Harlan J. Strauss arrives in Ireland from the United States to meet family members of Irish revolutionaries that he first encountered and recorded fifty years ago.
Harlan’s original tape recordings, and the newly-collected Civil War memories of more than eighty people from around the country, are used to cast fresh light on the impact of the Civil War on families and communities all over Ireland.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
A two-part television documentary series, The Silent Civil War, airs 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.
