Silent Civil War: American student's old interview tapes shed light on Irish conflict
Free State soldiers unload guns at Albert Street Railway Station, Cork - shortly after the battle of Douglas during the Irish Civil War in August 1922
Harlan J Strauss acted in Netflix’s House of Cards, amongst other screen performances. He switched to full-time acting after a career working at the Pentagon, acting as an advisor to eight secretaries of defense, including Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. He sat at the table, negotiating over 20 international treaties for the United States government.
Before his time in foreign affairs, Strauss travelled to Ireland in 1972 as a PhD student. He was in his mid-twenties, researching revolutionaries and their motivations. His research took him to the doorstep of James Dillon in Dublin, a giant of Irish politics in the second half of the twentieth century and son of John Dillon, one of Charles Stewart Parnell’s key lieutenants.
“Nobody warned me about him,” says Strauss. “Here I was in his beautiful little house. I knock on the door. He opens it up, and he starts talking. I was thinking, ‘Am I in front of Winston Churchill?’ Here was the orator of the century. He talked to me as if he was talking to a hundred people out there in the Dáil – with such finesse and candour and humour. It was amazing.”
Strauss travelled to Ireland for the fourth section of his PhD at the University of Oregon, having already researched revolutionaries in the American war of independence; Oliver Cromwell’s Britain; and the Russian revolution. (He reckons he was only the second person after prominent pre-Bolshevik leader Alexander Kerensky to pore over the last Tsar’s secret police files which are now kept in the Hoover Library & Archives.)
Strauss wanted to speak with living revolutionaries for his study. He hit on the idea of interviewing survivors from Ireland’s revolutionary years because there so much press coverage at the time about the Troubles in Northern Ireland. He asked himself: “Why not look at their predecessors in the 1920s? There must be some of these old codgers still around.”
The young American fired off letters to academic peers and journalists in Ireland. “Invariably,” he says, “I got back responses, ‘Well, my boy, come to Ireland. Some of my best friends are revolutionaries. I’ll introduce you to all these guys’.”
Strauss travelled to Dublin from the United States with his Philips cassette recorder and a list of targets. Every time he did an interview he asked the interviewee if there was anyone else they would recommend which led to further leads; often they would make the phone call to introduce him. Only one person declined and that was because he was sick.
“Frank Aiken was one of my troubled ones,” says Strauss. “He was one of two people – along with Peadar O’Donnell – who refused to be tape-recorded. He was a little nasty. He was not a kind, generous person. He was a tough guy.”
Others were more forthcoming, including Robert Barton, one of the Treaty signatories, who was in his nineties; Seán MacEntee; John A. Costello; Seán MacBride, Seán Mac Eoin; and Liam Ó Briain.
Strauss went up north, too, to interview Lord Brookeborough, Northern Ireland’s longest serving prime minister when he left office in 1963, and a bête noire of the IRA’s during the War of Independence. “Sir Basil Brooke was a tough, opinionated prejudiced guy, still living in the past,” says Strauss.
Strauss also had a salty interview with Márie Comerford, an Easter Rising veteran and mainstay of Cumann na mBan. He met her the day after interviewing Ernest Blythe, the Blueshirt and long-time managing director of the Abbey Theatre.
“Márie Comerford was really down on Ernest Blythe… arch enemy. Because I had talked to Blythe the day before, I mentioned that. She was really taken aback. He was one of the people that put her into jail during the civil war. She never forgave him.”
The Irish Civil War looms large in Strauss’s trove of interview tapes, which he has donated to Ireland’s National Folklore Collection after carrying them around in a dusty, plastic travel bag for almost half a century. They form a key resource in The Silent Civil War, a two-part documentary series screening on RTÉ television. (See panel.)
One of the aspects that makes Strauss’s tapes so compelling is that he was curious about the psychological make-up of Irish revolutionaries. He wanted to find out why they did what they did, not so much what they did. It meant he asked some very provocative, offbeat questions. He quizzed the former Fianna Fáil government minister Michael Hilliard, for example, about what it was like to be on hunger strike. Hilliard survived 35 days on hunger strike during the civil war.
“Well, it's an extraordinary experience,” said Hilliard. “It's a tremendous experience to have. Your mind gets crystal clear. You live in a sort of ecstasy after about 21 days. You have daydreams and night dreams, the most beautiful dreams. The subconscious mind, I think, begins to operate. I'm not certain. I can't explain it. You recall as if you were looking at a film of what happened to you from the very early days of your life, from your childhood.”
Hillard also described the harrowing physical effects. “They are very depressing. You lose the flesh off your thighs and muscles off your legs. You become a skeleton. There comes a thick-like slimy film on your tongue and throat that you must scrape off every morning. You don't suffer from any desire for food after a portion of the time. You're living off your own substance, but the compensations are these beautiful dreams.”
- The Silent Civil War airs 9.35pm, Wednesday, April 26 on RTÉ One. It will also be available on the RTÉ Player
It’s difficult not to shed a tear watching The Silent Civil War, which is based on oral memories harvested from relatives of participants in the Irish civil war and first-hand testimonies gathered by Harlan J Strauss in the early 1970s. The trauma caused by the atrocities and their silences – and particularly the 77 state-sanctioned executions, some of teenage boys – have left wounds that have carried through generations.
There is a section on a horrifying gang rape in Dromineer, Co Tipperary, following a raid on a house by anti-Treaty rebels in June 1922. While raped over several hours, the husband of 42-year-old Eileen Biggs was held captive in an adjoining room. She died in a Dublin psychiatric home in 1950. The case was reported in Irish newspapers and mentioned in the House of Commons in the 1920s, but slipped from memory until recently.
Margaret Kennedy, a grandniece of some of the men charged in a district court in Nenagh with the gang rape, is interviewed in the documentary. There is a monument to Martin Hogan, the ringleader of the raid on the Biggs house, and a suspect who was never charged with the rape of Eileen Biggs, on Dublin’s Grace Park Road.
The documentary also contains intriguing details. A document captured on Márie Comerford when she was arrested in 1923 contains codewords (“duck” = “a machine gun”; “number of eggs mentioned” = “number of soldiers”, etc.). Arthur Griffith’s only surviving grandson remembers the name of Éamon de Valera was not allowed to be mentioned in his house growing up; he was referred to as “that long string of misery”.
