Seeing Ghosts: Gothic Discourses and State Formation (2012)

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37Éire-Ireland 47: 3 & 4 Fall/Win 12 Gothic Discourses and State Formation

Caoilfhionn Seeing Ghosts:

Ní Bheacháin Gothic Discourses

and State Formation*

Women and children and most of the men in part of the district of Mullagh, Co. Clare, will not leave their houses after dark because of stories of the appearance of a ghost. The “ghost” which moves about between 9 pm and midnight, according to a correspondent, “is said to be a man of military appearance, wearing a trench coat, and carry-ing what appears to be a rifle.” The “ghost” can be seen at two differ-ent places at the same hour.1

This unusual report—presented in the Irish Independent in 1928 un-der the heading “A Ghost with a Gun: A Strange Story from Clare”—represents just one ghost story emerging from the Irish Free State in the 1920s and 1930s. Following the War of Independence (1919–21), the subsequent compromise settlement of the Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921), and a bitter Civil War (1922–23), the fledgling Cumann na nGaedhael administration sought to establish a modern state. How-ever, in both urban and rural landscapes, ghosts in various forms and guises stalked the new regime. Examining these different hauntings and the political ephemera that accompanied their manifestations, we encounter the shadow side of the postcolonial state-building project that emerged with the crisis in the republican narrative of nationhood precipitated by the Civil War. As anti-Treaty republicans deployed Gothic tropes and motifs throughout the 1920s, we also recognize the unresolved nature of the political situation and the sense of an unreal-ized revolutionary potential lingering just beneath the surface of early postcolonial culture. A Gothic aesthetic was evident in the work of diverse writers and artists, and members of the republican women’s

1. “A Ghost with a Gun: A Strange Story from Clare,” Irish Independent, 8 Nov. 1928, 10.

*In the editing of this essay, I would like to thank the following for their comments and suggestions: Vera Kreilkamp, Angus Mitchell, Tom Moylan, and Mark Quigley. Of course, all errors remain my own.

38 Éire-Ireland 47: 3 & 4 Fall/Win 12 Gothic Discourses and State Formation

group Cumann na mBan described themselves as “Ghosts” on leaflets they distributed in Dublin between 1927 and 1931. This Ghost cam-paign represented a radical deployment of Gothic motifs, for these marginalized female activists described and understood themselves as ghostly revenants in the public life of the new Free State. Simi-larly, beginning in the Civil War period, antistate forces challenged the modernizing discourses of the new government, representing it as a grotesque double of the British regime it had replaced.

The Civil War erupted in June 1922 between the forces of the pro-Treaty provisional government and the anti-Treaty forces that remained loyal to the Irish Republic. Former comrades and friends took opposing sides in the struggle, and casualties on both sides were greater than the numbers killed during the War of Independence; moreover, the subsequent executions of republican prisoners greatly exceeded the numbers put to death by the British administration be-tween 1916 and 1921. As the optimism of the revolutionary period eroded, new conflict precipitated social, political, and cultural crisis. While communities fractured and political elites struggled to man-age the conflict, anti-Treaty discourse took a Gothic turn, expressing heightened alienation and giving voice to a growing despair.

Modern Gothic can be viewed as an aesthetic that, in John Paul Riquelme’s words, “brings to the fore the dark side of modernity.”2 From this perspective, the twentieth-century version of the Gothic arguably shared certain concerns with Modernism while also mani-festing tendencies that seem implicitly to counter developments in high Modernism.3 Modern Gothic evolved, suggests David Punter,

2. John Paul Riquelme, “Introduction: Toward a History of Gothic and Mod-ernism: Dark Modernity from Bram Stoker to Samuel Beckett,” Modern Fiction Stud-ies 46, no. 3 (2000): 585.

3. Gothic Modernism manifests itself through its antirealistic tendencies, its creation of suspense, an obsession with violence, and the use of doubling techniques that dismantle the myths of Western exceptionalism and challenge the legitimacy of existing hierarchical power structures. See, for example, Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace, eds., Gothic Modernisms (New York: Palgrave, 2001), and the special is-sue on Gothic and Modernism, Modern Fiction Studies 46, no. 3 (2000). John Paul Riquelme’s overview essay in the latter provides a synopsis of some of the intersec-tions and crosscurrents between twentieth-century Gothic and literary Modernism (585–605). See also the enlarged collected volume that subsequently arose from the Modern Fiction Studies special issue: John Paul Riquelme, ed., Gothic and Modernism: Essaying Dark Literary Modernity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).


to become more than a “perturbation or troubling of an accepted mainstream of historical documentation: it now records, in one sense, the actual dreadfulness of events and, in another, the state of a con-sciousness whose perceptions are colored—darkly—by a sense of im-minence, if not the actuality, of catastrophe.”4 Recent analyses suggest that Irish Modernism was infused by Gothic tropes and sensibilities.5 Within the Free State, recalcitrant activists deployed such conven-tions to explicate history and to articulate a sense of foreboding and impending doom. This Gothic turn of anti-Treaty cultural resistance thus marked a critical questioning of the new order and highlighted a cluster of anxieties responding to the emergent postcolonial state. It also distinguished early postindependence cultural and political ac-tivity from the disillusioned naturalism that dominated Irish writing from the Civil War period. Furthermore, in contrast to mainstream political discourses produced by pro-Treaty forces, this Gothic aes-thetic deployed a rhetoric of grievance—a sense of betrayal, horror, mistrust, and alienation from the common-sense project of establish-ing a new state. Such Gothic modes expressed an ideological and cultural confrontation between a modern state-building project and its shadow side—an oppositional public sphere manifest in the phan-tom Irish Republic retaining the loyalty of anti-Treaty activists and existing as a recurrent presence in the Free State during the 1920s. Although elements within the pro-Treaty forces were keen to pro-mote the benefits of the recent political settlement by connecting it to a national modernization project, the new government also mobilized and contained “tradition” and a teleological version of nationalist history. Both sides in the Treaty dispute, therefore, would have been susceptible to political haunting—to the remonstrating presence of a phantom Republic.

