History: 'No Surrender Here!' - The Civil War Papers of Ernie O'Malley, 1922-1924 Edited by Cormac KH O'Malley and Anne Dolan Lilliput Press, 642pp. €55Where would we students of the Irish revolution be without Ernie O'Malley?
His On Another Man's Woundis hands-down the most evocative memoir of the War of Independence. His frank interviews with fellow veterans are one of the key sources for understanding the history of the IRA. And his career has inspired writing and film-making by Roddy Doyle, John McGahern and Ken Loach.
Not surprisingly, it is O'Malley's persona as a lone gunman and rebel with a cause that has attracted attention, not his actually important stint as an IRA division commander and bureaucrat after the Truce of July 1921. This is the subject of his little-read second volume of autobiography, The Singing Flame, and it is also the period for which his original correspondence still survives. Some of this has been published before, in Prisoners, a neat volume edited by Cormac O'Malley (Ernie's son) and Richard English (who has also written the excellent biography Ernie O'Malley: IRA Intellectual) but it is out of print.
Now we have a second and much more comprehensive collection, edited once again by Cormac O'Malley, this time with Anne Dolan, author of the very fine Commemorating the Irish Civil War. It is a superb production all round, and there is as full an apparatus as one could want, going far beyond index, bibliography and notes. Most of the key IRA executive documents from 1922 are appended, all individuals named in the letters are identified, and three separate introductions have been included, two by the editors, and one by JJ Lee. Frankly, it's just about the best presented collection of letters I've ever seen.
THE BOOK IS divided into three sections, each prefaced with an essay by Dolan to set the scene. Part One takes O'Malley from the command of the 2nd Southern Division against the Tans and British army, onto the anti-Treaty IRA Executive to defend the republic, and into the Four Courts to face the Free State guns as the Civil War began. This is by far the briefest section of the book thanks to a scarcity of material, but there are still some interesting revelations.
In December 1921, when it looked as though the Anglo-Irish talks would break down, the order was sent out to prepare for war, in which case all suspected spies were to be shot within the first 24 hours, an order that would have condemned hundreds to death. From a few days later, we have Liam Lynch's magnificently confused first reaction to the Treaty, the first appearance of the political incoherence that is a recurring feature of these documents. Next comes the hopeless muddle of the anti-Treaty Army Convention, with Tom Barry agitating for a military dictatorship and now-Chief of Staff Lynch arguing for patience. Then, finally, war, and Oscar Traynor's strange order to the Four Courts garrison to surrender.
O'Malley was among those captured, but he managed to escape almost immediately, only to be rewarded with a job he didn't want: Acting Assistant Chief of Staff. This was pure paperwork, annoying to the author but giving us an arresting picture of an organisation crippled from the start. "This apology of a war", O'Malley called it. Such, at least, was the view from Dublin. Lynch, headquartered in the south, remained zanily optimistic throughout, an outlook wedded to his refusal to consider any kind of political option or reality at all. O'Malley was a bit dubious about this purely military perspective, but was almost as apolitical himself. It was a very unselfconscious revolution.
The memo-writing came to an end in November 1922, when O'Malley's Ailesbury Road hideout was located. This allowed for an appropriately big finish to his guerrilla career: a guns-blazing last stand worthy of the Battle of Algiers. The fact that he accidentally shot one of his hosts in the face is a bit Cheneyesque, but honour was restored by his having hit two soldiers, as well as taking seven bullets himself. This sets the stage for the book's final section, his prison correspondence over the next two years.
Here there is genuine self-revelation amidst the misery of his slow convalescence and the grim euphoria of a long hunger strike. Partly this is due to the fact that he was now mostly writing to his quasi-maternal confessors, Sheila Humphreys and Molly Childers. Mrs Childers was also the recipient of O'Malley's first attempt at autobiography, a brief but remarkably raw account of the 1916-21 period that should be required reading for anyone interested in the struggle. Indeed, there is an almost universal quality to it - one could imagine a young Russian revolutionary of the 1870s, or his Chinese counterpart in the 1930s, writing in much the same way about their encounters with those they were supposedly liberating: "fighting was easy compared with that awful, soul-numbing, uphill fight against one's people's ignorance and prejudice".
Not that the letters ever succumb to bitterness, however. What emerges instead is something of a testament to republican idealism, self-sacrifice and solidarity, as exemplified by that most noble of stalwarts, Bob Barton, who nursed O'Malley through the worst of his travails. So here is another experience shared by rebels in many times and places: years of suffering are at least as likely to sustain them as break them. I dare say there are a few O'Malleys in Abu Ghraib and Bagram Air Base prisons as we speak.
Peter Hart holds the Canada research Chair in Irish studies at Memorial University of Newfoundland. He is currently working on a collection of Michael Collins's letters