Examining Peter Hart

Examining Peter Hart Field Day Review 10 2014 Examining Peter Hart Niall Meehan The late Peter Hart, who died at a tragically young age in July 2010, asserted in his 1993 Trinity College Dublin (TCD) PhD thesis, and in the 1998 Oxford University Press book based on the thesis, that republican forces fought a sectarian war against Protestants during the 1919–21 Irish War of Independence and afterwards.1 It culminated in a ‘massacre of Protestants’ in late April 1922 (thesis, 161; book, 132), that is after Anglo-Irish hostilities ceased in July 1921 but prior to the start of the Irish Civil War in June 1922. Equally controversially, Hart asserted that Irish Republican Army (IRA) Flying Column leader Tom Barry covered up an earlier ‘massacre’, of British Auxiliary prisoners after the 28 November 1920 Kilmichael Ambush (thesis, 53; book, 37). In his thesis and book Hart portrayed these linked events as emblematic of ethnically charged sectarian hatreds that drove ‘the nationalist revolution’ (thesis, 392; book, 292). He went on to write: The April massacre is as unknown as the Kilmichael ambush is celebrated; yet one is as important as the other to an understanding of the Cork I.R.A. Nor can the murders be relegated to the fringes of the revolution or described as an isolated event. They were as much a part of the reality of revolutionary violence as the killings at Kilmichael. British Army barracks at Bandon, Co. Cork, during the War of independence. Photo: Imperial War Museum, London. © IWM 103 Field Day Review 10 2014 Examining Peter Hart by Níall Meehan 102 Field Day Review One of the destroyed British Army Crossley tenders photographed in the days after the Kilmichael Ambush. Photo: Daily Sketch. 1 2 3 The patterns of perception and victimisation revealed by these events are also of a piece with the whole revolution. These deaths can be seen as the culmination of a long process of social definition which produced both the heroes of Kilmichael and the victims of the April massacre. The identity of the former cannot be fully understood without the latter. In addition, Hart alleged that ‘at least one’ unnamed ambush participant ‘may have been involved’ in the April 1922 ‘massacre’ (thesis,161; book, 132).2 Of course, Peter Hart, in his professional role as historian was perfectly entitled to explore and to present evidence leading to such conclusions. However, there are concerns that his evidence presentation breached ethical standards. Evidence contradicting his favoured conclusions was obscured, misrepresented or excluded. Hart’s subsequent 1998 book introduced some changes, but these point up in sharp relief errors and anomalies in the thesis. Occasionally changes corrected errors, but 104 not the argument the errors sustained. It appeared that for Hart conclusions came first. In order to explore and to explain why I have formed this opinion, I will deal first with the November 1920 Kilmichael Ambush and then with the 1922 April killings. I will at that stage discuss the intellectual climate within which Hart’s research was accepted uncritically. 4 Section 1 – Kilmichael Ambush The ambush on 28 November 1920 occurred two years after Sinn Féin’s victory in the November 1918 General Election, taking 73 of 105 Irish seats.3 And it was over a year since Britain had outlawed the separatist Dáil (parliament) set up by Sinn Féin in January 1919. In the meantime, the IRA had emerged as a military force that defended the legitimacy of Dáil institutions and defied British jurisdiction. The hotbed of this defiance and resistance outside Dublin was in Ireland’s largest and southernmost county, Cork. 5 The Irish Republican Army and its Enemies, Violence and Community in Cork 1916–1923 (TCD PhD thesis 1993), The IRA and its Enemies, Violence and Community in Cork 1916–1923 (Oxford, 1998). Hereafter, page numbers intext are from 1992 ‘thesis’ and/or 1998 ‘book’. Footnotes refer to other publications. A note accompanying the text at this point referred readers to Hart’s April killings chapter, that failed to elaborate on this claim. The allegation was irst made by Kevin Myers in the Irish Times (hereafter IT) 25 May 1989. Due to negligible support for other parties, no votes were cast in 25 seats that Sinn Féin won uncontested. This has led to confusion in reporting the considerable Sinn Féin mandate estimated conservatively at between 60 and 70 per cent. Counting only votes cast, some ideologues minimize Sinn Féin support at 47 per cent. For example, Kevin Myers, IT, 14 October 2000 and Eoghan Harris, Sunday Independent, 15 December 2013. J. B. E. Hittle, Michael Collins and the Anglo Irish War (Lincoln, NE, 2011), 167–77. Brian P Murphy, The Origins and Organisation of British Propaganda in Ireland 1920 (Cork, 2008), 52–62. Richard Bennett, The Black and Tans (New York, 1995), 122. Two intelligence oicers stationed at Macroom were arrested on 6 November while in civilan attire and executed as spies. See David Grant’s excellent website, www.theauxiliaries. com/INCIDENTS/agnewmitchel/agnew-mitchell.html (accessed, 31 May 2014), also Charles Browne, Bureau of Military History Witness Statement (hereafter BMH WS) No. 873. Examining Peter Hart Times (London), 2 November 1922, recruitment advertisement. See www.theauxiliaries.com 6 7 8 Their newspaper promotion was recalled somewhat cynically by IRA oicer Charlie Browne in The Story of the 7th (Cork, 2007), 39. The original Black & Tans were a pack of hounds from Limerick. Bennett, 37–38. Report of the Labour Commission to Ireland (London), 1921, 56; Lord Longford (Frank Pakenham), Peace by Ordeal (London, 1972 (irst publ. 1935)), 48–58; F. P. Crozier, Ireland Forever (Bath [1932], 1971), 133; Charles Loch Mowat, Britain Between the Wars 1918–1940 (London, 1965), 65; Hittle, 115, 116. Tom Jones and Keith Middlemas, Whitehall Diary, Vol. III, Ireland 1918–25 (Oxford, 1971), 41. The Kilmichael Ambush in west Cork occurred exactly one week after ‘Bloody Sunday’ in the capital, Dublin. On the morning of 21 November the IRA executed 12 British officers, two Auxiliaries and a civilian; the majority of those killed were senior intelligence operatives. Later that day, in apparent reprisal, Crown forces fired into a crowd at a Gaelic football match in Croke Park, killing ten spectators and a footballer. Finally, three IRA volunteers, Dick McKee, Peadar Clancy and Conor Clune, were tortured before being unofficially executed in Dublin Castle, allegedly during an attempt to escape.4 The two Auxiliary casualties on Bloody Sunday were the first killed in action since that force’s deployment in Ireland.5 During 1920 the British press had promoted the new Auxiliary division of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), recruited from ‘ex-officers’, as an elite counter-insurgency body. The Auxiliaries inherited the name ‘Black & Tans’, which had been applied earlier in 1920 to RIC recruits from lower ranks of the British Army, who were issued with mixand-match green (police) and khaki (army) uniforms.6 The Auxiliary Division’s first commander, Brigadier General F. P. Crozier, who resigned in February 1921, later described the force as, ‘soldiers in disguise under no army and no R. I. C. code’. A fact-finding British Labour Party Commission reported in January 1921, ‘things are being done in the name of Britain which must make her name stink in the nostrils of the whole world’. In the mid 1930s Pakenham listed reprisal killings, torture, and systematic destruction of homes and businesses, combined with generalized criminality, attributed to these forces. Mowat’s verdict is that the Auxiliaries and Black & Tans were ‘the greatest blot … perhaps on Britain’s name in the twentieth century’. Hittle later summed up their role as, ‘a sort of English Freikorps’ that engaged in ‘clearing out towns, and burning and looting of houses, farms, factories, and dairies, while shooting or arresting unnamed citizens and sending them to internment camps.’7 While elements of the regular British Army came in for similar criticism, the combined Black & Tan / Auxiliary forces deservedly received most. At Kilmichael, a force of 17 Auxiliaries (plus one Black & Tan) was wiped out by the Flying Column of the IRA’s Third West Cork brigade. Sixteen lay dead on the battlefield, one survivor was left for dead, and another who escaped was later captured and killed. Privately, British Prime Minister Lloyd George noted, The Chief Secretary went to Ireland last night. The last attack of the rebels [at Kilmichael] seemed to him, Bonar Law and myself to partake of a different character from the preceding operations. The others were assassinations. This last was a military operation.8 Publicly, however, the Kilmichael affair was portrayed quite differently. To counter the effect of this major setback, Irish Secretary, Sir Hamar Greenwood gave the British House of Commons a lurid tale of how a hundred IRA fighters had surrounded and killed the Auxiliaries, and then savagely mutilated their bodies with axes. British propagandists further amplified this account in the press.9 In his memoir, Guerrilla Days in Ireland (1949), ambush Commander Tom Barry rejected the British account as ‘atrocity propaganda’. He countered that the Auxiliaries called a ‘false surrender’ during the fight, causing two (of three) fatalities from his force of thirty-six. That event justified for Barry a fight-to-thefinish without prisoners. It also created the basis for Hart’s revision.10 105 Field Day Review Re-creation of British map of IRA deployment and distribution of auxiliary bodies at the Kilmichael Ambush, 20 November 1920. Bob McDonough, Fenian Design. 9 The Kilmichael Ambush position was planned carefully. Barry’s force was deployed between bends on the Macroom-Dunmanway Road. He expected two open-deck Crossly Tender lorries with nine Auxiliary troops in each. At the end of the ambush positon, Section-One of Barry’s force with ten fighters and three in a Command Post were to attack the first lorry. Section-Two, with ten more fighters some 150 yards off on the same side 106 of the road would tackle the second. A sixman group spread out higher up across the road, half of Section-Three, would prevent Auxiliaries in both lorries taking up positions on that side. The other half of Section Three, positioned before the bend of the road that formed the ambush position, were deployed to tackle the possibility of a third lorry. In addition to these thirty-seven fighters (including Barry), three unarmed scouts ‘[P]ress representatives were “held up” at various points and it was almost an impossibility to secure a[n independent] narrative’, according to the Irish Times (1 December). However, despite reliance on the ‘oicial’ version, its correspondent also reported on ‘a number of burnings … in the neighbouring locality’, including two farmhouses adjacent to the ambush location. The Illustrated London News published a photograph of one such farmhouse on 11 December 1920. Reprisal burnings were a typical feature of Crown forces response to military setbacks. A letter appeared on 2 December in Examining Peter Hart Site of the Kilmichael ambush. Photo: 1931 the Irish Times, denying that journalists were ‘stopped several times’. The author, ‘C. H.’, probably London Morning Post (formerly Irish Times) correspondent C. H. Bretherton, was nevertherless ‘frightened’ by ‘the attitude of surrounding oicers … and it was not impossible for us to to have been shot in error’. However, having established their identity C. H. reported, the journalists ‘were unmolested’ and that ‘we took refreshment with one of the oicers at Macroom’. See also, n. 135. were positioned, the nearest reportedly 150 yards away.11 After 5pm and a wet, near freezing, daylong wait, scouts signalled two Auxiliary lorries approaching. The IRA force remained concealed, apart from Barry. Wearing an Irish Volunteer officer’s uniform,12 Barry stood in the road with his hand in a ‘halt’ position as the first lorry approached. As intended, Barry’s presence and appearance appeared to confuse the driver, who slowed down. At a prearranged point, Barry commenced the action by blowing his whistle and throwing a Mills Bomb that exploded in the driver’s cab. Both the driver and Colonel Craik, the Auxiliary Commander, were killed immediately; the other surprised occupants died in a sharp and very bloody close quarter encounter that followed. There were no Command Post or Section-One IRA fatalities. The second lorry was simultaneously attacked by Section Two, but its occupants were better positioned. Suffering causalities, they deployed to the road and fired back. The driver began reversing but broke the lorry’s suspension in the roadside ditch. The first IRA casualty, Section Two commander Michael McCarthy, reportedly was killed at this stage.13 With the first lorry force out of action, Barry and his three Command Post fighters moved silently to attack remaining Auxiliaries from the rear. On approach, Barry reported that he heard them shouting, ‘We surrender, we surrender’, and observed rifles being discarded. The Auxiliaries reportedly then fired their revolvers at three IRA fighters who exposed their positions to accept the surrender, killing Jim O’Sullivan and mortally wounding Pat Deasy. Consequently, according to Barry’s account, he ordered, ‘rapid fire and do not stop until I tell you’. He refused further surrenders and ordered a fight to the finish without taking prisoners, resulting in the execution of at least one unarmed Auxiliary. Barry later contended that ‘soldiers who had cheated in war deserved to die.’14 Afterwards, all of the Auxiliaries were assumed dead. However, one survived though severely wounded, and another escaped but was captured later and executed. 107 Field Day Review Barry drilled his traumatized volunteers after what he called ‘the bloodiest fight in Ireland’ during the Independence War. Then the IRA set the lorries on fire and, before departing, collected arms and intelligence material plus the bodies of their two dead and one mortally wounded comrades. In his historical reconstruction of the ambush sixty-eight years later, Peter Hart did not endorse British allegations that Barry’s men had engaged in mutilation. The medical examination did not substantiate it. Alternatively, however, Hart charged that ‘Barry’s “history” of Kilmichael … is riddled with lies and evasions. There was no false surrender as he described it. The surviving Auxiliaries were simply exterminated’ (thesis, 51; book, 36). Thus, Hart pitched his academic history of a massacre, that resembled the official British position, against Barry’s recollection of a military engagement, that was in line with the British cabinet’s original private assessment. Hart claimed that IRA veteran testimony he accessed supported his conclusions. However, his unusual decision to anonymize testimony from elderly republican informants (twelve in the thesis, thirteen in the book) complicated the task of unravelling his narrative. Hart reported that, because an unquantified ‘large number’ of his interviewees required anonymity, he, for an unknown reason, had anonymized all their identifies (thesis, 478; book, 330).15 Why did Hart anonymize even those interviewees content to associate their names with their testimonies? What justification was offered to, and accepted by, examiners about a decision that apparently lacked an historiographical precedent? What protocols (if any), ensuring academic rigor, were put in place? Hart did not discuss them. When I asked, Hart’s internal examiner declined to explain.16 At this point Hart’s methodology, as distinct from his interpretation, requires examination. Hart’s methodology implied that anonymity was required to obtain information that otherwise might have remained hidden. Alternatively, however, 108 Hart’s provision of blanket anonymity to all his interviewees obscured information that was otherwise available, and it also hampered any researcher’s investigation of Hart’s claims. Moreover, such an investigation was made more difficult because Hart’s elderly informants had died when his research was eventually published. Of the initial twelve elderly anonymous republican informants, Hart claimed that two, interviewed by him in 1988–89, were Kilmichael Ambush veterans. Hart reported access, also ‘under condition of anyonymity’, to three more ambush accounts that had been recorded on audiotapes in the ‘late 1960s’ and were in the possession of a Fr. John Chisholm (thesis, 478; book, 330). Chisholm had made the tapes while assisting IRA veteran Liam Deasy to write his own War of Independence memoir, Towards Ireland Free (Cork, 1973). Here is how Hart introduced these interviewees (thesis, 46, n. 50; book, 33, n. 56): The following reconstruction [of the Kilmichael Ambush] is primarily based on five detailed interviews carried out with Kilmichael veterans, three of them conducted by Dr. John Chisholm and two by myself (interviews with E. Y., 3 April, 25 June 1988; H. J., 19 Nov., 1989). I was also fortunate enough to be given a tour of the ambush site by the latter.17 This explanation is clear if it refers to five ambush participants (Hart’s two and Chisholm’s three), but is misleading if it does not. There are problems associated with both groups of interviewees. Hart’s thesis convention of identifying his own informants by their initials (sometimes reversed) led me in 2008 to suggest that Hart’s interviewee, ‘E. Y.’, above, was Edward ‘Ned’ Young.18 Young died aged ninety-seven on 13 November 1989. On 18 November the weekly Southern Star printed a report and photograph headlined, ‘Ned Young – last of the “Boys of Kilmichael”’.19 Throughout the 1980s, this widely read newspaper referred progressively to Ned Young as, respectively, one of the last three, then one of the last two, and, from 1987, 10 Times (London), 30 November 1920. Brian P. Murphy, The Origin and Organisation of British Propaganda in Ireland in 1920 (Aubane/Spinwatch, 2006), 64. Tom Barry, Guerilla Days in Ireland ([1949] Cork, 1989), 44, 45, 51. The perfected British view for public consumption was in the Times (London), 2 December 1920. Though presented as from a senior Cork police oicer Murphy (67) demonstrated that British Director of Publicity Basil Clarke constructed it. 11 Barry’s account summarized from his Guerilla Days in Ireland, 1989, 40–46. 12 Origin of the uniform in Paddy O’Brien, BMH WS 812. 13 ‘Eyewitness’ (pseud., Tom Barry), ‘Kilmichael — Part II’, An Cosantóir, vol. 20, no. 21, 16 May 1941, republished in Terence O’Reilly, ed., Our Struggle for Independence, Eye-witness accounts from the pages of An Cosantóir (Cork, 2009), 11, 103; BMH WS 1,234, Jack Hennessy. 14 Meda Ryan, Tom Barry: IRA Freedom Fighter (Cork, 2003), 56. 15 Hart observed in his second article based on his research, ‘As several of the veterans I interviewed asked not to be quoted by name I will refer to all of them by their initials’. Why ‘all’? How many are ‘several’? ‘Class, Community and the Irish Republican Army in Cork, 1917–1923’, in Patrick O’Flanagan, Cornelius Buttimer, eds, Cork History and Society (Dublin, 1993), 983, n. 34. 16 Professor David Fitzpatrick stated that to do so, ‘would involve a gross breach of conidentiality’, letter 17 November 2008. 17 In the thesis (46, n. 50), Hart refers to Chisholm ‘tapes’ in the possession of Fr. John Chisholm, whereas the book mentions ‘research’ (33, n. 56). However, the bibliography in both publications refers to tapes (thesis, 478; book, 330). Examining Peter Hart Southern Star, 18 November 1989, p. 20. Hart’s ambush ‘scout’ interview was dated 19 November. 109 Field Day Review as the very last and only Kilmichael survivor. The publicly acknowledged second-to-last surviving veteran, Jack O’Sullivan, died in December 1986.20 Ned Young appeared in a large front-page photograph in the daily Cork Examiner on 30 November 1997 under the headline, ‘The Last Boy of Kilmichael’. No one ever contradicted these seemingly uncontroversial desgnations. Hart’s second ambush interviewee, ‘H. J.’ (renamed ‘AF’ in Hart’s book), was reportedly interviewed six days after Young died, one day after his death was reported, on 19 November 1989.21 The implications of those dates alone constitute a major problem. Hart’s other three taped accounts, made in the late 1960s by Fr. Chisholm, were not individually differentiated in his text and citations, either because Hart could not or simply did not do so: Hart did not inform readers as to the reasons. Unusual problems have arisen concerning the informants. Let us discuss them in detail. 