This fugitive or phantom Republic, moreover, represents a striking manifestation of ghostly happenings with antecedents in the recent

4. David Punter, “Gothic and Modernism: Essaying Dark Literary Modernity,” Modernism/modernity 17, no. 1 (2010): 253.

5. See, for example, Jim Hansen, Terror and Irish Modernism: The Gothic Tradition from Burke to Beckett (New York: State University of New York Press, 2009); James F. Wurtz, “Scarce More a Corpse: Famine Memory and Representations of the Gothic in Ulysses,” Journal of Modern Literature 29, no. 1 (2005): 102–17; Graham Fraser, “‘No More than Ghosts Make’: The Hauntology and Minimalism of Beckett’s Late Work,” Modern Fiction Studies 46, no. 3 (2000): 772–85.


past; since the Land League period, alternative systems of legality and administration had shadowed the British government in Ireland.6 During the Treaty debates, anti-Treaty figures regularly referred to the Republic as a public sphere already in existence, even if without a state apparatus. For example, Liam Mellows, subsequently executed during the Civil War, asserted this political entity as a reality:

I for one believed, and do believe, that the Republic exists, because it exists upon the only sure foundation upon which any government or republic can exist, that is, because the people gave a mandate for that Republic to be declared. . . . There is the Irish Republic existing, not a mandate to seek a step towards an Irish Republic that does not exist. . . . The facts are that the Irish Republic exists.7

Throughout the 1920s, the Republic shadowed the Free State government as publications and directives continued to address its “citizens.” This proxy authority was presented as the legitimate gov-ernment, the authentic double of a fabricated and monstrous Free State that had attempted to displace it. By invoking this spectral po-litical entity, activists attempted to call forth an audience into histori-cal agency by means of a narrative differing from that sanctioned by the new government. In this account the Republic was the legitimate authority; thus history—in the form of the anticolonial struggle—was not completed.8 The preface of Dorothy Macardle’s The Irish Repub-lic (1937), for example, explores this fugitive public sphere shadowing the official one:

For the Irish people the Republic was, for a few tense years, a living reality which dominated every aspect of their lives. Its existence was a fact of human history, if not of logic or law. . . . Its existence was of a kind very baffling to its enemies for the Republic was an invisible within a visible, an intangible within the tangible State.9

6. See, for example, Heather Laird, Subversive Law in Ireland, 1879–1920: From “Unwritten Law” to the Dáil Courts (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005).

7. Official Report: Debate on the Treaty between Great Britain and Ireland, Signed in London on the 6th December 1921 (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1922), 228–29 (4 Jan. 1922).

8. See, for example, National Library of Ireland (hereafter NLI), LOLB 161–169, Sighle Humphries Papers: P106/2373, P106-2391, and P106/2689.

9. Dorothy Macardle, The Irish Republic (London: Victor Gollancz, 1937), 29, cited in Geraldine Meaney, Gender, Ireland and Cultural Change: Race, Sex and Nation (London: Routledge, 2011), 57.


This proxy public sphere and its advocates tracked the new Free State, challenging its authority and attempting to claim the loyalty of the population. Both in form and content, such political haunting undermined the state-building project, for the evocation of an emo-tively charged Republic revealed the limits and precariousness of the new regime.

Two theoretical perspectives shape this analysis of the Gothic ten-dencies in anti-Treaty cultural politics. The first is the framework for examining occluded activisms that originated with the Indian Subal-tern Studies Group of the 1980s and was subsequently developed by postcolonial scholars; the second is Raymond Williams’s concept of a structure of feeling. Both paradigms are helpful—one focusing on recalcitrant cultural practices, the other illuminating the mood that characterizes an era. Subaltern-studies theorists emphasize the role of nonelite subjects as agents of history, thereby questioning the form and content of much mainstream history writing. Ranajit Guha, for example, asserts that historians, even sympathetic ones, have tended to view the rebel figure as an unconscious participant in political insurgency.10 By denying rebels a self-conscious agency, traditional history can portray their activism as merely a reflexive response to external political or social conditions.

Subaltern studies, rather, foregrounds consciousness and agency; its practitioners also emphasize fragmented remnants of the past and nonteleological approaches to historiography. Such perspectives are particularly useful when considering the Gothic aesthetic of the anti-Treaty movement, which can be read merely as part of an intractable “die-hard” republican tradition or as a direct response to the new gov-ernment’s attempt to criminalize anti-Treaty activists. However, such interpretations sideline the extent to which the Cumann na mBan “Ghosts” were self-consciously promoting an alternative mode of ac-tivism and political identity. A shift in emphasis, in other words, results in a change of focus; elite politicians and state institutions still figure in the narrative, but they no longer serve as the fulcrum about which ev-erything else turns. Subaltern studies, with its emphasis on refractory cultural formations that are an integral part of modernity and the post-

10. Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” in Gregory Castle, ed., Postcolonial Discourses: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 121.


colonial condition, also provides a useful lens for examining archival fragments not easily accommodated by mainstream historiography.11 Discussing the traces of hauntings in Spanish society and historiogra-phy, for example, Jo Labanyi suggests that ghosts are a useful illustra-tion of the ontological status of subaltern history in the present—where nonelite histories haunt official state-oriented accounts.12 Using such a critical lens brings to the fore subaltern cultural and political prac-tices, thereby opposing the privileging of teleological narratives that neatly appropriate such historical fragments and subordinate them in the process. Cumann na mBan activists were, of course, not subaltern in the class sense outlined by Antonio Gramsci or by the early work of the Indian Subaltern Studies Group; they were, rather, literate, often middle-class figures who turned to modern technologies for political ends. However, the erasure of their activism from mainstream histori-ography and their surviving status as the defeated remnants of the rev-olutionary period suggest the need for an investigative framework that accommodates the fragmented elements that follow civil war—and a perspective that prioritizes political agency over outcome or success.

