The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence

by Charles Townshend

  Hart’s arguments have proved highly contentious, and his work has become the subject of a protracted and sometimes bitter dispute unique in recent Irish history-writing. Under a scrutiny more intense than most history books ever experience, some flaws in Hart’s use of evidence emerged. An early critic pointed out that the general remark about southern Protestants in the Record had been followed by a proviso, which Hart did not quote: ‘An exception to this rule was in the Bandon area where there were many Protestant farmers who gave information … it proved almost impossible to protect these brave men, many of whom were murdered …’ Since the Record was compiled before April 1922, it cannot have been talking of the Bandon Valley massacre, but it was claimed to modify Hart’s essential argument, and indeed to suggest to some that he was guilty of ‘elision’ – selective quotation (if not outright suppression of evidence).61

  Some of Hart’s critics have backed up their rejection of his argument by pointing to a resolution of the Protestant Convention that met in Dublin in May 1922, to the effect that ‘hostility to Protestants by reason of their religion’ in the twenty-six counties where they were a minority ‘has been almost, if not wholly, unknown’. But there is a problem in taking this as unforced testimony. If Protestants had been subject to ‘hostility’, or even to what F. S. L. Lyons in a famous phrase called ‘repressive tolerance’, they would be more likely to play it down than emphasize it.62 Other assertions, like Meda Ryan’s that most if not all of those killed in April 1922 had informed on the IRA, or other republican assertions that the killings were carried out by a maverick IRA group, or by British intelligence agents (trying to provoke a sectarian war which would justify a British return), depend on unrecorded evidence – folk memory. Ryan bases her assessment on a document supposedly abandoned by K Company of the ADRIC when it left Dunmanway workhouse in 1922. Unfortunately this list of wanted IRA men and ‘helpful citizens’, despite being recognized as ‘sensational’ and carefully studied by several Cork IRA men, has not been preserved. In its absence, the most striking thing about interpretations like Ryan’s is their assumption that those listed as ‘helpful citizens’ actually gave information to the police – precisely the point that Hart offered concrete evidence to dispute. (She calls it an ‘informers’ dossier’.) Her suggestion that the document ‘confirmed the existence of a British Loyalist vigilante type organisation’ called the Loyalist Action Group would seem to go well beyond even the evidence reportedly contained in the lost document.63

  One initially uncontroversial element in Hart’s account was his suggestion that the spate of killings was triggered by the death of Michael O’Neill, acting commandant of the Bandon battalion in a raid on a Protestant house in Ballygroman on the night of 26 April 1922, which ended in a miniature inferno when O’Neill’s comrades returned to destroy the house and its occupants the next day. Recently, though, it has been pointed out that three British intelligence officers had been captured by the IRA about twelve hours before the Dunmanway shootings. (They were held by the Macroom battalion in the old RIC barracks, and shot on orders from Cork No. 1 Brigade.)64 In all, seven British soldiers, two of them senior intelligence officers, were being held by the IRA during the ‘massacre’ before being executed, and the fact that Hart seemed to see no significance in this has been described as ‘remarkable’. Indeed one of his critics asserts that this ‘ahistorical’ neglect of information has undermined not only Hart’s work, but the entire Irish historical profession.65 Hart has also been accused of ‘marginalising’ the role of the famously atheist Frank Busteed, whose participation in the killings would, for some, ‘indicate a non-sectarian explanation’ for them.

  How far Hart’s general contention that most of those killed as spies and informers had not given information will hold up remains open to question. His statistics, compiled from press reports, may well be adjusted by further research. It has been argued, as we have seen, that the intelligence system in Cork No. 1 Brigade was one of the best in the country, and had the capacity to identify informers with some accuracy. This argument may be extended to West Cork. We should note, though, that while John Borgonovo’s research has been taken by some to ‘directly contradict’ Hart’s argument, its conclusions are not entirely dissimilar. Trying to explain ‘the high proportion of ex-servicemen shot in the city’, Borgonovo suggested that the IRA ‘probably found it easiest to assassinate isolated men of low social standing, rather than prominent pillars of the community, close associates, or members of Republican families’.66