19 November 1989 Interview—the H. J. / ‘scout’ problem The informant whom Hart reportedly interviewed on 19 November 1989 was presented differently in his thesis and book. In the thesis he appeared as H. J., a regular ambush participant. However, in Hart’s 1998 book, renamed AF, he was recharacterized as an unarmed ‘scout’ situated ‘some distance’ from the fighting (compare book 35, n. 61, with thesis 49, n. 55). And yet, in both the thesis and the book, this person was reportedly engaged in shooting British Auxiliaries (book, 35; thesis, 50, n. 56). Additionally, the thesis reported that this interviewee had toured Hart around the ambush site, an attribution the book withdrew (compare book 33, n. 56 with thesis 46, n. 50).22 Likewise, a thesis reference to the IRA’s time of arrival at the ambush site is ascribed to the same interviewee but, again for no apparent reason, this is altered in the book by citing someone who was not there (compare thesis 33, n. 11 with book 24, 110 n. 11).23 Finally, Hart’s thesis narrative and a sketch of the ambush position (thesis, 47; not reproduced in book), indicating the deployment of IRA personnel, ignores scouts entirely, an odd omission if Hart had interviewed a scout. There are further significant differences. But first, why was this claimed interviewee reported differently in the two publications? Between the completion of Hart’s thesis in 1992 and the publication of his book in 1998, it became clear to Hart that he dated his H. J. / AF interview after Ned Young died in November 1989. Why did Hart make this mistake? Hart may not have been aware of publicity surrounding Ned Young’s death when he dated his interviews.24 He may, however, have accepted and also misread a significant published mistake. On page 46 of the December 1989 Southern Star Centenary Supplement, a Ned Young photograph was mistakenly captioned, ‘one of the few surviving veterans’.25 Hart most likely saw this, as his thesis cited the facing page, 47 (thesis, 415, n. 111; book 286, n. 47). The mistaken caption may have given Hart the false impression that a) Young was still alive and also, b) that he was ‘one of the few surviving veterans’ of the Kilmichael Ambush, rather than of the entire War of Independence. Hart’s thesis interview dating may, therefore, have appeared nonproblematic to him.26 Hart probably became aware there was a problem, however, after submission of his thesis (1992) and before book publication (1998). In 1995, a substantial commemorative booklet on Kilmichael Ambush participants was published, titled The Wild Heather Glen, the Kilmichael Story, in Grief and in Glory.27 Hart acknowledged that the publication contained ‘a profile of every man at the ambush, with many valuable biographical details’ (book 131, n. 17). Since those details included the year participants were born and died, that observation alone undermined Hart’s claim to have interviewed H. J. / AF on 19 November 1989. 18 He became AA in Hart’s book. I pointed out in Troubled History (21) that thesis interviewees were identiied by their initials, sometimes reversed, whereas in the book they appeared sequentially and less identiiably as AA, AB, AC, etc. 19 Reproduced on the cover of Meehan, Troubled History. 20 Southern Star reports of deaths of three remaining 1980s Kilmichael veterans, 3 & 24 December 1983, 7 December 1985, 20 December 1986, 26 November 1988, 18 November 1989. See my, ‘Reply to Jef Dudgeon on Peter Hart’, Irish Political Review (IPR), Nov. 2011, vol. 26, no. 11, at www.academia. edu/1080790/. 21 Southern Star, 18 November 1989. Meda Ryan, Tom Barry, 69, irst noted a problem with Hart’s claim that he interviewed two ambush veterans in 1988–89 when only Young was alive. 22 See Niall Meehan, ‘Troubles in Irish History’, in Brian Murphy, Níall Meehan, Troubled History (2008), 23, at www. academia.edu/166387/. 23 The 1998 book (24, n. 11), cites ‘interviews with AA 3 Apr. 1988, and AE, 19 Nov. 1989’. The 1992 thesis (33, n. 11), cites ‘interviews with E. Y. 3 April 1988, and H. J. 19 Nov. 1989’. In all other citations 1992’s H.J.=AF, whereas C.D.=AE. C.D. is Dan Cahalane who, though a member of Barry’s lying column, did not participate in the Kilmichael ambush (and Hart did not assert that he did). 24 Hart’s dating of his interview with C. D. (Dan Cahalane, AE in the book) is similarly problematic. Hart’s ‘Youth Culture and the Cork IRA’ (in David Fitzpatrick, ed., Revolution?, TCD History Workshop, 1990), referred to interviewing eleven IRA veterans and to interviewing the same C. D.—Cahalane— once. But Hart gives diferent dates, on 17 and 19 November 1989 (11, 21). In his 1992 thesis, Hart referred to interviewing him (43, n. 39) on 19 November, whereas on Examining Peter Hart another page (176, n. 79) it is 18 November (no date here in book, 142, n. 65). Hart seemed uncertain about his interview date. Was it 17, 18 or 19 November 1989? Whichever date, it is surprising that Hart did not become aware that Ned Young, originally from Dunmanway, died on 13 November. Since Cahalane lived in Dunmanway, he might have told Hart this. This point is reinforced since Hart reported interviewing an ‘I.R.A. veteran’ in his Dunmanway home, that once belonged to an April Killings victim, solicitor Francis Fitzmaurice, killed on 27 April 1922. That was Dan Cahalane in Carbery House, Dunmanway. This made an impression on Hart, who embellished the fact. In his April killings chapter conclusion, Hart professed himself ‘struck by the symbolic reversal involved in the former guerrilla living in the grand ancien regime home, and by his denial of what this suggested: that the nationalist revolution had also been a sectarian one’ (thesis, 391–92; book, 291–92). To establish this observation, Hart asserted that the ‘veteran’ ‘bought the house a few years later, after it had fallen into disrepair’. That is not accurate. Initially, the house functioned as a Free State ‘military post’. A Dr Francis E. Fitzmaurice sold the contents by public auction in 1925. Dunmanway auctioneer Henry Smith bought and occupied the house in 1933. Cahalane purchased Carbery House from Smith in 1955, thirty-four years after the April killings (F. Fitzmaurice solicitors had carriage of sale). Cahalane died in 1996. Had he been alive when Hart’s book was published two years later, the easily identiiable Cahalane might have sought a correction. See Southern Star, 12 March 1923, 8 September 1923, 25 April 1925, 6 May 1933, 22 January 1955, 27 April 1996. In the absence of other explanations, that is possibly why the ambush participant named H. J. in the thesis was newly described in the book as an unarmed ‘scout’ (named AF). If so, however, that change did not resolve Hart’s problem. The Wild Heather Glen booklet included Kilmichael scouts in its list of forty-six IRA ambush participants (thirty-seven armed fighters, including Tom Barry, three scouts, two dispatch scouts, four post-ambush helpers). All five scouts were later identified individually by Tom Barry’s biographer Meda Ryan. The last two reportedly died in 1967 and 1971.28 If media and other reports are accurate, Hart made claims with regard to evidence allegedly provided by anonymous witnesses that he could not have made had he named them. It was incumbent on Hart to establish the authenticity of his sources in ordinary circumstances. Using anonymous information heightened, not diminished, this responsibility. It is not known how or whether the examination process ensured authenticity. It would be surprising if the provenance of anonymous interviewees was not considered during it. New Anomalies That last point brings us to a collection of essays titled Terror in Ireland 1916–1923, edited by David Fitzpatrick and published in Hart’s memory in 2012, which contains an important chapter on the Kilmichael Ambush by Dr. Eve Morrison.29 Morrison, who generally supported Hart’s approach, obtained privileged access to the Chisholm audiotapes and to an unpublished paper by Hart, responding to his critics. Morrison’s essay gave rise to new anomalies she debated with me but largely failed to acknowledge. Whereas I viewed Hart’s mistakes as systemic, Morrison suggested that they arose from ‘muddled’ notation. Professor Fitzpatrick conceded in the same publication that Hart was ‘occasionally careless’ in presenting primary source material.30 Hart’s muddle may be his message if it follows from attempts to obscure or hide evidence. Let us take the discussion on to explore this point. New anomalies are: 1. Morrison reported that the Chisholm audiotapes of the late 1960s recorded two Kilmichael veterans speaking about the ambush, not three, as Hart stated.31 2. A 2004 unpublished riposte to critics by Hart, to which Morrison was given privileged access, named all his sources (as of 2004) apart from one, the ‘scout’. If he remained anonymous even to the anonymizer, his existence is questionable.32 3. An utterance from one audiotaped veteran, Jack O’Sullivan, was wrongly attributed in Hart’s book to the ‘scout’ (35, n. 61). In other words, Hart confused an utterance from someone to whom he said he spoke in 1989 with testimony on what was, at that time, a twenty-year-old audio recording. 4. However, unknown to Morrison, this attribution mistake was new to the book. It was unclear in the thesis. The change introduced to the book was obviously mistaken, since the second of the three quotations ascribed to the ‘scout’ contained, after the first, ‘“Barry made us”, said another’.33 The above points indicate Hart’s difficulty reporting evidence accurately and also continuing problems reporting the ‘scout’. These problems were again initially obscured and also possibly produced by anonymous evidence presentation. However, there are further anomalies associated with Hart’s reporting of Ned Young’s testimony. 111 Field Day Review Edward ‘Ned’ Young The anomalies associated with reporting what Ned Young said interacts with previous findings, 1. Eve Morrison revealed that the second interviewee in the late 1960s Chisholm tapes, alongside Jack O’Sullivan, was Ned Young. This is surprising because Young was also (as noted) reportedly the sole Kilmichael participant still alive in 1987–89 and therefore theoretically (albeit, as we shall see, problematically) available then for Hart to interview.34 Hart consequently presented Ned Young as two different people in his Kilmichael discussion: he was Chisholm’s late 1960s audiotaped interviewee as well as Hart’s 1988 interviewee.35 Anonymity made this double counting of Ned Young possible. 2. Hart’s previously noted failure to distinguish individually audiotaped interviewees may therefore make a kind of (albeit unethical) sense. Distinguishing them, even anonymously, as with his own claimed interviewees, would have necessitated reporting E. Y. (Edward ‘Ned’ Young) as one person who had been interviewed by both Chisholm and Hart, rather than, by implication, two separate people, one of whom Chisholm had interviewed on tape, the other with whom Hart had spoken personally. 3. Morrison paraphrased Young on the audiotape speaking of a false surrender. Young mentioned it at least twice (as revealed at a talk where Morrison played part of Chisholm’s Young interview tape). Nevertheless, Hart’s report of the tape’s contents ignored both of Young’s utterances, although the question of whether there was indeed a false surrender is absolutely central to Hart’s characterization of Barry as a liar. Before proceeding with discussion of Young’s testimony, a general point must be made. 112 Hart reported that he interviewed two ambush participants (Young and H. J. / AF —i.e., the ‘scout’) in 1988–89, when only one ambush participant (Young) was still alive, and that he had listened to three additional participants on the late 1960s audiotape, when, according to Eve Morrison, it appears that merely two (O’Sullivan and Young) were recorded. Hart’s total of five anonymous accounts is therefore cut initially to four, if we accept Morrison’s report of merely two persons on the audiotapes; to three once we cease double-counting Ned Young; and to only two if we advisedly discount the ‘scout’, since all such former scouts, according to The Wild Heather Glen and Meda Ryan, were dead in 1988–89 (and since Hart’s ‘scout’ has additional problematic baggage). Thus, we are left with two audiotaped Chisholm interviews, with Ned Young and with Jack O’Sullivan, together with Hart’s claimed Young interview, for a total of three spoken accounts from two people. There is more to be said about Hart’s claimed encounter with Ned Young, however. His son, John Young, stated in a sworn affidavit in 2007 that Hart would have found it impossible to interview the sole surviving ambush veteran during 1988, using the normal meaning of the word ‘interview’. According to his son, Ned Young suffered a debilitating stoke in late 1986 and ‘virtually lost the power of speech’. He was in the care of John Young, who controlled access to his father.36 John Young stated and continued to state that Peter Hart did not interview his then ninety-six-year-old father.37 Adding to the Ned Young puzzle is that Hart, later in the doctoral thesis and book, stated he had access to ‘Edward Young[’s] statement’, that is, Young’s then unreleased Bureau of Military History Witness Statement (BMH WS), No. 1,402 (thesis, 306; book, 232), though without noting that Young was a Kilmichael Ambush veteran.38 The statement explains, among other Irish War of Independence activities, Young’s role in the Kilmichael Ambush. In his chapter on the Kilmichael Ambush Hart neither revealed nor cited Young’s statement.39 25 Probably, the extensive over 100-page supplement was written and laid out prior to Young’s death. 26 Hart was unclear as to who participated in the ambush. He cited in the thesis (54, n. 66) a ‘Michael O’Sullivan’ in the Southern Star, 16 January 1971, as a ‘veteran of Kilmichael’. Hart changed this designation to an ‘I.R.A. survivor’ in his book (38, n. 74), presumably because a deinitive list of ambush participants published in 1995 (discussed below) contained no one of that name. Inaccurate newspaper information became Hart’s inaccurate citation. 27 Ballineen Enniskean Heritage Group, 1995. 28 Meda Ryan, Tom Barry, 69. 29 ‘Kilmichael Revisited: Tom Barry and the false Surrender’, in David Fitzpatrick, ed., Terror in Ireland, 1916–1923 (Dublin, 2012). Hereafter ‘Kilmichael Revisited’ and Terror, respectively. 30 ‘Kilmichael Revisited’, 173; David Fitzpatrick, ‘Introduction’, Terror, 3. Niall Meehan, review including David Fitzpatrick, Eve Morrison, responses, at www. academia.edu/1871818/, and my reply, www.academia. edu/1994527/ 31 Morrison indicated also that two of Hart’s ‘quotations remain unattributable’ but not which ones, ‘Kilmichael Revisited’, 161. 32 In her reply to my review of her ‘Kilmichael Revisited’ essay, Morrison reported being on the trail of the scout. If he existed his name should have the initials, HJ or JH. Hart’s unpublished reply was possibly in response to Meda Ryan’s Tom Barry that appeared in 2003. In a 2005 interview in History Ireland and in a subsequent article, Hart avoided giving a detailed response to criticism. He asserted instead that Meda Ryan’s analysis contained no new research and that her analysis was not ‘rational’. He claimed also that Brian Murphy’s criticism was not published. A previously Examining Peter Hart uninvolved observer, Andreas Boldt, subsequently criticized Hart for avoiding detail and for adopting an emotional and ad hominem approach. See History Ireland, ive issues, vol. 13, nos. 2–6, Mar–Apr to Nov–Dec, 2005. 33 See Meehan, Troubled History, 23, after ‘Fifth’. Compare Hart’s book (35, n. 62), which introduces the new ‘scout’ reference, with his thesis (50, n. 56), which is ambiguous as to attribution. Hart may have confused himself. His preceding note referred to ive following ‘Chisholm interviews’ quotations, intermingled with other source material (thesis, 48, n. 53; book, 34, n. 59). This included an Auxiliary reportedly pleading, ‘I’m a Catholic, don’t shoot me’ (thesis, 48; book, 35). As noted by Morrison (170), no veteran reported that plea on tape. It was in a recorded question from Fr. Chisholm to Ned Young. Chisholm told Young that the sad anecdote was relayed to Chisholm by ambush veteran Paddy O’Brien (who was not recorded speaking about the ambush). Had Hart stated this in the thesis, instead of leaving the anecdote unattributed, he might not in the book have seemingly included it as one of ive Chisholm interview quotations. Once he did, the book contained an orphaned sixth quotation, O’Sullivan’s, that Hart then attributed to the ‘scout’. 34 Morrison’s reply to my Terror in Ireland review conirmed my deduction in Troubled History (22) that in the thesis E.Y. was Ned or ‘Edward’ Young (identiied by Hart as AA in his book). 35 Father John Chisholm, a custodian of the tapes to which he gave Hart preferential access, has been inconsistent. In 2010, after 40 years, eight in all were made available to a second researcher, television producer Jerry O’Callaghan. He reviewed them for a January 2011 TG4 television documentary, Scéal Tom Barry (trans., ‘Tom Barry’s In effect then, Hart presented Ned Young as three separate people in his research but without informing readers: (a) under his own name in the 1956 Witness Statement, when Young was 64; (b) on a late-1960s recording, when Young was in his late seventies; and (c) as Hart’s 1988 interviewee, when he was ninety-six. Presumably, informing readers would have defeated the purpose of anonymity (and might have diminished the reputed scope of Hart’s research). But the availability to Hart of the first two Young testimonies raises the question of what might usefully have been added by again interviewing Young in 1988, four years short of his 100th birthday.40 By far the most significant anomaly is Hart’s reporting of Ned Young’s testimony about his role in, and memories of, the Kilmichael Ambush. Young was in ambush Section Three, which Barry had deployed high up and spread out across the road from Sections One and Two. In his 1956 Witness Statement, Young reported that he was pursuing an escaping Auxiliary soldier at Kilmichael at a time when the false surrender event was said to have happened.41 In other words he did not witness personally that aspect of the action, a fact Hart did not report. Nevertheless, Young stated on the Chisholm audiotape that after the fighting ‘stopped’,‘[t]hey [other IRA volunteers] told me afterwards that … the Tans said, “we surrender”, and then started to fire again’. While Hart (and Morrison’s essay) did not cite Young’s interview statement on this vital point, Morrison did paraphrase Ned Young reporting separately: ‘[H]e had seen [John] Lordan bayonet an Auxiliary and that after the ambush members of the column had informed him that this Auxiliary had surrendered falsely’.42 Remarkably, then, Hart’s thesis and published narratives ignored some of Young’s most significant testimonies on the Chisholm tape—that referred twice to a false surrender event at Kilmichael. This is a stunning example of an extraordinary flaw in Hart’s methodology: he simply ignored information that contradicted his point of view. It is difficult to discern a logical basis for ignoring Young’s testimony on this point. Hart concluded instead that ambush commander Tom Barry was one of a number of ‘political serial killers’ (thesis, 118; book, 100) on the Republican side in the War of Independence, and that Barry later concocted his untrue ‘false surrender’ narrative in 1949 by using ‘lies and evasions’ (thesis, 51; book, 36), which, among other crimes, were employed to justify the murder at Kilmichael of unarmed British Auxiliary prisoners. While omitting information demonstrating this was not the case, Hart also obscured related important information in footnotes. In his thesis (37, n. 19) (book, 27, n. 21), nine pages prior to his almost blow-by-blow report of the actual fight at Kilmichael, Hart noted without further elaboration that as ‘interviews confirm, the ‘false surrender’ story was circulating within the I.R.A. as early as 1921’. As interviews confirm?—How so?—Whose interviews?