Mick Clifford: Sinn Féin’s distortions conveniently ignore big truths about the Civil War

The party no longer espouses the socialist republic for which the provisional movement killed so many — but it needs to take ownership of its own history

The Ballyseedy monument is a memorial to the Republican insurgents executed by Free State forces at Ballyseedy, on the Tralee to Cork Road just outside of Tralee.

WHEN asked in 1969 about his reflections on the Civil War nearly 50 years earlier, Sean Lemass replied: “Terrible things were done on both sides, I’d prefer not to talk about it.”

Lemass had fought on the anti-treaty side during the conflict. In 1923, after the guns had fallen silent, his brother Noel was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by Free State elements.