Irish Revolutionary History

Cover sheet from Una Stack's witness statement Continued from  previous post . The witness statements are nearly all in the form of typewritten pages and each one has a cover sheet detailing the name and address (at the time the statement was made) of the witness and what his or her role (as understood by the investigator) had been in the events being described. Most of the statements were given orally by the witnesses and then typed up in a more organised form by the investigator (usually an army officer) then shown to the witness again for authorisation. [1] In some cases, “between six and eight drafts” were necessary before the final version was signed off. [2] This means that the statements do not necessarily reflect the actual words of witnesses because some of the statements had undergone a certain amount of editing in order to make them more grammatically correct or more straightforward to read. A few of the witnesses, for example in the case of the Austin Stack...

Brighid O'Mullane circa 1918. From the National Museum of Ireland collection. Continued from  previous post . Another of the ways in which the Bureau of Military History witness statements can throw new light on our understanding of the events surrounding the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty is by providing fresh insights into the attitudes and motivations of some of the significant figures connected with the Treaty negotiations. One example of this type of insight involves Michael Collins and his decision to sign the Articles of Agreement which became known as the Anglo-Irish Treaty. This is usually portrayed as a pragmatic, but reluctant, decision based on a realistic assessment of the IRA’s chances of defeating the British in any renewed conflict. Michael Hopkinson, writing in the Cambridge dictionary of Irish Biography , mentions Collins’s awareness of the IRA’s “dire shortages of arms and ammunition” at the time of the truce [1] (something which is attested to in t...