—Conducted by whom? Hart’s main text not only ignores this important point, it also censors the fact that a ‘false surrender’ narrative was reportedly enunciated to Ned Young, by fellow ambush participants, after the fighting ‘stopped’ on 28 November 1920. Moreover, an account of the false surrender at Kilmichael did indeed appear in 1921, from British Prime Minister Lloyd George’s imperial adviser, Lionel Curtis: ‘It is reported by Sinn Féin that a white flag was put up by the police, and that when the attacking party approached to accept the surrender fire was opened upon them’. In addition, in 1926 Piaras Beaslai published an account in his biography of Michael Collins. However, Hart appeared unaware of these. He claimed that former Auxiliary Commander F. P. Crozier’s Ireland Forever (1932) contained the first published account of a false surrender. That claim in turn enabled Hart to suggest, in the same note, that Barry’s own 1949 false surrender narrative, as well as that by Kilmichael veteran Stephen O’Neill in 1937, ‘may in part have been prompted by Crozier’, whose account Hart discounted. Hart presented no evidence, however, to accompany these speculations.43 113 Field Day Review Footnoted paraphrasing In another footnote, within his ambush narrative proper, Hart paraphrased testimony by the mysterious H. J. who reported, in Hart’s paraphrase, a ‘sort of false surrender’ (thesis, 49, n. 55), that caused no IRA fatalities. Hart’s main text ignored this interesting claim. And readers will recall that the book version of this same note reintroduced H. J. as AF, an unarmed ‘scout … further away from the ambush site’ (book, 35, n. 61).44 In this context it may be possible to identify the mysterious scout. That is because Hart cited by name in his book (132, n. 20), but not the thesis, the BMH WS (No. 1,234) of another Kilmichael veteran, Jack Hennessy. As with Ned Young’s Witness Statement, Hennessy’s was not divulged or cited in Hart’s Kilmichael Ambush chapter. Hennessy, who died in 1970,45 was involved in the thick of the fighting in Section Two at Kilmichael. Nevertheless, he appears to be the best fit for Hart’s unarmed ‘scout’, AF—not least because Jack Hennessy’s initials reversed are H. J., the seemingly armed 19 November 1989 thesis interviewee who in the book became ‘AF’ the unarmed ‘scout’.46 Hennessy’s uncited (by Hart) Kilmichael Witness Statement narrative noted the death in action of Michael McCarthy, the Section Two leader. After suffering a head wound, Hennessy took up McCarthy’s rifle because his own was jammed with blood. Significantly, Hennessy reported shouting ‘hands up’ to an Auxiliary who had ‘thrown down his rifle’, followed by the same Auxiliary drawing his revolver. Hennessy reported that he then ‘shot him dead’. Hart’s notation of the previously mentioned ‘sort of false surrender’ in which ‘no I.R.A. men died’, was attributed to H. J (thesis, 45, n. 55). Is this the ‘sort of ’ false surrender referred to above? In his thesis Hart did not cite Hennessy’s Witness Statement. It may be, however, given the above, that Hart also had access to the statement when writing his PhD thesis. In any case, Hart’s citing of Hennessy’s Witness Statement at length in a later chapter entitled ‘The Boys of Kilmichael’, 114 on his family home being torched and being tortured by the Essex Regiment in July 1920 (132), while ignoring its Kilmichael Ambush evidence, makes no sense.47 Hennessey’s BMH testimony, like Young’s on the Chisholm audiotape, may have been inconvenient to Hart and hence either obscured or ignored. The absence of verbatim citation is evident in another quotationless footnote. In both his thesis and his book, Hart paraphrased ‘all’ of his interviewees as follows: All of the men interviewed agree on this point: [Michael] McCarthy and [Jim] O’Sullivan did not stand up and did not die because of a fake surrender. Two of these veterans considered Barry’s account to be an insult to the memory of these men. (thesis, 48, n. 52; book, 34, n. 58) Let us leave aside the implicit assumption that the third IRA fatality at Kilmichael, Pat Deasy, did succumb to a ‘fake surrender’. The problem with Hart’s statement is that ‘all of the men’ are (it appears) in fact also merely those to whom he referred, in the same note, as ‘[t]wo of these veterans’. They are the only two veterans verifiably interviewed— although not by Hart himself: that is, they are Ned Young and Jack O’Sullivan on the Chisholm audiotapes. Thus, any testimony confirming that Barry insulted the memory of McCarthy and Jim Sullivan and in relation to the false surrender should be recorded in their taped Chisholm testimonies. Unfortunately, Hart (and Morrison) did not publish those testimonies. However, I obtained a transcript of the Jack O’Sullivan/Chisholm interview.48 With respect to what he told Chisholm about the Kilmichael Ambush, remember that Jack O’Sullivan, like Ned Young, was in Section Three, stationed higher up across the road. Here is the excerpt in which Jack O’Sullivan discusses, with Chisholm, Michael McCarthy’s death: John Chisholm — Yes but still [Tom Barry] put [Michael] McCarthy in charge [of No 2 section]. Story’). The eight tapes contained one interview with an ambush veteran, Jack O’Sullivan. Then, in 2011, nine tapes were reported, which Eve Morrison reviewed for her Kilmichael essay. O’Callaghan queried the ninth tape discrepancy at a talk at TCD 26 October 2011 given by Morrison. Chisholm, who was present, admitted mislaying the ninth tape that he gave to Morrison. Ned Young turned up on the ninth tape, though Chisholm had informed Ned Young’s son, John Young (letter 12 April 2008, copy in author’s possession), that his father was not interviewed. According to John Borgonovo, for this and other reasons, ‘Chisholm’s partisanship and inconsistencies have polluted this evidential well’ (‘Revolutionary Violence’, Irish Historical Studies, vol. 38, no. 150, November 2012, 330). I requested that Morrison publish the complete Young transcript. I publish a substantial portion of the Jack O’Sullivan / Fr. Chisholm audiotape interchange here and I can provide an entire transcript. Jerry O’Callaghan kindly gave it to me. 36 John Young aidavit appended to Brian Murphy, Níall Meehan, Troubled History, at www.academia.edu/166387/. 37 ‘Why Spinwatch is publishing Ned Young’s statement’, at www.spinwatch.org/ index.php/issues/northernireland/item/301–whyspinwatch-is-publishingjohn-young%E2%80%99sstatement. See also Young debating with Morrison at www.historyireland.com/ letters-extra/peter-hart-etc/ (accessed 21 May 2014). 38 Witness statements from former participants were completed in the 1950s (mainly) and released in 2003 by the Irish Army’s Bureau of Military History (BMH). They are, since 2012, available online: www. bureauofmilitaryhistory. ie/bmhsearch/browse.jsp. ‘Edward Young statement’, copy in author’s possession, is identical to BMH version. Examining Peter Hart 39 Hart’s book (33, 56n) also noted ‘a detailed statement … by one of the ambush party’ and an additional taped interview, both held by the Ballineen Enniskeane Area Heritage Group. Hart ignored the ‘statement’ thereafter and the heritage group denied that the new anonymously presented tape belonged to them, Meda Ryan, History Ireland, Jul–Ag 2005. I discuss it later. 40 It should be noted also that Hart misreported Ned Young’s age at interview as eightyseven, not ninety-six (thesis, 100, 178n; book, 80, 46n). This error, like others, was obscured by anonymity. 41 Young also spoke about this in a 1970 radio interview on the 50th anniversary of the ambush, rebroadcast RTÉ Radio One, 28 November 2008 (copy in author’s possession). 42 Young testimony from Chisholm tape played by Morrison at a TCD Contemporary History seminar I attended, entitled ‘Kilmichael, the Veterans speak’, 26 October 2011. Morrison’s Young/Lordan revelation, Terror in Ireland, 168, discussed in my review, www.academia. edu/1871818/, 12. 43 Lionel Curtis, ‘Ireland’, Round Table, June 1921, XI, no. 43, 500; Piaras Beaslai, Michael Collins and the Making of a New Ireland (Dublin, 1926), vol. II, 97; F. P. Crozier, Ireland Forever, 128; Stephen O’Neill, The Kerryman, Christmas 1937, published as, ‘Auxiliaries Annihilated at Kilmichael’, Rebel Cork’s Fighting Story, Tralee, 1947 (republished Cork, 2009, with Peter Hart introduction). Hart also considered it signiicant that a 26 November 1932 Irish Press article on Kilmichael by Barry omitted the false surrender (thesis, 36, n. 18; book, 26,n. 19). Meda Ryan reported that Barry’s reference was edited out, to which cut he objected, Tom Barry, 87–88. Hart also wrote that the authenticity of a ‘captured’ typewritten, ‘rebel commandant’s report’ Jack O’Sullivan — That’d tell you. That’s what I’m coming at, that McCarthy never got credit for his bravery as a soldier and then … Chisholm — Yes. O’Sullivan — Another thing I think is very wrong. Chisholm — Yes. O’Sullivan — And it wasn’t up to me because his own pals from Dunmanway should have taken care of it. It was a wrong thing to say that Michael McCarthy got up out of his position … Chisholm — Yes. O’Sullivan — and got shot. Now there could be two meanings to it. Chisholm — Yes, yes, yes, well you see the way Tom Barry put it was that the Auxiliaries cried, ‘we surrender, we surrender’ … O’Sullivan — Yes. Chisholm — … and then, only then Michael McCarthy stood up and he said that once the Auxiliaries saw him they just shot. O’Sullivan — Yes. Chisholm — And shot, it was a bogus surrender. O’Sullivan — I know, I know, that covers my story, but ah then I, I always say that Michael McCarthy was even dead before … Chisholm — was dead before the Auxiliaries surrendered. O’Sullivan — Before they surrendered. Chisholm — Yes. O’Sullivan – Yes. Chisholm — And I’d say the same of Jim Hurley … Jim O’Sullivan. O’Sullivan — Yes, Jim O’Sullivan, yes, Jim O’Sullivan hadn’t a hope. Chisholm — No. O’Sullivan — He was up high. Chisholm — Yes. And I’d say the very same thing happened about … O’Sullivan — ‘Tis very likely. Chisholm — Pat Deasy too. O’Sullivan — Yes. Chisholm — The whole three of them, so you wouldn’t be satisfied with Tom Barry’s story as history but you think it good, a good dramatic account. O’Sullivan — Well now I’ll tell ya I read it and I tell you it couldn’t remind me of anything only a Wild West story. I mean a man can get away with escapes once, twice or three times but there was too many of them in Tom Barry’s story. Chisholm — Yes. O’Sullivan — I mean, it wasn’t Tom Barry’s ‘twas somebody else that wrote this story. I suppose he just told them what to say. In 1941, when writing for the Irish Defence Forces journal An Cosantóir, Tom Barry also reported that McCarthy had died before the false surrender. Barry did not assert that McCarthy rose from his position. Also, Barry habitually stated publicly (contrary to Chisholm’s allegation and Hart’s footnote) that only Jim O’Sullivan and Pat Deasy (and not McCarthy) were shot during the false surrender episode. On tape, Jack O’Sullivan was responding to Chisholm’s mistaken assertion with regard to McCarthy in Barry’s narrative. Significantly, O’Sullivan then said, in relation to the ‘bogus surrender’, ‘that covers my story’. In other words, for Sullivan there was a false surrender and McCarthy died before it—precisely the same account made by Barry in 1941.49 Nevertheless, Chisholm as interviewer interrupted Jack O’Sullivan to press his own opinion. He confusingly interjected that Jim O’Sullivan and Pat Deasy were not false surrender victims when Jack O’Sullivan was observing that Jim O’Sullivan was ‘up high’ and ‘hadn’t a hope’. Jack O’Sullivan responded ‘Tis very likely’ and ‘yes’, perhaps not wishing to contradict Chisholm’s perceptions. O’Sullivan expressed no personal view other than that the ‘bogus surrender’ ‘covers my story’. Chisholm failed to query Jack O’Sullivan on Jim O’Sullivan being ‘up high’ and that he ‘hadn’t a hope’.50 Chisholm’s eagerness to interject also prevented O’Sullivan from elaborating on,‘there could be two meanings’ to McCarthy’s death. In prioritising his own meaning and in 115 Field Day Review attempting to lead his interviewee, Chisholm failed to elicit a denial of the false surrender story from a veteran who had no difficulty disparaging the style of Barry’s memoir. The accuracy of Hart’s inadequately paraphrased and footnoted report of this interview cannot be sustained: O’Sullivan did not challenge the false surrender account; nor did his testimony substantiate Hart’s charge that Barry insulted the memory of his dead comrades. In fact, Jack O’Sullivan said, in another part of the transcript, ‘I liked Barry as a soldier’, and he praised Barry’s bravery. That covers O’Sullivan. Morrison had access to Ned Young’s testimony and should have been in a position to clarify what it said on Barry’s alleged ‘insult’. Unfortunately, she did not do so in relation to either Young or Jack O’Sullivan, although she did report one of Young’s two affirmations, on the Chishom tape, that a false surrender had occurred. Be that as it may, it is demonstrated again that Jack O’Sullivan’s and Ned Young’s taped evidence about the ambush, which Chisholm made available to Hart but to no one else for over twenty years, in fact undermined Hart’s own interpretation of what had happened at Kilmichael. Because of that, we may surmise, Hart misreported that evidence. Moreover, his mis-identification of false surrender fatalities was in any case based on a significant misreading of Barry’s account, which we will now discuss. Misreading Tom Barry Hart demonstrably ignored Ned Young’s audiotaped observations (and earlier Witness Statement). He misinterpreted what Jack O’Sullivan told Fr. Chisholm. Hart also misreported the independent (i.e., of Tom Barry) origin of the false surrender narrative. Finally, he also misreported Tom Barry’s own published account of how the event itself unfolded. Barry consistently reported that there were two false surrender IRA fatalities (of three in total), Jim O’Sullivan and Pat Deasy. Hart (and Morrison following Hart) misreported Barry as having stated 116 that three of his men had died because of the false surrender. The misreading is easily demonstrated. A long citation by Hart in his regular text included Barry stating that the false surrender ‘killed two’ of the IRA fighters. Hart then mistakenly reported that Barry claimed that it ‘caused the death of three IRA men’ (thesis, 31–32; book, 22–23). Hart’s assault on Barry’s account is partly based on this misreading.51 For instance, Hart’s introduction in the book of a new anonymous taped source is affected by his misunderstanding McCarthy’s death. Hart cited his new source (book, 36) in a discussion of how volunteers may have been enraged by the deaths of ‘their comrades’: They died to my mind a cruel death, because the men that were in with Mick McCarthy, where he was shot, they knew their two men were shot and they came out and they shot them and I think a bayonet was used on one or maybe two of them. The use of ‘they’ and ‘them’ is potentially confusing, a confusion encouraged by Hart’s ambiguous presentation. Are those indicated by the first ‘they’ IRA Volunteers, or are ‘they’ Auxiliaries? It is possible that ‘they’ are the IRA and ‘them’ near the end are Auxiliaries. If so, two IRA Volunteers adjudged by Barry to have been victims of the false surrender, Jim O’Sullivan and Pat Deasy, are explicitly separated out from Michael (Mick) McCarthy. It may plausibly be implied that they, unlike him, suffered a ‘cruel death’, if they were killed during a false surrender. Since Hart, did not understand the distinction between McCarthy and his comrades in the context of the false surrender, he was not in a position, therefore, to accurately frame this oral evidence for the reader. It is possible also that ‘they’ are Auxiliaries without violating the sense of this interpretation, in which the alleged cruelty of their death is due to the animation of IRA Section Two survivors targeting Auxiliaries they believed responsible for the false surrender. It was Hart’s job to clarify ambiguity, in particular of the ambush in General Strickland’s papers, Imperial War Museum, ‘seems unquestionable’. It did not mention a false surrender. But Hart’s almost full citation of the document (thesis, 35–36, n. 16; book, 25–26, n. 18) omitted the following, ‘Our casualties were, one killed and two who have subsequently died of wounds… . P. Deasy was killed by a revolver bullet from one of the enemy whom he thought dead.’ It is generally agreed it was the other way around, that two IRA ambush participants were killed and one ‘subsequently died of wounds’. Pat Deasy was wounded and died later, yet in the ‘report’ he is the one ‘killed’. In any case, Barry noted that during the Truce he was approached to provide a report of the ambush to the British for family compensation purposes, but refused, Guerilla Days, 51. If the British had captured a report already they would hardly have asked Barry and, requiring it but being refused, they had reason instead to concoct their own. Meda Ryan, 2005, 83, cited A.J. S. (Steven) Brady (son of the Church of Ireland rector of Macroom) on Auxiliaries working with solicitor T. P. Grainger to provide documentation required to process compensation claims, including for the Kilmichael Ambush. According to Brady, ‘I won’t say how it [Kilmichael documentation] came about, but it helped the families to get good compensation’. Ryan, 73–84, and Brian Murphy, IT letters 10 August, 1 September 1998 have placed further question marks over the document’s authenticity (plus see Peter Hart replies, 1 & 7 September 1998). Charles Townshend, The Republic, the Fight for Irish Independence (Oxford, 2013), 215, ignores Barry, Ryan and Murphy’s evidence, and wonders at the purpose of a forgery. However, he questioned the document’s assertion that Examining Peter Hart 44 45 46 47 48 the ammunition-strapped volunteers possessed 100 rounds each, ‘which sounds[s] more like a regular military than volunteer level’. Barry stated, Guerilla Days in Ireland, (1989), 42, that the nearest scout was positioned 150 yards away, in which case a capacity to either see or hear detailed evidence in the November twilight is questionable. Irish Press, 12 February 1970. Hart’s reporting the utterances of one of his other interviewees, C.D., Dan Cahalane, reversed his initials also. Particularly also as Hart followed this citation with a British intelligence assessment, ‘should have a trace of a bullet wound somewhere about his head, received at Kilmichael’. Hennessy’s index entry tantalizingly states, ‘Hennessy, Jack, Kilmichael Ambush’. From Jerry O’Callaghan, Blackrock Pictures, who made it while producing the television programmme Scéal Tom Barry (‘Tom Barry’s Story’), aired in Ireland on TG4 19 January 2011. O’Callaghan’s transcription exactly matches short segments Morrison published in her ‘Kilmichael Revisited’ essay. in the use of anonymous sourcing. In this he also failed. Hart appears to have misquoted and/ or ignored a combination of evidence and individuals to create jumbled up utterances moulded together to suggest that the IRA at Kilmichael could not claim a justifiable basis for killing all of their Auxiliary adversaries. These mistakes and the misreported taped interviews were used, it appears, to create an aura of suspicion surrounding the veracity of Barry’s account, that also allowed Hart to later ignore Barry’s significant views on the subject of spies and informers. Auxiliaries On the other hand, Hart consistently understated the reputation of the Auxiliaries for brutality. For example, he cited reminiscences by IRA veterans Charlie Brown and Micheál Ó Suilleabháin, which, Hart claimed, demonstrated the Auxiliaries’ ‘decency and restraint’ (thesis, 40, n. 30; book, 29, n. 33). In fact, however, on the pages that Hart cited, Ó Suilleabháin had written of ‘John Bull’s terrorists’ and ‘that riff-raff ’. Likewise, Brown’s memoir, which devoted four pages to the ‘Auxiliaries Arrival’, mentioned ‘their almost total lack of discipline’ and asserted that each Auxiliary ‘seemed a law unto himself ’. The only possible justification for Hart’s characterization is Brown’s report of what happened when three Auxiliaries expelled his parents from their home and set it on fire after the Kilmichael Ambush: ‘Major Mitchell and [Auxiliary] O/C Col. [Buxton] Smith sent a party of men to extinguish the blaze’.52 Hart also cited Liam Deasy on the ‘soldierly humanity’ of Colonel Craik, the British commander at Kilmichael. However, Deasy’s remark was made in odd appreciation of Craik’s ineptitude. He arrested and freed Deasy twice within fourdays soon before the Kilmichael Ambush, despite Deasy providing different false names each time. Deasy’s next sentence noted the ‘mercenary depravity of the majority of the Auxiliaries’, a statement Hart ignored.53 In general, Hart seemed to go out of his way to subdue popular perceptions of the unpopular force. Thus, Lionel Fleming, son of the Church of Ireland Rector of Timoleague in West Cork, observed in his memoir that, ‘I have never met anyone with experience of the Black and Tans who has defended them, or who has been able to justify the extraordinary policy of using a Crown force for the sole purpose of indiscriminate terrorism.’54 Strikingly, although Hart cited Fleming’s memoir for other purposes, he never quoted or referred to this passage. The issue here is not the existence or precise delineation of a ‘false surrender’ at Kilmichael, although no verifiable evidence has emerged that contradicts it. Nor is the discussion predominantly about the wisdom of attempting to recreate in minute detail what exactly happened in the twilight of 28 November 1920. Rather, what is most important, at least from an academic and historiographical perspective, is Hart’s apparent attempt to obscure, misrepresent, or simply ignore participant testimony that qualified or contradicted his interpretations of events and his seeming determination to demonize republicans during the War of Independence. It is difficult to construe Hart’s misreporting and mistakes as merely the random effect of incompetently reported or ‘muddled’ citations. Rather, they seemed to have a purpose: to undermine Tom Barry’s historical reputation and thus, by extension and more broadly, to portray the IRA in as negative a manner as possible early on in his narrative, so as to condition readers for what came later. 117 Field Day Review Section 2 IRA Sectarianism Thesis Table One: West Cork 26–29 April 1922 Killings—Who, When, Where (Including, ‘Richard Harbord’ and ‘Ralph of Rosscarbery’ from Hart thesis in italics) Who When (date) Ballygroman House Killings 26 April 1922 O’Neill, Michael Wed 26 April Woods, Herbert Hornibrook, Thomas Hornibrook, Samuel Macroom Killings 26 April 1922 Lt R. A. Hendy Wed 26 April Lt. G. R. Dove Lt. K. L. Henderson Pr. R. A. Brooks Bandon Valley Killings 27–29 April 1922 Fitzmaurice, Francis Thurs 27 April Gray, David Buttimer, James Howe, Robert Thurs 27 April Nagle, Robert Harbord, Ralph (survived) Chinnery, John McKinley, Alexander Buttimer, John Greenfield, James Bradfield, John When (time) Where Hart Map Number Hart narrative Sequence + Page No (thesis) Sources: (newspaper news + inquest reports) 3am (Morning) Ballygroman (near Ovens) 1 1 1 1 13, p.373 14, p.374 15, p.374 16, p.374 SS 29Apr SS 29Apr SS 29Apr SS 29Apr 3pm Dick Williams Hotel Macroom Not discussed by Hart 12.15am 1am (after) 1.20am (about) 10.30pm Dunmanway Dunmanway Dunmanway 2 2 2 3 p.366 2 p.365 1 p.365 SS,IT 29Apr SS,IT 29Apr SS,IT 29Apr Ballaghanure (near Ballineen)55 Clonakilty McCurtain Hill Murragh (near Enniskean) Castletown (near Ballineen)57 Ballineen Caher (near Ballineen)58 Caher (near Ballineen) Killowen (b/w Enniskean-Bandon) 3 4 p.366 IT 2May 8 11 p.368 IT 29Apr, 1May n/a n/a IT,CC,BN 29Apr 4 5 p.367 IT 29Apr 5 7 7 10 6 p.367 8 p.368 9 p.368 12 p.369 IT 1May IT 2May IT 2May IT 12May 6 9 7 p.367 10 p.369 11pm (after) Thurs 27 or 28 April56 Fri 28 April Sat 29 April Not known Early… morning 1.30am 2am 2am 11pm Fictitious (Hart thesis) events ‘Richard Harbord’ Thurs ’27-28 April’ ‘Ralph of Rosscarbery’ Fri ‘28 April’ ‘same night’ ‘Enniskean – Murragh’ ‘Rosscarbery’ [SS = Southern Star, IT = Irish Times, CC = Cork Constitution, BN = Belfast News Letter. Material within inverted commas by Peter Hart] 118 Examining Peter Hart From Peter Hart thesis 1992, p.380 49 McCarthy named by ‘Eyewitness’ (pseud., Tom Barry), ‘Kilmichael — Part II’, An Cosantóir, vol. 20, no. 21, 16 May 1941, republished in Terence O’Reilly, ed., Our Struggle for Independence, Eye-witness accounts from the pages of An Cosantóir (Dublin, 2009), 11, 103. Barry named Pat Deasy and Jim O’Sullivan as false surrender casualties in ibid and Guerilla Days in Ireland, 1949 (44). See also my review of Terror in Ireland, 1916–1923, 9–10, at www.academia.edu/1871818/. For the record, Morrison also reported in her Kilmichael essay in Terror in Ireland, ‘Jack O’Sullivan categorically denied to Chisholm that there had been a false surrender’ (167). The assertion is followed by note 45 (178), containing, ‘This denial is more emphatic in the untaped version of the interview with O’Sullivan: telephone interview with Chisholm, 27 July 2011’ (my emphasis). In other words, Chisholm claimed O’Sullivan unequivocally rejected the false surrender, but not in the evidence he supplied to Morrison. 