There are several treasure troves of archive material about the revolutionary period in Ireland. The strangest and the most depressing (and perhaps also the most useful) is called the Military Service Pensions Collection. It was released in 2014. The website explains: ‘Legislation was introduced, commencing in 1924 and continuing in 1934 and 1949, to recognize the service of veterans from Easter Week 1916 through to the 30 September 1923, who were proven to have had active service during the week commencing 23 April 1916, and in the War of Independence and the Civil War, through the payment of service pensions.’

The collection is the archive of applications for these pensions. It provides not only much serious and corroborated information about the revolutionaries themselves but about those who cared for them and supported them and often survived them. Mao Zadong wrote about the relationship between people and insurgents and noted that ‘the former may be likened to water, the latter to the fish who inhabit it.’

The 1,773 witness statements in the Bureau of Military History differ from the files in the Military Service Pensions Collection. The 1,773 witness statements were written by the fish, so to speak, in the aftermath of the Revolution. No one was encouraged to explain their current circumstances or give their views on the state that emerged.

The Military Service Pensions Collection includes some account of the water. And the water contains people who are needy and poor as well as those who were once involved in insurrection. If the Bureau of Military History archive is filled with illusion, the Pensions archive has much to tell us about disillusion. If class politics are oddly scarce in the Bureau material, then the Pensions archive shows what happens when you set class politics aside – you get the distilled voice of misery, poverty and want.

A book appeared recently with some fascinating essays on the Pensions archive. It is called ‘A Very Hard Struggle: Lives in the Military Service Pensions Collection’ and is edited by Anne Dolan and Catriona Crowe.

In her Introduction, Anne Dolan alludes to a single short file that covered a woman’s application for a pension that failed. What use is something like that to historians?

‘There are histories here,’ Dolan writes, ‘of struggling and of getting by, of being slighted, of being overlooked, histories of disappointment and middle age, of health and harm, and what the revolution asked, of being a woman in her forties, married in a small place..’

The Military Service Pensions Collection, she adds, ‘brought within the scope of the history of the Irish revolution more men and women, more forms of activism and participation than any other single source. It brings us further down the ranks, and far beyond the ranks, in ways that the Bureau of Military History…never could.’

In an interview at the end of the book, Diarmaid Ferriter said that, before the release of the Pensions archive, he had not been expecting ‘the scale and the intimacy and the texture of the lives of the people who were applying and the degree to which you’re into their lives and sometimes into their living circumstances and into their medical details…’

In an essay about history and memory and the Pensions archive, Fearghal McGarry writes about the ‘blurring of boundaries between archive, memory and historiography’. He considers new approaches to the study of the past ‘such as the history of emotions and the family’ and quotes the American writer Marianne Hirsch who defines ‘postmemory’ as ‘the relationship of a second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births.’

I think it is easier to define these ‘powerful, often traumatic, experiences’ or identify them, when we consider people who lived in the direct shadow of the Holocaust, Jewish people whose parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles were murdered by the Nazis.

There is a short film on youtube of Marianna Hirsch, a professor at Columbia, explaining what she means by ‘postmemory.’ She is speaking about the artist Art Spiegelman who told the story of what had happened to his family in Nazi concentration camps, ‘a story that had completely marked his life,’ Hirsch says, ‘but it was not his own story, he did not remember it, but he was totally shaped by it.’

She is writing about a specific moment in history, a particular legacy, a kind of trauma that is like no other.

Thus, I believe that it would be hard to identify ‘postmemory’ in Ireland as something that belongs to the descendants of people who died or suffered during the Irish revolutionary period. It would be hard to claim that the experience of people in an earlier generation ‘completely’ marked  someone’s life that was ‘totally shaped by it.’

But I may be wrong. It is hard to measure other people’s trauma.

My grandfather died in 1936 of natural causes at the age of forty-eight, leaving four children under the age of fifteen. There was no money. My mother, the eldest, was taken out of school, sent on a commercial course, and worked in an office.

These are easy sentences to write but they barely represent the intense frustration my mother felt at not being able to study and get on in the world. This frustration became a mild kind of rage. It had a mild to serious effect on the next generation. We lived with it. But I don’t want to exaggerate. It came and went.

My other grandfather died in 1940. This grandfather fought in the 1916 Rebellion in Enniscorthy and was interned on Frongoch in Wales afterwards. My uncle, his second son, who was born in 1904, was involved in revolutionary activity from the age of twelve. He was imprisoned in the War of Independence and later interned by the Free State in the Civil War. He spent fourteen days on hunger strike in 1923.

Even the thought now of my grandfather being taken from that small house in the town, arrested for revolutionary activities, with no clear idea of when or if he might return, and then later my uncle, still a teenager, arrested twice as well, once by the British and once in the Civil War, makes me feel uneasy.

My problem is that if I wish to use a word stronger than ‘uneasy’, if I wish to claim some residual trauma, even if I want to use the word ‘trauma’ at all, I have to stop. The most I can claim is that what occurred more than a hundred years ago seems oddly unresolved. It would be better if it hadn’t happened.

