Everyday Violence in the Irish Civil War presents an innovative study of violence perpetrated by and against non-combatants during the Irish Civil War, 1922-3. Drawing from victim accounts of wartime injury as recorded in compensation claims, Dr Gemma Clark sheds new light on hundreds of previously neglected episodes of violence and intimidationranging from arson, boycott and animal maiming to assault, murder and sexual violence-that transpired amongst soldiers, civilians and revolutionaries throughout the period of conflict. The author shows us how these micro-level acts-particularly in the counties of Limerick, Tipperary and Waterford-served as an attempt to persecute and purge religious and political minorities and to force redistribution of land. Clark also assesses the international significance of the war, comparing the cruel yet arguably restrained violence that occurred in Ireland with the brutality unleashed in other European conflict zones.

Since the 1990s, in the wake of the wars and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, violence against women in wartime has become a matter of international concern. This article, on gender-based violence (G.B.V.) during the Irish Civil War, draws on research from scholars and activists around the globe, and newly accessible archival sources, to highlight the relatively humane treatment of women in Ireland – even during the bitter final stages of the Irish Revolution, c.1912–23. Records of the Irish Free State's Compensation (Personal Injuries) Committee show that women suffered some serious and traumatising interpersonal violence during 1922–3 – often on account of their gender (as guardians of the domestic space). Women's interactions with the Civil War were thus distinctive from men's because of the prevalence in Ireland of forms of aggression and intimidation, including crimes against property, which transgressed public/private boundaries. However, I argue that it did not serve the strategy nor ideology of either warring side to denigrate women en masse. The genocidal aims underlying conflict-related G.B.V. elsewhere in the world were absent in Ireland, where gendered power structures, shored up by Catholic authority, remained largely unshaken by the revolution – despite the great efforts of many radical females. Revolutionary Ireland was not a safe place for many Irishwomen (nor indeed for some men); however, for pro- and anti-Treaty forces, maintaining propriety militated against the need for sexual violence as warfare.

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