The historian Diarmaid Ferriter has remarked on a well known journalist, born in the 1950s or thereabouts who first heard of the Irish Civil War about 1970 and wondered why.
I was born in 1941 and never heard about it in school for a number of reasons. Our teachers,parents, uncles, and aunts had lived through it, two world wars, 1916 and the ‘Tan War and,
in many cases had been participants on various sides, and often married partners who had been on the opposite sides to themselves.
Fianna Fail, on coming to power in 1932, began binding up the nation’s wounds. James Dillon, whose father, John Dillon together with the Parliamentary Party he led, was politically buried byde Valera and Sinn Fein in 1918, helped Dev into office in 1932. Most of the “anti Treaty” IRA accepted the 1938 Constitution, the Free State Army kept out of politics and obeyed its orders.
All parties in Dail Eireann supported neutrality, and only James Dillon publicly disagreed with it.
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