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In episode 2 of AFTERLIVES, Associate Professor Fionnuala Walsh (UCD School of History) is joined by Dr Leeann Lane (DCU) and Professor Lindsey Earner-Byrne (TCD) to discuss the ordinary lived experience of Irish women in the aftermath of war and revolution and also their work uncovering poverty, welfare and the search for recognition of women’s contributions and losses.

AFTERLIVES: 'My life wasn't much after': women's voices in the Military Archives

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Supported by UKRI External Participatory and Collaborative Research Fund, London South Bank University and University College Dublin Decade of Centenaries Seed Funding.

In episode 2 of AFTERLIVES, Associate Professor Fionnuala Walsh (UCD School of History) is joined by Dr Leeann Lane (DCU) and Professor Lindsey Earner-Byrne (TCD) to discuss the ordinary lived experience of Irish women in the aftermath of war and revolution and also their work uncovering poverty, welfare and the search for recognition of women’s contributions and losses.

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Afterlives

The aim of the Afterlives project is to uncover the life stories and contributions of rebellious women in the wake of revolution and civil war in Ireland, Finland and Germany 1918-1980s. Listen to episode 1 – Grannies, Guns, and Archives – Tracing revolutionary & post revolutionary women’s lives – here.

Listen on Apple | Spotify | Soundcloud

Useful resources

Throughout the podcast there are lots of useful resources mentioned which you can use as part of your own historical research.

These include:

Bureau of Military History

The Bureau of Military History Collection, 1913-1921 (BMH) is a collection of 1,773 witness statements; 334 sets of contemporary documents; 42 sets of photographs and 13 voice recordings that were collected by the State between 1947 and 1957, in order to gather primary source material for the revolutionary period in Ireland from 1913 to 1921. The Bureau’s official brief was ‘to assemble and co-ordinate material to form the basis for the compilation of the history of the movement for Independence from the formation of the Irish Volunteers on 25th November 1913, to the 11th July 1921’ (report of the Director, 1957).

Military Service Pensions Collection

The collection comprises a large and varied corpus of archival material and records. The two broad streams of legislation are used to illustrate the nature and content of the personal files of applicants and the relevance of the supporting administrative records and other material in the collection. The supporting administrative and other records were gathered to assist the Department of Defence and the bodies set up under the legislation in deciding on the merit of each applicant’s case.

Military Archives

From as early as 1924, the National Army, recognising the importance of the War of Independence, undertook to preserve historical documents from that time. Some of the earliest collections preserved by the Historical Section include the Collins Papers, Civil War Operations and Intelligence files and Captured Documents (Civil War up to 1925), which continue to be made available today.

Further Reading

Anne Dolan and Caitriona Crowe. A Very Hard Struggle – Lives in the Military Service Pensions Collection (Dublin, Department of Defence, Ireland, 2023). Download, from https://www.militaryarchives.ie/collections/online-collections/military-service-pensions-collection-1916-1923/publications

Leeann Lane, Rosamond Jacob. Third Person Singular (Dublin: UCD Press, 2010).

Leeann Lane, Dorothy Macardle (Dublin: UCD Press, 2019).

Lindsey Earner-Byrne, Letters of the Catholic Poor: Poverty in Independent Ireland, 1920-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)

Fionnuala Walsh, “‘A fanatical separation money mob’: The British Army Soldier’s Wife in Wartime Ireland, 1914-1918″ in British Journal of Military History, vol. 9, no. 2 (2023):106-124

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