Speaker: Professor Lindsey Earner-Byrne

Online and in person in The Shtepps Lecture Theatre, the Hub, UCC

Lecture Description: Before the Irish Civil War was even officially over, thousands of families and individuals had their lives blown irrevocably off course by trauma, injury and/or the death of a family member. Grief was often sidelined by the mundane but necessary work of survival, which frequently involved bureaucratic encounters commodifying loss to fit the dictates of official ‘case-making’. This paper looks at the gendered impact of this process. In particular, it explores the impact on the relatives of those injured or killed during or as a result of the conflict, who tended to be disproportionately women and children.  

Lindsey Earner-Byrne is the Professor of Irish Gender History at University College Cork. She has published on the history of motherhood, sexuality, welfare and poverty including a recent study with Professor Diane Urquhart on the history of abortion on the island of Ireland. She is currently working on the life experiences of the firstborn generation on the island of Ireland after the formation of the two states in 1921 and 1922.

 
This lecture is last in an eight-week autumn lecture series: 'Civil War in Ireland: New Perspectives', a collaboration between the National Library of Ireland and the Atlas of the Irish Revolution editorial team, UCC