By her own admission, Ellen McWilliams’s most recent book – her fist non-academic work – is difficult to categorise. It’s part history, part memoir, alongside very personal musings on nationhood, motherhood and much more.
“When I was writing I had no conscious design for the book in terms of form or genre,” she explains.
“Early reviews have helped me to find a language to describe it – the book has been called a work of mourning, a lament, a keen, which makes perfect sense to me now even if I could not see it at the time.”
Published by Belfast-based Beyond the Pale, Resting Places: On Wounds, War and the Irish Revolution has been met with high praise. According to former BBC foreign correspondent Fergal Keane it is “a work of eloquent, haunting beauty”, while Fintan O’Toole describes it as “a remarkable conversation between the past and the present”.
The book is ostensibly about the Dunmanway Massacre (or what are sometimes called the Bandon Valley Killings), a spate of killings that took place near Bandon in west Cork in April 1922, as the British forces were withdrawing from Ireland following the truce in July the previous year. Among those who died were IRA acting commandant Michael O’Neill, who was shot at the home of the Hornibrooks, a Protestant family suspected of supporting the crown forces.
O’Neill’s killing sparked a cycle of violence and executions which subsequently saw 13 more Protestants shot dead, and some buried in bogs, while farms were burnt in an atmosphere of suspicion and recrimination. The actions were condemned at the time by both pro and anti-Treaty elements of the IRA, who believed the killings to be partially, if not entirely, motivated by sectarianism.
The townlands where the attacks took place is where Ellen McWilliams (née McCarthy) grew up in the 1980s, oblivious to the carnage her rural idyll had witnessed some two generations previous. While some families fled, many of her neighbours and friends in the area are the descendants of those killed, yet the atrocities are rarely if ever mentioned.
She recalls her “shock at discovering how close the terrible events of April 1922 were to my home place”.
“I have only ever had the shadowiest sense of this history and kept a safe distance from it because it was so rarely spoken about when I was growing up, or at least that was my experience,” she says.
In exploring the legacy and intergenerational impact of the Dunmanway Massacre, the author also touches on her own family’s involvement in the War of Independence and Civil War that followed. Her great grandmother was a Cumann na mBan activist, while her great uncle was “amongst the first class rank and file soldiers of the Cork No 3 Brigade” of the IRA.
Domiciled in the south-west of England for the past 20 years and now a senior lecturer in literature at the University of Exeter, she is married to an Englishman. The couple have a young son, who if not necessarily the inspiration for the book, is in many ways its target audience.
“I wrote this book first and foremost for our son, James, who as the child of an English Protestant father and Irish Catholic mother may one day have questions about the history,” she says.
“If I couldn’t find the right publisher I planned to put the manuscript away for him until he is older.”
The author’s explorations of the folk memory surrounding Oliver Cromwell are contrasted with her historian husband’s more sympathetic take on the English revolutionary, who is remembered in Ireland for mass slaughter. Likewise, while the British forces are cast as malignant in west Cork, the story of Harry McWilliams, her husband’s uncle who was killed at Ypres in 1915, is recalled with tenderness and compassion.
Out of respect for her neighbours in Cork, she declines to name the victims of the Dunmanway Massacre, however, prologues to the text are written by Charles Duff and Neale Jagoe; the former’s grandfather was one of the Protestants murdered in 1922, while the latter’s grandfather fled west Cork at the time in fear.
“If writing this book has taught me anything it’s that these stories may go underground, but they always break through to the surface again – even if it takes two generations,” says Ms McWilliams.
The author wrote to Neale Jagoe, who lives in Ballycastle, Co Antrim, after he wrote an article in the News Letter recounting his family’s experience a century ago. He is among a number of figures from across the island, including Miami Showband massacre survivor Stephen Travers, who have offered support and encouragement for Ms McWilliams’s endeavour.
“I now consider Neale a great friend and we spoke together recently at an event at Queen’s University Belfast and received an incredibly supportive and warm response from the audience,” says Ms McWilliams.
“Stephen Travers was hugely supportive at key moments, something that spurred me on when I was struggling.”
In relation to legacy of the conflict in the north, much closer in time than the events recounted in the book, does the author believe her experience offers any insights into dealing with the past?
“People in the north have a particularly sympathetic relationship with this book – they understand the shadows cast by political violence better than anyone else because so many have lived and survived it, in all its terrible intimacies,” she says.
However, noting that the book is very much a personal project, the author is reticent about suggesting the exercise has a wider application.
“I’m not sure this book offers any lessons or attempts to – if it’s anything it’s a story of discovery that slowly and painfully feels its way to understanding,” she says.
“It is, however, a book that moves from south to north and also moves back and forth across the Irish Sea as it traces the history and my own place in it.”
:: Resting Places: On Wounds, War and the Irish Revolution by Ellen McWilliams is published by Beyond the Pale.