Writing
Resting Places: On Wounds, War and the Irish Revolution
The prologue to Resting Places was published in the Irish Times on Good Friday, April 2022:
'Dunmanway Fields: Saying Something to Break the Silence about a Great Local Hurt'.
My publisher, the Belfast based Beyond the Pale Books, describes the book as follows:
‘Ellen McWilliams reflects on her Catholic upbringing in West Cork in the 1980s and 1990s, and on relations with her Protestant neighbours. She is haunted by the killings in the period of Ireland’s War of Independence and Civil War, and in particular by the ‘Dunmanway massacre’ of April 1922 which marked the area where she grew up. Her great grandmother was active in Cumann na mBan and her granduncle fought for independence as well as in the anti-Treaty IRA. The book reveals why the events of those days remain deeply personal and how they shape her adult life as she moves to England, marries an expert on Cromwell and the English Civil War, teaches Irish literature at an English university, experiences pregnancy and childbirth, and nurtures her son in his early years.’
Resting Places offers up an Irishwoman’s elegy for two Revolutionists, Oliver Cromwell and Terence James MacSwiney, a meditation on the unexpected correspondences between the English Civil War of the seventeenth century and the Irish Civil War of the 1920s, a prayer to John Milton and William Shakespeare, and a keen for a Famine Road and for the troubled history of the plantation town of Bandon in Co. Cork. It sings a hymn to my Irish-speaking Grandmother’s home place of Baile Bhúirne, site of the shrine of the Medieval St. Gobnait, and speculates by way of a counterfactual history as to what may have happened if my father-in-law’s uncle had survived the Battle of Ypres during the Great War in 1915 and had later been posted to West Cork during the years of the War of Independence where he would have risked encountering the Irish Republican Army women and men in my Grandfather’s family. It is a book about darkness, sight and illumination, delayed speech, and what happens when concealed histories are brought into the light.
The book includes a contextualising overview by historian Andy Bielenberg (University College Cork) and reflections by Charles Duff and Neale Jagoe, the Grandsons of two of the victims of April 1922.
Resting Places could be read as a memoir or a collection of personal essays, but it is neither – literary scholar Lucy McDiarmid describes it as 'the creation of a new literary form'; I have always gone to great lengths to avoid, at any cost, writing in the first person, so this book has come as a shock.
Beyond the Pale Books is a not-for-profit independent publisher unlike any other and I was blessed to have the wisdom and academic insight of editors Robbie McVeigh, Bill Rolston, and Mike Tomlinson during the, at times challenging, development of the manuscript.
Any author royalties that Resting Places earns will be donated to the organisation Relatives for Justice, Belfast, for its work with victims and survivors.
Early Reviews of Resting Places:
‘This is a work of eloquent, haunting beauty, a song of mourning and revelation that deserves the widest possible audience. This is a story rooted in a place and time, but it is truly the story of all wars in all times.’
Fergal Keane
‘Written more in sorrow than in anger, Ellen McWilliams’s meditations on history, memory and the legacies of atrocity add up to a remarkable conversation between the past and the present, and between silence and articulation. Her explorations begin in, and return to, both her home ground of County Cork, of her family, and of her own physical existence, but they range boldly into the difficult terrain of trauma and grief and bring back the fruits of wisdom and forgiveness.’
Fintan O'Toole
‘A powerful, moving book about the heaviness of history and a reckoning with what reconciliation can mean in the present. To read it is to walk with ghosts, to time-travel, to sit with the grandchild of the Irish civil war as she navigates intergenerational trauma. A story told with deep love, empathy and a desire for healing. I am not the same after reading it.’
Claire Mitchell, Author of The Ghost Limb: Alternative Protestants and the Spirit of 1798
‘Resting Places: On Wounds, War and the Irish Revolution by Ellen McWilliams is a beautifully fearless conversation about a hidden, unmentionable past that gently removes the obstruction which, for a century, caused us to stammer and speak in hushed tones. Anyone with an interest in the past, present and future of our shared island should read this book. The emergence of a truly great, courageous and unique Irish writer.’
