The 1918 Spanish flu in Ireland left more devastation than armed conflict—yet it remains history’s blind spot
SOMETIMES history forgets.
We have just been through a profoundly stressful pandemic which we hardly talk about now and which might feature as little in the historical record as the flu epidemic of 1918 does.
Measured by the death toll alone that flu was a far greater crisis for Ireland than the war that is memorialised in the famous memoirs of Ernie O Malley, Tom Barry, Dan Breen and others.
Estimates suggest about 2,400 were killed in the War of Independence while about ten times that number died in Ireland of the ‘Spanish flu’.
Clearly we don’t measure the historic importance of events by the numbers who die or we would have more books about that epidemic than about the wars.
Occasionally there was an overlap of those big stories at a local level.
I am browsing through The Dead of the Irish Revolution by Eunan O’Halpin and Daithi Ó Corráin, a book I often turn to, and I read the story of William Staines who died on November 2 1918.
He was an engineering student in Dublin. During the Easter Rising he picked up a British army hand grenade and attempted to throw it back when it exploded, taking off a piece of his skull.
The Pensions Board denied his mother a dependent’s allowance because influenza had killed him, not his war wounds.
O’Halpin and Ó Corráin, have included him among the war dead all the same.
Staines died in the second wave of the flu epidemic. It had started in Dublin and spread from there through the rest of the country.
I’ve been reading about that epidemic and the political upheavals of that time in a new collection of essays, Ulster 1912-22, Change, controversy and conflict, edited by Alan F Parkinson and Brian M Walker.
An essay by Patricia Marsh tells the story of the epidemic.
Marsh shows how the spread of the infection followed the railways, from Belfast out to Portadown and Newtownards and Derry and from Derry into Donegal on the Londonderry and Lough Swilly Railway lines, now long gone.
Donegal was hit particularly badly whereas other parts of the west, without a train service, suffered less.
The two stories overlap again in the third wave of the epidemic in the case of Pierce McCan. After the Easter Rising he had been interned in Knutsford Prison.
After his release he took up the gun again and was arrested as brigade O/C of the Irish Volunteers in Tipperary. In the General Election of December 1918, while in prison in Gloucester, he was elected Sinn Féin MP for Tipperary East.
There he caught the flu and was moved to a nursing home where he seemed for a time to be recovering before he died on March 6 1919.
There are similarities and differences between how that pandemic and our recent one were managed.
One thing that was common to both periods was the idea that quinine would help. During the recent pandemic a rumour spread that the anti-malaria drug chloroquine could cure it and sales soared.
Other medical advice was to send for the doctor ‘as early in the day as possible’.
It’s amazing now to think that there were days when you could summon a home visit.
Our advice during the pandemic was to stay away from the doctor.
In Belfast and Derry, schools were closed. In Derry the schools had just been reopened after a measles epidemic to be closed again after one day.
In Belfast, Methodist College, like many of the secondary and grammar schools, rejected government advice to close and suffered badly, as did Friend’s School in Lisburn.
Marsh shows how some local authorities handled things more diligently than others.
An order to close cinemas was widely rejected by the cinema owners though many imposed a ban on school children who were presumed to be more vulnerable.
During the pandemic one apparently ruled that churches should close but there was alarm among authorities about the Irish custom of waking the dead. They believed then that corpses in open coffins were still infectious and the close gathering of people at such events was a risk.
During the Covid 19 pandemic restrictions were imposed on numbers at funerals and wakes though these rules were often disregarded, most notably at the massive turnout in Belfast for the funeral of IRA man Bobby Storey.
But no one then moved to ban wakes, perhaps because, their being mostly a Catholic custom, such a move would have been seen as sectarian.
And you can still pick up a note of cultural revulsion in commentary of the time. Back in 1919 The Irish Times described waking as ‘an objectionable practice’.
Marsh quotes the archdeacon of Armagh describing the waking of the dead as ‘the contradiction of everything that was desired in a time of sorrow’.
Many things have changed in Ireland since the Spanish flu. You can’t send for the doctor but the practice of waking is still with us.
Ulster 1912-22, Change, controversy and conflict, edited by Alan F Parkinson and Brian M Walker is published by Ulster Historical Foundation
The Dead of the Irish Revolution by Eunan O’Halpin and Daithi Ó Corráin is published by Yale University Press
See More: Flu, Illness, Irish History, Pandemics, War
