GREYSTONES
GREYSTONES – Rosemary Raughter
Greystones during the revolutionary period, as revealed in the Bureau of Military History Witness Statements Bureau of Military History The Bureau of Military History (BMH), established in January 1947 under the auspices of the Department of Defence, had as its stated objective: To assemble and co-ordinate material to form the basis for the compilation of the history of the movement for independence from the formation of the Irish Volunteers on 25 November 1913 to 11 July 1921.1 In order to fulfil this aim, statements, both written and oral, were gathered from a range of individuals engaged in some way with the events of the period. By the time the project terminated, 1,773 witness statements had been recorded, mostly from members or former members of organisations such as the Irish Volunteers, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, Sinn Féin, the Irish Citizen Army and Cumann na mBan. Statements by constitutional nationalists, unionists and members of the Crown forces or British administration were also featured, but in much smaller numbers, and there were some surprising omissions; most notably, 1916 leader, Taoiseach of the government that established the BMH, and future President of Ireland, Éamon de Valera, failed to record a statement.
Access to witness statements While the process of collection came to an end in 1959, there was considerable uncertainty about where the material should be stored, and to what extent and for how long the guarantees of confidentiality extended to witnesses should be observed. The BMH had begun its work a little over three decades after the cessation of hostilities, and despite the fact that its brief extended only to the signing of the Truce in July 1921 (and thus excluded the especially divisive topics of the Treaty negotiations and the Civil War), many issues of sensitivity
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