Stephen Travers, Peace Activist and Survivor of the Miami Showband Massacre, Newry, Co. Down, 1975
‘In Resting Places Ellen McWilliams has created a new literary form, a series of meditations on personal, ancestral, local, and national histories. Each chapter, in an artful meandering, moves as thought moves, from childbirth and pregnancy to Oliver Cromwell’s infancy, or from her husband’s sourdough bread to the death of his great-uncle at Ypres. And all the book’s rich materiality – toys, horses, chickens, the Infant of Prague, a list of Irish vocabulary words for the Leaving Cert – leads back in every chapter to reminders of a massacre during the Irish Civil War in McWilliams’s native West Cork. In its efforts to record and comprehend family love, neighbourly kindness, and political violence, Resting Places never simplifies the subjects of its meditation: its perspective is generous, expansive, visionary.’
Lucy McDiarmid, Author of At Home in the Revolution: What Women Said and Did in 1916
‘Maya Angelou said “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you”. Ellen McWilliams unlocks the layers of her intergenerational, untold story of revolution and silences embedded deep in West Cork in this book.
A brave, eloquent, and personal account by a literary scholar who has already contributed to the recovery of other Irish women writers’ untold narratives of kinship, exile, secrets and displacement.’
Linda Connolly, Author of Women and the Irish Revolution: Feminism, Activism, Violence
‘Resting Places opens with the vibrant west cork floral palette of Fuchsia, Montbretia, Foxglove, and Rhododendron, blooms gesturing to the blood spilled on bruised land in which they grow. Nature, human and other, are here interwoven with history and its telling, as Resting Places speaks what has been unspeakable. This unflinching tale is transformative, bearing complex witness to the complications of local and national history, perfectly pitched between outrage and forgiveness. McWilliams’s compelling, courageous, and artful storytelling amplifies what Lindsey Earner-Byrne has called the “whispers at the edge of the archive” and steeply reforms the national story into one of healing and account.’
Moynagh Sullivan, Founding Member of the Irish Motherhood Project
‘“Rural Ireland does its best to be good at death.” That refers to obsequies. It might equally signify the creation of death. At the centre of McWilliams’s threnody is a massacre that took place a century ago in West Cork but might as well have been yesterday. It is unforgotten and will continue to be so as her son learns about that “exquisitely painful” time and finds the solace she found in taut prose which is a balm even though it treats of colonial crimes, republican crimes, the contagion of faith, the weight of history and fractured families.’
Jonathan Meades
‘A rich and complex book, partly a hymn in praise of the writer’s family and the locale in West Cork from which they and she sprang, partly a memoir of the writer’s own life, and partly a meditation on violence and hurt in West Cork during the Irish War of Independence and the Civil War that followed.
E. M. Forster described the Alexandrian Greek poet C.P. Cavafy as, “standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe”. Ellen McWilliams is a writer in the same mould. “Tell all the truth but tell it slant” (as Emily Dickinson counselled) are her watchwords. What she writes about has been written about before, but the way she does it here has never been done before. This book is all freshly minted – striking, surprising, and remarkable.’
Carlo Gébler
‘An evocative, highly original, vivid and personal book.
Compelling and fascinating throughout.’
Richard English, Director of the Senator George Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice and author of Irish Freedom: The History of Nationalism in Ireland and Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA
‘Land, family, community and tragic history make one of the most powerful and poignant combinations of which human experience is capable, and rarely has it found such an expressive and humane voice, capable of such wonderful language, as that of Ellen McWilliams.’
Ronald Hutton, Author of The Making of Oliver Cromwell and The British Republic 1649 – 1660
‘Resting Places: On Wounds, War and the Irish Revolution is passionate and often disturbing but it is also enriching and therapeutic. Ellen McWilliams is sensitively responsive to the natural world of her own childhood and that of her growing son yet she is painfully aware of the dark secrets it conceals and the fragility of its promises.
Resting places are never as completely paradisal as they seem to the passing gaze. Long before they reach the end, readers of this book will have developed an acuter understanding of the apparent simplicities of the “murderous fields” of the Irish countryside.’
Timothy Webb, Editor of The Penguin Selected Poetry of W.B. Yeats
‘A wonderful book: a deeply personal testimony, penetrating, painful, and extraordinarily moving – and so full of honesty and love.’
John Haffenden, Editor of The Letters of T.S. Eliot
Published Reviews
'Resting Places: On Wounds, War and the Irish Revolution is Ellen McWilliams’s deeply
personal reckoning with sectarian, or at least identity-based, killings in west Cork.
