Peer Reviewed Articles by Thomas Tormey
Studi Irlandesi, 2019
In 1916 members of the Scottish unit of the Irish Volunteers were deeply involved in preparations... more In 1916 members of the Scottish unit of the Irish Volunteers were deeply involved in preparations for the Easter Rising in Dublin and some republican activists travelled from the west of Scotland to participate in
the rebellion. What follows is a limited prosopography of the revolutionary involvement of those members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), the Irish Volunteers, or Cumann na mBan, who were resident in Scotland between 1913 and 1915 and who fought in Ireland in 1916, or who were prevented from doing so because they were imprisoned. By covering militant activity in both Ireland and Britain, this treatment will argue that Scotland’s Irish republicans were highly integrated with the wider separatist movement in Ireland and beyond,
while being very much of the Glasgow, and Europe, of their time.
Addressing more recent history, chapters by Dr Michael Kennedy and Dr James McCafferty explore po... more Addressing more recent history, chapters by Dr Michael Kennedy and Dr James McCafferty explore political, diplomatic and military aspects of Ireland's involvement in the UN mission in Congo in the 1960s. Dr Kennedy examines Ireland's experience dealing with the UN secretariat during the Congo Crisis, while Dr McCafferty, a veteran of the UN operation, focuses on the experience of the Irish Army in the Congo from 1960-64, suggesting that the Army's experience there provided the foundation for success in subsequent peacekeeping operations. Abstracts of the research dissertations written by the students of the 72nd Senior Command and Staff Course as part of the MA in Leadership, Management and Defence Studies (LMDS) programme are included in the Review. To view any of the theses listed, please contact the Defence Forces Library at: [email protected].
PhD Thesis by Thomas Tormey
PhD Thesis, 2021
Drawing on a long tradition of area studies on irregular warfare and county studies in Irish hist... more Drawing on a long tradition of area studies on irregular warfare and county studies in Irish history, this thesis examines the Irish War of Independence in the counties of Dublin and Roscommon. The thesis centres on the analysis of the significance, execution, occurrence, authorship, and consequences of the small actions that it holds to form the core element of the conflict as both a political contest for power and a lived experience. In order to do this, the thesis offers a treatment of both the dynamics of the conflict itself and the nature of individual activism in both an urban and rural setting. The central importance of cover for guerrilla units, regardless of geographical milieu, will be highlighted. The idea of cover, in its broadest sense, taken to mean an ability to avoid both detection and fire, had different manifestations in different environments: the city offered anonymity, the countryside offered privacy. The treatment draws on a broadly based historical methodology that includes aspects of diplomatic, political, and strategic histories-from-above, as well as tactical military, political, and social histories-from-below
Public History by Thomas Tormey
The Irish Story website, 2021
Lectures and seminars by Thomas Tormey
The Military Archive and MHSI War of Independence, 2021
TCD Centre for Contemporary Irish History Seminar Series
Book Reviews by Thomas Tormey
English Historical Review, 2021
Review of a collection of essays published by Dublin City Council to mark the centenary of the 19... more Review of a collection of essays published by Dublin City Council to mark the centenary of the 1916 Rising
Irish Studies Review, 2019
Twentieth Century British History, 2019
Conference Papers by Thomas Tormey
The Diaspora and the Irish Revolution, 1916-1923, 2021
The scholarship relating to diasporic interventions in Ireland’s struggle for independence is a w... more The scholarship relating to diasporic interventions in Ireland’s struggle for independence is a wellestablished but ever-growing field. Work on the IRA in Scotland has included contributions from Iain
Patterson, Máirtín Ó Catháin, and Gerard Noonan. Of these, only Patterson has cleaved close to the topic
of this paper, although it must be said that his 1993 article pre-dates the release of a good deal of the
source material that historians of the Irish revolution rely on in the twenty-first century.
Drawing on source material relating such as the Military Service Pensions Archive, Bureau of Military
History witness statements, and British cabinet documents, this paper will offer a new interpretation of
Scotland’s interaction with the Irish War of Independence. Through an analysis of the activities of the IRA in Scotland the paper will discuss how patterns of violence across Britain and Ireland knit together.
