I clearly remember the first time I read Tom Barry's IRA memoir, Guerilla Days in Ireland. It possessed all the arresting qualities of the rebel-told tale, with sincere and courageous patriots fighting an oppressive empire in a story of adventure, heroism and loss.
The two books reviewed here both consider those revolutionary escapades of Barry and his IRA comrades. Meda Ryan's fascinating biography, Tom Barry: IRA Freedom Fighter, demonstrates her considerable and detailed knowledge concerning the famous Cork republican. It also reflects her profound sympathy and respect for the man about whom she writes. She refers to Barry's "greatness" and to his "genius as a commander", and in chronicling his intriguing life she produces many valuable details for the reader.
She also takes issue on numerous occasions with Prof Peter Hart, author in 1998 of a brilliant and pioneering study of the Cork IRA. Hart's new book, The IRA at War 1916-1923, is a superb collection of essays about the Irish revolution, and it begins by asking some very important questions. Why, for example, was the 1916-23 revolution so violent? Why were the IRA much stronger in some parts of Ireland than in others? Is it appropriate to describe the IRA of these years as terrorists? Were Protestants ethnically cleansed from southern Ireland during this bloody era?
These and other questions are then systematically addressed in 10 essays which reflect truly formidable research (often involving systematically acquired statistical data). The book concentrates on revolutionary "violence, its practitioners, and its victims", and, as in Hart's previous work, victims are rightly central to his analysis. As a consequence, the book disposes of too romantic a reading of this troubled era. It coolly shows, for example, that the majority of the Irish revolution's victims did not die in military combat. Instead, the unpalatable fact is that (as in the recent Northern Ireland troubles) most revolutionary victims were civilians, non-combatants. So the Irish revolution tended not, in general, to be a story of brave combat between military forces, but rather something far more cruel and vicious: people tended to be attacked (by all sides) "while defenceless, alone, or in small groups".
Hart's book is shrewdly attentive to local variation, and it deals with the revolution north and south: "The revolution happened all over Ireland, and explanations of why and how must be applied in the same way".
Since he explores a wide range of categories of possible explanation and motivation (class, gender, ethnicity, religion, and so on), Hart's conclusions do subvert some comforting self-images, with orthodox readings - whether nationalist or unionist - relentlessly subjected to rigorous scrutiny. If ideologically neat explanations for events "fail to meet empirical and logical tests", Hart argues, "they should be discarded". Quite so. Thus the revolution appears in these pages not just as a national war of liberation against Britain, but rather as a series of overlapping conflicts.
Yes, there was conflict between Irish republicans and Britain; but also between rival ethnic groups in Ireland; between in-group and out-group within local communities; and between rival brands of Irish nationalists. To ignore any of these kinds of violence is to limit our understanding of what the revolution actually involved.
The tremendously impressive range of sources consulted by Hart, together with the cold clarity of his historical analysis, make this a book of great importance. Tested against the data presented in Hart's book, Tom Barry's own arguments certainly fray in key places. In her impressive biography, Meda Ryan cites Barry's claim that the descent into violence in the revolution was one in which "it was the British who set the pace". But, as Peter Hart's exhaustively researched figures convincingly show, it was the rebels who were responsible (rightly or wrongly) for initiating the violence which prompted escalation. The cold evidence shows this to be the case in 1916, but also with the onset of the War of Independence in 1919.
In another fascinating quotation deployed in Ryan's biography, Barry talks of the republican people and their reason to fight: "There were families who were very poor. When we went into some of these houses, it was painful to see these people, without shoes, with scanty clothing in the freezing cold, with little to eat".
Yet, Hart's research unambiguously demonstrates that the IRA and other militant republicans were in fact drawn from all classes, not particularly from the poor. If there were social groups which did make a disproportionate contribution to the republican struggle in these years, then Hart shows that such groups were not the poorest in society, but rather skilled tradesmen and artisans, and clerks or shop assistants.
Prof Hart argues that we should read the years of the Irish revolution through the lenses, not of partisan ideology, but rather of deep research, comparative analysis and honest interrogation. The results, as evident in his excellent book, are complex and sometimes disturbing. Much of the violence of this period was carried out against (often defenceless) minority groups within one's community: northern Catholics, southern Protestants, ex-soldiers, tramps, and other marginal people. Much, though by no means all, of this brutal violence was carried out by the IRA. Meda Ryan's biography suggests that Tom Barry should be seen as a "true patriot".
This seems entirely fair to me. But it is important, as Peter Hart powerfully reminds us, to recognize that true patriotism possesses its own dark colours.
Richard English is professor of politics at Queen's University, Belfast.