National Orphans and a Nation's Trauma: Experience, Emotions, and the Children of the 1916 Easter Rising Martyrs

Abstract

This article begins the work of recovering and understanding children’s unique experiences during the Irish Revolution by exploring the history of a diverse group of children and young people bound together by their fathers’ politics during and after the 1916 Easter Rising. In tracing the children of the executed and martyred rebel leaders of the Easter Rising, I seek to challenge and extend the way trauma has been conceptualized and applied by historians of Ireland’s revolution, instead arguing that the methodologies of the history of emotions and experience offer more fruitful terrain to explore. In this way, trauma is not an essentializing state of being but instead is navigated, renegotiated, and resurfaced throughout one’s life, frequently into old age. Leaning into the inherent uncertainty that writing about children’s emotional experiences entails, I read into, across, and against fragmentary and diverse sources to recover the stories of these children who were plunged into national prominence by their fathers’ executions. I also acknowledge my own emotional response to these children’s stories and seek to explore the methodological value of this affect in the archive for historians of the Irish Revolution.