Furthermore, the paper will also discuss how units of the IRA in Scotland played upon and exacerbated
longstanding Scottish Protestant fears about an Irish Catholic ‘enemy within’. The effect that this process
had on both the strategic situation in 1921 and the long-term position of the Irish in Scotland will also be
considered.
These topics are of particular importance given that Scotland was and is Ireland’s closest neighbour, was
host nation to a proportionately large diasporic population in the revolutionary decade, and has been
the subject of numerous historiographical comparisons covering many periods.
Erhard Rumpf’s seminal statistical work on the Irish War of Independence lists County Roscommon, ... more Erhard Rumpf’s seminal statistical work on the Irish War of Independence lists County Roscommon, along with Longford and Sligo, as part of a “second centre” of violence outside the south-west. Rumpf’s statistics are based on his own tabulation of violent incidents by county but do not take account of variations in population. Later, Peter Hart’s work on the geography of the revolution attempted to rectify this. Hart found that, when adjusted for population, Roscommon was the second most violent county outside Munster. While not unproblematic, this body of work suggests that the Irish Republican Army’s campaign in Roscommon between 1919 and 1921 deserves more scholarly than has been afforded it heretofore. Particularly so, since the neighbouring counties of Longford and Galway have been subjected to academic scrutiny by Marie Coleman and Fergus Campbell respectively.
This gap in the historiography is not caused by any want of source material. A great deal of information can be gleaned from: veteran accounts collected by the Bureau of Military History and Ernie O’Malley, data on individual activists held in the Military Service Pensions Collection, and internal IRA reports preserved in the Richard Mulcahy papers. Using these sources this study will examine Roscommon’s two IRA brigades, north and south, in the light of the wider scholarship of the conflict.
The importance of Dublin in the War of Independence was appreciated at the time by the IRA, and h... more The importance of Dublin in the War of Independence was appreciated at the time by the IRA, and has been noted in at least some academic commentary since. A 1921 GHQ memo noted “[t]his is the first Irish war in which Dublin is in national hands. This factor may by itself prove decisive”; while John Bowyer Bell wrote in the 1970s that “although all the romance is on the side of […] the lads on the hillside, the core of Irish resistance was Dublin”. Furthermore Peter Hart’s statistical work seems to show the number of incidents in Dublin City being second only to County Cork. Bearing that in mind, this paper will examine the IRA’s campaign in the city after Bloody Sunday, concentrating on the actions of the Dublin Brigade, rather than Michael Collins’ Squad or other GHQ units.
My paper from the annual conference of the Historical Perspectives Society in Glasgow. The resear... more My paper from the annual conference of the Historical Perspectives Society in Glasgow. The research formed the foundation of an article on the Irish Story website.
Historians such as Charles Townshend and WH Kautt have sought to analyse the actions of the Irish... more Historians such as Charles Townshend and WH Kautt have sought to analyse the actions of the Irish Republican Army of 1919-1921 in terms of modern theories of guerrilla warfare and to place the Irish War of Independence within the wider history of insurgency/counterinsurgency. The purpose of this paper will be to analyse the IRA's campaign in Ireland's largest city, Dublin, between 1919 and 1921, in the light of modern military thought on warfare in urban areas. In his 2005 work The utility of force, retired British general Rupert Smith wrote that modern militaries were now " engaged, constantly and in many permutations in war amongst the people ". More recently, David Kilcullen has conducted research into modern urban guerrillas and how they nest within the complex urban environment. It is submitted here that one of the permutations referred to by Smith is the fighting of counterinsurgency campaigns within a living city. That is: a city which continues to function to some degree and/or daily life proceeds to an extent. These campaigns are usually fought against insurgent groups who are nested within the city's systems in the way Kilcullen has described. In this discrete category of irregular warfare, guerrilla actors make use of urban life itself, rather than the city's built environment per se, to provide cover for their activities. What follows is an examination of three aspects of the Irish War of Independence in Dublin city. These aspects are: the establishment of a counter-state bureaucracy and IRA general headquarters concealed within Ireland's capital; the intelligence operations of Michael Collins and his team of assassins; and lastly the urban guerrilla campaign of the IRA's Dublin Brigade in 1921. Using a combination of first-hand accounts and contemporary documents echoes of the processes described by Smith and Kilcullen can be discerned in each of these elements of the separatist campaign. Such an analysis will help to relate the legally constrained, media drenched environment of Dublin in the 1920s to our evolving understanding of the changing face of war in the twenty-fist century.
