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Towards the end of the twentieth century, the overwhelming and almost unanimously shared distorted vision of the Irish Republican Army targeting the survivors of the First World War contributed considerably to portraying Irish veterans of the First World War as a severely persecuted community during the Irish War of Independence (1919–1921). In portraying them as victims not of collateral and indiscriminate political violence but of selective violence in wartime, historians projected onto the IRA the image of a paramilitary organization hunting, intimidating, torturing, and executing the veterans of the Great War. However, this interpretation and portrayal of them being a severely persecuted group does not bear scrutiny when the empirical evidence from the period is examined. The enumeration of all veterans assassinated by the IRA cannot help us understand the reasons why they suffered (alongside other communities). It appears necessary to rely on primary sources to properly appreciate the reasons for their executions. Irish veterans of the First World War formed a heterogeneous community with diverse motivations and expectations. When the Irish War of Independence broke out, some of them staunchly supported the British Crown, others supported the revolution, while the overwhelming majority aspired to a peaceful and quiet reintegration within their local community. As such, to use the appellation “Irish veterans” already presents some flaws, given that the post-war trajectories of this community varied greatly. In addition, the present article argues that the distortion cannot be dissociated from the three decades of communal violence and republican insurrection in Northern Ireland (1969–1990). The representation of the IRA hunting down First World War veterans emerged after thirty years of sectarian violence and illustrates that the historians who shaped it belonged to their time. Nonetheless, those historians also belonged to the second generation of revisionists who advocated professional scholarship and a “mental war of liberation from servitude to myth” to achieve Ireland’s historiographical revolution. While challenging the traditional literature and cleansing Irish history of republican mythology, professional historians’ dissatisfaction with republicanism led some of them to shape a distorted vision of the IRA persecuting the survivors of the First World War at a time when contemporary unionism rediscovered and explored its historical consciousness. In the late 1960s, the Northern Irish state celebrated its founders and sought to strengthen its unionist sense of belonging through overt acts of identification, historical re-enactments, demonstrations, and the revival of loyalist mural art. A new unionist iconography sought to cement the distinctive Northern Irish heritage and culture and consequently generated its own unionist myths, while professional historians begged for the demystification of Ireland’s history. It comes as no surprise that the new revisionist stream and the illumination of the historical consciousness of modern unionism alike are the breeding grounds of that distorted vision of the IRA systematically targeting veterans of the First World War. The constant confrontation with and denunciation of republican mythology helped to introduce a unionist rhetoric. However, while many detractors of the revisionist historiography lamented that heroic figures had been cleansed from Irish history, and accused revisionist historians of launching a historical counterrevolution, they did not seem to deplore that the IRA was portrayed as an entity deliberately persecuting First World War veterans. Furthermore, although the advocates of the revisionist stream highlight the necessity of relying on primary sources and historical evidence, they seem to deliberately neglect another historical fact: the vital role played by First World War veterans during the War of Independence. Hundreds of them joined the IRA to fight for the independence of Ireland. The widespread, and now accepted, legend of the IRA tormenting the survivors of the Great War contributed to dissociating veterans of the First World War from the republican movement, whereas they did train, supervise, and fight with the IRA. That distortion fed on the total absence of historical research on their vital role in shaping the organization. The centenary of the Irish War of Independence represents an unexpected yet welcome moment to challenge traditional narratives by bringing to light the origins of that distorted vision of the IRA persecuting and hunting down First World War veterans.