  The precise details of these grim events may forever remain murky, but the interpretation of what they signified is of real public importance. For Hart, the deaths represented ‘the culmination of a long process of social definition’ – the definition of who was and was not Irish. As another historian has put it, they ‘momentarily exposed the embedded belief that Protestants as a community were outsiders and interlopers’; yet another has talked of ‘the latent sectarianism of centuries of ballads and of landlordism’ welling up in the killing of Protestants.67 Republicans, on the other hand, have always denied such a view. In formal terms they have held to an essentially territorial definition of Irishness, deriving from the ‘United Irish’ vision of Wolfe Tone – ‘Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter’. Tone’s non-sectarian emphasis, of course, itself underlined the power of sectarianism and the threat it represented. The most explosive label in the dispute was not ‘sectarian’, however, but ‘ethnic’. Hart’s reference to ‘campaigns of ethnic cleansing’ sent out real shockwaves. One of his most persistent critics spoke of his ‘making the then IRA seem capable of uninhibited ethnic rather than controlled military violence’.68 (‘Uninhibited’ was a revealing addition to the debate.) On the other side, it has been suggested that ‘Republicanism which has lived off and prospered from a false prospectus of non-sectarianism, has everything to lose if these killings are what they appear.’69

  Hart was careful later to say ‘we must not exaggerate’: ‘Cork was not Smyrna.’ But merely setting ‘Munster, Leinster and Connaught’ alongside ‘Silesia, Galicia and Bosnia’ in the wide frame of the ‘unmixing of peoples’ was highly suggestive, especially as he invoked ‘all of the nightmare images of ethnic conflict in the twentieth century’ – ‘the massacres and anonymous death squads, the burning homes and churches, the mass expulsions and trains filled with refugees, the transformation of lifelong neighbours into enemies, the conspiracy theories and the terminology of hatred’.70 The fact that Hart linked the Volunteers with earlier, pre-political agrarian secret societies has allowed critics to charge him with espousing ‘a wider narrative … that presents the violence of Irish history as stemming from ancient sectarian hatreds’, ignoring ‘structural factors’ such as the impact of British policy. This wider narrative was supposedly ideological – motivated by hostility to the violent activism of the Provisional IRA – and so was a kind of ‘public history’, different from neutral academic scholarship. It could be viewed as political propaganda, even if of a very subtle kind. The legitimacy that the IRA of the 1970s drew for its armed struggle from its Volunteer ancestry could be undermined if the original Volunteers’ campaign were delegitimized.71

  The issue of sectarian killing certainly touches a nerve in the public consciousness. While some have angrily repudiated Hart’s image of the IRA, for others it has launched a painful re-examination of collective memory. Joseph O’Neill’s Blood-Dark Track, a remarkable journey into the history of one family, skilfully links south Cork with the Turkish coastal city of Mersin.72 The sense of a gradual (if still partial) lifting of a veil of silence pervades Gerard Murphy’s The Year of Disappearances, a large-scale investigation of ‘political killings’ in Cork in 1921–2, presented as a personal journey of discovery into his community’s history. Murphy, one of the many schoolboys who had ‘marched dressed in Volunteer uniforms for the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Rising’, found that the ‘new perspective on the IRA’ his inquiries revealed ‘did not fit with the imag
e of brave flying columns fighting impossible odds that we had celebrated in 1966’. ‘It gradually began to dawn on me that the truth of the time had never been told.’73 The truth, he says, is that dozens of men ‘disappeared’ in Cork in the year after the Truce, and were buried in ‘killing fields’ like the Rea, a few miles north-east of Cork city, and Carroll’s Bogs just south of it (now the Cork Municipal Dump). Before being killed, many were held in a vaulted tomb in a cemetery at Knockraha, known as ‘Sing Sing’.

