ABSTRACT
A prolonged civil war is the most overt indication of an attenuated societal schism. One of the most bitter and complicated of these civil wars took place in Ireland between 1916 and 1923, encompassing coups and pogroms, a war of national liberation, terror, communal violence, and ultimately a variety of imposed and contrived solutions that still haunt the island. Not all victors in civil wars select toleration as a method to secure a stable society; in fact, very, very few do, although a system foreseeing permanent repression is not necessarily a favored option. In fact, the most efficacious solution to disposing of a subsociety is genocide. In social terms civil war is a struggle between two societies incapable of coexisting in the husk of previously unified institutions. Essentially the struggle is over either the purity or the unity of society, a battle for a Communist Russia or a free Ireland.
