by Neil Jordan
I looked down at my bare feet and saw he had taken his shoes.
GLOSSARY
BLACK AND TANS
The auxiliary police force that the British hurriedly sent to Ireland in 1918 and 1919 as replacements for the domestic Irish constabulary, which almost unanimously resigned in protest after hostilities with the British broke out. The name comes from the improvised nature of their uniforms.
CIVIL WAR
In 1921 the British government opened talks with the separatists. A treaty was signed and ratified in December 1921, though the Republican faction, led by Eamon De Valera, denounced such concessions as the exclusion of Northern Ireland from the Irish Free State and the imposition of an oath of allegiance to the British Crown. The Free-Staters, led by Michael Collins, argued that under the circumstances the concessions were acceptable. The Irish parliament narrowly ratified the treaty in January 1922 after the stormy Treaty Debates. When the general elections of June 1922 gave the Free-Staters a majority, the Republicans boycotted parliament. A full-scale civil war broke out and lasted until the middle of the fall, when the balance tilted to the Free State government. With British approval, the government ratified a national constitution in December 1922.
MICHAEL COLLINS
The hero of the War of Independence (the Anglo-Irish War) of 1918-21, in which he rose to command all Irish rebel forces, Collins became the head of the provisional government of the Irish Free State in January 1922. He assumed military command of the Free-Staters in the Civil War and was killed in a Republican ambush on August 22, 1922.
W. T. COSGRAVE
The Taoiseach (Tee-shock), or prime minister, of the Irish Free State from 1922 to 1932, Cosgrave galvanized the disorganized and leaderless Free-Staters into a workable government. In 1927 he passed legislation that forced the boycotting Republicans to participate in parliament.
THE DAIL
Ddil is the Gaelic word for "assembly" and the official name of the Irish parliament.
EAMON DE VALERA
The American-born linguist, political theorist, and leader of the Republican movement. Captured by the British in the bloody Easter uprising of 1916, he was spared the death penalty because of his U.S. citizenship. After a spectacular breakout from a Welsh prison, he returned to Ireland, rejected the Anglo-Irish treaty as negotiated by Michael Collins, resigned as president of the parliament, and led the Republicans through the Civil War. He grudgingly acquiesced to W. T. Cosgrave's legislation in 1927 and reentered government. De Valera took the prime ministership in 1932 and held it almost continuously until his election as president of Ireland in 1959 and again in 1966.
THE FREE STATE
The Anglo-Irish treaty that created the Irish Free State produced a divided Ireland, with six of its thirty-two counties, all in the north, remaining in British possession, and the rest retaining the accouterments of British dominion. In the new Irish constitution of 1937—which created the titular position of president of Ireland—the name "Irish Free State" was officially replaced by the name "Eire."
LORD HAW-HAW
William Joyce, the Brooklyn-born, Irish- and English-educated Nazi collaborator who broadcast propaganda from Germany during much of World War II. He was executed by the British for treason in 1946 (unlike De Valera, his U.S. citizenship didn't spare him; he had illegally acquired a British passport in 1933, and prosecutors argued that this made him a British subject).
I.R.A.
The Irish Republican Army, the military arm of the Sinn Fein, the Irish independence movement.
IRREGULARS
Official term for those I.R.A. members who fought the FreeStaters in the Civil War.
I.T.G.W.U.
The Irish Transport and General Workers' Union.
THE REPUBLICAN MOVEMENT
Those who politically and militarily supported the idea of Ireland's becoming a republic completely independent of the British empire.
THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE
Also called the Anglo-Irish War of 1918-21. The guerrilla war conducted against the British in Ireland after Britain refused to grant Ireland independence as called for by the Home Rule Act of 1914.
THE TRUCE
The cease-fire agreed upon by Britain and the Irish parliament in July 1921, when independence negotiations began.
THE TREATY WITH BRITAIN
The agreement, negotiated by Michael Collins, that recognized the partition of Ireland into North and South and granted imperial dominion status to the South.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Neil Jordan is the author of three other novels—The Past, The Dream of a Beast, and Shade—and a short-story collection, Night in Tunisia. He is also the award-winning writer and director of such films as Mona Lisa, Interview with the Vampire, Michael Collins, The Butcher Boy, The End of the Affair, and The Crying Game, for which he won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in 1993. He lives in Dublin.
A NOTE ON THE TYPE
Linotype Garamond Three is based on seventeenth-century copies of Claude Garamond's types, cut by Jean Jannon. This version was designed for American Type Founders in 1917, by Morris Fuller Benton and Thomas Maitland Cleland, and adapted for mechanical composition by Linotype in 1936.
