and trauma of not burying her son had fundamentally broken this woman.
While Catherine’s gratuity was increased to £100, she was not considered eligible for a pension until 1953. (She had re-applied in 1927.)
‘Thus, almost thirty years later, Catherine Byrne had to document her loss all over again for another generation of bureaucrats. On this occasion, however, she had to surrender what must have been one of the most precious documents she possessed: a letter written to her sister by the priest, who had given her son the last rites as he lay dying on a road in Kerry.’
Catherine, who must have been impoverished, lived with her sister in later life. She wasn’t able to enjoy her pension as she died a year after receiving it.
As to why there was the heart-breaking delay in informing Catherine of her son’s death, there was a degree of administrative confusion at the time and often people didn’t hear that their relatives were killed for quite some time.
‘In this case, there were so many James Byrnes that there was confusion. It must have been totally traumatic for Catherine.’
On top of the grief was poverty. ‘I was reading something about Ireland today where it said 50% of Irish children would be living below the poverty line if it wasn’t for welfare transfers. It shows how important state structures are.’
Lindsey says that the State that was forming in Ireland was patriarchal and had a clear class bias. ‘This was a State that didn’t trust the working classes, male or female and it had all those misogynistic ideas about women.’
If Jimmie Byrne was just a number whose death wasn’t officially reported for three months, his mother was a long suffering woman who fell prey to the prejudices of bureaucrats and was instead supposed to be consoled by the trope of an all forgiving Jesus on the cross. Hardly likely to put food on the table….
Atlas of the Irish Civil War is edited by Helene O’Keeffe, John Crowley, Donal Ó Drisceoil, John Borgonovo and Mike Murphy. Published by Cork University Press.