The fragmentary ephemera produced by the women involved in the Ghost campaign between approximately 1927 and 1931 provide cultural historians with material evidence to investigate nonelite ac-tivism.13 The distribution of political flyers around Dublin—each concluding with the eponymous signature “Ghosts”—raises issues about historiography, material culture, and forms of ephemera as well as about intersections between gender, republicanism, and the Free State. The campaign might be best viewed as a discursive and frac-turing intrusion into the period’s official state-nationalist narratives; the phantom might-have-beens of history reminded citizens of the ghostly Republic and the horror of the Civil War, and in both form

11. See, for example, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002), and David Lloyd, Ireland after History (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999).

12. Jo Labanyi, “History and Hauntology; Or, What Does One Do with the Ghosts of the Past? Reflections on Spanish Film and Fiction of the Post-Franco Period,” in Disremembering the Dictatorship: The Politics of Memory since the Spanish Transition to Democracy, ed. Joan Ramon (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 65–82.

13. The “Ghost” leaflets are poorly catalogued and have not been collected in a systematic way. Thus, the leaflets are scattered across collections, and it is difficult to discern the exact number produced or the dates of production.


and content they challenged the prosaic realities of state-building. Like the activities of other nonelite groups, those of the “Ghosts” demand a historiography that can accommodate uncertainty and un-conventional modes of activist self-expression.

Another paradigm for understanding the agency of the post-Treaty ghosts, the impact of their campaign, and the Gothic turn in repub-lican thinking appears in Raymond Williams’s concept of a structure of feeling and its associated methodologies. Williams’s theory high-lights the less tangible characteristics or “feeling” of an era, the social experience that is “in solution” and that has not crystallized into in-stitutions or any explicit manifesto.14 Drawing on these ideas, I sug-gest that the phantom Republic created a sense of being haunted by a lost potential and by traces of an earlier optimism—and that this feeling was a feature of Free State life. Postindependence Ireland was thus characterized by a specter standing as an eerie double for the revolutionary potential of the immediately preceding era.

Throughout the 1920s, an anti-Treaty rhetoric featuring Gothic motifs and apocalyptic language represented the aesthetic of the de-feated—with ghosts, doppelgängers, and specters invoking the return of an unresolved past. As Fred Botting argues, by the late nineteenth century surviving Gothic heroes are “gloomy, isolated and sovereign, they are wanderers, outcasts and rebels condemned to roam the bor-ders of social worlds, bearers of a dark truth or horrible knowledge.”15 Through the flyers they distributed in the post-Treaty period, repub-lican activists accessed such Gothic motifs to articulate their con-cerns; these leaflets convey the structure of feeling that infused anti-Treaty political rhetoric—the remnant of an old narrative and the raw material for a new one. The breakdown of the nationalist narrative of destiny following the Civil War and the acceptance of the Treaty precipitated a genre of crisis that differed from an earlier Anglo-Irish Gothic responding to the impending collapse of an established social order. In the later post-Treaty republican Gothic, a new aesthetics responded not to the breakdown of an existing order but to one that was still incipient, one predicated on optimism and manifest in alter-native political and cultural practices as well as demands.

14. See Raymond Williams’s Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 128–35.

15. Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996), 98.


During the 1920s, after the bloodshed and destruction of World War I, all of Europe was haunted; such a “ghosting” would have been especially pronounced in Ireland where the thousands of war dead were neither officially mourned nor commemorated. In a nationalist context, a striking contemporary reference to Irish hauntings appears in Patrick Pearse’s last pamphlet, Ghosts, which appeared just a few months before his execution for his leadership role in the 1916 Easter Rising. In his preface, Pearse invokes a country of specters:

Here be ghosts that I have risen this Christmastide, ghosts of dead men that have bequeathed a trust to us living men. Ghosts are trou-blesome things in a house or in a family, as we knew even before Ib-sen taught us. There is only one way to appease a ghost. You must do the thing it asks you. The ghosts of a nation sometimes ask very big things; and they must be appeased, whatever the cost.

Of the shade of the Norwegian dramatist, I beg forgiveness for a plagiaristic, but inevitable title.16

Presenting the ghosts of Ireland’s revered nationalist figures as the guardians of the republic who must be obeyed, Pearse echoes several of his recurring themes. Somewhat ironically, in view of the exclu-sively male pantheon invoked in his pamphlet, the Cumann na mBan women of the Ghost campaign appear to have adopted their phantom identity in direct tribute to Pearse’s martyrdom.17 His reference to Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 Ghosts, a play banned in Ireland and Britain un-til 1915, suggests hauntings in the form of unhealed psychic wounds and socially repressed taboos, an understanding gaining currency in the early twentieth century. Influenced by emerging psychoanalyti-cal discourses, ghosts had moved from supernatural phenomena to manifestations of guilt and internal “dis-ease.”

Although naturalism was the dominant literary form in the Irish Free State, the emerging view of ghosts as expressing repression in-

16. See Pádraic H. Pearse, Political Writings and Speeches (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1962), 221.

