The Irish War of Independence is significant in the book chiefly for what followed it: the 1921 partition of Ireland, which divided the island between a southern Irish Free State and a northern six counties that remained under British rule. The war also appears through family memory and scattered references to its violence, linking the Price family’s republican inheritance to a longer history of struggle and loss.

Background and Political Outcome

The account places the war after the 1916 Easter Rising, when Irish revolutionaries seized the post office in Dublin and declared an independent republic. British authorities crushed the rebellion, and Patrick Pearse and fourteen of his comrades were executed. The book distinguishes that rising from the later Irish War of Independence: it is after the war that the narrative locates the 1921 partition. Twenty-six counties in the South achieved a measure of independence as the Irish Free State, while six counties in the North continued under British rule.

Partition did not settle the meaning of national belonging. The Price family, like other staunch republicans, refused to call the place where they lived Northern Ireland, preferring the North of Ireland. In the book’s account, even the name of a place could signal a political position. The war’s consequence therefore reaches beyond a change in territorial government: it shapes the language through which the family understands the division of the island.

Violence and Family Memory

The conflict’s violence enters the narrative through a story Brendan Hughes told about his great-grandfather. During the War of Independence, his great-grandfather tried to throw a grenade at an armoured car; it exploded in his hand and blew his arm off. The anecdote is brief, but its blunt sequence—an attempted attack, a weapon’s premature detonation, and permanent injury—makes the danger of armed struggle part of inherited family history.

The book also notes, in its account of the disappeared, that people were disappeared during the War of Independence. It supplies no cases or further particulars in this reference, so the point remains a historical echo rather than a developed account. Set beside the grenade story, it places injury and disappearance among the recurring costs attached to Ireland’s republican conflicts.

A Legacy of Defeat and Continuity

The war belongs to a history that later republicans recalled as one of noble failure. At the Felons Club, founded in part by Gerry Adams’s father, veterans of earlier conflicts—including Albert Price—met to drink, tell war stories, and consider what might have been. Their recollections made the past present in ordinary social life, passing the experience of struggle to a younger generation.

That inheritance carries both political conviction and a warning about its human cost. Elsewhere in the book, the Price family’s republican history is bound to commemoration, armed commitment, and personal suffering. The Irish War of Independence is not recounted here through a detailed military chronology; instead, its importance is registered in the divided political order it left behind and in the stories through which later generations understood resistance, defeat, and sacrifice.