50 Meda Ryan, Tom Barry IRA Freedom Fighter (Cork, 2005), 66–67, spoke to veterans in the 1970s and 1980s. She cited ambush veteran Dan Hourihan, who was beside Jim O’Sullivan, observing, ‘After they shouted that surrender, it was silence! Jim lifted himself. Thought it was all over. God rest his soul!’ If Peter Hart was to sustain or strengthen his thesis, that the Cork IRA (and Irish Republicanism, generally) were characterized by ethno-religious fanaticism, then it was strategically necessary to link his interpretation of the British Auxiliary deaths at the Kilmichael Ambush of November 1921 to what he would allege to be the IRA’s senseless sectarian ‘massacre’ of innocent Protestants in April 1922. Thus, in both his PhD thesis and his book, Hart linked the ambush and the IRA who carried it out, under their officers’ orders, to later killings of Protestant civilians. No evidence was adduced that the killings were ordered or authorized by IRA command and Hart’s book removed thesis speculation as to individual culpability. The absence 119 Field Day Review Carbery House, Dunmanway, Co. Cork. Photo: (c. 1865–1914), by Robert French. National Library of Ireland. of evidence was a means by which Hart grounded his sectarianism thesis. Hart’s characterization of the April 1922 killings as sectarian is therefore quite problematic. That characterization (like his reconstruction of events at Kilmichael) depended in turn on serious misuse, distortion, or non-use of much of the available evidence. The central focus of Hart’s ‘sectarian massacre’ thesis is the killing of ten Protestant men, who lived in Cork’s Bandon Valley, that took place between 27 and 29 April 1922. First, soon after midnight on Thursday, 27 April, three men—Francis Fitzmaurice, David Gray, and James Buttimer—were shot dead in Dunmanway. Later, between 10.30 p.m. and 2 a.m. over 27–28 April, further along the Dunmanway to Bandon road, five more Protestant men were shot dead in or near the adjacent towns of Ballineen and Enniskean: John Chinnery, Robert Howe, Alexander Gerald McKinley, John Buttimer and James Greenfield. The Reverend Ralph Harbord was wounded at Murragh Rectory, to the west of Enniskean. One additional outlying victim was shot dead after 11 p.m., Robert Nagle of 120 Clonakilty, some 15 km south. Finally, on 29 April the final eleventh victim, John Bradfield, was shot dead in Kilowen, again near Enniskean. These intertwined details of time and geography are more easily understood by consulting Table One (p. 118) and a map of the territory on which I have superimposed each cluster of killings (p. 119). Those ten deaths (plus the wounding of Rev. Ralph Harbord) constitute what we shall call, for convenience, the ‘Bandon Valley Killings’. However, there were two other sets of killings that also occurred in West Cork on Wednesday, April 26, the day before the Bandon Valley Killings began. The first set began about 3:00 a.m., when one of the Protestant occupants of Ballygroman House, near Ovens (off the main BallincolligMacroom road, about 31 km from BallineenEnniskeane), shot and killed an IRA officer, Michael O’Neill. The inhabitants failed to admit O’Neill who reportedly identified himself. He was shot dead after entering the house unarmed through a window. Later that same morning, three Protestant loyalists from Ballygroman House—Herbert Woods, 51 Also in Barry’s pamphlet, The Reality of the Anglo Irish War 1920–21 in West Cork (Tralee, 1974), 16. He wrote, ‘the Auxiliaries were iring again … and two volunteers fell’. See also 13–14, where we ind, ‘two IRA men were killed’ by the false surrender. In her response to my review, Morrison pointed to an ambiguous footnote (Reality, 16, n. 11), referring to ‘two, at least’ false surrender victims. Barry did not write it. A prominent ‘Publisher’s Notice’ asserted, ‘[f]ootnotes … have been drafted and inserted by us as publishers’, see reply to Morrison, www.academia. edu/1994527/ 52 Micheál O Suilleabháin, Where Mountainy Men Have Sown (Tralee, 1965), 91, 92; Charlie Browne, The Story of the Seventh (Schull, 2007 [1972]), 39–41. Colonel Buxton Smith resigned from the Auxiliaries on 25 February 1921, committed suicide on London’s Clapham Common, 5 February 1922, IT, 8 Feb 1922. Richard Abbott, Police Casualties in Ireland 1919–21 (Cork, 2000), 163, mistakenly calls him ‘Barton Smith’ and gives 4 Feb. using the same source. 53 Liam Deasy, Towards Ireland Free (Cork, 1973), 164-67. 54 Lionel Fleming, Head or Harp (London, 1965), 70, Fleming’s emphasis. Hart’s use of this text, mostly about Fleming’s life as an Irish Times journalist, attempted to demonstrate a deep sectarian divide, though without page numbers (thesis, 389, n. 86; book, 290, n. 121). One latter day champion of the force, and of Peter Hart, is the journalist Kevin Myers, ‘Laziness and Propaganda have unfairly tarnished the Black and Tans’ reputation’, Irish Independent, 29 Aug. 2006. Examining Peter Hart Enniskeane, Co. Cork. Photo: (1880–1900), by Robert French. National Library of Ireland. 55 See, www.census. nationalarchives.ie/ pages/1911/Cork/Castletown/ Ballaghanure/408903/ 56 Ralph Harbord said 27 April, whereas Richard reported 28 April, in separate Grants Committee claims. Possibly around 12 midnight. 57 See, www.census. nationalarchives.ie/ pages/1911/Cork/Castletown/ Castle_Town/408933/ 58 See, www.census. nationalarchives.ie/ pages/1911/Cork/Kinneigh/ Caher/409050/ 59 Southern Star 29 April 2014. Dorothy Macardle, The Irish Republic (New York [1937], 1965), 704–05. 60 Another term used to describe the War of Independence of 1919–21, in addition to the ‘Anglo-Irish War’. 61 Mowat, 74–75. Michael Farrell, Northern Ireland, the Orange State (London, 1980), 27–60. See also John Brewer, Gareth Higgins, Anti-Catholicism in Northern Ireland 1600–1998, the Mote and the Beam (London, 1998), 94–6; G. B. Kenna (pseud., Fr. John Hassan), Facts and Figures of the Belfast Pogroms 1920–1922 (Dublin, 1922), at, www.academia. edu/6318325/ 62 John Borgonovo, The Battle for Cork (Dublin, 2011), 34– 38; Robert Kee, The Green Flag, Volume III, Ourselves Alone (London 1972), 163–64. 63 In John Regan, Myth and the Irish State (Sallins, 2013), 116. Thomas Hornibrook, and his son Samuel— who were believed responsible for O’Neill’s death, disappeared and were presumed killed.59 For convenience, we shall refer to the deaths of Woods and the two Hornibrooks as the ‘Ballygroman House Killings’. The second set of killings took place later but also on the same day, Wednesday, April 26, when three British Intelligence officers, Lieutenants R. A. Hendy, G. R. Dove, and K. L. Henderson, plus their driver, R. A. Brooks (and Hendy’s dog), disappeared from the Dick Williams Hotel in Macroom, and, like the occupants of Ballygroman House, were presumed killed by the IRA. These we shall call the ‘Macroom Killings’. Logically, either set of disappearances and presumed killings—or, indeed, both sets—that took place on Wednesday, 26 April, might have been crucially linked to, and even causal in triggering and hence explaining, the 10 Bandon Valley Killings that began early on the morning of Thursday, 27 April. As we shall see, however, Peter, Hart emphasized only one set of killings, those at Ballygroman House, and linked them to the Bandon Valley Killings, while practically ignoring the second set that occurred at Macroom. Hart could argue that the Ballygroman House Killings of Protestant civilians sparked a sectarian chain of events. The Macroom Killings, of British intelligence officers, suggested the possibility of a different, non-sectarian interpretation of the ten deaths that occurred shortly afterwards in the Bandon Valley. Before we evaluate Hart’s sweeping claims, and before we examine closely what happened in West Cork in late April 1922, we need to establish the overall political and social contexts in which those tragic events occurred. The Bandon Valley Killings took place after the Truce of June 1921 had concluded the ‘Black and Tan War’60 and after the AngloIrish Treaty of December 1921 had imposed on the future Irish Free State significant limitations on Irish sovereignty, including an oath of loyalty to the British Crown and, arguably most importantly, Partition. Of course, Partition was first imposed in June 1920 by the Government of Ireland Act, and since then the Nationalists in what was now, 121 Field Day Review officially, Northern Ireland, had endured what amounted to a sectarian reign of terror under unionist rule.61 In January 1922, both Sinn Féin and Republican forces in the IRA split over the Treaty and over the legitimacy of the new Free State regime, which anti-Treaty Republicans viewed as having been imposed by British duplicity and coercion. During this period also the RIC was being disbanded and British troops began a process of withdrawal. Thus, in January–June 1922, Irish society experienced months of acute political and military instability: intra-Republican hostilities; vicious sectarian strife, primarily in the North; class conflicts between urban and rural employers and workers; 122 plus extensive opportunist criminality.62 Overlaying this turmoil was the prospect of a renewed ‘state of war with the British Empire’ if Treaty terms were not fulfilled, as Winston Churchill threatened Michael Collins.63 The events in West Cork of April 1922 took place, therefore, in a tense, uncertain period when the pro- and anti-Treaty Republicans were drifting into the Irish Civil War, which began in late June 1922, two months after the April Killings. The Bandon Valley Killings of 27–29 April 1922 were seen in an all-Ireland context. According to Dorothy Macardle writing in 1937, they were ‘violently in conflict with the traditions and principles of the Republican British soldiers search civilians at Fermoy Station during the War of Independence. Private Papers of General Sir Peter Strickland KCB KBE CMG DSO. Imperial War Museum London. Examining Peter Hart 64 Collins reply, IT 29 April 1922. See, G. B. Kenna, Facts and Figures of the Belfast Pogroms 1920–1922, 186–94. Kenna noted the diiculty of using a sectarian headcount to assess deaths, given that some Protestants were killed by Crown forces while in the act of shooting Catholics, and some were killed by coreligionists for associating with Catholics, or being mistaken for them, 67, 133, 142, 173. 65 Macardle, op. cit.. Keran Glennon, From Pogrom to Civil War, Tom Glennon and the Belfast IRA (Dublin, 2013), 69. Glennon (264) also makes the point that Catholics sufered more casualties in areas where the IRA was not present to protect them. See also, Niall Cunningham, ‘The Social Geography of Violence During the Belfast Troubles, 1920–1922’, CRESC Working Papers, University of Manchester, No.122, March 2013, 7, at www.academia. edu/5363137/; Farrell, 55–56. Hart did not consult Macardle’s history, irst published in 1937. 66 Irish Times, 29 April 1922. 67 Kenna, 148. Southern Protestant attitudes are further discussed in Section Three. 68 For example, David Fitzpatrick, ed., Terror in Ireland 1916–1923, published in memory of Peter Hart, that failed to analyze unionist ‘terror’ in Northern Ireland, though contributor Brian Hanley commented on historians’ failure to do so in relation to 1919–23 and post 1968, 18–19, 20–22. See my review and reply to responses, www.academia.edu/1871818/, and www.academia. edu/1994527/ 69 See Willie Kingston, ‘From Victorian Boyhood to the Troubles: a Skibbereen Memoir’, Skibbereen Historical Journal, vol. 1, 2005, 35–35. As Barry Keane in Massacre in West Cork, the Dunmanway and Ballygroman Killings (Dublin, 2014), 189, remarked, ‘a lot in one weekend but certainly no “pogrom”’. Army [and] created shame and anger throughout Ireland.’ The attacks were initially thought to have been sectarian retaliation for persecution of Catholics in the new Northern Ireland, where more people—229 in all—died in February, March, April and May 1922 than in any previous month. A month-old pact between Michael Collins and James Craig, representing the north and south administrations, that purported to resolve the crisis, collapsed on 28 April. Collins responded to a 25 April letter from Craig accusing the latter of bad faith.64 Revealingly, according to Macardle, the deaths in the Six Counties ‘became so familiar that they occupied little space in the press … in comparison with the murders which took place during the last week of April in County Cork’.65 Soon afterwards on 5 June, the London Guardian noted, ‘the very tolerable [situation of southern Protestants] compared with that of Catholics in Belfast [where], in three days of last week … some 1,500 Catholics, men women and children, had the roofs pulled or burned over their heads.’ Southern Protestants condemned unionist attacks on Catholics in the North before and after the southern April killings, and rejected outright Ulster Unionist assertions that they received in the south treatment comparable to what Catholics endured in Northern Ireland. However, on 29 April 1922, the day it began reporting the April killings and Collins’s response to Craig, the Irish Times (and Independent) also reported a denial by four ‘heads of the Protestant Churches in the Northern Ireland area’ that Catholics there were subject to persecution. The Church of Ireland, Presbyterian and Methodist leaders defended, for example, the expulsion of over 6,000 workers from their jobs in Belfast shipyard and engineering works in June 1920, mainly Catholics, that included former British forces personnel, and socialists (including Protestants) opposed to the practice. They asserted: It is not true that Roman Catholics have been denied their natural right to earn their daily bread. The shipyard workers did not exclude any man because of his religion. They refused to work with men who would not pledge their word of honour that they disapproved of the terrible murders which were then taking place.66 However, expelled Protestant worker James Baird testified in the Dublin Evening Telegraph on 11 November 1920, On the 21st of July [1921], and on succeeding dates, every Roman Catholic—whether ex-service man who had proved his loyalty to England during the Great War, or Sinn Féiner who claims to be loyal to Ireland and Ireland alone—was expelled from the shipyards and other works … Almost 10,000 workers are at present affected, and on several occasions men have attempted to resume work only to find the ‘loyal’ men still determined to keep them out. Given the resumption of attacks in 1922, which by June had seen over 20,000 Catholics expelled from their their homes, it is likely that north-south Protestant tensions would have deepened, had the April Killings not intervened to create a fleeting impression of north-south sectarian similarity, that was followed by the southern civil war. 67 A regional and denominational imbalance in discussion of Irish deaths in 1919–22 is replicated in the work of historians such as Hart.68 To be sure, the sudden eruption of killings in West Cork caused panic among local Protestants. The 1 May 1921 issue of The Irish Times reported over 100 men leaving the area by train en route to Britain.69 Contemporaries who viewed the killings as sectarian also thought them exceptional; however, Peter Hart employed the Bandon Valley Killings to validate his insistence that the IRA had pursued a sectarian agenda during the 1919–22 period and to corroborate his assertion that Protestants were ‘“fair game” [for] the I.R.A. [and] for a large segment of the Catholic population’ (thesis, 390; book, 290). In his book (291) Hart reinforced the 123 Field Day Review point by arguing further that the ‘minority [i.e., Protestant] population of West Cork were seen not only as past enemies and current undesirables, but also as a future fifth column’. Revealingly, in his thesis (390) Hart referred to West Cork’s ‘loyalist’— not ‘minority’—population, but for his published book Hart transformed what was a non-sectarian, political description into a religious one, thereby seeming to strengthen his allegations of IRA (and general CatholicNationalist) sectarianism. Yet in both his publications, Hart contended that, In the end, however, the fact of the victims’ religion is inescapable. These men were shot because they were Protestant. No Catholic loyalists, landlords or ‘spies’ were shot or even shot at.[70] The sectarian antagonism which drove this massacre was interwoven with political hysteria and local vendettas, but it was sectarian none the less: ‘our fellas took it out on the Protestants’.[71] The gunmen, it may be inferred, did not seek merely to punish Protestants but to drive them out altogether. Within this rhetoric of ethnic intolerance can be detected the quasi-millenarian idea of a final reckoning of the ancient conflict between settlers and natives. (thesis, 386; book, 288) Thus, Hart claimed later that the Bandon Valley Killings were the culmination of a sectarian IRA campaign that had commenced in ‘the summer of 1920’.72 He concluded that ‘[t]he nationalist revolution had also been a sectarian one’ (thesis, 392; book, 292).73 Peter Hart’s interpretation of IRA activities as sectarian in Cork (and in the South of Ireland, generally) depended partly on an official British document, The Record of the Rebellion in the Sixth Divisional Area, which Hart characterized as ‘probably the most trustworthy [account] that we have’. Setting aside the question of why Hart might so describe an official British military history, which in fact contained anti-Irish prejudice,74 124 what is of far greater importance is that Hart had to censor the document to make it support his charge of IRA sectarianism. In order to make his case that the victims of the Bandon Valley Killings were murdered because they were Protestants, Hart had to discount the possibility that, during the Irish War of Independence, they had been British informers, whose information had cost IRA volunteers their lives or liberty, and thus were killed primarily or only for that reason. To support his hypothesis, Hart cited the following section of The Record: ‘the truth was that, as British intelligence officers recognised “in the south the Protestants and those who supported the Government rarely gave much information because, except by chance, they had not got it to give.”’ (thesis, 413; book, 305–06)75 Hart ignored, however, and failed to alert his readers to, the existence of the Record’s immediately following passage, which indicated that, exceptionally, the Bandon Valley region, in which the April 1922 killings took place, had witnessed widespread loyalist informing: [A]n exception to this rule was in the Bandon area where there were many Protestant farmers who gave information. Although the Intelligence Officer of the area was exceptionally experienced and although the troops were most active it proved almost impossible to protect those brave men, many of whom were murdered while almost all the remainder suffered grave material loss.76 There seems to be no justifiable basis for Hart’s failure to cite the latter passage, irrespective of whether it referred directly to the April killings.77 That passage clearly identified ‘the Bandon area’ as having generated extensive loyalist collaboration with Crown forces. It therefore signified a plausible basis for suggesting that the April 1922 victims were targeted for suspected loyalist activity, not simply because of their Protestant identity. Ironically, Hart’s thesis supervisor/internal examiner, in his own 70 Hart’s claim is not accurate. The premises of Roman Catholic loyalist James McCarthy were shot at over 27–28 April, as were those of Protestants cited by Hart as victims: William Jagoe, premises shot at; Rev’d Ralph Harbord, wounded, when Murragh Rectory was ired upon. Also, Catholic and former RIC member Thomas Sullivan claimed the attackers raided his house. See British National Archives, Kew, Irish Grants Committee claims of Ralph C. V. Harbord (CO/762/58), William Jagoe (CO/762/4), James McCarthy (CO/762/13), Thomas Sullivan (CO/762/175). 71 The phrase was taken from an account resembling a description of the Ballygroman House killings in Leon O’Broin’s research on Protestant Irish Republican Dr Dorothy Stopford (Protestant Nationalists in Revolutionary Ireland, the Stopford Connection (Dublin, 1985), 177), though the event described there is identiied as having occurred during the later Irish Civil War and does not mention fatalities. Despite this uncertainty, Hart cited this phrase at this point in his regular text and entitled his April Killings chapter, ‘Taking it out on the Protestants’. 