17. Pearse’s pamphlet named a pantheon of Irish male nationalist ghosts, includ-ing Wolfe Tone, Thomas Davis, James Fintan Lalor, and John Mitchel among others. Cumann na mBan activists Sighle Humphries and Eithne Coyle participated in the Ghost campaign, and both the Sighle Humphries Papers, University College Dublin Archives (hereafter UCD Archives), P106/1450, and the Eithne Coyle Papers (UCD Archives), P61/34-9, contain copies of Pearse’s pamphlet.


fluenced the literature and culture of the period, with Gothic motifs surfacing in fiction.18 The return of the dead appears, for example, as a recurring theme in Dorothy Macardle’s Earthbound: Nine Stories of Ireland (1924), a collection set during the War of Independence. In stories like “De Profundis” and “The Prisoner” and in later novels like Uneasy Freehold (1942), Macardle refers to purgatorial hauntings by those with unfinished business in Ireland. Her Gothic short story “The Portrait of Roisin Dhu” offers a striking critique of the con-ventional gendering of nationalist iconography and the enervation of women within such constraints. Geraldine Meaney argues that Mac-ardle’s fiction expresses shadowy realities that could not be articu-lated in her massive historical work The Irish Republic (1937).19 In the popular fiction, however, a specter of unfinished historical business erupts as ghosts demand redress and destabilize the certainties of the living. Although a recent biography suggests how the role of the occult and spiritualism so central to late nineteenth-century culture strongly influenced the Gothic turns in Macardle’s fiction, that frame of reference might be extended to include the political rhetoric char-acterizing the Civil War.20 Certainly the short stories frequently focus on political themes, and Macardle wrote many of them while impris-oned in Mountjoy for her own republican activities.

A Gothic aesthetic occurs in Irish cultural production of the ear-ly twentieth century, reflecting a cluster of anxieties about changing political, social, and economic contexts. In literature W. B. Yeats and

18. For an analysis of this cultural trend of naturalism, see Joe Cleary, “Toward a Materialist-Formalist History of Twentieth-Century Irish Literature,” boundary 2 31, no. 1 (2004): 207–41. For a useful bibliography of Irish Gothic fiction, see Jar-lath Killeen, “Irish Gothic Revisited,” in Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 4 (2008). Luke Gibbons argues that although “originally a literary genre, with a distinctly popular or sensational appeal, the Gothic spread out into the recesses of everyday life, giving rise to a phantom public sphere haunted by fear, terror and the dark side of civility.” He explores the figuring of the Catholic Irish as a collective contagion in imperialist discourses from the seventeenth century. See Luke Gibbons, Gaelic Gothic (Galway: Arlen House, 2004), 10.

19. See Geraldine Meaney, “The Gothic Republic: Dark Imaginings and White Anxieties,” in Maria Cinta Ramblado-Minero and Auxiliadora Perez-Vides, eds., Single Motherhood in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Cultural, Historical and Social Essays (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006), 13–29.

20. Nadia Clare Smith, Dorothy Macardle: A Life (Dublin: Woodfield Press, 2007).


Elizabeth Bowen famously turned to the Gothic, as did Harry Clarke in visual art. Clarke’s illustration The Last Hour of the Night (1922) invokes the recent destruction of Dublin, both as a result of poverty and the political conflicts of the War of Independence and the Civil War (figure 1). On the left, this pencil and ink drawing depicts Dub-lin’s finest buildings—the General Post Office, the Custom House, and the Four Courts—as burning shells; on the right stand the di-lapidated remains of Georgian townhouses. Dominating the ominous scene, a grotesque figure looms over this destruction and chaos. Pat-rick Abercrombie’s Dublin of the Future (1914, published 1922), a work that also deploys a Gothic aesthetic, included Clarke’s drawing as its frontispiece. In their award-winning urban plan, Abercrombie and his colleagues presented a proposal for regenerating Ireland’s capital city that they envisioned as a diseased human body in need of modern medical intervention. Mark Crinson describes the publication’s “hy-brid discourse” as conjoining “disease, traffic, surgical intervention, blood circulation and the movement of water.”21 The plan’s Gothic descriptions of Dublin justify a modernizing architectural project.

Whereas pro-Treaty thinkers and the subsequent Cumann na nGaedheal government emphasized a discourse of modernization and opportunity to justify acceptance of the compromise settlement, opposition rhetoric turned to the language of despair and horror.22 Anti-Treaty publications featured the Free State as a monstrous rep-lica of the British regime it replaced, the Republic as a living entity that would continue to operate and to shadow the new state, and militant republicans as heroes who were now out of time—the bear-ers of a devastating truth being denied in the public sphere. Figure 2 reproduces a poster showing King George V as the patriarch of a family tree with two branches: one depicting leaders of the British colonial administration in Ireland, the other the Free State leader-ship. Both branches are positioned above a subheading that declares,

21. Mark Crinson, “Georgianism and the Tenements, Dublin 1908–1926,” Art History 29, no. 4 (2006): 647.

22. Arguing that the Treaty provided the means to secure sovereignty over the longer term, the new administration sought to shape the Free State within the struc-tures of the Commonwealth and worked to develop Irish industry and infrastructure. These achievements were highlighted in the national media, in the Free State hand-book of 1932, and in 1927 and 1932 general-election-campaign publicity material.


“Executed the following soldiers of the Irish Republic,” with the Free State’s list starkly longer than that of the British.23 Under the patri-arch King George, the members of the Free State administration are listed on the right: Timothy Michael Healy, the first governor general of the Irish Free State (1922–28); Richard Mulcahy, commander of the pro-Treaty forces during the Civil War; and Kevin O’Higgins, minister for justice and external affairs in the first pro-Treaty govern-ment, notorious for confirming the execution of seventy-seven cap-tured republican prisoners.24 The British family members appear on the left: Lord French, the British viceroy and lord lieutenant of Ire-land (1918–21); Viscount Hamar Greenwood, the last chief secretary

23. NLI, EPH D (POL 1920–30/64). 24. Kevin O’Higgins was later assassinated by the IRA in 1927. While in office,

he established the Garda Síochána, the unarmed national police force, and worked to increase the Free State’s autonomy within the framework of the British Common-wealth of Nations.

