COMING HOME

Collins' Barracks
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It was already dark when I arrived at the barracks.

The day's conference had just come to a close and the talk I had come for was not scheduled to begin for another three quarters of an hour.

I should really have come for the conference which was closer to my interest than the talk. But that hadn't been possible so I settled for the talk. Anyway I'd meet Eve.

This is John Burgess, his wife Tess Fitzsimons and their daughter Sadie around 1912.

He didn't know it then, but he would become a wounded returnee from WWI and she would meanwhile be one of the "separation women". The war would see their comfortable life fall apart.

John in the doorway of his father's premises

John's father was a master bootmaker at the Fountain in James's Street and John was the heir apparent, due to take over his father's business in a few years time. The couple were already living in a "company" house in Adelaide Terrace nearby.

It's not clear how or why John enlisted. There are rumours of a pub. In any event he got the call and headed for the European theatre of war. His father, who was shortly to retire was raging and John's wife and, by then, three children had to move to a tiny house across the Liffey on Oxmantown Road.

When John returned wounded from the war he was unemployed for a while and eventually ended up in Dublin Corporation.

That story was my interest in the day's conference which dealt broadly with the plight of returnees. The talk was more specifically about those who put their military skills at the disposal of the rebels in the War of Independence and John was not one of those.

Eve Morrison

So, given she had nothing to say about John Burgess, it is to Eve's credit that she gave a talk which I found most interesting.

The talk had been organised by the Education & Outreach Department of the National Museum of Ireland, and Brenda Malone, Curator of Military History at the Museum, in honour of the National Museum's late colleague, F. Glenn Thompson.

Its title was: "In Ireland there is no Peace": Irish War Veterans and Irish Separatists in 1919

The Museum is (part) situated in Collins' Barracks.

Eve commented on the plethora of sources now available, most of them online. When she was doing her PhD research on the Bureau of Military History she had to sit in a room and read through nearly two thousand Witness Statements over the course of a year.

This reminded me of some of my own research on the yet to be digitised Censuses of 1901 and 1911. It wasn't long before your head started spinning as the microfilm images flashed by. And, of course, they, no more than the Witness Statements then, were not digitally searchable.

Today's armchair researchers never had it so good.

She stressed the need to use sources critically. Apply a degree of scepticism, suss out the context and cross compare sources for corroboration.

She mentioned that publishers are rejecting a few books a year, much to the disappointment of neophyte authors who base their whole text, for example, on a single Witness Statement.

That said, there is still a lot of research that needs to be done on returnees.

The IRA, in the War of Independence, benefitted from a few hundred returnees with military experience. But they had to be very careful with recruitment as the British were encouraging some returnees to join up and spy on the IRA. There were cases where the IRA rejected whole groups of returnees who were offering to join up.

Lots of returnees joined up with the Free State Army at the outbreak of the Civil War and it was claimed (I think she said by Tom Barry or Dan Breen) that this was a decisive factor in the victory of Free State Forces over the IRA.

There was a lot of anger among returnees over what they considered broken promises over housing and employment which were made when they were originally being recruited to the army.

Eve & Diarmuid Bolger NMI