72 Peter Hart, ‘Deinition, Deining the Irish Revolution’, in Joost Augusteijn, ed., The Irish Revolution, 1919–23 (Basingstoke, 2002), 25. 73 See note 24 for the dubious evidential premise on which this conclusion was based. 74 Peter Hart, ed., British Intelligence, the Final Reports (Cork, 2002), 6. Hart’s omission of a chapter on ‘The People’ from this 2002 edition of the Record, without informing readers, hid this fact. The missing chapter noted that, Examining Peter Hart ‘practically all commanders and intelligence oicers considered that 90% of the people were Sinn Féiners or sympathisers with Sinn Féin, and that all Sinn Féiners were murderers or sympathized with murder. Judged by English standards the Irish are a diicult and unsatisfactory people. Their civilization is diferent and in many ways lower than that of the English. They are entirely lacking in the Englishman’s distinctive respect for the truth.’ Intriguingly, despite supposed deiciencies ‘the Irish’ were not accused of sectarianism, in Brian Murphy, ‘Peter Hart, the Issue of Sources’, IPR, vol. 20, no. 7, July 2005, appended to Meehan, Murphy, Troubled History, at www.academia. edu/166387/ 75 This is self-serving. Many Protestants refused to inform. See, for example, Olga Pyne Clarke, She Came of Decent People (London, 1985), 52–53 (cited later). 76 Cited in Brian Murphy, ‘Peter Hart, the Issue of Sources’. Also appended to Meehan, Murphy, Troubled History, at www.academia.edu/166387/. Murphy irst cited this document in his September 1998 review of The IRA and its Enemies, in The Month, SepOct. 1998. See also n. 74. research, had cited the paragraph from the Record that Hart omitted.78 Professor Fitzpatrick did not, it appears, notice Hart’s censorship and require restoration of the full text. Hart’s external examiner had also previously researched and cited this source. The supervision and examination process did not resolve this anomaly. Hart also published in his thesis a mistake resulting in an extra fictional victim of the April 1922 killings. Both the mistake and Hart’s later correction are instructive as a further example of how Hart promoted his view of republican sectarianism despite the evidence. In his thesis (136) Hart claimed that fifteen Protestant civilians were shot; his book (115) mentions (correctly) fourteen—thirteen killed and one wounded (see Table One, p. 118).79 The thesis stated (367) that at Murragh rectory, near Enniskean, ‘the son of the Rector, Richard Harbord, was killed’.80 He reported also that, ‘The Reverend Ralph Harbord was shot … in Rosscarbery, but escaped with only a wound’ (369).81 This outlying Rosscarbery victim (the furthest from the main site of killings, see map) was used by Hart to establish a random widespread sectarian pattern to the Bandon Valley Killings, based on simultaneity and territorial spread. However, the seeming fact that two Harbord family members were reportedly attacked should have tempered this conclusion. Attacks on members of the same family in different places in sequence could, albeit with difficulty, be explained as random. But Hart offered none. In fact, however, no ‘Richard Harbord’ was shot dead and no attack took place in far away Rosscarbery. Rev’d Ralph Harbord was wounded all right, but at Murragh rectory by rifle fire from the adjoining road.82 He was the son of the unharmed Rev’d Richard C. M. Harbord who resided at Murragh. Hart silently rectified the mistake in his book. That should have constrained claims of spontaneous sectarian activity over a wide geographic area, that was now considerably constricted (see Hart’s and also my, more detailed, map). Compare contrasting sentences, first the thesis (378), The other two victims, Robert Nagle in Clonakilty and the Reverend Ralph of Rosscarbery,[83] lived south of the Bandon River and were clearly attacked by a different party—or parties—altogether. In the book, the clear exposition above became this vague assertion (282), The other victims, in and around Clonakilty, lived south of the Bandon Valley and were clearly attacked by a different party—or parties—altogether.84 In other words, loss of the oddly named ‘Ralph of Rosscarbery’ had no affect on Hart’s conclusions about the geography of the killings. The error itself in the thesis should in any case have constrained Hart’s conclusions with regard to the randomness of target selection and sectarian spontaneity (given Hart’s original false belief that two members of same family were targeted simultaneously). In Hart’s book, Richard Helen from Clonakilty, who claimed to have been an April killings survivor, substituted for the fictitious Rosscarbery wounding of Rev’d Ralph Harbord. Helen stated he was apprehended in Clonakilty, but escaped, the same day Robert Nagle was shot dead in the late morning of Thursday, 27 April. Clonakilty could therefore have been visited by some of the killers operating over the evening of 27–28 April in and around Ballineen and Enniskean. This example again indicates that for Hart, evidence, even when withdrawn, served pre-determined conclusions. His sectarianism thesis came first. This point is not concluded. Hart’s promotion of the fate of Richard Helen in Clonakilty provides another example of evidence misuse. Hart asserted that post-war southern loyalist claims from the Bandon Valley region for compensation did not reveal evidence of informing. The British government’s Irish Grants Committee compensated loyalists who claimed to have 125 Field Day Review suffered materially due to activity in support of British rule. Hart’s argument, if true, would reinforce a view of the killings as sectarian. However, Hart’s claim is inaccurate in the case of the very same Richard Helen. Helen’s significance is, first, in his claim that he, unlike Robert Nagle (also from Clonakilty), survived (thesis, 369, n. 15; book, 276, n. 19),85 and, second, it contained corroborating testimony. This was provided by an ex-policeman, who supported Helen’s claim to have informed on IRA operations. Helen initially received £225 from British funds to relocate to England. The Grants Committee later awarded him an additional £200 ‘ex gratia’.86 Helen then appealed his ‘beggarly treatment’. He claimed that ‘my loyalty cost me thousands of pounds’, and enlisted support from former RAF Flight Lieutenant and Clonakilty RIC District Inspector (DI), B. D. Higmaw. Higmaw described in detail the information he claimed Helen had supplied concerning a planned IRA ambush in February 1922, shortly after the IRA had killed another RIC DI, Richard Kenny.87 Higmaw lauded Helen as ‘a resolute fearless supporter of the British flag’ and stated, ‘it was entirely due to the action of Helen that I was not murdered’. Hart ignored Higmaw and his evidence in its entirety and instead wrote that Helen, ‘had been active in the volunteer recruitment movement, had been on good terms with the police, and helped them in February 1922 when their barracks was under threat of attack’ (thesis. 384, n. 66; book, 286, n. 96). That is misleading. Helen actually wrote that on an unspecified date, ‘I organised the party who held the Constabulary Barrack in Clonakilty against the I.R.A. and joined that party remaining with them for about a week.’ Higmaw, not Helen, mentioned February 1922, that was after the War of Independence, but did not mention any attack on the RIC barracks.88 Higmaw dated an entirely different verified event in February 1922. Helen, it was asserted by Higmaw, informed on a further planned IRA ambush on the already wounded son of DI Kenny, that 126 preserved the lives of Higmaw and others. Hart ignored this episode and Higmaw’s testimony that Helen had informed on the IRA. Hart lifted his dating of Helen’s activities in support of the authorities from Higmaw’s testimony. Hart also marginalized Helen’s claim of assistance to the authorities, noting that he had merely ‘helped’ in relation to a ‘threat of attack’ on the RIC barracks in February 1922 (a date Helen did not mention). Is this merely another example of Hart ‘muddling’ his sources? Or was this a calculated failure to detail Helen’s alleged anti-IRA activities? It was open to Hart to question the veracity of Helen and Higmaw’s claims in pursuit of a substantial monetary reward (instead of cherry-picking the parts that suited his argument), but he would then have been obliged to state why he accepted some compensation claims but rejected others.89 Had Hart reported Helen’s claim adequately he would have been unable to observe that [i]f the victims had been active in opposing the I.R.A. they or their relatives would almost certainly have mentioned it in their applications to the Irish Grants Committee, which was charged with compensating those who suffered for their loyalty to the Crown. (thesis, 382, n. 57; book, 285, n. 79) Clearly, the victim Richard Helen ‘mentioned it’. This evidence was surely significant, but evidently not to Hart, because it suggests that the victims of the Bandon Valley Killings were targeted by their attackers for their specific political and military activities, not chosen randomly or for sectarian reasons.90 Frank Busteed But, who did Hart think was responsible for at least some of the April 1922 killings in West Cork? In 2008, I pointed out that Hart named in his thesis one individual as partly responsible for the killings.91 According to Hart, IRA officer Frank Busteed claimed that 77 It has been suggested that Hart thought the Record was written after the April killings. Information, conirming that it was written in early April 1922 was released in 2001. The critical issue is that Crown forces successfully and exceptionally recruited Protestant loyalists as collaborators in the area. Either way, Hart’s censorship had no justiiable basis. On this, see Barry Keane, ‘Chasing Shadows—Peter Hart, John Regan, Eve Morrison, Gerard Murphy, the Record of the Rebellion and the Dunmanway Killings’, at www.academia. edu/4960537/. See also Keane’s, Massacre in West Cork: The Dunmanway and Ballygroman Killings (Cork, 2014). 78 David Fitzpatrick, Politics and Irish Life 1913–21: Provincial Experience of War and Revolution (Cork [1977], 1998), 27, n.47. 79 These formulations exclude the Macroom killings of four British Army personnel. 80 Is this a reference to the Rector himself or to a son also named Richard? This unnecessarily unclear writing is problematic in the context of the problems discussed here. 81 Citing, n. 17, ‘Rev. Ralph Harbord statement (C0/762/58)’. 82 Rev’d Richard Harbord, CO/762/155. His son’s compensation claim was possibly a basis for the Rosscarbery mistake, as he ministered there in the later 1920s. No source accompanied the ‘Richard Harbord’ claim (thesis, 367). 83 The absence of a surname creates an impression that ‘Ralph’ was Harbord’s surname. See also n. 80. Examining Peter Hart 84 This point is explained in more detail in my ‘Distorting Irish History Two, the road from Dunmanway: Peter Hart’s treatment of the 1922 “April killings” in West Cork’, 3–9, 14, at www.academia. edu/612672/. Hart’s assertion that the victims were not ‘chosen entirely at random’ meant merely that Protestant men were targeted, ‘With the exception of James McCarthy, who was Catholic (and whose life was not threatened)’ (thesis, 383). 85 Richard Helen, Irish Grants Committee compensation claim, CO/762/33. 86 Worth stg£10,827 and £10,640, respectively, in 2012, according to Bank of England Inlation Calculator at, www.bankofengland.co.uk/ education/Pages/inlation/ calculator/lash/default.aspx (accessed 10 March 2014). 87 ‘Distorting Irish History Two’, 19. IT, 13 Feb 1922. Richard Aboott, Police Casualties in Ireland 1919–1922 (Dublin, 2000), 277, refers mistakenly to ‘Keany’. 88 Helen’s reference to an undated attack on the barracks possibly referred to an earlier event prior to the end of the War of Independence in June 1921. 89 Barry Keane makes this point. As Helen was reported at a race meeting in May 1922 and was elected to Chair Clonakilty Urban District Council in 1926, Keane questioned Helen’s assertion that he was banished from Ireland, Massacre in West Cork, the Dunmanway and Ballygroman killings (Dublin, 2014). He then observed (168): ‘How are historians expected to approach the rest of the claims made to the British compensation committees if it can be shown that the irst citizen of Clonakilty might not be telling the truth? … [I]t is probably best to be highly sceptical about uncorroborated testimony from witnesses in this story, especially when the evidence is in their own interest.’ he had ‘killed five to six loyalists, Protestant farmers’, at the time of the April killings (thesis 377, n. 47). Hart wrote in this footnote that, Frank Busteed, the Blarney I.R.A. leader … was quoted by Ernie O’Malley as saying ‘We shot four or five locals, then we could move anywhere’ in the Civil War. He also said that ‘We shot five to six loyalists, Protestant farmers, as reprisals’ in the same period (O’Malley Papers, P17b/l12). As these killings certainly did not take place after July 1922, the only events which fit this description are those of April.92 Oddly, however, Hart withdrew that note from his published book (282). But in his thesis, Hart had also stated emphatically (117–18) that Busteed, ‘was involved in [killing]… three British officers in Macroom and a massacre of Protestants in the early months of 1922.’ [my emphasis] Yet again, those last eleven words were omitted from the same sentence in Hart’s book (100). So too was the following observation (thesis, 379): ‘Frank Busteed of Blarney, the hardest of diehards, also seems to have claimed a share of responsibility.’ The unexplained excisions from the book, of such seemingly crucial phrases and evidence, are of interest. Hart three times named Busteed in his thesis, twice in his April killings chapter, as having had a major responsibility for the April 1922 killings in West Cork. Why did Hart eliminate those references from his book? Might it have been because Busteed’s father was a Protestant and Busteed, himself, although raised as a Roman Catholic, later became ‘an outspoken atheist’ (thesis, 330, n. 145; book, 248, n. 149)?93 Arguably, such a person would be unlikely to shoot Protestants randomly on a sectarian basis and was also therefore unhelpful to Hart’s overall thesis.94 If, on the other hand, Hart had evidence that ruled out Busteed, an apparently self-confessed killer, that too would have been of significant interest. It may be, also, that Busteed inserted himself retrospectively into these events. If so, that too required discussion. Hart’s failure, in his book, to discuss Busteed’s possible involvement in the April 1922 killings may also be linked to his seeming lack of interest in the Macroom Killings of 26 April and in their possible causal link to the Bandon Valley Killings that began early on the following morning. Readers will recall that the Macroom Killings involved the disappearance from Dick Williams Hotel of three British intelligence officers (Hendy, Dove, and Henderson) and their driver (Brooks).95 Hart’s apparent disinterest in the Macroom Killings is notable for several reasons. First, the Macroom Killings of 26 April were more proximate in both time and geography to the killing of the three Protestant civilians (Fitzmaurice, Gray, and James Buttimer) in Dunmanway, which initiated the Bandon Valley Killings early on the following morning of 27 April. By contrast, the Ballygroman House Killings, which Hart did link causally to the Bandon Valley Killings, had occurred earlier on 26 April, before the abduction of the British intelligence officers in Macroom. Second, Busteed himself claimed involvement in both the Macroom Killings and the Bandon Valley Killings (although not the ones at Ballygroman House). Logically, therefore, Busteed would seem to be a self-declared link between the Macroom and Bandon Valley Killings, suggesting a possible causal (or at least a coincidental) relationship between both sets of killings. Hart noted, but did not discuss, Busteed’s claim in relation to the Macroom Killings in his thesis and book (thesis, 117–18; book, 100); however, he did so far removed from his chapters on the April 1922 killings.96 Hart never identified any other participant in either set of killings. His decision, in his book, to drop Busteed from his April killings chapter and to treat the British intelligence officers’ disappearance from Macroom in a cursory manner makes no evidential sense. The plain-clothes British officers abducted in Macroom were, contrary to Truce arrangements, under orders to reestablish intelligence links that had lain fallow since the ending of official hostilities in June 1921. On 26 April 1922, the southern 127 Field Day Review Men of the Royal Irish Constabulary lie along the edge of a road beside a field during an ambush in County Clare during the War of Independence. Private Papers of General Sir Peter Strickland KCB KBE CMG DSO. Imperial War Museum, London. based Sixth Division Brigade Intelligence Officer Lieutenant R. A. Hendy, acting on orders, ‘wished to see the state of affairs at Macroom, … making the excuse of lunching with a mutual friend along the way’. Two battalion officers, Lieutenants G. R. Dove and K. L. Henderson, plus Private R. A. Brooks, their driver, accompanied Hendy. All were in civilian attire.97 Hendy’s father later reported that the officers were acting under ‘imperative orders’, but refused to reveal the source of this information.98 The officers travelled from Ballincollig to Macroom, stopping in Farran to interview an ex-British army officer before leaving at noon. The IRA in Macroom became suspicious, in part because they recognized two of the officers, Hendy and Dove, as having previously ‘tortured and shot unarmed [IRA] prisoners’.99 A. J. S. (Stephen) Brady, son of the Anglican rector of Macroom, later—in his ‘account of Protestant family life in early 20th century Cork’—recalled their wartime mistreatment of IRA prisoners: he observed 128 that either Hendy or Dove had ‘trussed an IRA [prisoner] like a fowl, had a rope tied to his ankles, was thrown on the road and dragged behind an army vehicle at high speed to his death’.100 Likewise, Busteed, himself, accused two of the three officers of having thrown his mother downstairs on a raid, after which she died. 101 Hendy, Dove, and Henderson explained to the IRA, as their orders advised, that they were on a fishing trip, although they had no rods or other fishing equipment.102 As their orders also advised, the officers had lunched en route with their ‘mutual friend’ in Farran, which was near Ballygroman.103 That was not, for Hendy and his companions, a favourable accidental or intended coincidence, because earlier that same morning, at Ballygroman House, IRA officer Michael O’Neill was shot dead, followed by the disappearance of those held responsible, Protestant loyalist Thomas Hornibrook, his son, Samuel, and a former British officer, Captain Herbert Woods. Peter 90 See, Niall Meehan, ‘Distorting Irish History Two, the road from Dunmanway: Peter Hart’s treatment of the 1922 ‘April killings’ in West Cork, at, www.academia.edu/612672/, 8–14. An aside: why would relatives of necessity be informed of clandestine activities? And, of course, the dead victims were hardly in a position to mention anything. 91 Meehan, in Troubled History, 24. ‘After the War of Independence, some further questions about West Cork, April 27–29 1922’, Irish Political Review, vol. 23, no. 3, March 2008. 92 Hart misinterpreted O’Malley’s notation. According to Pádraig Ó Ruairc, the correct manner is as follows, ‘[O’Malley:] (In the (C/W) we shot 4 or 5 locals —then we could move anywhere.) [Busteed:] We shot 5 to 6 Loyalists, Protestant farmers as reprisals. ...’. In other words, while Busteed did claim responsibility for shooting loyalist Protestant farmers, the irst sentence within parentheses is O’Malley’s. I am indebted to Pádraig Ó Ruairc on this point, by email 5 Dec 2013. O’Malley’s notebooks are being transcribed from his near illegible handwriting by Ó Ruairc and others. See, Cormac O’Malley, Tim Horgan, ed., The Men will Talk to Me, Kerry Interviews by Ernie O’Malley (Dublin, 2012); Cormac O’Malley, Cormac Ó Comhraí, ed., The Men will Talk to Me, Galway Interviews by Ernie O’Malley (Dublin, 2013). 93 Hart’s note on Busteed, after the withdrawn thesis comment, is placed at an earlier point in the book. Examining Peter Hart Irish Times, 1 May 1921. Hart misreported the newspaper account. 94 Busteed’s grandson, Brian O’Donoghue, noted that he ‘possessed both understanding and empathy regarding [the Protestant] part of his heritage’. He further observed, ‘Frank’s having Protestant relations was not unusual in the IRA owing to ‘mixed marriages’ going back generations in a relatively stable community.’ History Ireland, vol. 20, no. 3, May-June 2012. 95 Their execution was conirmed by Dan Corkery OC, Macroom Battalion, Cork No.1 Brigade, BMH WS 1719. The four bodies were exhumed and repatriated to England in 1923, Southern Star, 15 December 1923, Irish Independent, 13, 14 December 1923. 96 Busteed’s claims are detailed in Sean O’Callaghan, Execution (London, 1974). Hart reported O’Callaghan’s account ‘substantially accurate’, though subject to Busteed’s ‘excessive egotism and at times fallible memory’ (book, 15, n.55; thesis, 21, n.52 and 377, n. 47). On oicer’s arrest, A. J. S. (Steven) Brady, The Briar of Life (Dublin, 2010), 194–96. 97 Paul McMahon, Irish Spies and British Rebels (Woodbridge, 2009), 67. 98 Regan (2013), 190. 99 Dan Corkery, BMH WS 1719, also Sean Healy 1479, Michael Walsh 1521, Tomás Ó Maoileoin (Malone), 845; Borgonovo (2011), 38. 