Figure 1: Harry Clarke, The Last

Hour of the Night, 1922. From P. Abercrombie,

S. Kelly, and A. Kelly, Dublin of the

Future, 1922.


for Ireland in the British cabinet (1920–22); and Sir Nevil Macready, the last British military commander in Ireland. Visually united in a family tree, these men are depicted as sharing a murderous kinship, with the Irish official government appearing as a grotesque doppel-gänger that mirrors the British regime it has replaced. Such doubling among characters, a classic element in the Gothic repertoire, here insinuates a sinister kinship between the colonial and postcolonial

Figure 2: Civil War poster depicting the British and Free State regimes as two branches of one family tree. This image is reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Ireland: NLI EPH D (POL 1920–30/64).


regimes. Damningly critiquing the ideology and performance of a new elite, the poster also conveys a Gothic suggestion of bad blood and familial degeneration as this entirely masculine family presides over slaughter and violence.

Other documents invoke the discourse of horror characterizing republican rhetoric of the period. The handbill titled The Supreme Horror refers to the 8 December 1922 reprisal executions of Rory O’Connor, Liam Mellows, Richard Barrett, and Joseph McKelvey in Mountjoy Prison one day after the Irish Republican Army (IRA) assassination of Seán Hales (figure 3). None of the condemned men were involved in the assassination of Hales, a member of the Free State legislature, a close friend of Michael Collins, and the brother of one member of the IRA ambush party who had shot Collins. Only the year before O’Connor had been best man at the wedding of Kev-in O’Higgins, the minister who signed the execution order. Regarded as one of the lowest points of Civil War politics, these executions ush-ered in a new stage of bitterness and despair; a highly charged Gothic rhetoric expressed the darkness of the recent past:

. . . and beneath the shadow of the wings of the Irish Republic:WE DENOUNCE

The MONSTROUS OUTRAGE; the UNSPEAKABLE CRIME; and TRANSCENDENTAL HORROR perpetrated at Mountjoy.

FOUR MEN, who surrendered LAST JULY; FOUR MEN, for whose personal safety by the PRIMITIVE INSTINCTS of human society, their gaolers were responsible; FOUR MEN, who, by vol-untarily laying down arms, became entitled to the SCRUPULOUS CARE and CONSIDERATION of their captors.

These FOUR MEN are dragged from their cells and BUTCHERED as an OFFICIAL REPRISAL. . . .

Woe to our fathers, who permitted this SPECTRAL HORROR to come to pass; WOE TO THEM, who have brought this BLOOD-GUILT upon our innocent issue. . . . FOR DEEDS ARE DEATHLESS; and DARK DEEDS haunt a Na-tion’s soul unto damnation, BE THEY ACQUIESED IN. . . .25

25. NLI, ILB 300, p. 3, no. 123. This file also contains another handbill (no. 125), similar in style, tone, and format. Entitled “The Supreme Crime,” it deals with the execution of Erskine Childers.


In this undated newssheet, the Free State regime is depicted as a space of monstrous otherness, a nightmarish reality where civility and social justice are perversely inverted.

In language from a Gothic repertoire, the two handbills featured in figures 4 and 5 deploy similar terminology. The first depicts the Civil War as resulting from a curse that will not be lifted until Ireland has “scrapped the imperial treaty”; the second depicts the Free State administration as presiding over a “new terror.” Such ominous warn-

Figure 3: “The Supreme Horror,” Civil War ephemera, c. 1923. This image is reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Ireland: NLI ILB 300, p. 3, no. 123.


ings again draw on Gothic conventions—as does the notion of dark and unforgivable deeds shadowing perpetrators as they attempt to resume normal lives.26

Despite their ambitions and leaving only traces in the form of po-litical ephemera, the Ghosts predictably play a small role in the his-torical record. But ephemera left by radical groups at the margins of the state constitute an alternative archive that offers information about the agency and consciousness of the historical figures produc-ing such documents.27 To consider consciousness means to prioritize

26. See Wurtz, “Scarce More a Corpse,” 104. Wurtz traces an Irish Catholic Gothic tradition from James Clarence Mangan through James Joyce. Arguing that ghosts and other Gothic motifs emerge in response to deep and repeated trauma, he suggests that such guilt is not just a result of anticolonial feeling but also serves as a political critique. For Wurtz, a defining feature of this version of the Gothic is its emphasis on the effects of sin; being haunted is linked to a sin that cannot be forgiven.

27. See Laura E. Lyons’s “Hand-to-Hand History: Ephemera and Irish Repub-licanism,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 5, no. 3 (2003): 407–25. Lyons notes that political ephemera can illustrate the “complex work that marginalized groups undertake in creating self-representations,” and that, in certain

Figure 4: “The Curse,” Civil War ephemera, 1922.

This image is reproduced courtesy of the National

Library of Ireland: NLI ILB 300, p. 13, item 52.


agency over result; thus, the successful outcome of an action does not become the sole measure of historic import. Although we cannot fully reconstitute the consciousness of the historical activists in the Ghost campaign, their self-descriptions begin to reveal their motivations and activities—and their sense of their roles in history. To view the Ghost leaflets merely as idiosyncratic republican ephemera means to occlude the self-conceptualizations of those producing them—figures who believed in their powerful claim on the present even as they rec-ognized that as republican women they were becoming increasingly marginalized and effaced in the public sphere. Such forms of nonelite activism and expression can adumbrate an alternative politics—one

instances, ephemera can constitute a “form of political analysis written from the in-side.” 416, 420.

Figure 5: “The New Ter-ror,” Civil War ephem-era, 1922. This image is reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Ireland: NLI ILB 300, p. 13, item 73.


not producing a new historical narrative, but offering fragmentary insights into the political and cultural consciousness of groups at the margins of state-dominated accounts.

