Interpretations

The Irish War of Independence is traditionally told as a heroic David-and-Goliath struggle, a sort of victory achieved through skirmishes, ambushes, sophisticated spying and all the localised drama of guerrilla warfare. A certain romanticism clings to the popular account, enhanced by veterans’ biographies (such as Dan Breen's My Fight for Irish Freedom[1924]) and the 1997 film, Michael Collins. Even Lyons is not immune – he comments on the ‘stoic’ endurance by the population of a long war that proves that the Irish did not want a quiet life but possessed the ‘impulse to fight, to hold on, to contend with almost insuperable difficulties and almost impossible odds’. He makes the claim that, out of the ashes of war, rose ‘the deathless phoenix of independent nationality’. This claim seems rather inflated.

It is hard to get at some of the real stories for the simple reason that both the British and the Irish governments have been remarkably slow to release documents, presumably because of their great sensitivity. Yet, despite a slow start, inroads have been made to the popular account on several levels. Firstly, the question of whether or not it was actually a war has been articulated. The Irish War of Independence has been so labelled by generations of Irish people enjoying the fruits of free statehood and, from 1949 onwards, republicanism. It was regarded as a necessary step in embarking on the road to full national autonomy.