100 Brady, The Briar of Life, 196. See also, Patrick J. Twohig, Green Tears for Hecuba, Ireland’s ight for Freedom (Ballincollig, 1994), 227–28; Browne, 82; Borgonovo (2011), 38. Hart suggested that it was the Ballygroman House Killings that initiated the Bandon Valley Killings in the days following. That is certainly plausible. However, there is at least as much basis for suggesting that the immediately following appearance and then disappearance of the three British intelligence officers was also related. As noted, in his thesis Hart raised the latter possibility, but in his book he ignored or suppressed his earlier interpretation. Busteed had named three intelligence officers responsible for his mother’s death as Viney, Dove and Macallister. He stated also that these were the officers he shot on 26 April. The first and last names are clearly mistaken. Busteed was also mistaken in describing where the officers were abducted. ‘Viney’ was named during the process of execution and he is mentioned as a one-armed intelligence officer directly responsible for his mother’s death.104 ‘Viney’ may in fact be Hendy, who was ‘[s]everely wounded in the right arm’ as a result of a ‘[b]omb wound’ in March 1917 in France.105 The Macroom Killings—the IRA’s arrest and execution of the three British intelligence officers and their driver— were highly significant in their own right and almost sparked a return of full-scale AngloIrish hostilities. They halted temporarily British troop withdrawal from southern Ireland. Crown forces fruitlessly scoured the countryside for the missing officers and engaged in large formation military standoffs with the IRA locally. The Macroom Killings comprised an event of historical significance—and not merely because the commander of the British forces, ‘evidently in a savage mood’, was then Sixth Division Brigade Major Bernard Law Montgomery, of Donegal Anglican ancestry and later World War Two fame in North Africa at El Alamein.106 Yet, despite the significance of the Macroom Killings, Hart failed, even in his thesis, to consider the event or the possibility that the deaths of the British intelligence officers were connected with either the Ballygroman or the Bandon Valley Killings, even though timing, territorial proximity, and Frank Busteed linked them closely. Indeed, in Hart’s perspective, neither the Macroom Killings nor, by extension, any of the April killings, could be associated with ‘intelligence’ or any other rational military or political considerations. Rather, Hart asserted, they were best explained by irrational Irish ethno-religious or sectarian hatreds of Protestants. Thus, Hart argued that the Macroom Killings (and, by extension, those that followed) were associated with IRA ‘conspiracy theories’: Such conspiracy theories were flourishing in southern Ireland at this time, fed by political uncertainty, paranoia and the continuing fear of renewed war with Britain. On the same day that O’Neill was shot [at Ballygroman House], for example, another republican was killed in a raid in Wexford after receiving ‘information that certain Orangemen possessed firearms’ and four British soldiers were kidnapped - and later shot as ‘spies’ - in Macroom. (thesis, 375; book, 280) Hart further marginalized the Macroom killings by noting, ‘Three [additional] British officers’ travelling from Cork to Bantry ‘were 129 Field Day Review also [captured by the IRA and] released on 30 April’ (book, 280, n. 49; thesis, 375, n. 40). However, those three did not exist, and the 1 May 1922 issue of The Irish Times, cited by Hart, contains no such report.107 While, in his thesis, Hart suggested that the British officers killed at Macroom were ‘offduty’ (135), he corrected this early in his book (before his chapter on the April 1922 killings) to admit they were ‘still plying their dangerous [intelligence] trade— though the government denied it’ (114). It is notable therefore that, in his ‘conspiracy theories’ statement, quoted above, Hart still placed the Macroom victims’ status as ‘spies’ in inverted commas, and identified them simply as ‘British soldiers’ rather than as intelligence officers, which Hart now realized three of them were.108 Hart’s overall disinterest in making a connection, in his book’s April killings chapter, between the Macroom and Bandon Valley killings (and his continued usage of inverted commas around the word ‘spies’) therefore made no sense—particularly so since Hart asserted that Busteed was involved, or claimed to have been involved, in both sets of killings. Arguably, however, an adequate consideration of a possible connection would have upset the primacy of Hart’s seemingly unshakable conviction that all the April 1922 killings were motivated by religious animosities.109 Put simply, the officers did not conform to his preferred IRA ‘enemies’ typology. These were depicted typically as helpless, innocent, Protestant, civilians. Republican assertions of loyalist informing Hart encountered were chacterized as fantasies acting ‘as a spur to rage and hysteria’ (thesis, 383; book 285). This is not to say the events at Macroom and in the Bandon Valley were definitively intertwined. All connections are circumstantial. Rather, it is to state that evidence of a connection, however tentative, between the Macroom, Ballygroman and Bandon Valley killings was demonstrably stronger than Hart’s speculations about ‘religious antagonism’ based on sectarian jealousies and long-nurtured grudges 130 (thesis, 388, 389–91; book, 289, 290–91). However, that very absence of clear evidence of sectarianism liberated Hart’s interpretive imagination. It promoted speculation at will in language presenting the appearance of sociological depth, but which was in fact devoid of content and thus merely a species of academic rhetoric.110 Arguably, however, if the events at Macroom were linked to those in the Bandon Valley and at Ballygroman, it may ironically have been in the interests of both the British and the IRA to deny any connections between them. The British wished to deny their dead officers’ intelligence functions, and also to avoid admitting that they possessed any civilian intelligence ‘assets’ in the Bandon Valley area. On their part, the Irish Republicans denied vehemently, to the British, having had anything to do with the officers’ disappearance.111 For the IRA, revealing an intelligence-related reason for the civilian shootings would inevitably have drawn attention to the near-simultaneous disappearance of the senior British Army intelligence personnel. Militarily and politically, therefore, and in their mutual interest in avoiding a renewal of Anglo-Irish hostilities, it made sense for the British to promote a ‘sectarian’ narrative of all the April 1922 killings and for the Irish Republicans to acquiesce in it. Admittedly, my explanation here is speculative but, in the absence of other information, surely plausible. Indeed, the author Patrick J. Twohig revealed in Green Tears for Hecuba (1994) a successful attempt to persuade him not to tell the story of the intelligence officers in 1959. One persuader was former IRA officer Charlie Brown, who, Twohig suggested, indentified one of the Macroom British officers as having tortured prisoners. Brown, like Busteed of ‘mixed’ Protestant-Catholic parentage, is named also in A. J. S. (Stephen) Brady’s memoir as placing an IRA guard on the home of Brady’s father, the Anglican Rector of Macroom, during the immediately following Bandon Valley killings.112 Twohig, who did not write on the latter event, wondered at,‘the Macroom affair [being] the most hushed up 101 O’Callaghan, Execution, 181–82, 189–92. The British raid on Busteed’s family home was in response to the disappearance of elderly loyalist informer, Mary Lindsay. She informed on the 28 January 1921 Dripsey ambush at which Busteed was second in command, leading to the capture of eight and subsequent execution of ive IRA volunteers. The British spurned an ofer to spare Lindsay’s life in return for those of the IRA volunteers. When they were executed, so was she and her house was burned, Tim Sheehan, Lady Hostage (Mrs Lindsay) (Cork, 2nd ed., 2008), 81–103, 116, 154, 166, 176–77. Also in O’Callaghan, 106–9, 154–5, 175–9, who details Busteed’s role in exposing her role, arresting and then executing Mary Lindsay. 102 A detail conirmed in Twohig, 338, the third account of the event to be published after Eoin Neeson, The Civil War 1922–23 (Cork, 1966) and Nigel Hamilton, Monty, the Making of a General 1887– 1942 (London, 1981). There is no doubt that the oicers were on duty. British 6th Division Commander, Major General Strickland, noted in his private diary on 26 April, ‘Hendy, Dove, another out on I[ntelligence] work not back’, in Regan (2013), 191. 103 McMahon, 67. Twohig, 338. John M. Regan, ‘The ‘Bandon Valley Massacre’ as a Historical Problem’, History, vol. 97, no. 325, Jan–Feb 2012, 79. 104 O’Callaghan, 190, 191, 181–82, 189–92. Examining Peter Hart 105 See, www.cairogang.com/ other-people/british/castleintelligence/incidents/ kilgobnet%201922/hendy/ hendy.html (accessed 19 February 2014). This physical condition is corroborated by IRA volunteer James Murphy who reported being tortured by three oicers, including Hendy and Henderson. He noted, ‘one of the oicers (a one-armed man) then attacked me’, by attempting to force a small grenade into Murphy’s mouth, while the other two held him, BMH WS 1521. ‘Viney’ may also be a corruption of ‘Vining’: A Lt. Vining was named by Hart as one of ive British oicers who dragged the body of IRA Cork No.1 Brigade 3rd Battalion OC, Walter Leo Murphy behind a car on 27 June 1921, after Vining shot Murphy. Hart also reported ‘Protestant folklore’ as stating that the same thing was done to Herbert Woods, who killed IRA oicer Michael O’Neill at Ballygroman on the morning of 26 April. This was supposedly in revenge for Murphy’s treatment by Vining in June 1921 (book, 96, 297). See also Tim Herlihy and others, BMH WS 810, on Vining shooting Murphy and unarmed IRA volunteer Charlie Daly, who was tortured before he was killed. This is another reason to question Hart’s exclusion of a Busteed connection between the Macroom and some of the civilian killings in April 1922. 106 Nigel Hamilton, Monty, the Making of a General 1887– 1942 (London, 1981), 163. Hart cited Hamilton but his incorrect pagination (153–54) should be 162–63. Hamilton’s later The Full Monty, Volume I: Montgomery of Alamein (London, 2001), omits this incident in its entirety. Borgonovo, The Battle for Cork, 39–40. of any other incident in the Troubled Times … [O]ne tends to look for cause [for the secrecy]. On the surface, there seems to be none’.113 The complication of the simultaneous civilian killings might have been the catalyst for an IRA cover-up of what had happened at Macroom, and why it had happened, or it may be that there was simply reticence in discussing a truce violation (though it was on both sides). It is possible also that those who carried out the civilian killings were not authorized to do so but independently connected the killing, at Ballygroman House, of IRA officer Michael O’Neill by former British officer Herbert Woods, with the almost immediately subsequent appearance of three of Woods’s fellow officers at Macroom, especially since two of the latter had tortured and killed IRA prisoners (and, reportedly, Frank Busteed’s mother) during the previous Anglo-Irish War. But, even if these speculations as to an ‘intelligence’ connection between the Macroom killings and the Bandon Valley killings are plausible, one question remains: how and why did (or could) the IRA select their ten Bandon Valley targets? In 2003, Meda Ryan drew attention, in her expanded biography of Tom Barry, to a British intelligence dossier, which contained a list of ‘helpful citizens’ [i.e., local informers] in West Cork, and which she reported she had studied prior to the 1998 publication of Hart’s book. According to Ryan, departing British Auxiliaries had reportedly left this dossier behind when they evacuated their Dunmanway headquarters. Ryan reported that the dossier listed, as ‘helpful citizens’, all the persons who were killed in the Bandon Valley on 27–29 April 1922, except for the brother and son of two individuals whose surnames only were included.114 Unfortunately, this document is not in the public domain, and its present location is unknown. However, Ryan’s research claim has been strengthened because a subsequently discovered Bureau of Military History Witness Statement (No. 1,741), given by former IRA soldier Michael O’Donoghue, asserted that: Poor Mick O’Neill ... a grand chivalrous warrior of the I.R.A. … called at the house of a British loyalist, named Hornibrook, to get help for a broken-down motor. As he knocked on the door, he was treacherously shot dead without the slightest warning by a hidden hand from inside the house. The I.R.A in Bandon were alerted. The house was surrounded. Under threat of bombing and burning, the inmates surrendered. Three men, Hornibrook, his son and son-in-law, a Captain Woods. The latter, a British Secret Service agent,115 confessed to firing the fatal shot. Why? God alone knows. None of the three knew O’Neill or he them. Probably Woods got scared at seeing the strange young man in I.R.A. attire knocking, thought he was cornered and fired at him in a panic. The sequel was tragic. Several prominent loyalists—all active members of the anti-Sinn Féin Society[116] in West Cork, and blacklisted as such in I.R.A. Intelligence Records—in Bandon, Clonakilty, Ballineen and Dunmanway, were seized at night by armed men, taken out and killed. [My emphasis] Some were hung, most were shot. All were Protestants. This gave the slaughter a sectarian appearance. Religious animosity had nothing whatever to do with it. These people were done to death as savage, wholesale, murderous reprisal for the murder of Mick O’Neill. They were doomed to die because they were listed as aiders and abettors of the British Secret Service, one of whom, Captain Woods, had confessed to shooting dead treacherously and in cold blood Vice-Commandant Michael O’Neill that day near Crookstown in May 1922. Fifteen or sixteen loyalists in all went to gory graves in brutal reprisal for O’Neill’s murder. To be sure, O’Donoghue’s statement was not an eyewitness account; it is secondhand evidence. Also, O’Donoghue explicitly linked the Ballygroman House killings to the Bandon Valley killings, as did Hart (but for very different, ‘irrational’ causes), whereas 131 Far left: Irish Times, 7 April 1922. ‘Southern Protestant Appeal’ letters led to the formation of the Protestant Convention. This was ignored by Hart, who cited a false story that day. Left: Irish Times, 4 May 1922. Hart ignored this event, though he saw this issue of the newspaper. I have postulated that the Macroom killings may have been important also in connecting the killings before and/or afterwards, either directly or indirectly. Nevertheless, O’Donoghue’s statement is significant, for several reasons. First, it was composed many years before Peter Hart researched and wrote his thesis and book. Second, it stresses a ‘British intelligence’ connection between the deaths at Ballygroman House and the Bandon Valley killings—and, the reader will recall, that those killed at Macroom also shared that ‘intelligence’ connection. Third, O’Donoghue testified that the Bandon Valley victims were selected by reference to ‘IRA intelligence records’. Indeed, O’Donoghue himself apparently thought it important to report that Woods (O’Neill’s killer) was a ‘British Secret Service agent’ (like the British officers killed at Macroom), and he implied that that fact was crucial in generating the ‘sequel’—the reprisal killings, based on ‘IRA intelligence records’, of the ten Bandon Valley Protestants. How did the IRA obtain or compile the ‘intelligence records’, which, according to O’Donoghue, apparently sealed the fate of 132 107 These British oicers are as ictitious as Hart’s additional April killings victim, ‘Richard Harbord’. Hart’s mistaken observation is curious. The Cork Examiner reported on 1 May that rumours of the oicer’s release were oicially discounted. It is therefore unclear where Hart obtained his mistaken view, unless he misread the Examiner and transposed his misreading to the Times. Another ‘muddle’. 108 Meehan, Troubled History, 24; ‘After the War of Independence, some further questions about West Cork, April 27–29 1922’, Irish Political Review (IPR), vol. 23, no. 3, March 2008, at www.academia.edu/170416/; ‘‘The Further One Gets From Belfast’, a second reply to Jef Dudgeon’, IPR, vol. 27, no. 2, February 2012, at www.academia.edu/1328920/. Charles Townshend repeated Hart’s assertion in stating that seven British soldiers were held at that time, The Republic, 372. 109 The killing of the oicers was treated in depth in works cited by Hart: Neeson (1966); Hamilton (1981), and Twohig (1994). Examining Peter Hart 110 John Regan researched further signiicant evidence surrounding the points I raised in 2008. He debated them with Professor Fitzpatrick in the journal, History, in History Ireland magazine and at a History Ireland Hedge School with John Borgonovo and Eve Morrison. See Regan, ‘The ‘Bandon Valley Massacre’ as a Historical Problem’, History, 97 (2012); ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the Two Histories’, History Ireland, vol. 20, no. 1, Jan–Feb 2012; ‘The War of Independence: “four glorious years” or squalid sectarian conlict?’ History Ireland Hedge School, National Library of Ireland, 11 January 2012, at, www.vimeo.com/35893747/ (accessed 10 March 2014). 111 Eoin Neeson, The Civil War 1922–23 (Dublin [1966], 1989), 100–02, the irst to write on the episode, foolishly suggested that Black & Tans or Auxiliaries were responsible. Possibly, he was fed disinformation. Hamilton, Monty, The Making of a General, 1887–1942, revealed strenuous IRA denials and Montgomery’s fruitless eforts at discovery. John Borgonovo, The Battle for Cork, 38–40, detailed the threats and manoeuvres of both sides leading to a standof on 30 April, and on 2 May when Montgomery might have been killed had he not retreated. 112 Brady, The Briar of Life, 194. Curiously, Brady reversed the historical sequence by writing on the Bandon Valley Killings immediately before those of Macroom, about which ‘[A]n armed I.R.A. man, who was a friend of mine approached me in Main Street. “I just want to give you a tip,” he said. “Be discreet; whatever you know keep your mouth shut. If you’re wise, you know nothing.”’ 113 Twohig, Green Tears for Hecuba, 341, 343. 114 Meda Ryan, Tom Barry, 209–14. 115 This designation of Woods, while important as a matter of perception, is not independently veriied. the Bandon Valley victims? Was it partially or wholly assembled in the course of hostilities? Or was the dossier, reportedly abandoned by the Auxiliaries when they left Dunmanway, which Meda Ryan examined a half-century later, alone responsible? Or perhaps the IRA obtained the information on April 26 under duress, from Woods of Ballygroman House or from Hendy, Dove, or Henderson at Macroom, before they were executed? After all, they were tasked with renewing intelligence contacts. We do not know for sure. Protestant Convention Much of this information was not available to Hart, though a substantial amount was. However, as noted, Hart censored important evidence, which he was able to consider, that pointed to a non-sectarian explanation for the April 1922 killings. He also ignored further important information, about which he did know, pertaining to the April killings and to southern Protestant attitudes. For example, the broadly supported and representative ‘Protestant Convention’, which met publicly in Dublin on 11 May 1922 (during Church of Ireland Synod week), ‘place[d] on record’ the following statement, referring to the then seemingly inexplicable Bandon Valley killings that had occurred two weeks before the Convention: ‘We place on record that, until the recent tragedies in the County Cork, hostility to Protestants by reason of their religion has been almost, if not wholly, unknown in the twenty six counties in which Protestants are in a minority.’ The Convention was reported prominently in the 12 May 1922 Irish Times and Irish Independent. The amended resolution was published in the Irish Times on 3 May. It appeared in its initial form, in reference to an absence of sectarian attacks on Protestants, in the 7 April Irish Times. In that issue, an E. A. Aston, whose name is significant (see below), was listed as one of the ‘Hon. Secretaries’ of the Provisional Organising Committee of the ‘The Southern Protestant Appeal’. The Appeal linked in with and became the Protestant Convention, that also was launched in the Irish Times on 7 April. Though he cited the 7 April 1922 Irish Times Hart ignored this information. He cited instead a separate report of ‘six [RIC veterans] … shot in one day in Clare and Kerry’ by the IRA. This citation formed part of Hart’s argument, in both his thesis and book, that the IRA targeted its ‘enemies’ at random. Hart mentioned also in this context the West Cork killings and the disappearance the three British officers in Macroom (thesis, 137–8, n. 264; book 114–15). Although the 7 April Irish Times indeed headlined five RIC veterans killed in Clare and Kerry, with another badly wounded, the paper published no follow-up details. Instead, the next day’s issue admitted (in a shorter, less prominent, report) that the news of the six shootings was ‘unconfirmed’, and that the paper’s Clare correspondent knew nothing about them. That day’s Irish Independent stated prominently that the reports ‘are denied and discredited in the localities concerned’. The Independent criticized the Irish Times (as well as the Daily Mail and the Belfast Newsletter) for poor, false and biased reporting—which the Independent associated with propaganda designed to halt RIC disbandment and to promote political destabilization.117 Whether the latter charge was or was not true, for our purposes it is important to note the following: Firstly, Hart researched the 7 April 1922 issue of the Irish Times, and so it is difficult to believe that he did not read its account of southern Protestant opinion on responsibility for sectarianism. Secondly, Hart employed the initial Irish Times report of the IRA shooting six RIC veterans, but failed to report either the Irish Times’s own corrections of that story or the seemingly authoritative refutations made by the Irish Independent. Finally, one can only wonder why Hart apparently based his research on such incidents primarily on the proUnionist Irish Times, while (at least in this instance) seemingly ignoring reports in the Irish Independent, which was Ireland’s bestselling (although conservatively Nationalist) daily newspaper. 