The Irish Civil War: Politics by other means
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The Irish Civil War Fatalities Project is the first systematic attempt to investigate the number of people killed during this seismic period of our history.
Killing and death are central elements in warfare providing an indicator of violence which is easier to measure relative to other forms of violence since it is usually recorded in compensation claims, death certs, commemorative sites, newspapers, gravestones, military pension files and research already undertaken by historians.
The intention of the digital mapping project, which details all of the combatant and civilian fatalities, was to leave a commemorative legacy, while also contributing to advancing the academic analysis of the conflict.
Conducted in the Schools of History and Geography at UCC, it aimed to identify all conflict-related deaths from the beginning of the Civil War on June 28, 1922, (when the National Army opened the attack on anti-treaty forces occupying the Four Courts in Dublin) until the ‘dump arms order’ by the anti-treaty IRA on May 24, 1923.
Within this time frame, a total of 1485 fatalities were identified across the 32 counties of which 371 were civilians, 638 were National Army and 429 were IRA.
Dublin was the county with the highest number of fatalities accounting for 260 in total, while Cork was the second-highest with 215.
But these counties had particularly large populations relative to the rest of the country; when we adjust for population it transpires that Kerry was by far the most violent county, and it was this county which witnessed the most significant anti-treaty resistance, in addition to many of the worst atrocities of the conflict.
The project defines the Irish Civil War as an intra-nationalist conflict and as such it focused to a greater degree on the 26 counties which became the Irish Free State. However, we also examined and mapped conflict-related deaths in Northern Ireland in the same time frame, but this starkly revealed that fatalities here followed a fundamentally different pattern accounting for merely 59 deaths out of the total.
There was only one National Army death in Northern Ireland, who had been wounded across the border. This all reveals that the Irish Civil War was largely fought in the 26 counties on the issue as to who had the right to govern the nascent state. More northerners actually fought and died south of the border, particularly on the pro-treaty side than in Northern Ireland.
July and August 1922 marked the peak months for total fatalities. While the battle for the Four Courts had a relatively low level of fatalities, the wider battle for Dublin down to the July 7, 1922 was costly; we have logged over 70 fatalities in this and something approaching half of these were civilians, making it the single most lethal episode in the entire conflict for both combatants and civilians.
Following this dramatic beginning, during which the National Army quickly subdued anti-treaty resistance in the capital, the primary theatre switched to Munster. This was a far more difficult assignment for pro-treaty forces since the province constituted the major stronghold of the anti-treaty IRA.
The great majority of the Munster IRA had opposed the treaty from the outset, so crushing this opposition was a paramount military objective to consolidate the authority of the new regime.
Major defeats in the short-lived battles for the cities of Limerick and Waterford, which both fell into Free State hands on July 21, 1922, starkly revealed that the anti-treaty IRA was no match for the National Army in conventional urban warfare, notably in contexts where artillery could be deployed.
The superior military leadership of the National Army in tactical terms began to surface during a series of amphibious landings between Kerry and Cork, which opened up two fronts for the anti-treaty IRA, with which it struggled to cope.
A considerable advantage of going by sea was that this route could not be contested in any way, except at the point of landing, and since this was in the hands of the National Army, the anti-treaty IRA were at a major disadvantage, as several new fronts emerged.
The landings and subsequent battles in Passage (in Cork) and Fenit (in Kerry) and the battles for Limerick and Waterford were collectively the most lethal military engagements in Munster in terms of lives lost, all taking place in the conventional phase.
While it is often assumed that the end of the ‘conventional’ phase of the conflict in August 1922 marked the end of major combat, our figures tell another story. Fatalities remained high in the autumn and early winter of 1922 as the IRA, having been driven from fixed positions, resorted to more familiar guerrilla tactics.
This period, from September to the end of November 1922 accounted for over one third of National Army fatalities for the entire conflict and they lost much of the momentum achieved during the opening months.
National Army losses began to fall in the winter of 1922, which the new regime could point to as a justification for the more repressive approach taken from November, when the growing Free State Army began a more aggressive campaign against the guerrillas, whose ranks were progressively depleted by incarceration in particular.
The fact that executions increased as overall violence declined reflected an important development. The Republicans had switched to non-combat tactics such as burning the houses of Free State supporters and the destruction of communications infrastructure.
The Munster counties of Cork, Tipperary, Kerry and Limerick, combined with Dublin, were the primary arenas of the conflict.
Secondary centres in the West, in counties Sligo, Mayo and Galway, in addition to Wexford, Louth and Kildare in Leinster collectively demonstrate a distribution of fatalities which very strongly correlates with areas where the IRA was mostly anti-Treaty.
Counties such as Clare and Longford in contrast, where the IRA was mostly pro-Treaty, were far more quiet.
The vast majority of deaths were inflicted by gunshot (from rifles, revolvers and machine guns), but explosives, mostly in the form of improvised explosives or ‘mines’, and to a lesser extent artillery and grenades, also featured.
Apart from combat, most pro-Treaty deaths were the result of accidents, which took an alarmingly high toll on National Army soldiers.
Firearms, explosives or motor accidents and ‘friendly fire’, collectively accounted for something approaching a third of pro-Treaty fatalities.
Anti-Treaty IRA volunteers were less prone to accidents than their opponents, presumably because they had fewer weapons, explosives and transport at their disposal.
The figures generated by this project reveal that fatalities between June 1922 and May 1923 were somewhat lower than during the War of Independence. So even allowing for further deaths in the prelude and aftermath, the Irish Civil War was by no means more terrible than what had gone before.
One of the interesting findings were some differences in the social backgrounds of combatant victims. On average the National Army came from poorer backgrounds than the anti-treaty side.
Pro-treaty forces could more justifiably claim the title ‘the men of no property’, who signed up with the National Army for a wage. Far more from Dublin died in the National Army than in the IRA.
In Kerry, the reverse was the case. The anti-treaty perception in Munster was that the invading National Army was made up largely of ex-British soldiers from Dublin in particular who had fought under the Union Jack during the First World War.
This gave rise to the pejorative term ‘Jackeens’ for Dubliners which has proved an enduring linguistic legacy of civil war divisions.
One of the defining features of the Irish Civil War was the relatively low level of civilian fatalities; over three-quarters of fatalities in the 26 counties were combatants.
In a wider European comparative context, the Irish Civil War lacked a strong class dimension, while ethno-religious divisions were not a significant aspect of the conflict in the 26 counties, where it was largely fought.
It therefore lacked the intensity of violence in much of eastern Europe and Russia in these years, or even in the civil war in Finland.
But it was more in terms of timing than intensity that Irish civil war violence needs be contextualised within the wider wave of political violence experienced across Continental Europe in the aftermath of the First World War.
So what relevance does this have today? It is often said that Civil War is simply politics by other means. Conversely, it might equally be said in the Irish case that politics is civil war by other means.
At the last general election, the three largest political parties which took the great bulk of the votes, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Sinn Féin all trace their republican origins back to pre-treaty Sinn Féin.
Elections in the Republic of Ireland, a century later, are still largely about which descendant/s of pre-treaty Sinn Féin should govern the country, revealing the continued salience of civil war divisions.
- Andy Bielenberg, principal investigator of the Irish Civil War Fatalities Project and senior lecturer at UCC School of History