  The commandant of the 2nd Battalion of Cork No. 1 Brigade, Mick Murphy, told Ernie O’Malley, ‘Every spy who was shot in Cork was buried so that nothing was known about them. They just disappeared.’ Since only a quarter of the spies executed during the Anglo-Irish war disappeared, Gerard Murphy argues that this recollection ‘is far more likely to apply to the period when the IRA was the sole authority in Cork during the spring and summer of 1922’.74 The number can only be guessed at, and Murphy’s guesses – ‘up to 35’ in total – have been dismissed by some as pure speculation. His suggestion that a primary role in the illegal killings (notably the killing of several boys) was played by Florrie O’Donoghue and his wife Josephine, and that O’Donoghue used his skills as a historian to construct a cover-up, has shocked many to whom O’Donoghue represented the very model of the ‘old IRA’. Murphy’s rejection of the IRA’s actions does not explicitly imply a rejection of its casus belli, but it can look that way – indeed it can be seen to raise ‘big questions about the plausibility of the whole Republican interpretation of history’.

  Technically, Murphy’s approach invites some criticism, as it relies too often on drawing conclusions from coincidences and omissions. Hypotheses are turned into assumptions and then ‘presented as factual statements’.75 His methods, mixing archival research (some of it highly original) with the patient teasing out of local memories, do not convince those who argue not just that the IRA did not do such things, but also that such memories simply could not have been suppressed by whole communities for so long. Murphy’s suggestion that ‘the secrecy and censorship in place in Cork from February to the end of August 1922 makes a space in which it is possible for all kinds of people to have disappeared’ is certainly tendentious. But his suggestion that for southern Protestants ‘suppression was the price of survival’ rings truer than the argument of those who hold that the failure of Protestant public bodies to protest against the killings proves that they did not happen.

  The evidence for the situation of Protestants is mostly indirect rather than direct, but it can hardly be doubted that Protestants felt under threat and that there was often some reason for this. A few republicans were quite open in their view of what Kathleen Keyes McDonnell frankly identified as ‘an alien community’, the Protestant ‘settlers’. ‘More than three centuries after the foundation of Bandon, the descendants of the settlers fled before Irish wrath or fell to rebel bullets.’76 The first action of Tom Barry and the West Cork brigadier Tom Hales when they rushed back to Cork from Dublin after the Dunmanway killings was to place guards on Protestant houses. The South Tipperary brigadier Seamus Robinson had to act to protect Mrs de Vere Hunt, a firm supporter of the Volunteers and reliable provider of hospitality. A ‘stately and cultured lady’, she was, as Robinson carefully put it, ‘a non-catholic’, and so ‘suspected by the locals to be anti-national’. Robinson was asked to authorize a local Volunteer action to ‘remove’ the Hunts to get their land for ‘division’. He was able to hand out a lecture on how the Volunteers ‘should try to win these people rather than alienate them’, but this was clearly news to ‘the locals’. Likewise a republican police officer in Tipperary, a former flying-column man, recorded that ‘many Protestant people’ asked him for protection. They were naturally assured that ‘they were going to get the protection of the Irish Republican Army and the Irish Republican Police’; but it must be considered significant that they needed it.77

  HIBERNIA IRREDENTA

  In the nationalists’ view, sectarian violence was something that happened in the north, and they were its victims. That was largely undeniable, and the northern experience of the Truce was peculiar. It was, as the Belfast Volunteer commander Roger McCorley observed, an ‘extraordinary’ period. All through it, there was a ‘state of affairs in which we had official relations with the RIC and British military and open warfare between ourselves and the Special Constabulary’. According to the Truce terms, ‘we were supposed to have our arms in dumps or under strick [sic] supervision in training camps but it was perfectly obvious that this … was not being observed by us in Belfast’; the British seemed ‘satisfied that it could not be observed while armed attacks were being made on us’.78 The ‘B Specials’ became ever more active: ‘things they never attempted to do before the Truce’, Thomas Fitzpatrick said, ‘they did during the Truce.’ Seamus Woods, OC 3rd Northern Division and Belfast liaison officer, was instructed not to liaise with the police as they were under the control of the Northern Parliament. ‘For some time previous to Xmas and up to the end of December the Catholic population of the city were subjected to continuous and murderous onslaughts from armed Orange gangs,’ with ‘both the police and the military’ acting in conjunction with them. The provocative activity of the Specials and ‘those of the old RIC who were connected with the “Murder Gang” during the war’ was ‘becoming daily more unbearable’, and Woods thought liaison was a dead letter. ‘Our position in this city is becoming one of fighting for existence with no hope of succeeding.’79

