Over 200, 000 Irishmen and women enlisted in the Great War, 1914-18. Over 35, 000 were killed, including Jack Coleman, my mother’s uncle. This is something I only found out about in the last couple of weeks, and something I plan on researching more. His sister married a British soldier, Jack Moore and was somewhat ostracized from the family for doing so, whilst his brother, Jim “Pops” Coleman, my grandfather, was a member of the Mullingar Batallion of the old IRA.
Irish family histories are often steeped in rumour and heresay; positive discrimination when it comes to involvement in the War of Independence, mixed discrimination when it comes to the Civil War, and often ignorance when it comes to the Great War or WWII.
I came across the above pictures a week or so ago on the dublin.ie forum, a stained glass window in Cathal Brugha Barracks dedicated to the memory of the 16th Irish Division. It was from looking at this that my mother started talking about the family history so I thought it was worth sticking these up here.
Credit to Breener for the images.
Click on the book for more.
Click on the book for more.
Donal
Ciarán
Sam
Come Here To Me! 
People seemingly indulged in a kind of omerta no matter who was involved or in what way. One of my cousins was told by her grandmother that part of the reason was the belief that “loose talk cost lives”. In a small city like Dublin you couldn’t be sure who you were talking to in a pub or a shop or you job. You wouldn’t know who’d had a relative in the British Army or the IRA or which political stripe they might have been.The older aunts and uncles who were in the middle of it in some cases, or born only a few years after 1916 never talked about it when I was a god forbid.
It’s only in the last few years I’ve discovered one of my fathers cousins was shot in Capel street by “Republican Police”. Another was shot in Croke park. Another was a Captain who is supposed to have fought with Michael Collins. On the mothers side her mother ran past the British Army barricade at the end of Moore street to get a midwife. None of this was ever talked about and only snippets emerged as time went on. The only constant I detected overall was an attitude that’s best summed up by the expression “this kip” (in reference to Ireland in general). Funny enough that’s the remark I hear most now as well for the present generation.
excellent stuff there, my grandfather and granduncle, irish speakers from the aran islands, were in the connaught rangers. never talked about it much, though. Sad
Similar story here – any time my da ever tried raising the War of Independence / Civil War with his father, the conversation would be killed with “I was a soldier not a politician”, so he grew up knowing nothing other than that his father had been in the IRA in Belfast at the start of the pogrom, interned in the Curragh from which he escaped (supposedly in a refuse cart), then in the FS Army in Donegal in the Civil War.
I started digging last year and came up with loads – my granda had been Brigade Adjutant in Belfast, then was sent to Co. Antrim as a fulltime IRA organiser, then became O/C of the Antrim Brigade (my da’s reaction: “You mean I’m descended from the officer class? Well maybe now I’ll get the respect around here that I deserve.”)
The escape from the Curragh part was all true – the Curragh Military Museum put me in touch with an officer in today’s Defence Forces whose grandfather was the man who escaped with my granda.
The Donegal part was the hairiest and what he went through there probably explained his later silence. Too much to go into here, but let’s just say, Peadar O’Donnell wasn’t a fan.
While I was running around unearthing all this, my mum chipped in one day with the fact that – again, completely unknown to me – her uncle was one of “The Boys of Kilmichael”, as in Tom Barry, Auxies, etc. She’d never mentioned it before as she grew up being told it wasn’t talked about.
The final smashing of the last bit of my granda’s omerta came one night when my brother, my parents and I were skypeing. While we were chatting, my brother was surfing about and suddenly butted in to announce he’d found a passenger list for the ship on which my da and his father had come back from Australia. My da was born there, but was led to believe growing up that his mother had died out there in childbirth when he was one or two, after which him and my granda came back to Belfast. My brother said “Da, are you sitting down? You’re on the passenger list, so is Granda and so is your mother. She didn’t die in Australia.”
Anyway, long story short, it turned out my da had lived in Clare with his parents after coming home from Australia (his mum was from down there). She died after having a miscarraige and it was only after THAT that him and my granda moved to Belfast. He was only three when she died so he had no recollection and his father never breathed a word of the truth to him before he died. Being charitable, I reckon he must have been hugely scarred, having been through the pogrom, jail, the Civil War and then to become a widower after just six years of marraige and he just built an impenetrable wall of silence around his past.
So it wasn’t until last June, seventy seven years after she died, that my da finally got to visit his mother’s grave for the first time.
Dr. Nightdub, its comments like this that make me realise why I love being part of this blog… Stories like yours above are too often lost, and unless we get them out there in one way or another, they may well be lost forever!