In a contemporary theory of ghosts, Jacques Derrida emphasizes their power by arguing that such specters become authoritative fig-ures as they destabilize the present. Once a ghost appears, witnesses anxiously await a reapparition. In assuming a spectral quality, then, the Ghosts of Cumann na mBan might be viewed as avenging Gothic revenants. By means of an unusual imaginative move with implicit political import, they conceive of themselves as spectral moral con-sciences provoking the guilt of the haunted. Such a spectral status can confer authority, for as Derrida asserts, the ghost has the unset-tling ability to act as an unseen, ever-present witness.28 Both Derrida and Avery F. Gordon emphasize the ghost not merely as a psycho-logical projection but also as the conduit through which the past lives on in the present. Gordon even argues that haunting is “a constitu-ent element of modern social life.”29 The Cumann na mBan Ghosts, then, were not obsolete remnants from the past; they were, rather, a functioning part of the post-Treaty body politic, constituting a ri-poste to the political and cultural formations of the postcolonial state. Their rhetoric suggests a staged confrontation between the rational, modernizing discourses of the new state and the nightmare of history from which the new administration aimed to distance itself.

In Uineseann MacEoin’s collection of oral testimonies, Cumann na mBan activist Sighle Humphries provides a direct account of her role in the Ghost campaign:

I continued my work actively with Cumann na mBan and the IRA from 1924 onwards. They were the fallow years of the Cosgrave ad-ministration when there was very little that Republicans could do except oppose, oppose. I remember in 1928, we produced a series

28. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (London: Routledge, 1994). Derrida as-serts that “this spectral someone other looks at us, we feel ourselves being looked at by it, outside of any synchrony, even before and beyond any look on our part.” This “visor effect” and the invisibility of the ghost mean that the haunted must focus on the message being delivered: “since we do not see the one who sees us . . . , we cannot identify it in all certainty, we must fall back on its voice.” 6–7.

29. Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 50–58.


of leaflets signed Ghosts in an attempt to win soldiers and gardai away from the administration. What naiveté! Most of the year 1928 was however spent in Mountjoy. The charge this time was embracery, which is a term used about people who try to influence jurymen. We had delivered letters, leaflets and appeals to jurymen in political cases. A number of us were arrested, including Maire Comerford. I was six months in prison on remand. . . .

I had been charged in the District Court (that day) on an illegal organisation charge. Detective Officer Hughes said the police found 20,000 copies of “Ghosts” in my office. Other charges were then pre-ferred against me.30

That these women were aiming for maximum impact is suggested by the mode and volume of the leaflets’ distribution.31 If 20,000 cop-ies were discovered in Humphries’s possession, the Ghost campaign was indeed visible—as thousands of Dubliners awoke to find leaflets in their letterboxes or posted to railings. Their contents reveal the immediate political views and concerns of the women—for example, the activities of juries, an ideology of international anti-imperialism, and attacks on the legitimacy of the Irish Free State.

As evident in figures 6, 7, and 8, the one-page leaflets used threat-ening language and deployed the eponymous signature, “Ghosts.” While Sighle Humphries was in prison awaiting trial for her part in the campaign, other activists continued to issue the flyers, one of which questioned the definition of treason and, like other Cumann na mBan ghost publications, reminded jurors that they were charged with “safeguarding the rights of the citizens of this country.”32 The Ghosts urged jurors to reject the new state apparatus, equating “this country” with the phantom Irish Republic; thus, by appropriating the language of the official government but by appealing to latent loyalty to the Republic, the leaflets haunted the Free State. Similarly, in Oc-

30. Uinseann MacEoin, Survivors (Dublin: Argenta, 1980), 348.31. In her papers, Sighle Humphries includes handwritten instructions with a

circular addressed to “Soldiers of the Free State Army, Members of the Free State Police,” asking that they be delivered by “hand or by post” to officers serving in differ-ent barracks (UCD Archives, P106/1456). Other leaflets were attached to pillars and posts. In one diary entry (3/4/1928), Humphries notes that leaflets should be posted on telegraph poles, at church gates, and through private letterboxes (P106/1435 – 27).

32. National Archives of Ireland (hereafter NAI), Department of An Taoiseach Files, S 5864B.


tober 1928 a circular addressed to jury members urged them to reject “the murderers of 1922 in their wicked vendetta against honourable citizens who scorn to betray their country in England’s interests.”33 Here the Ghosts invert conventional notions of political legitimacy: the “honourable citizens” are now well-known Republicans such as Sighle Humphries and Frank Ryan, whereas the “murderers” are members of William Cosgrave’s Cumann na nGaedheal government. Inversion of the state-sponsored understanding of law and order had been an important weapon of Irish activists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries under the British regime. Although the Dáil

33. Ibid.

Figure 6: “Packed Juries”: Ghost Leaflet, c. 1928. This image is reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Ireland: NLI LOLB 161 (77).


courts had ceased to function in 1924, the Ghosts did not posit an alternative system; their resistance to the new government emerged, rather, in a discourse challenging its legitimacy as they invoked the phantom Republic. An earlier Ghost pamphlet (figure 6) described the twelve jurors who found Con Healy, an ex-IRA man, guilty of fir-ing on a garda detective in 1928 as “renegades” and “traitors.”34

To print the names and addresses of the jury members on a leaflet was an intimidating gesture, as the foreman of that jury, John White, had already been shot and injured at his Terenure home in January 1929; his address is listed on the pamphlet with the ominous adden-dum that he was “now in Stephens Hospital.” The Ghosts had al-

34. NLI, LOLB 161 (77).

Figure 7: “Address of ‘Welcome’”: Ghost Leaf-let, 1928. This image is reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Ireland: NLI LOLB 161 (74).


ready produced leaflets protesting against Healy’s conviction, which led the minister for justice, James Fitzgerald-Kenney, to read extracts from them into the record of the upper house of parliament, Seanad Éireann.35 He referred to a conspiracy to intimidate jurors involv-ing an “association which calls itself ‘The Ghosts.’”36 The rhetoric employed in these foreboding leaflets, some directly aimed at any collaboration with the Free State, was indeed menacing.