133 Field Day Review Thus, rather than reporting accurately the southern Protestant rejection of sectarian victimhood in the 7 April Irish Times, Hart preferred to reference inaccurate propaganda about the IRA shooting ‘old enemies’ (thesis, 137; book, 114), in the process ignoring even the Irish Times’s own report questioning the story published the following day. Hart’s seemingly strategic newspaper citations can be illustrated further. The origin of the 7 April Protestant Appeal (later Convention) was a 21 March letter to the Irish Times from E. A. Aston calling on southern Protestants to oppose sectarian violence in Northern Ireland and stating, ‘We owe it as a matter of decency to our Catholic fellow citizens who have so steadfastly refused to visit the sins of Ulster upon us’. Hart did note the existence of this letter, although not in the Irish Times. He cited instead the West Cork Southern Star of 25 March. The Star mentioned Aston by name and cited ‘his letter to the press’, but Hart, in his footnote, did not name him or mention that he was a Protestant. Hart’s text asserted, ‘it was widely—and wrongly—believed (and not just by republicans) that the local Protestant community had remained silent on [killings of Catholics] and thus tacitly supported the [Belfast] pogroms’ (thesis, 372, n. 29; book, 278, n. 32). Hart’s accompanying note stated, ‘See Star, 25 March, 29 Apr. 1922. In fact, there were frequent Protestant meetings and letters to the editor condemning the northern pogroms and testifying to southern tolerance in the months before the [Bandon Valley] massacre.’ Hart could have added, accurately and relevantly, that it was the case after it as well. Though, if also the case beforehand, Hart’s overall thesis collapsed at that juncture. The cited 29 April Southern Star is perhaps more significant. It contained a Schull (West Cork) Protestant resolution headlined ‘Pogrom denounced’. The resolution condemned ‘the atrocious crimes recently committed in the North of Ireland’ and disassociated ‘Protestants of various denominations in the parish of Schull’ from, 134 Irish Times, 3 May 1922. Protestant Convention motion mentions the West Cork killings. 116 See John Borgonovo, Spies, Informers and the ‘Anti-Sinn Féin Society’: The Intelligence War in Cork City, 1919–1921 (Sallins 2006), whose research suggests that civilian loyalists were mobilized as an organized body in Cork. Barry, in Guerilla Days (1949), 110, 111, also addressed this issue and referred to a former British oicer, ‘an important organizer of espionage’ who was executed, and to ‘a Protestant Minister, head of an intelligence group’, who escaped. The clergyman was exposed by a member of the group, Tom Bradield. He divulged to IRA soldiers he thought were British, ‘the Rev Mr. [John Charles] Lord is my man and I give him information’. After Bradield implicated himself the IRA executed him. Ó Broin suggested the existence of a sectarian based ‘anti-independence movement’ in the area. Ó Broin, 177. This evidence puts lesh on the admission in the Record of the Rebellion which Hart censored. Hart paid no attention to this information (not least as he had characterized Barry as a liar), though he cited the page on which it appeared in Ó Broin’s book by using a phrase found there for his chapter title, ‘Taking it out on the Protestants’(see n. 71). See also on Bradield, BMH WS, 470, 540, 1648, by, respectively, Denis Lordan, Ann Hurley-O’Mahony, James ‘Spud’ Murphy. Examining Peter Hart Southern Star, 29 April 1922. Joint Protestant resolution, Schull, Co. Cork. 117 Hart’s referencing facilitated this false report entering the record. Richard Abbott, Police Casualties in Ireland (Cork, 2000), 294, noted for 7 April (one day later), ‘ive recently retired members of the RIC were shot and killed with another six being seriously wounded’, but without naming them or providing a source. Seamus Fox’s independently constructed database of casualties states ive dead and ive wounded on 6 April, again unnamed, at www.dcu. ie/foxs/irhist/april_1922. htm (accessed 18 November 2013). Fox cited Abbott and Hart. Hart’s formulation that six victims were merely ‘shot’ implying that all were wounded, as distinct from ive shot dead and one wounded (Times report), is muted. Hart’s misreport of a false report may thus have helped further inlate an already dubious account of six RIC casualties to ten or eleven. Commentary on the IRA shooting unknown victims or shooting speculative ‘enemies’ at random is another aspect of Hart’s research. See the Peter Hart inspired, The Year of Disaearances, Political Killings in Cork 1920–22 (Dublin, 2010), by Gerard Murphy. TCD’s Professor Eunan O’Halpin made a supportive television programme for TV3 (Ireland), that interviewed Murphy and cited Hart, In the Name of the Republic, 18 & 25 March 2013. My review, Gravely Mistaken History, critiques the programme, at www. academia.edu/3218006/. the acts of violence committed against our Roman Catholic fellow countrymen. Living as a small minority … we wish to place on record the fact that we have lived in harmony with the Roman Catholic majority and that we have never been subjected to any oppression or injustice as a result of different religious beliefs. The paper also began reporting the April killings that day. Hart, in his thesis and book, ‘remained silent’ on this West Cork Protestant opinion and on the highly significant 12 May Protestant Convention resolution that opposed unionist violence against Catholics in Northern Ireland. Although that resolution’s final version noted the April 1922 killings in West Cork, it also asserted quite emphatically that southern Protestants had not previously been subject to sectarian hostility. Hart’s failure to report the Protestant Convention, the largest, most expressive and definitive meeting is anomalous. Its motion in its final form was advertised in the Irish Times around the time Hart cited the newspaper on the April killings (thesis, 366, n. 9; 367, n. 11; 370, n. 18; 371, n. 23, 25; 375, n. 39, 40; 379, n. 53; 389, n. 87, for 28, 29 April, 1, 2 May). The resolution, amended to take account of the West Cork killings, was published in the 3 May Irish Times under the headline, ‘Sectarian Outrages, Protestant Convention in Dublin’. The Convention was advertised prominently on 4 May with, ‘Public Notice, Irish Protestant Convention to condemn sectarian outrages and intolerance’. Hart stated that he did a ‘complete survey … of the Irish Times from ‘May 1916 to May 1923’ (thesis, 459, 489; book, 316), yet he failed to report this event. His ‘complete survey’ of the Southern Star (book, 316; thesis, 449) failed to note a report of the Convention on 25 May 1922. This demonstrates a faulty empirical method. We know that Hart read the 4 May 1922 issue of the Irish Times prior to the publication of his book in 1998, because he cited that issue in an essay he published in 1996. Hart’s essay cited the newspaper to support his own suggestion that the IRA’s attacks on Protestants ‘might be termed “ethnic cleansing”’, although the Protestant Convention in Dublin, advertised that same day, emphatically denied the validity of Hart’s argument.118 Of course, one can argue that members of the South’s Protestant minority, now isolated from their northern brethren by a Partition that the former never wanted, had reasons to conciliate the majority in the Irish Free State by denying they had been victimized by Catholic-Nationalist sectarianism. What is implausible, however, is the argument that Hart was therefore somehow justified in ignoring entirely an explicit denial of his own hypothesis made in 1922, after the April killings, by the largest and most representative body of southern Irish Protestants. Yet, Hart’s non-treatment of the Protestant Convention seems entirely in character with his overall approaches to, and his misuses of evidence concerning, both the Kilmichael Ambush and the tragic events of April 1922. 135 Field Day Review Section Three Southern Protestant and Academic Views Hart’s allegations that IRA actions in 1919–22 were driven primarily by bitter sectarian hatred of Protestants surely required more robust evidence and analysis. This would be true for PhD research produced in any academic institution, but perhaps especially in one whose leading academic voices, in the past, had expressed opinions directly contrary to Hart’s. For example, in 1924 the Rev’d John Henry Bernard, TCD Provost from 1919 to 1927, declared that, [d]uring the melancholy years 1920–1923, there have, indeed, been outbursts of violence directed at loyalist minorities, but for the most part it has been qua loyalist and not qua Protestant that the members of the Church of Ireland have suffered’.119 Bernard, it should be noted, was (as TCD described him) ‘a convinced unionist’ (his family was from Co. Kerry) and a former Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin.120 One might expect that ‘a unionist reminiscing soon afterwards would have lamented IRA sectarianism, had he believed it to be one of the organisation’s motives during 1919–22. Bernard’s opinions in fact mirrored others often expressed within the southern Protestant community, and so, arguably, Hart should at least have considered them to be important if not authoritative. Similar Protestant opinions were so commonplace in 1919–22 that they were easily available to later historians, not least the previously noted Protestant Convention. In 1921, for instance, a US fact-finding delegation reported a Methodist minister in Limerick who said that Wesleyan ministers ‘entirely ridiculed’ the idea that southern unionists were in danger. A Protestant businessman from the same city commented that Protestants were ‘more fearful’ of Crown forces than of ‘Sinn Feiners’.121 Their fears were illustrated by the experience of Bantry’s 136 leading trader, G. W. Biggs, a southern unionist. Biggs wrote opposing Ulster Unionist claims in the Irish Times on 24 July 1920, that, I feel it my duty to protest very strongly against this unfounded slander [of intolerance on the part] of our Catholic neighbours ... I have been resident in Bantry for 43 years, during 33 of which I have been engaged in business, and I have received the greatest kindness, courtesy, and support from all classes and creeds in the country. Immediately after the publication of his letter, the Black & Tans burned down Biggs’s substantial business premises and the British military commandeered his home, forcing Biggs to send his family to Dublin while he, himself, went to live in a hotel.122 Sixth Division Brigade Major Bernard Law Montgomery afterwards remarked, ‘it never bothered me a bit how many houses we burned’ and ‘I regarded all civilians as “shinners” ’, including, it seems, G. W. Biggs. A letter in the Times of London on 30 September 1920 from John Annan Bryce, a younger brother of a former Chief Secretary for Ireland, explained what had happened. Annan Bryce complained of a British threat to burn republican-owned properties, if those of loyalists were targeted. He explained, citing G. W. Biggs’s experience, ‘there is no justification for the issue of such a notice in this district, where the only damage to loyalists’ premises has been done by the police’. Significantly, in his later correspondence Annan Bryce reported the arrest and deportation back to Ireland of his wife Violet for attempting to speak in Wales about British reprisal burnings and other atrocities.123 Southern Protestant alienation from British forces may be gleaned also from Olga Pyne Clarke’s observation concerning her father’s and grandfather’s clash with the British Army in Cork during DecemberJanuary 1920-21. 118 ‘The Protestant Experience of Revolution in Southern Ireland’, in Richard English, Graham Walker, eds., Unionism in Modern Ireland, 1996, 92, 97, n. 68. See later discussion on Hart’s ‘ethnic cleansing’ claim. There was time to revise the 1998 book narrative. For instance identifying initials of interviewees in the essay were changed for the subsequent book, 96, n. 30–39 (excl. n. 34), n. 43. Also, a reference to a ‘massacre of 14 [Protestant] men in West Cork’ (92) implies that the additional Harbord victim in the thesis had not yet been excluded. 119 ‘The Church of Ireland since Disestablishment’, The Review of the Churches, vol. 1, no. 1, 1924, in IT, 14 January 1924. 120 John Henry Bernard, 1919–1927 (c. 1860–1927), www.tcd.ie/provost/ history/former-provosts/ jh_bernard.php (accessed 18 September 2013). 121 In a comment to a fact-inding US American Commission on Conditions in Ireland, Interim Report, ‘Supplemental Report, the Religious issue’, 1921, 115. 122 Biggs’s fate was noted in David Hogan (pseud., Frank Gallagher), The Four Glorious Years (Dublin 1953), 115, a book otherwise cited by Hart (book, 205; thesis, 261). 123 Montgomery in Hamilton, Monty, the Making of a General, 158, 160. For Annan Bryce letters, House of Commons questions, editorials, see Times (Lon.), 30 Sep, 8 Oct, 1, 2, 4, 9, 12, 16 Nov 1920, summarized in Eamon Dyas, ‘The Crown’s Campaign Against Protestant Neutrality in Cork During the Irish War of Independence’, Church & State 86, Autumn 2006, at, www.atholbooks. org/archives/cands/cs_ articles/bryce.php [accessed 5 March 2014]. 124 Olga Pyne Clarke, She Came of Decent People (London, 1985), 51–52. 125 Macardle, 423–44. Examining Peter Hart J. Annan Bryce on Crown Forces attacks on Protestants, Times, 30 September 1920. 126 Bradield’s fate was commented upon in note 116. As discussed also later, he featured in song at the Magdalen College Cambridge 2013 Parnell Lecture. 127 In 1915 (IT, 16 November), Hammond denied he was ‘the leader of the [Dublin Diocesan Synod’s] Orange section’, but explained, ‘I would be proud of the privilege if I were.’ The Orange Order met openly in Dublin in 1920 and espoused its Protestant unionist message. See IT, 10 July. One day [Cork Divisional Commander General Strickland] stamped into my father’s office and in his extremely rude, brusque manner said, ‘Look here Clarke, you are trusted by both sides: it’s your duty to give me information’. Father, looking him in the eye, calmly said, ‘I will not inform against my own countrymen. It is your duty to control the rabble your government has let loose on Ireland. Good morning’. Going purple in the face, the General stormed out, crossed the Mall to Grandfather’s office, and received virtually the same reply.124 Strickland’s efforts arose in the context of publicity surrounding the burning and looting of Cork City Centre by Crown forces on 11 December 1920, and a consequent switch from unofficial to officially sanctioned reprisal burnings in Janaury 1921.125 Borgonovo’s analysis (2006) suggests that Strickland’s attempts to recruit local informers, such as Olga Pyne Clarke’s kinsmen, were countered by the IRA shooting informers during the early months of 1921. Though some were Protestant, it appears that Strickland’s attempts to polarize local communities only increased at least some Protestants’ alienation from British policies and actions. For example, on 27 January 1921 the Times (London) Cork correspondent reported ‘many’ loyalist protests against Strickland. They complained, ‘it is now an offence to remain neutral’. The reporter described the fate of the recently executed west Cork loyalist John (a.k.a. Tom) Bradfield, ‘found guilty of having attempted to inform the enemy of the presence and movement of republican troops’.126 It is clear that there were distinctions among southern loyalists and unionists (both Protestant and Roman Catholic) and within the Protestant community itself. Southern Protestant opinion was split, and there appears to have been an active minority who identified both with British military policies and with contemporary actions in the North by the Ulster Volunteer Force, the B-Specials, 137 Field Day Review and other unionist forces. Clearly, for security reasons, such southern loyalists did not advertise their activities, but it appears that their stance was more or less understood. Their minority status within southern Protestantism may be gleaned from the failure of a motion at the Dublin diocesan Church of Ireland Synod in October 1920. It alleged that Protestants, in particular ‘churchmen’, were ‘subjected to injury and intimidation for their political and religious opinions’ due to ‘a campaign of murder and terrorism in the South and West’ (a synonym for the territory not under Ulster Unionist control). On encountering opposition at the synod the proposer, Rev’d T. C. Hammond, retreated, first by stating that the ‘loyal citizens’ referred to as under threat could include Roman Catholics (a significant admission on Hammond’s part), and second by admitting, ‘[i]t was a matter of very deep regret to many of them that associated with the campaign of terror there were some, happily only a few, who regarded themselves as members of the Church of Ireland.’ A Protestant republican was clearly, to Hammond, a contradiction in terms. The Irish Times reported on 19 October 1920 the synod’s dissection of Hammond’s motion. An editorial noted that the synod, ‘deleted 138 the passage which referred to persecution on religious grounds, and it refused to regard the campaign of violence as being limited to the South and West of Ireland.’ The editorial continued, ‘[i]n both respects [the synod] showed … a wise recognition of facts’. It affirmed, ‘[t]here is no evidence … that Southern churchmen have been persecuted merely on account of their religious opinions’. It was further noted that the then Archbishop, Dr. Gregg, agreed generally with these sentiments. The avowedly unionist and determinedly Protestant Irish Times, plus the assembled representatives of Ireland’s largest Protestant denomination, would surely have expressed themselves differently had they experienced Irish life differently. Rev’d T. C. Hammond, who moved the motion, was a leading member of the Orange Order127 and also General Superintendent of the proselytising ‘Irish Church Missions (to the Roman Catholics).’ Despite his criticisms of Irish republicans and vehement denunciations of Roman Catholicism, Hammond’s organization made no claims regarding sectarian persecution by the IRA, apart from the one rejected by Hammond’s coreligionists. The Connellan Mission, for which Hammond acted as Secretary, openly sold and distributed a Protestant Truth Society pamphlet, Rome Behind Sinn Féin (a sequel to Rome behind the Great War) during 1921–22. In truth, Hammond’s Irish Church Missions was opposed to Roman Catholics irrespective of what they did. In 1917 the organization’s AGM was informed that there were too many Roman Catholic chaplains serving at the front with the British Army, who were ‘not wanted’. Association with such people might permanently ‘tinge’ returning Protestant young men, it was suggested.128 In 1997, Trinity College historian Professor R. B. McDowell, published his history of southern unionists. McDowell, a Protestant unionist, lived through the period concerned. He stated, in relation to the April 1922 killings, ‘armed bands shot down a dozen Protestants, several of them well known Times (London), 27 January 1921. Loyalists mobilized as informers by General Strickland suffered from counter action by the IRA 128 IT, 17 April 1917. Unfortunately, the National Library microilm and Irish Times archive copy of this article is damaged. I am grateful to Eamon Dyas for recovering a full copy in London. See Warren Nelson’s highly sympathetic in-house biography, T. C. Hammond, his Life and Legacy in Ireland and Australia (Carlisle, PA, 1994). In it, apart from a fear of not being wanted in the New Free State, there is no discussion of any IRA campaign against Protestants, Nelson suggested (66–69) that potential ‘danger [to Hammond] lay in the fact that he was used by both sides as an intermediary’, and that, due to a consequent ‘misunderstanding’, Hammond was ‘for a time on a “hit list”’. Reportedly, a republican who later became an evangelist said Hammond was saved due to his ‘reputation for helping people regardless of their religion’. Hammond reported that a bullet once went through his sleeve, but he was unsure if this was a warning or a ‘poor shot’. Hammond was certainly politically prominent. The IT (22 March 1922), reported him as a distributor of Rome Behind Sinn Féin (1921, 2nd ed., republished in 2000 with an appreciative preface by Hammond admirer, Rev’d Ian Paisley), in a court case alleging breach of copyright, see also IT, 30 July 1921. Hammond unquestionably raised the ire of devout Roman Catholics. As the main leader of an aggressive mission ‘to the Roman Catholics’ within the Church of Ireland, Hammond spared no efort in insulting the ‘Romish’ church, Examining Peter Hart Troops of the Essex Regiment and a Royal Irish Constabulary officer outside the barracks at Clonakilty (1919–21). © IWM. in converting waverers and publicly parading successes. He was ever vigilant also in detecting papist inluences within the Church of Ireland. In May 1922, Hammond was a founder member of the Bethany Home, that took in unwed Protestant mothers, primarily, and sat on its managing Committee until his departure for Australia in 1935. There, in the mid 1940s, Hammond, author of In Understanding Be Men, accused an Anglican Bishop of importing Romanist ‘ritualism’ into a prayer book. During a consequent legal challenge to the publication, Hammond was accused of inheriting from his homeland ‘an obviously anti-Roman Catholic complex and tends to ind something Romish in everything he can’, Ruth Teale, ‘The “Red Book” Case’, Journal of Religious History, vol. 12, no. 1, June 1982, 79. See Niall Meehan, ‘“Protestants were left as Orphans”’, Church & State 102, 4th Quarter, 2010, at www.academia.edu/350972/ ‘Harvesting Souls for the Lord’, Dublin Review of Books, 18 June 2011, www.drb.ie/ essays/harvesting-souls-forthe-lord. 129 Crisis and Decline, the Fate of the Southern Unionists (Dublin, 1997), 127. Hart did not engage with this research. 