A team of collectors, researchers and historians gathers at The National Folklore Collection in UCD to record memories of the Irish Civil War that were passed on through families and communities throughout Ireland.

The group unexpectedly uncovers a trove of audio recordings with men and women central to the Irish revolutionary period. These tapes have remained buried in an attic in the United States for fifty years.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________

A two-part television documentary series, The Silent Civil War, starts on RTÉ One and RTÉ Player on Wednesday, 26 April and continues on Wednesday, 3 May.

Commissioned by RTÉ’s Specialist Factual department from Scratch Films, the series is produced in association with the National Folklore Collection in UCD and RTÉ Archives. The two-part strand is based on the testimonies of family members of a number of those who were involved in the Civil War in Ireland between 1922 and 1923.

The documentary series also unearths over 30 hours of previously unheard audio recordings of 32 prominent figures involved in those revolutionary years in Ireland. Recorded by a young American researcher, Harlan J. Strauss, as part of his post-graduate work in 1972, the tapes feature original recordings of Frank Aiken, Dan Breen, Peadar O’Donnell, Máire Comerford, John A. Costello, Ernest Blythe, Seán Dowling among many others. Those tapes have remained untouched for fifty years. 

The Silent Civil War is supported by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media under the Decade of Centenaries Programme, 2012 – 2023.