Such menace appears in the apocalyptic language and the ma-cabre imagery of another leaflet, issued in response to the appoint-ment of the new governor general, James MacNeill, following the retirement of Timothy Healy in December 1927 (see figure 7).37 The dates (1169–1928) positioned at the top of the poster and the rhetoric throughout that posits MacNeill as just the latest in a line of British-appointed administrators (including Poynings, Mountjoy, and Strongbow) evidence Cumann na mBan’s conviction that the Anglo-Irish Treaty had failed to bring independence—and that the nationalist struggle had not ceased.38 Again the Ghosts suggest that the problem of history and the specter of unfinished business could not be erased. By paraphrasing and then quoting from the writings of the executed revolutionary hero Patrick Pearse, they embrace the radical republican tradition as their inheritance, contesting the own-ership of that tradition claimed by state nationalism.39

Although many leaflets were directed at jurors or members of the Free State army, some were open letters to individual politicians or

35. Another leaflet supporting Healy condemned the jurors that found him guilty as “degenerate and slavish citizens.” NLI, LOLB 161 (68).

36. Seanad Éireann Debates, vol. 12 (20 June 1929). 37. NLI, LOLB 161 (74).38. Mentioned on the poster, Timothy Coughlan was killed on 28 January 1928

by police informant Seán Harling during what was probably a botched assassination attempt. It has only recently emerged that Coughlan—both an IRA volunteer and a member of Fianna Fáil—was one of those responsible for the July 1927 assassination of Kevin O’Higgins, minister for justice and vice president of the Executive Council. Coughlan’s funeral was attended by thousands of republicans, and the event received much press attention.

39. Competing projects of remembrance characterized the 1920s in the Free State. For example, both pro-Treaty and anti-Treaty groups held rival annual pil-grimages to Wolfe Tone’s grave at Bodenstown, each laying claim to his legacy. See, for example, Ian McBride, ed., History and Memory in Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Mairín Ní Dhonnchadha and Theo Dorgan, eds., Revising the Rising (Derry: Field Day, 1991).


to the general public. One addresses the minister for justice, James Fitzgerald-Kenney, rebuking him for his membership in “that usurp-ing Assembly called the Free State Parliament” (figure 8).40 Another explains “why Switzers windows were smashed,” justifying such ac-tion against the Dublin department store by drawing attention to window displays that promoted British rather than Irish goods. Other leaflets expressed solidarity with anti-imperialist activists in India and Egypt, making clear that the anticolonial struggle persisted in Ireland despite the establishment of the Free State:41

We suffer even greater ignominies than they. Our country, Ireland, has been wiped off the face of the map. In its stead we are misrep-

40. NLI, LOLB 161(73).41. Anti-imperialism is a recurring feature of republican discourses through-

out the 1920s and ’30s. See Caoilfhionn Ní Bheacháin, “The Mosquito Press: Anti-Imperialist Rhetoric in Republican Journalism, 1926–39,” Éire-Ireland 42, nos. 1–2 (2007): 256–89.

Figure 8: “An Open Let-ter”: Ghost Leaflet, 1930. This image is reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Ireland: NLI LOLB 161 (73).


resented by the “The Irish Free State” and “Northern Ireland.” The two British-imposed governments operating in Ireland do not repre-sent the Irish people. They function by force, by means of “Safety” Acts and “Treason”Acts. Thus, it is easy for us to sympathise with India’s soldiers of Freedom.42

By challenging the legitimacy of the two existing states in Ireland, this circular again undermined accepted notions of law and order. It suggested, moreover, that the post-Treaty state negated neither the agency nor the existence of a phantom Republic.

As noted above, her oral testimony links Sighle Humphries to the Ghost campaign; her collected papers, moreover, demonstrate the am-bition and remit of the movement. When Humphries was brought to trial in May 1928, the Evening Herald reported the proceedings under the headline “Treason and Embracery,” commenting that “during the course of the taking of evidence, [she] kept smiling sarcastically in the dock.” Evidence submitted by the prosecution included Ghost leaflets and a letter from the chief of staff of the IRA to Humphries noting, “I disagreed rather violently with some of the views you express in your note, but it is not wise to be writing much about such matters.”43 Like many brought to trial, this republican deployed her court appearance as both protest and performance; when asked to plead, she refused. When Humphries was again asked if she had anything to say, the newspaper records that she began reading “in Irish from a book in her hand,” and that when she left the dock “there were cheers and shouts of ‘Up the Republic’ from the crowd of women who were in court waiting for the hearing of cases for street trading.”44 Such incidents illustrate the visibility of the Ghost campaign and suggest why the Cumann na nGaedheal government (and later the Fianna Fáil admin-istration) reacted so decisively against republican challenges to state legitimacy. The spontaneous shouts of “Up the Republic” in response

42. NAI, Department of An Taoiseach Files, S 5864A.43. Reported in the Irish Times coverage of her appearance in court. See “Let-

ters to Jurors: Woman Charged with Embracery,” Irish Times, 18 May 1928, 11. Re-trieved 22 Jan. 2010 from ProQuest Historical Newspapers (1859–2008). (Document ID: 1324599452.)

44. See the Evening Herald’s report of the incident, which is presented under the heading “Treason and Embracery”; a copy of this article is available in the Sighle Humphries Papers, UCD Archives P106/1461.


to Humphries’s defiance demonstrated a public tolerance and sup-port for the activities of antistate groups and invoked the remnants of an alternative citizenship representing the phantom Republic. In such moments the material reality of the Free State itself appeared as an insubstantial entity superimposed onto the legitimate Irish Republic.

