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  • The Men Will Talk to Me: Kerry Interviews by Ernie O’Malley
  • Anna F. Kaplan
The Men Will Talk to Me: Kerry Interviews by Ernie O’Malley. Edited by Cormac K. H. O’Malley and Tim Horgan. Cork: Mercier Press, 2012. 360 pp. Softbound, $29.95.

Much has been written about the Irish Civil War (1922–23). The collection of interview excerpts comprising The Men Will Talk to Me: Kerry Interviews by Ernie O’Malley is one of the first books to present the voices of the individual Irish who fought for their independence, allowing them to tell their experiences of the war. Ernie O’Malley—editor Cormac O’Malley’s father—was a highly respected member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and served as the commandant general of the 2nd Southern Division. He began an oral history project in the late 1930s focused on his compatriots, which was meant to serve as complementary research for his own memoir on the Irish Civil War; O’Malley undertook the interviews in order to fill in the gaps in his own memory. Having put his memoir aside by 1948, he concentrated on collecting the stories that these men would tell only to him as a fellow member of the IRA. The resulting narratives not only detail the Kerry IRA Volunteers’ side of the war but also expand the scope of the struggle for independence to include the years preceding organized fighting, tracing experiences from 1916, the year of the Easter Rebellion, through 1923, the end of the Irish Civil War.

Ernie O’Malley spent almost twenty years traveling Kerry County in southwestern Ireland recording 450 individual narratives. While this book looks at eighteen of these interviews only, this small sample from the complete collection provides a representative overview of the varied experiences documented in O’Malley’s project, and it hints at the other possible nuggets that could be sifted from the remaining 432 narratives. Except for a sparse chronological list of events at the end of the book, The Men Will Talk to Me does not provide additional historical information to support or explain the details of the narrators’ stories. In order to understand the larger context in which these oral histories fit, the reader has to know Irish Civil War history already. It also seems that the reader is supposed to take these memories at face value, accepting the experiences as support for the written canonical history, without the editors [End Page 408] challenging the narrations and exploring why these individuals remember—or do not remember—events of and leading up to the war in certain ways.

The editors group the selection of interviews geographically, beginning with North Kerry and Tralee and ending with South and West Kerry. Each transcript begins with a short synopsis providing background information on the interviewee before launching into the stories. Some narratives, such as Tim Hurley’s, are only two pages and concern a single subject, while others, such as Johnny O’Connor’s, span over fifty pages and discuss multiple topics. Notably, all of the narratives published in this book are from male interviewees; women are starkly absent from the book, which begs the question of whether there are any women narrators in the larger group of interviews housed in the University College Dublin Archives. It makes sense that the Ernie O’Malley Military Notebook Interviews collection in the Ernie O’Malley Archives at the University College Dublin focuses primarily on the men who fought in the Irish Civil War, but the war did not leave the women untouched or inactive in the struggle. Although the book’s title, The Men Will Talk to Me, suggests Ernie O’Malley’s presence, he remains merely a ghost between the pages with occasional input in the footnotes. Since it primarily focuses on the interviews, the book does not expound upon the uniqueness of his sympathetic ear for collecting these stories.

This collection of oral histories is also an interesting entrée into the different approaches taken to recording peoples’ stories. Since O’Malley recorded the narratives before the establishment of the oral history field with its own best practices, the editors explain...

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