Gendering the Emotionality of a Revolution: Male revolutionaries’ emotional expression after the establishment of the southern Irish state

Abstract

This thesis is an analysis of the emotional impact the Irish revolution (ca. 1913-1923) had on its male participants—the members of the Irish Volunteer Force (IVF), later named the Irish Republican Army (IRA). The Irish revolution encompassed a myriad of events including an armed insurrection in 1916, a revolutionary war from 1919 to 1921, and a civil war from 1922 to 1923 and eventually culminated in the establishment of the southern Irish Free State (The Republic of Ireland from 1949). Although these events were subsequently termed the Irish revolution, it can be argued that this term in itself was more of a way of creating a historical narrative for the establishment of the southern Irish state than it was a coherent series of events. Thus there is a certain mythicization of the revolution not as a historical event, but as national origin story—“the revolution”. This thesis poses that because the triumph of physical force republicanism over other forms of nationalism in establishing an independent southern Irish state affected the popular retelling of the revolution, that this popular retelling in turn affected its veterans and their emotional relationship to their own experiences. From this, it analyses how the popular memory of the Irish revolution affected the emotional expressions of its male participants about their own personal experiences during the revolution. It explores primarily the theme of male honour—how this was sought to be preserved in male republican recollections—and seeks to define which actions were seen as dishonourable and which were not. Crucially, it argues the inherent emotionality of the republican masculine experience in the retellings of the revolution, and how shying away from acknowledging emotions in Irish historical debate might be to the detriment of understanding emotions as an integral part of the revolution.