Taoiseach: London government's 'destructive role' prevented any chance of avoiding civil war a century ago 

Taoiseach Micheál Martin: 'For me, the greatest ‘what if’ of the Civil War remains the question of what could have been achieved if Ireland’s leaders had been allowed the time, space, and freedom to prevent conflict.' Picture: Maxwells Dublin

Taoiseach Micheál Martin says the “destructive role” played by the London government in the wake of the Anglo-Irish Treaty prevented any chance of avoiding the civil war 100 years ago.

Writing in the Irish Examiner today, Mr Martin said direct and constant pressure on the provisional government led to many opportunities for compromise being spurned in early 1922, the repudiation of the ‘pact’ and the opening of hostilities.

“For me, the greatest ‘what if’ of the Civil War remains the question of what could have been achieved if Ireland’s leaders had been allowed the time, space, and freedom to prevent conflict,” Mr Martin writes.

He says it is difficult to miss London’s rigid inflexibility in relation to the Treaty and secondly, and most importantly, its constant and ultimately successful push for action against anti-treaty forces.

Mr Martin also says the scale and nature of the state executions was unique — even at a time of conflict in many of the new states of Europe. 

“These executions were often vindictive and they signalled a complete abandonment of the search for reconciliation or an agenda for what would come next,” he writes.

“Equally, within communities, vendettas were often acted on and the unity of previous years lost.”

The militarily decisive part of the conflict was over relatively quickly, so that by August 1922 the survival of the provisional government was not in question.

Yet it is in the following year that we find many of the events which still retain their power to shock.

“The story of our Civil War and its impact is a complex and challenging one. It is not the single event which explains everything which followed — but it is vitally important,” Mr Martin writes.

Referencing Seán Lemass who was only 23 when he finished the Civil War, Mr Martin says for him and his colleagues, the challenge was not how to refight the Civil War it was how to create new possibilities and to never again experience such a war.

The fact that Ireland avoided the catastrophic extremism of the left and right which destroyed so much of Europe during the last century must have a link to this sense of refusing to see the Civil War as a guide to future actions, he says.

Ultimately it is the men and women on both sides of that war who got on with the task of building a successful independent state which could secure Ireland’s place amongst the nations of the world, Mr Martin adds.

“We have many flaws, but only the most partisan can deny that post-Civil War politics succeeded, in the face of extraordinary pressures, in developing not just one of the world’s longest continuous democracies but also a dramatic reversal of a history which had once been defined by poverty and a lack of development,” he added.

He says, one of the great mistakes which can be made in remembering civil wars is to assume that the challenge is to decide ‘who was right’ rather than to try to find new narratives and understandings.

“In truth, in Ireland we have far too often used the Civil War as a single-source explanation for everything which followed — and we have viewed even the most complex issues with an unchanging and limited perspective, Mr Martin adds.