  Northern nationalist opinion welcomed the Treaty, particularly in the border areas. In Lurgan, nationalist streets were ‘decorated … with flags and bunting to celebrate the event’.80 Seán MacEntee was asked to resign his seat by the South Monaghan Comhairle Ceanntair after voting against it. The Catholic Church in the north was firmly against de Valera.81 The northern IRA also seems to have taken a broadly positive attitude to the Treaty. This was not because it shared Frank Aiken’s nuanced assessment of the issues – in fact the men of his division did not. But it seems to have assumed that the partition part of it could never happen. In Belfast, many were simply indifferent to it – as was McCorley himself when Joe McKelvey telephoned from Dublin to tell him that the Treaty had been passed, and ask whether he should come out against it. McCorley said their position would be unchanged either way.82 With weary resignation he noted that the Volunteers’ ‘normal wartime footing’ returned in early 1922. In fact the Northern Ireland government instructed its security forces just a few days after the Treaty that any restrictions on the ‘enforcement of the law’ were forthwith cancelled, and that all liaison arrangements with ‘the Sinn Féin authorities’ would cease as of 1 January.83

  A medical student at Queen’s University in Belfast, Michael MacConaill, a member of 3rd Northern Division’s 2nd Brigade, gave a vivid picture of what this meant. Working after hours at the Mater Hospital, he found that ‘the mortality rates from gunshot wounds were unduly high’ – thanks to delays in getting victims to hospital because of the difficulty ambulances had in entering or leaving conflict zones. ‘Scenes which recalled those of the Place de la Guillotine in Paris took place almost daily at the gates of [the] Mater Hospital,’ which was in a loyalist area. ‘The women of the district used to gather with their knitting and await the arrival of the ambulances’; assuming that all the people brought in ‘were Nationalists, in plain words, Catholics’, they ‘would cheer their arrival, jeer at the patients and often try to tear the clothes from them’. MacConaill felt that ‘since a state akin to that of continuous trench warfare existed in Belfast for several years my duties exposed me to the same risks as that of a RAMC man on the Western Front.’ He was deliberately fired on twice, and developed a technique for crossing dangerous roads, drawing fire by ‘throwing a coat across a side street and then following quickly’.84 At least this meant that (as McCorley noted) ‘we had no difficulty in Belfast concerning wounded IRA men as the hospitals … were full of gun-shot wound cases.’

&n
bsp; At the other end of the political scale, the three governments (four if the Dáil–Provisional Government be counted double) cobbled together an agreement labelled the ‘Craig–Collins pact’. The British initiative in bringing Craig and Collins together stemmed from Churchill’s view of Collins as someone he could do business with – in effect, someone who accepted the British government’s perspective on the northern issue. Collins did have some interest in an accommodation. It is not clear if he had ever shared the belief that the boycott would overawe unionists, but it now looked sensible to cash in what few chips the republicans possessed, abandoning the boycott if the Northern government undertook to end the discrimination and persecution that had provoked it.

  Collins started out with the standard nationalist view that Ulster resistance was entirely created by British interference. He minimized its extent – writing to Art O’Brien that there was ‘really only one small question in Ulster and it has its pivot in the Belfast shipyards … the spot from which the strength of intolerance comes’. Reacting to MacEntee’s call for the boycott he had gone as far as to snort that ‘there was no Ulster Question.’85 When he went to speak to a ‘monster meeting’ in Armagh in September 1921 he followed the old line that Protestant intolerance was ‘the product solely and entirely of British policy’, and invited Protestants ‘as Irishmen to come into the Irish nation … to come in and take their share in the government of their own country’. He could say little else, of course, and it is not clear whether he actually believed there was any chance of this. He did, at the same time, reassure his nationalist audience that whatever happened he would not ‘desert’ them. When as head of the Provisional Government in January 1922 he had to come up with an actual policy, he decided that ‘non-recognition of the Northern Parliament was essential’. Craig’s government ‘could stop all the outrages in the North if they set their hands to do so’.