If we excel at anything in Ireland it is in burying uncomfortable truths. We hide them from ourselves and everyone else – and that was never truer than in the case of the Civil War, a calamity which became immediately shrouded in omertà. Bad things happened – people on all sides knew that – but nobody wanted to talk about it.
A century on, with those who had participated in this defining internecine struggle long since dead, part one of The Silent Civil War (RTÉ One, 9.35pm) explores the conflict – and the memory fog that descended the moment the fighting stopped. This is a gripping story of ordinary people who felt they had to do terrible things, whether to protect the fledgling state or topple it.
But it is also a story of highly selective recollection, with some figures elevated while others are airbrushed out of history. “There is a huge gap in terms of who is memorialised,” Liz Gillis says, one of the historians collecting testimony from the families of those involved in the war for the National Folklore Collection in UCD and the RTÉ Archives. “They are the winners in terms of being memorialised.”
One of the “losers” was Arthur Griffith, founder of the original Sinn Féin, the film argues.
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“Second place was Arthur Griffith,” his grandson Shane Gray says, who contrasts Griffith’s footnote status with the exultation of Michael Collins.
“I always felt that wasn’t fair – wasn’t a true reflection of the roles they both played in history. The fact he [Griffith] died at 51 was a shocking, awful loss to the family. One can only speculate how different history would have been had he lived.”
As anyone who had family involved in the Civil War will know, the conflict was not regarded as an appropriate topic for casual conversation.
“His father gave him a one line answer: ‘I was a soldier, not a politician’,” one man says, whose grandfather took up arms. “He knew from his father’s tone of voice, ‘that’s as much as you’re going to get out of me’. The Civil War is not to be talked about.”
This dirty war knew no limits. Oriel House, the nerve-centre of the new State’s counter-intelligence staff, is likened to Gestapo HQ. “He was never apologetic. He always said that what was done was done,” says one relative of an intelligence officer who had interrogated anti-treaty gunmen.
Drawing a veil over the Civil War does more than merely minimise trauma. It obscures war crimes – and glosses over appalling sexual violence. Across much of Munster, the anti-treaty side ushered in chaos – and women inevitably became the targets in many cases.
“I was ashamed, even though I hadn’t done anything,” Margaret Kennedy says, who suspects three of her grand-uncles were involved in the rape of Eileen Biggs, attacked in her home at Dromineer, near Nenagh, by men in IRA uniforms.
“Mrs Biggs died in 1950 in a psychiatric home. I wanted to pay my respects to this woman,” Kennedy says as she stands over an unmarked grave. “To say sorry, she’s not forgotten. The fact she’s in an unmarked grave might suggest she’s forgotten. She’s not.”
It is a chilling coda to a documentary that acknowledges that, in the short term, burying the truth is an understandable coping mechanism. The powerful argument the film makes is that, in the long run, it is always better to remember than to forget. If you don’t, the deepest wounds will never heal.
RTÉ One, Wednesday, April 26th, 9.35pm-10.35pm
