Dutch historian delves into a turbulent period in Mayo’s history

As we observe the progress of the devastating war being waged by Russia in Ukraine, the most immediately compelling images are the ones showing death and destruction. They portray a terrible truth about war. Innocent people are randomly killed; families are shattered; property and treasured possessions are destroyed. There is a heavy toll on the defending army, with ever expanding cemeteries of freshly dug graves.
Yet we also see images of people trying to get on with their normal lives. Drinking coffee and chatting in cafes. Walking their dogs in the streets of Kyiv, knowing that at any moment a random Russian missile may target them. Attending concerts, when they may have to rush to the bomb shelter if an air raid siren goes off. People are resilient and try to cope. Communities come together and help each other. But economic development is put on hold indefinitely.
Curiously, these were some of the thoughts that passed through my mind as I read ‘Mayo – The Irish Revolution, 1912-23’, by Dutch historian Joost Augusteijn, published by Four Courts Press.
The book grew out of the author’s doctoral research in the 1980s but, unlike many dissertations, it manages to combine detailed and careful scholarship with engaging and compelling readability.

‘On the fringe’
We are presented with an account of a turbulent period in Mayo that involved the concluding stages of the Land War; the outbreak of the 1914-18 Great War; the War of Independence from 1916 to 1921 and the Civil War from 1922 to 1923. The focus is not on strategic planning emanating from the Dublin HQ or the minute details of the fighting. Rather it portrays how a relatively isolated society, one that was still adjusting and modernising after the ravages of the Great Famine, coped with these events as their consequences spread through society.
Change came, but not in any massively disruptive, revolutionary sense. Violence was never the first choice for action. People pursued peaceful – albeit, assertive – political means, and were only pushed into armed conflict by coercive actions of the RIC and British forces.
The Land War had dragged on in Mayo. Evictions were still taking place on the estates of Lord Sligo as late as 1912 as a means of dealing with rent strikes. People remembered when Lord Sligo led efforts to get people to enlist in the army after the outbreak of the Great War. Westport won the prize for fewest recruits! An RIC County Inspector blamed this on underdevelopment and said that “the people in the greater portion of this county are still backward. Living in desolation and isolation for generations on the fringe of civilisation, they have experienced no influences to make them manly, sturdy and independent”.
At another recruitment drive, a British Army Colonel complained too: “There were shop assistants almost all big lusty fellows of the proper type for military duty, standing behind counters measuring out yards of ribbon that was women’s work and all these men should be serving their country.”
Ironically, a couple of years later, many of them were… but not the country that the colonel intended.
The geographical peripherality of Mayo had the effect of making it politically peripheral. Decisions were made in Dublin, and good communications with the West were not a priority (a pattern of behaviour that endures today). The first that the Mayo activists heard about the Easter Rising was on Easter Monday night, after it started. They were even unaware of the surrender the following Saturday.

Taunting and frustrating
Initial local reactions were negative. Castlebar UDC passed a resolution against the Rising: “We strongly condemn the actions of the pro-Germans and Sinn Féiners of Dublin in plunging portions of the country in horrors of civil war.” But these views changed when executions were carried out and internment round-ups started.
The military actions that took place in Mayo during the War of Independence are well known. Equally interesting, but not as dramatic, are the many accounts of how people hampered the British forces and the RIC by taunting and frustrating them.
At the trial of Ned Moane in early 1918 for singing a ‘seditious’ song, a band played equally ‘seditious’ songs outside the courthouse and disabled the van waiting to bring Moane back to the police station.
Augusteijn concludes that despite a late surge in violence, the War of Independence had been of relatively low intensity in Mayo. It never developed the extreme viciousness it did in many other counties. Even during the Civil War that followed, society continued to function.
The superior heavy weaponry of the Provisional Government forces meant that towns could not be defended by anti-Treaty forces, so fighting tended to be in the countryside. If both parties had been better trained and heavily armed, there would have been massive destruction of the kind seen in the Spanish Civil War.
Destruction Irish style was more insidious. I have often wondered if the relative neglect of regional development in Ireland, and of the northwest region in particular, may have had origins in the pro- and anti-treaty divisions of the Civil War.
Were the last regions to hold out destined to be the last to be developed?

Launch and talk
‘Mayo – The Irish Revolution, 1912-23’, by Joost Augusteijn, will be launched in The Irish History Bookshop, Cong, on Friday, September 29 at 8pm. Professor Augusteijn will be talking about his book at Tertulia Bookshop, The Quay, Westport, on Sunday, October 1, at 5pm.

John Bradley is a former ESRI professor and has published on the island economy of Ireland, EU development policy, industrial strategy and economic modelling.