The letters between the women activists and the IRA reveal ten-sions between two republican, antistate groups. Both Humphries and Cumann na mBan corresponded with the IRA leadership in 1927 when it protested against the Ghost campaign. The adjutant general wrote that the General Headquarters staff of the IRA “resent very strongly the independent action you have seen fit to take” and in-structed that Cumann na mBan “not take any action in which volun-teers are involved, until the measures you propose are submitted to, and receive the sanction of this Headquarters.” The adjutant general also objected to the use of “futile threats” by the Ghosts.45 Cumann na mBan’s executive responded assertively, noting that although the organization had not officially issued the circulars, with their “con-tents we are in entire agreement”:

The Executive resent very much the tone of the last paragraph of your communication. Cumann na mBan is an independent body of Irish women pledged to uphold the Republic, consequently not de-pendent on the good-will or approval of any other Organisation in any action it may consider necessary to take in the furtherance or maintenance of the Republican ideal.46

Sighle Humphries’s letter to the chief of staff of the IRA was less polite. She derided IRA volunteers who had sought legal assistance and thereby acknowledged the legitimacy of the Free State court. They were, in her view, attempting to “prove what good little boys they really are,” and she asserted that the Ghost leaflet made them look “ridiculously inconsistent.”47 These exchanges, revealing tensions between the two organizations, belie the stereotype of Cumann na mBan members as handmaidens of the IRA. Moreover Humphries’s rebuke to the chief of staff suggests that the intimidating tone of

45. Sighle Humphries Papers, P69/67 (4).46. Sighle Humprhies Papers, P69/67 (3).47. Sighle Humphries Papers, P69/67 (2).


the pamphlets was indeed merely rhetoric created by activists who turned to a Gothic aesthetic—rather than issuing actual threats that they intended to deliver upon. Humphries finished her letter with the comment that “I am really interested to know what you considered was a ‘threat’ contained in the circulars to jurors.”48 But despite her protest, the Ghost leaflets surely created anxiety among those co-operating with the state, as through one flyer’s identification of the injured juryman (figure 6). After these 1927 exchanges, for another four years the Ghosts continued to produce circulars demonstrating dissonance between Cumann na mBan and the IRA. Their imagina-tive discourse of haunting positioned these republican women as be-tween institutions, in process—and not simply within the corporeal realm of physical force.

Significantly, the Ghosts interfered with juries in 1927 when the state attempted to restrict women’s participation in the national jus-tice system by removing them from jury service—a move immediate-ly recognized as retrogressive by many women’s groups. This threat provoked the activists of the Ghost campaign, who understood how they were being rendered phantom-like by the official state. Although the government eventually accepted an amendment allowing women to volunteer for jury service, debates surrounding this issue revealed a harsh backlash against women who had been active in the public sphere.49 If, as Avery Gordon suggests, the figure of the ghost is “pri-marily a symptom of what is missing,” then to self-identify as such figures compels a society to confront absences—forcing it to engage with what has been rendered ghostly.50 In this instance, the female Ghosts intruding on the state’s attempt to normalize its authority through the judicial system provide a shrewd commentary on exclu-sions of women from governmental operations. Again, by assuming a spectral identity, women were representing themselves as revenants who could destabilize the Free State.

48. Sighle Humphries Papers, P69/67 (2).49. For an overview of this issue and some of the public discourses connected

with it, see Maryann Valiulis, “Engendering Citizenship: Women’s Relationship to the State in Ireland and the United States in the Post Suffrage Period,” in Mary O’Dowd and Maryann Valiulis, eds., Women and Irish History (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1997), 159–72.

50. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 63.


The contested quest to claim “citizens” continued for two de-cades, with traces of the alternative modes of identification persisting until the 1940s; by then, however, this strategy appears to have moved from the oppositional to the ironic. For example, the 1940 republi-can booklet Imaginary Happenings (figure 9) published implausible editorials and speeches from the dock, including an Irish Times edito-rial that “hits out at imperialism.” The booklet also reports on how the “Irish Press attacks Fianna Fáil,” how the “Standard defends the IRA,” and how “Dr. Hyde refuses to sign a Bill.” Mocking coverage of such fantasy events drew attention to the failings and predictability of elite politics and public discourses. By presenting these “imaginary happenings,” writers were drawing attention to the possibility of al-ternate realities, even as their ironic tone suggests a certain defeatism. But notwithstanding the irony, manifestations of the Republic and its spectral public sphere continued to cast a shadow over the state.

By identifying themselves as “Ghosts” and by turning to a Gothic aesthetic, anti-Treaty activists complicated both the historical nar-rative and the very category of the political. Their self-descriptions problematized an understanding of the political associated with prosaic and realistic practices of state-building. Gothic motifs also proved a suitable discourse for voicing the disappointment and alienation felt by opponents of the settlement of 1921. The frag-ments and ephemera produced by Ghosts expose the political and cultural haunting occurring in response to the emerging practices of post colonial modernity; such hauntings, in turn, reveal the fragility of state authority. Those who composed and circulated the Ghost leaflets can be easily elided from histories that prioritize the state or elite forms of cultural production: ghosts have no material ex-istence and leave little physical trace. Crucially, however, they can effect change. The Ghosts were aware that all constituencies—from jury members to Free State ministers to “citizens” of the Republic—were susceptible to the haunting presence of a phantom Republic as well as to the Gothic forms they adopted in their narration of a nation in crisis. Their campaign evidences how recalcitrant elements in the Free State mapped out alternative political, social, and cul-tural possibilities and how the ephemera they left offers a fugitive discourse not easily assimilated within any grand narrative. But po-litical ephemera can suggest complex meanings through their modes


of self- representation and genre, retrospectively providing insights into the mood or “structure of feelings” of a period. The deploy-ment of Gothic motifs also served as political analysis and argument. Thus the political practices performed by anti-Treaty activists and the literary and political artifacts they produced indicate that a sense of being haunted characterized that first decade of state-building. The discontinuous ephemeral fragments of this material culture, scattered across the archives, facilitates the beginning of an alterna-tive history. The Ghosts’ activism and mode of cultural expression emphasize the need for a political and cultural history alert to the ephemeral, evanescent, and episodic. This alternative history sug-gests that nonmodern hauntings are intimately linked to the mod-ern—and that the postcolonial state was shadowed by lost potential and by the dark moments of its genesis.

Figure 9: Imaginary Happenings, Republi-can Booklet, Dublin:

Irish Book Bureau, 1940.

Seeing Ghosts: Gothic Discourses and State Formation (2012)

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