OWEN O’SHEA: LEST WE FORGET

This month one hundred years ago the civil war reached its nadir with some horrific outrages in Co Kerry. Combatants on both sides died in terrible circumstances, including the outrage at Ballyseedy where nine men were tied around a mine and blown up. Miraculously one, Stephen Fuller, survived. This week's podcast guest is Historian Owen O’Shea, he looks back on those violent weeks and the subsequent fall out that resonated down through the generations. He also examines how exactly the past is being remembered today.

Neither political party which grew out of the civil war “covered themselves in glory” in how they treated those who were injured and damaged during the conflict, according to historian Owen O’Shea.

During the first decade of the state’s existence between 1922 an 1932 the Cumann na nGeadheal government was extremely parsimonious in compensating those who had fought on the free state side, and completely dismissive of anti-treaty veterans.

“Many were begging and begging in pension applications for some financial support,” O’Shea tells the Mick Clifford podcast. “They were battling mental health, financial troubles, breakdowns and immigration and the free state did very little in the first decade of its existence to support those who went out to fight for the state. Neither (political) party on the two sides of the conflict could claim they covered themselves in glory in that respect.”

The centenary of the Ballyseedy massacre, in which eight anti-treaty prisoners were blown up on a lonely road outside Tralee falls on March 7.

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