But the residual unease could equally come, or have been handed on more powerfully, from what happened to my other grandfather. Or it could also just be there, something that was in the air, something that came from a book I read or from something much harder to define.

Walter Benjamin remarked that the memory of oppressed ancestors is more catalytic of rebellion than any dream of liberated descendants.

So, too, any group of Irish people, liberated or not, might be more likely to view their rebellious ancestors as more significant than the quiet ones, the diffident ones. But why should this be so?

So, too, it must be easier for someone to imagine that you are descended from someone who almost starved in the Famine than someone who quietly, just for a few months, doubled prices (of bacon, say) and put the small profit away somewhere safe and later, without fuss, bought an extra piece of land, just a field or two. 

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The 1,773 witness statements in the Bureau of Military History were created to be read. The archive was opened when everyone who had given a statement was dead. What about the Pensions Archive? While the information given is surely public, some of the letters, as Anne Dolan points out in her introduction, have an intimate edge, they are, as she writes, histories ‘of struggling and of getting by, of being slighted, of being overlooked, histories of disappointment and middle age.’

Anyone who sought a pension for activities in the period 1916 to 1923 is also dead by now, so they can hardly complain about the archive being open and their letters read. But is it possible that the descendants, those affected by what Marianne Hirsch calls ‘powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births,’ could have a right to demand that a pleading letter from their mother or grandfather should not be in an open archive?

(Some material in the Pensions Archive is closed. At the end of a description of a file about another relative of mine, it reads: File contains: means assessment; material relating to family partly closed under Data Protection.)

Whose business is this when it can seem oddly recent but is, nonetheless, more than a century old? Does anyone have a right to ask that such correspondence be kept under lock and key because it might trigger memories and upset the next generation, or even the one after that? Or it might let their neighbours know too much? 

In the case of my uncle, whose application for a pension is available online for anyone to read, the last letter on the file is dated 1986, and that is, no matter what we do, living memory. In 1986, I often visited the house to which that letter was sent, the house where my uncle lived. I might have even seen the letter or the envelope on a table. But I did not know what it contained.

The file itself that covers my uncle’s case is pretty ordinary. It tells us more about unrelenting forms of bureaucracy than it does about insurgency in the period 1916 to 1923.

It is the 1986 letter that is puzzling.

It is written by an official called A. F. Verjans. It points out that my uncle had not claimed his pension - awarded to him in the early 1940s - between 1953, and the date of the letter, 1986. It concluded: ‘There is now a considerable amount of arrears due for the period 1 January 1953 to date. If you wish to have your pension resumed you should complete and return the attached form together with a request for payment of your pension.’

My uncle did not reply.

An historian looking at this might conclude that my uncle, perhaps, was not in full possession of his wits by 1986. (The file makes clear he was born in 1904.) But, no, he was not suffering from any mental incapacity. He would have understood perfectly that the letter seemed to be offering him a kind of windfall. He lived until 1995.

When Anne Dolan writes of ‘histories of disappointment and middle age,’ she might easily have added old age too. In old age, my uncle had not wavered in his support for Fianna Fáil, nor his loyalty to the Catholic church. But he did take the view that some of the younger Fianna Fáil ministers were young pups. He deplored their brashness. He himself lived modestly.

I heard him speaking only once about the military pensions. Since he was one of the last survivors of the rebellion period, he had often been asked to support applications for military pensions. He was amused at who was claiming to have been an insurgent. I had no idea that he himself had once applied for a pension.

In 1986, he was living on a small old-age pension. He could have done with the money he was now being offered, but he did not need it badly. He told no one about the letter. I think he would have deplored the idea of taking money like this from the state when he wasn’t in dire need.

It strikes me then that he must have been in dire need when he applied for the pension in 1940. His father had been granted a pension in 1937 for his revolutionary activities, but he died three years later. Thus, that pension dried up. When I look back at the large file about my uncle’s pension, I can feel a sense of wounded pride he must have felt – perhaps even shame - as he had to fill in form after form and do an interview that would be transcribed and typed. All of it was designed to win him the right to a pension based on his activities as a revolutionary between the ages of twelve and nineteen.

I am not surprised that he did not make a statement to the Bureau of Military History.

I feel this not because it is in the documents – it isn’t there – but I could be wrong. Pride could have been easier to set aside in 1940. There might have been other reasons for not making a statement to the Bureau. 

I was unsettled when I read the file and the final letter not because I worried anyone else might see it, but because it brought me into that room, the front room in my uncle’s house in Enniscorthy, and I imagined that letter coming. And then I imagined an earlier time when there wasn’t a penny in the house and they were waiting for news about the pension.

Looking at the file made me feel sad and uneasy. I can’t claim anything more than that. It isn’t a problem for me that everyone else can see the file because, for others, it would not carry any emotional weight. It would be information, a way of trying to set a context for what happened in the past, a context that might include files and facts but an equal amount of silence, what was not said, the letter to which no one replied.

Colm Tóibín (July 2024)