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Peer Reviewed Articles by Thomas Tormey
the rebellion. What follows is a limited prosopography of the revolutionary involvement of those members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), the Irish Volunteers, or Cumann na mBan, who were resident in Scotland between 1913 and 1915 and who fought in Ireland in 1916, or who were prevented from doing so because they were imprisoned. By covering militant activity in both Ireland and Britain, this treatment will argue that Scotland’s Irish republicans were highly integrated with the wider separatist movement in Ireland and beyond,
while being very much of the Glasgow, and Europe, of their time.
PhD Thesis by Thomas Tormey
Public History by Thomas Tormey
Lectures and seminars by Thomas Tormey
Book Reviews by Thomas Tormey
Conference Papers by Thomas Tormey
Patterson, Máirtín Ó Catháin, and Gerard Noonan. Of these, only Patterson has cleaved close to the topic
of this paper, although it must be said that his 1993 article pre-dates the release of a good deal of the
source material that historians of the Irish revolution rely on in the twenty-first century.
Drawing on source material relating such as the Military Service Pensions Archive, Bureau of Military
History witness statements, and British cabinet documents, this paper will offer a new interpretation of
Scotland’s interaction with the Irish War of Independence. Through an analysis of the activities of the IRA in Scotland the paper will discuss how patterns of violence across Britain and Ireland knit together.
Furthermore, the paper will also discuss how units of the IRA in Scotland played upon and exacerbated
longstanding Scottish Protestant fears about an Irish Catholic ‘enemy within’. The effect that this process
had on both the strategic situation in 1921 and the long-term position of the Irish in Scotland will also be
considered.
These topics are of particular importance given that Scotland was and is Ireland’s closest neighbour, was
host nation to a proportionately large diasporic population in the revolutionary decade, and has been
the subject of numerous historiographical comparisons covering many periods.
This gap in the historiography is not caused by any want of source material. A great deal of information can be gleaned from: veteran accounts collected by the Bureau of Military History and Ernie O’Malley, data on individual activists held in the Military Service Pensions Collection, and internal IRA reports preserved in the Richard Mulcahy papers. Using these sources this study will examine Roscommon’s two IRA brigades, north and south, in the light of the wider scholarship of the conflict.
the rebellion. What follows is a limited prosopography of the revolutionary involvement of those members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), the Irish Volunteers, or Cumann na mBan, who were resident in Scotland between 1913 and 1915 and who fought in Ireland in 1916, or who were prevented from doing so because they were imprisoned. By covering militant activity in both Ireland and Britain, this treatment will argue that Scotland’s Irish republicans were highly integrated with the wider separatist movement in Ireland and beyond,
while being very much of the Glasgow, and Europe, of their time.
Patterson, Máirtín Ó Catháin, and Gerard Noonan. Of these, only Patterson has cleaved close to the topic
of this paper, although it must be said that his 1993 article pre-dates the release of a good deal of the
source material that historians of the Irish revolution rely on in the twenty-first century.
Drawing on source material relating such as the Military Service Pensions Archive, Bureau of Military
History witness statements, and British cabinet documents, this paper will offer a new interpretation of
Scotland’s interaction with the Irish War of Independence. Through an analysis of the activities of the IRA in Scotland the paper will discuss how patterns of violence across Britain and Ireland knit together.
Furthermore, the paper will also discuss how units of the IRA in Scotland played upon and exacerbated
longstanding Scottish Protestant fears about an Irish Catholic ‘enemy within’. The effect that this process
had on both the strategic situation in 1921 and the long-term position of the Irish in Scotland will also be
considered.
These topics are of particular importance given that Scotland was and is Ireland’s closest neighbour, was
host nation to a proportionately large diasporic population in the revolutionary decade, and has been
the subject of numerous historiographical comparisons covering many periods.
This gap in the historiography is not caused by any want of source material. A great deal of information can be gleaned from: veteran accounts collected by the Bureau of Military History and Ernie O’Malley, data on individual activists held in the Military Service Pensions Collection, and internal IRA reports preserved in the Richard Mulcahy papers. Using these sources this study will examine Roscommon’s two IRA brigades, north and south, in the light of the wider scholarship of the conflict.