Dr McElligott won the funding for his project which is entitled, Echoes of War: The Everyday Legacy of the Civil War in North Kerry, 1923-1934. Using his native North Kerry as a regional case study, Dr McElligott’s project seeks to understand the complex legacies of the conflict on everyday life in the Irish Free State. The project will evaluate the extent to which violence, intimidation and rivalries, elicited by the Civil War, continued to resonate in communities across North Kerry in the post conflict period.

This project builds on recent studies which demonstrated that Civil War fatalities represented only the apex of the chronic violence that encompassed politics, land and labour disputes, personal vendettas, familial/communal tensions, sexual assaults on women and opportunistic criminality. It will also reveal that lower scale violence/intimidation/fear remained significant factors in daily life in areas like North Kerry long after the Civil War ended. 

Additionally, the study will examine the dynamics of personal grief, loss and private memory. It will investigate how individuals, families and communities in the region subsequently coped with the death, injury and loss of loved ones caused by the conflict. It will consider how the physical/psychological trauma and material impact of this manifested itself at a personal and communal level in the years that followed. Likewise, the extent to which North Kerry was impacted by the post-Civil War exodus of Republicans via emigration will be appraised.

Crucially, this project will further the existing national research on Civil War commemoration and memory, to chart the history of locally initiated commemorative projects to both pro and anti-Treaty forces in North Kerry and explore more broadly the communal remembrance of the conflict in national and broader European contexts.

Dr Richard McElligott is lecturer in Modern and Irish History in the Department of Business and Humanities, Dundalk Institute of Technology (DkIT). A native of Stacks Mountain, Kilflynn in North Kerry, Richard has published widely on the history of the Irish Revolutionary era, Irish cultural nationalism and Irish sport. His is the author of Forging a Kingdom: The GAA in Kerry, 1884-1934 and editor of A Social and Cultural History of Sport in Ireland. Other recent publications include: ‘“Boys Indifferent to the Manly Sports of their Race”: Nationalism and Children’s Sport in Ireland, 1880-1920’, in Irish Studies Review and ‘1916 and the Radicalisation of the GAA’ in Eire/Ireland