The book is an accounting with the murderous events of, in particular, April 1922 when exclusively Protestant members of the community were killed by the anti-treaty IRA. McWilliams's strength is that she not only tackles a markedly overshadowed episode of Irish history but does so as a local, as a woman, as an academic, and first and foremost as an Irish person. This book is not happy to leave things alone because they are uncomfortable to deal with or because they fray the acknowledged narrative. Indeed, McWilliams is more tenacious than most in insisting that the dark corners be lit because not to do so is an unforgivable betrayal.
She is not protecting the "green" she comes from or cheerleading the other she writes of. She is simply obsessed with digging at the truth and making it clear that the deaths of thirteen Protestant males in a small area around her home in the days of 1922 were the deaths of flesh and blood people. Their deaths are a stain on our Irishness but our subsequent silence is the pain that McWilliams gives voice to and, indeed, so eloquently feels.
The book is on a par with books like Lost Lives, a detailed account of all the dead of the most recent Troubles, and The Dead of The Irish Revolution, a detailed account of all the dead of the original troubles. Whilst those two books are deeply important and moving listings McWilliams's book is far more; it is an ache that the writer somehow translates into a coherent story.
What Ellen McWilliams does in this book though is remind us, especially now, that if we are to take sides we can only ever take the side of humanity. Do yourself a favour and buy and read this brave, moving book.’
The Irish Post
‘A remarkable book: brave, eloquent, empathetic and eminently readable.’
The Irish Examiner
‘A tender memoir… McWilliams’s local Georgian rectory in Kilcolman provides a startling metaphor for the difficulty of writing about two sides. When many Protestant Big Houses were burned in 1921, the rectory although “not quite the Big House of the Anglo-Irish imagination …” was spared “because a member of the family that lived there had the medical training to help the wounded and the injured — treating British soldiers in a makeshift ward in the attic and Irish rebels in the basement, an extraordinary and enlightened experiment in holding two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time.”
This could describe McWilliams’s “experiment” too. Freud has compared the mind or psyche to a house of several storeys, each of which corresponds to a different layer or strata of consciousness. Resting Places likewise provides several stratas of consciousness, a happy, safe childhood which nevertheless senses the darker history which eventually emerges in all its troubling detail, “…you watch the story of your life, your family, the house you grew up in and the community that raised you spill across the kitchen floor.”’
The Irish Times
'Tackles tragic events fearlessly, with passion, empathy and courage, creating the potential for understanding, healing and forgiveness across cultural and religious divides.'
The Southern Star
‘“OTHERING” is a concept far more in the public eye as a result of recent discussions about racism and immigration. Resting Places serves as a reminder that it is necessary to acknowledge the truth of history, however difficult that is, and “to stand in other people’s shoes” in order to achieve personal and collective resolution. This was the success of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in post-apartheid South Africa.
The message of the book is reconciliation and closure. Claire Mitchell, writing poetically in her fly leaf recommendation, reflecting on the power of Ellen’s writing, says: “To read it is to walk with ghosts, to time-travel, to sit with the grandchild of the Irish civil war as she navigates intergenerational trauma.”
Ellen McWilliams comes from generations of Irish Republicans. Her personal story raises the often unexplored human consequences of the fight for Irish independence and the civil war following the establishment of the Irish Free State.
The setting is West Cork where in 1922 Anti-Treaty Irish Republican Army (IRA) forces carried out a campaign against British settler families, grand country houses and suspected informers for the British occupation forces. In one such “Flying Column” raid in Dunmanway, Cork, IRA volunteer, Michael O’Neill was fatally wounded. In retaliation the IRA killed a dozen Protestants. Some were representatives of the occupying colonial state, others were unquestionably informers, but several were entirely innocent victims of what the book describes as a sectarian atrocity.
On the other side of the conflict were many victims of the excesses of the British Army and in particular the Black and Tans. McWilliams considers some of these in detail. She also helps to correct the imbalance of many previous histories of the Easter Rising, the War of Independence and the Civil War by highlighting the role of women, in particular the members of Cumann na mBan (League of Women) as detailed by Denis Lordan, Quartermaster of the Third West Cork Brigade, IRA.
McWilliams challenges the reader to put aside historical attachments to one side or the other and seek to understand the hurt that lives on from such battles. Similarly the author is conflicted between the fate of her family and their comrades, and the innocent Protestant victims of Dunmanway.
