Book gives fresh account of the ambush at Kilmichael

THE Kilmichael Ambush of November 28, 1920, was and remains one of the most famous IRA attacks of the Irish War of Independence.

A newly-published book from Irish historian Eve Morrison offers a comprehensive account of both the ambush and the intense debates that followed.

It explores the events, memory and historiography of the ambush, from 1920 to the present day, within a wider framework of interwar European events, global ‘memory wars’ and current scholarship relating to Irish, British, oral and military history.

Kilmichael: The Life and Afterlife Of An Ambush features extensive archival research, including the late Peter Hart’s papers, as well as many other new sources from British and Irish archives, and previously unavailable oral history interviews with Kilmichael veterans.

“There has always been more than one version of Kilmichael,” the publishers said. 

“Tom Barry’s account certainly became the dominant one after the publication of Guerilla Days In Ireland in 1949, but it was always shadowed and contested by others.

“In this book, Eve Morrison meticulously reconstructs both ‘British’ and ‘Irish’ perspectives on this momentous and much-debated attack.”

Morrison specialises in the revolutionary period (1916–23) and its social and cultural memory. Both her doctoral research on the Bureau of Military History (Trinity College Dublin) and a postdoctoral fellowship on the Ernie O’Malley notebook interviews (University College Dublin) were funded by the Irish Research Council.

Kilmichael: The Life And Afterlife Of An Ambush, by Eve Morrison, published by Irish Academic Press. Available now.