Ellen sums up her painful journey of exploration through the emotions of many aspects of her life in Ireland and subsequently in England, explaining that: “Staring down the barrel of history comes at a cost, but it is a price worth paying even if... it can feel at times as if your head is splitting.”
Perhaps British government ministers should read this book in order to gain an understanding of how wrongheaded their efforts are to block any effective exploration of the impact of “the Troubles” across communities in Northern Ireland.’
The Morning Star
‘It takes a particular type of courage and sensitivity to explore a difficult history with the living relatives of those directly impacted, one that would have been held within living memory in the past twenty years. It takes on an additional significance when that exploration is conducted with neighbours you have known all your life, yet their stories were unknown to you. For anyone interested in Irish history and how a community can live together in the wake of immense suffering, this publication will be a necessary addition to understanding how sometimes it can take a century of silence before grief can be approached.’
The Western People
'Perhaps the strangest thing in this book is the fantasy about marrying, giving birth to and indeed breast-feeding Oliver Cromwell.
Resting Places comes with endorsements from a heavy battery of Irish and English intellectual and literary celebrities, including Bristol University historian Ronald Hutton. It's as compelling as a letter from a close friend with a captivating narrative flow and easy eloquence. It's about history, but no history book before told us in gaudy detail about the author's pregnancy, c-section (and the scar), breastfeeding and menstruation.'
The Bristol Post
'It is difficult to pin a label on the book which, in turn, can be autobiography, political polemic, Irish history, social commentary, and much more. I liked it because it can't be pigeon-holed. But also because, whatever the subject being dealt with, it is well written. There are lines I returned to just to hear their rhythm again. Resting Places is a fine book, personal and yet reaching out to the reader in a way that draws you in and convinces with its sincerity.'
The Northern Review of Books
'Resting Places: On Wounds, War and the Irish Revolution by Ellen McWilliams explores how unresolved suffering "haunts" the present, with those scars living on in their descendants today. It doubly demonstrates the necessity of properly dealing with a violent past, our recent history aptly displays that.
This is not simply an historical narrative. It is deeply personal in places, outlining the author’s early life, her formative years and her family background. It deals with national identity, her maternal instincts and all that these entail. It also displays her intense knowledge and affection for her home area in Cork county. This fittingly leads us into her passionate connection to, and understanding of the Dunmanway Massacre, a spate of killings that took place near Dunmanway and the Bandon Valley in West Cork in April 1922.
In modern parlance, these murders by the IRA would be termed as ‘signal crimes’ that would have a disproportionate impact on the Protestant community to either leave or maintain a low profile. West Cork was to be replicated in Galway, South Armagh and North Fermanagh, and other areas in 1922. The incidents were to create a profound hostility and suspicion towards the Irish republic within the Protestant Unionist population. That was to be further characterised in the perceived lack of action by the Irish government during the recent Troubles.
Ellen does not attempt to disavow her family’s Republican past, highlighting her great grandmother’s involvement in Cumann na mBan, whilst her great uncle, Gerry Foley, was a member of the Cork IRA, and her grandfather Francie who was a ‘runner’ for the IRA in his youth.'
Ken Funston (Former Advocacy Manager with the South East Fermanagh Foundation)
The Belfast News Letter
Interviews about Resting Places have appeared in the Irish News and the Irish Evening Echo.
An excerpt can be found on the Irish television network RTE Culture site, as can an article on the genesis of the book: 'I have always done my best not to believe in ghosts'.
A profile of the work has recently been published in the New York Irish Echo.
Work in Progress
I am in the later stages of work on The Miracle Keepers, a coda to the Irish Big House Novel, inspired by the ruins of Castle Bernard in Bandon, Co. Cork. I have been working on this novel for years, but only recently discovered that my mother's uncle was one of the Irish Republican Army men who burned Castle Bernard to the ground and took the Earl of Bandon hostage in the summer of 1921. He was described by Republican leader, later Free State politician, Tom Hales, as among 'the1st Class Rank & File Soldiers of Cork No. 3 Brigade'. Writing this Big House novel is one way of rebuilding, I suppose.
Lord Bandon was treated kindly by his kidnappers.
Below: 'Bereft' by Sarah Strong, Mixed Media, 2003 (Reproduced with permission of the artist)
My Great Grandmother Ellen's Military Service Pension Application (MSP34REF54920 Bureau of Irish Military History)