130 Ralph C. V. Harbord (CO/762/58), Richard James Helen (CO/762/33), William Jagoe (CO/762/4), James McCarthy (CO/762/13), William Perrot (CO/762/121), Thomas Sullivan (CO/762/175). loyalists’.129 As implied, the terms ‘Protestant’ and ‘loyalist’ were distinguishable. Hart did see six compensation claims from reported April killings survivors. Four claims referred only to loyalists under attack. Rev’d Ralph Harbord referred to ‘Protestant loyalists’, while the self-admitted informer Richard Helen spoke of ‘the massacre of Protestants’, before detailing attacks on ‘loyalists’. William Jagoe, who claimed his premises in Dunmanway were shot at, was typical in his report that in the early morning of 27 April 1922, ‘an armed gang visited the town and murdered three wellknown loyalists. Several other loyalists escaped… On the next night 5 other loyalists were murdered.’130 Lionel Curtis, British Prime Minister Lloyd George’s imperial adviser and British delegation secretary during Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations, summed up the commonly held southern Protestant view. This is significant, because Curtis fully supported military suppression of the Irish rebellion. He had been editor of Round Table, the journal of a powerful group, to which he belonged, that supported imperial interests.131 In a lengthy June 1921 Round Table article, based on his extensive interviews and fact-gathering during a recent tour of Ireland, Curtis declared that, [t]o conceive the struggle as religious in character is in any case misleading. Protestants in the south do not complain of persecution on sectarian grounds. If Protestant farmers are murdered, it is not by reason of their religion, but rather because they are under suspicion as loyalists. The distinction is a fine but a real one.132 It is unfortunate that Hart apparently did not encounter Curtis’s considered views, because they might have helped answer his curiously echoing questions fifty years later: ‘If a Protestant farmer was attacked, was it because of his religion, his politics or his land, or all three? Was personal spite involved?’ (thesis, 62; book, 320) Perhaps even more significantly, Curtis was also the first to publish (in the same article) an account of an Auxiliary false surrender at Kilmichael,133 only eight months after the ambush, which contradicted Hart’s later interpretation of that incident. And finally, a later Round Table article commented, with reference to the April 139 Field Day Review 1922 killings in West Cork, that, ‘Southern Ireland boasts with justice that it has been remarkably free from the purely sectarian hatreds that have come to characterise Belfast’.134 This was treated as so self-evident that that Daily News correspondent, Hugh Martin, felt confident in observing in 1921, The bogey of Catholic intolerance in Ireland is no more to-day than a chimera kept alive to frighten political children with on this [English] side of the channel.135 Thus, much evidence suggests that Republican violence, even in its apparently unauthorized forms in April 1922, tended to have a rational military rather than an irrational sectarian character. Many Southern Protestants effectively denied that from the summer of 1920 they were potential or actual victims of murderous sectarian hostility. However, in The Republic, the Fight for Irish Independence (2013), Charles Townshend, the external examiner of Hart’s PhD thesis, suggested, ‘there is a problem taking [the Protestant Convention resolution] as unforced testimony’. He asserted, ‘[i]f 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 to emphasise it.’136 Perhaps, but arguably it would be eccentric for the representatives of victims experiencing murderous treatment to deny their community’s experience. Shooting people for sectarian reasons is clearly the opposite of ‘repressive tolerance’. It is repressive intolerance. Logically, Townshend’s view implies that, the worse the treatment, the more likely that its victims would deny or disavow it. In theory, then, Lionel Curtis’s statement that southern Protestants did not complain of sectarian persecution was evidence that in fact it had occurred. In which case, surely the Protestant Convention would have ignored the April killings. There is no compelling reason to believe that southern Irish Protestants evinced signs of such counter-intuitive 140 behaviour in Ireland in May 1922, when the Convention took place. Rather, their representatives’ published view appears to accurately reflect a settled understanding of their position in a highly unsettled situation. Questioning that understanding—or, in Hart’s case, ignoring entirely its expression by the Convention—may signify an adherence to a preferred reading of Irish history, despite the evidence. Such would be a product of ideology, not historical research. While claiming to question nationalist mythology, Hart appears instead, and ironically, to have systematically dismissed and undermined the views of many, perhaps most, southern Protestant unionists. His analysis is essentially a rationalization of sectarian ‘ethnic’ separation of Protestants and Roman Catholics in Ireland. It is in effect a justification of Partition that was influenced by the political nomenclature associated with the post-1968 violence in Northern Ireland. Hart referred later to republican and loyalist ‘paramilitaries’ during the 1912–22 period, as ‘a symptom of democratic and state failure … Full democracy was restored once ethnic sovereignty or security was secured’.137 In other words, Partition was a ‘good’ or ‘bestcase-possible solution’ to intractable ethnoreligious differences and hatred. However, the overwhelming majority of republicans in northern and southern Ireland did not aspire to create a sectarian ‘ethnic’ state. Likewise, Northern Ireland was hardly a democracy in the ‘[f ]ull’ sense, and, by contrast with the Nationalists’ goal, it was based on a sectarian identity claimed by unionists who comprised a majority in only four of Northern Ireland’s Six Counties. Irish but more particularly Ulster unionists recognized that a system of sectarian privilege was threatened by majority rule even under British jurisdiction.138 That is why Ulster unionists successfully rebelled against Home Rule during 1912–14, even threatening a bloody Irish and British civil war to thwart the will of Parliament and of the great majority of Ireland’s inhabitants.139 Ironically, Hart was, in effect, imposing sectarian categories, far more appropriate 131 Mowat, 90. Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, From Rhodes to Cliveden (New York, 1981), 179. Quigley details Curtis and co-thinkers’ attempts to maintain the inluence of the British Empire and Commonwealth during the course of the twentieth century. 132 Curtis, ‘Ireland’, Round Table, XI, no. 43, June 1921, 496–97; Mowat, 72, refers to Curtis’s article as the ‘most fair minded’ of his sources, though it is in fact sufused with imperial condescension toward the Irish. 133 See n. 43. Curtis, 500. 134 ‘The Brink of Civil War’, Round Table, XII, no. 47, June 1922. Examining Peter Hart 135 Ireland in Insurrection, an Englishman’s record of Fact by Hugh Martin (London 1921), 205, at www.academia. edu/6292615/. An alternative to Martin’s eyewitness accounts of British atrocities was, in addition to (the later discussed) Tales of the RIC, former Irish Times and Morning Post (Lon.) correspondent, C. H. Bretherton’s The Real Ireland (London 1925). He noted (24– 25) the following Protestant women, ‘Mrs Erskine Childers asking [English journalists] to tea, and Madame Maud Gonne MacBride, and Mrs Stopford Greene [giving him] a lively account of brutal British atrocities that they claimed to have witnessed’. Bretherton asserted (26–27), however, that the, ‘Black and Tans … never commited one tenth of the acts of terrorism attributed to them, or one hundreth part of the atrocities perpetrated by the Irish themselves ...’ Bretherton noted (77) ‘The impetus that set the ball of rebellion rolling in 1916 was supplied in Ireland, as in other slaveminded countries, by the international Jew’. This antisemitic theme was presaged by an observation (73) that De Valera’s ‘father was a Maltese Jew’. As Morning Post correspondent Bretherton wrote on the April killings on 29 April, ‘The southern Irish native is a barbarous savage, with a strong inherent penchant for murder, which those responsible for him— his priests, his politicians and his alleged organs of enlightenment—have not only failed to eradicate from his primitive bosom, but have actually fostered.’ Hart reported the Morning Post’s account the ‘most reliable’ in his thisis (374), but ‘partially reliable’, in his book (279). 136 Charles Townshend, The Republic, 371, to Ulster Unionism, on Irish nationalist ideologies, in ways that made political sense only within an imperial or colonial context. That is why such categories endured in Northern Ireland. To be sure, southern Ireland did become a conservative state dominated by a Roman Catholic ethos, largely as a result of Partition and the Irish Civil War, but it did not become anti-Protestant; rather it incorporated Protestant institutions into education, health and social and moral welfare provision.140 As a result, both southern Protestants and Catholics became subject to denominational social control, and arguably the main object of its architecture was the new Dublin establishment’s control of the popular majority. In the popular imagination, freedom from imperial persecution was also freedom from imperial religious persecution. For this reason institutional Roman Catholicism could claim an association with the new state in a manner institutionalised Protestantism found problematic.141 Hart’s conclusion that the April 1922 killings happened because Protestants were ‘fair game’ is not supported by evidence. On the contrary, Hart supported his published views only by ignoring or misrepresenting facts that contradicted it. In effect, Hart wrote a sectarian history that masqueraded as ‘brave’ and ‘objective’ by denying and displacing the ultimate Unionist and British responsibilities for sectarianism in Irish history. Hart placed responsibility instead on those who were the historic victims of imperial and colonial sectarianism, and who since the 1790s had sought a non-sectarian form of self-government. Indeed, that is why non-sectarian Protestants were, to T. C. Hammond’s consternation, in republican ranks in small but significant numbers.142 Had Irish republicanism in 1916–22 been ‘sectarian’, as Hart depicted, it is most unlikely that this Protestant participation would have occurred. To paraphrase and reverse Oxford professor Roy Foster’s dismissive phrase, Hart’s denial of the Irish historical record was merely ‘revisionism with footnotes’.143 Academic Resistance Hart was given every opportunity, before his untimely death in June 2010, to explain anomalies or acknowledge errors in his research. This he failed to do after the publications of Brian Murphy’s review of The IRA and its Enemies in 1998, Meda Ryan’s Tom Barry IRA Freedom Fighter in 2003, and Murphy’s and my Troubled History in 2008— all of which raised aspects of the critique further developed here.144 Hart’s thesis supervisor and examiner might have posed some of these questions before a PhD was awarded to the then graduate student. Since a viva voce examination did not take place, a final opportunity to do so was forgone.145 Hart’s work was subject instead, in its published book form, to the verdict of his academic peers and of the wider public. Initially, Hart’s analysis was afforded high praise, while his critics received summary dismissal.146 Hart’s book was nominated by Roy Foster as one of his books of the year in December 1998. In addition, Foster chaired the Ewart Biggs Prize panel that awarded the prize in 1998 to Hart.147 Typically, Dr. Senia Paseta approved highly of Hart’s ‘innovative and brilliant work—first class historical writing—superbly researched, constantly provocative and ultimately persuasive’. Likewise, Professor Paul Bew effused: ‘This is a great book. The first work on the Irish revolution which can stand comparison with the best of the historiography of the French Revolution: brilliantly documented, statistically sophisticated, and superbly written.’ And, Professor Eunan O’Halpin remarked that,‘[Hart] has set a standard of forensic documentary research which … those rushing to the defence of the good name of Cork republicanism may conceivably emulate but will surely not surpass’.148 Contrary to O’Halpin’s prediction, however, Peter Hart’s critics have not emulated the latter’s ‘standards’. Arguably, the failure of most reviewers of Hart’s works to perceive faults may be grounded in the same ideologically and politically determined considerations that have biased their attitudes 141 Field Day Review An armoured Rolls Royce and British soldiers at Kenmare, County Kerry, in 1921. © IWM. towards Hart’s critics. Those attitudes were conditioned by two factors. The first was alarm, within the Irish Republic’s political, media, and academic establishments, with regard to any historical accounts that might induce: first, any sympathy in the South for the post-1968 nationalist revolt in Northern Ireland; second, any objective understanding (in the South, in Irish-America, etc.)149 of the historical and contemporary reasons for the IRA’s armed campaign; and, third, any popular support for Sinn Féin’s enhanced political role after either the 1981 Hunger Strikes or, especially, the 1994 IRA ceasefire.150 Instead, revisionist accounts that promoted historical navelgazing, although described as courageously self-questioning and de-mythologizing, were preferred and promoted. Examining British motives and actions was deprioritized in favour of interrogating and misrepresenting Irish attitudes. The liberal intelligentsia were encouraged to believe—and to promote the belief that—there were hidden sectarian depths that exposed the ‘true nature’ of Irish nationalist and especially republican ideology and practice. This motif was best exemplified by the Irish-born BBC journalist Fergal Keane, 142 adopting the guise of deceived schoolboy, who declared that, [t]he campaign of terror waged against Protestants in the Bandon valley in County Cork was never in our textbooks, though our classrooms were only a matter of miles away. In fact, I had to wait until a Canadian academic, Peter Hart, produced his exceptional The IRA and its Enemies before I learnt the extent of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in my own home country.151 Arguably, then, those who promoted revisionist history had concluded that any truly objective understanding of the distinction in 1919–22, between the majority of southern Protestant unionists and an active minority of southern Protestant loyalists who informed the British about IRA activities, was too politically sensitive. Their strategy was to identify the entire Irish War of Independence as ‘sectarian’, which in turn could locate both it and the contemporary conflict in Northern Ireland within an acceptable, pro-Partition ideological paradigm that could reel in the unwary with its claims to academic impartiality. 137 Peter Hart, ‘Parliamentary Politics and the Irish Revolution’, in Fearghal McGarry, ed., Republicanism in Modern Ireland (Dublin, 2004), 39. John Regan’s two-word comment in his IT review, 21 Aug 2004, was ‘Northern Ireland?’. 138 On the signiicant extent of sectarian, Protestant, control of southern Irish society subsisting into the twentieth century, see Fergus Campbell, The Irish Establishment (Oxford, 2009), and my review, ‘Top People’, Dublin Review of Books, 14, Summer 2010, at www.academia. edu/242123. 139 See Alice Stopford Green’s acerbic, Ourselves Alone in Ulster (Dublin, 1918), at www.academia.edu/6294474/ 140 Niall Meehan, ‘“Protestants were left as Orphans”’, Church & State, 102, 4th Quarter, 2010, at www.academia. edu/350972/; ‘Church & State and the Berthany Home’, History Ireland, vol. 18, no. 5, Sep.–Oct. 2010 at www. academia.edu/320793/ 141 Given its unequivocal association with unionism. See, Andrew Scholes, The Church of Ireland and the Third Home Rule Bill (Sallins, 2009). Examining Peter Hart 142 This included Sinn Féin Ministers Robert Barton and Ernest Blythe, as well as head of publicity Erskine Childers. Cork IRA Protestants included Sam Maguire from Dunmanway and transportation oicers, the brothers Jim and Miah Grey (I am indebted to John Borgonovo for this latter information). See also, BMH WS 1242 A. K. Wordsworth on ‘visits of IRA leaders to her home … 1918–1921’; BMH WS 394 Presbyterian Minister Rev’d J. A. Irwin on speaking with Eamon De Valera in the USA (a remarkable document); BMH WS 632 Elizabeth Bloxam, who refuted tales of attacks on Protestants. 143 Roy Foster, ‘We are all Revisionists Now’, Irish Review, 1, 1986. Foster, a supporter of Hart’s analysis, concluded optimistically (5), ‘to say “revisionist” should just be another way of saying “historian”.’ See also Foster’s earlier ‘History and the Irish Question’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Fifth Series, vol. 33, 1983, where he wrote (170), post the successful emergence of Sinn Féin into electoral politics after the 1980–81 Hunger Strikes, ‘as revisionists, Irish scholars have gone so far as to dismiss most of the canon of Irish history as conceived by the generation of I916. However, mid-twentieth-century revisionism can itself be seen as part of the pattern whereby the study of Irish history reacts in a Pavlovian way to the dictates of politics; and the whole process can only be elucidated by considering the roots of the Irish discovery of their past, and the resulting interpretations of that past, on both sides of St George’s Channel. It must also involve, at the conclusion, some consideration of very recent history, trenching upon politics. In so doing, this paper exposes itself to most of the criticisms it levels at history’s treatment of the Irish question; and thus becomes part of the process.’ The second, closely related factor, was the emergence of a ‘liberal’ (tending towards ‘neoliberal’) consensus in southern Ireland that questioned pervasive Roman Catholic influence—ultimately, it is suggested here, in order to discredit and dismantle all ideological and institutional barriers, traditional Irish nationalism included, to the Irish Republic’s full incorporation into transatlantic capitalism and the European Union. For many Irish ‘liberals’, historical interpretations that identified the southern Irish state, from the very moment of its creation, as ‘Catholic-nationalist’ and antiProtestant, appeared at least superficially attractive, because they misrepresented both historical and contemporary Irish republicanism in ways that appeared decidedly unattractive, ‘backward’, and ‘atavistic’. This framework of ideas located structural and sectarian problems outside of a modernizing Irish state, which now was perceived as freeing itself from overtly Roman Catholic and republican influences, but which also masked the maintenance of socio-economic privilege and inequality. Thus, Irish republicanism and Irish Roman Catholicism were symbiotically linked with a ‘demythologized’ and discredited southern past and an abhorrent northern present. Hart’s history therefore answered an ideological and political need, the imperatives and perspectives of which framed the initially and enthusiastically favourable scholarly reaction to his book’s publication, as well as its systematic celebration by overtly antirepublican journalists. For example, Kevin Myers of the Irish Times (later, Irish Independent, currently Sunday Times), promoted Hart’s research from a very early stage. In 1990, Myers approved of ‘Peter’s’ research, which, he argued, suggested that the 1919–21 IRA were ‘a form of morality police, enforcing norms which the new state in due course would impose with the rule of law’.152 In 1995, Myers called for Hart’s ‘brilliant’ research to be published, even before the TCD library made his thesis available. And Myers praised Hart’s ‘masterly study’ on publication in 1998 that explained ‘how mythology has concealed the truth in Irish history’.153 Indeed, Myers had been assiduous in promoting the IRA/sectarianism thesis from at least as early as December 1989, when he admonished even David Fitzpatrick for not supporting it in his chapter on ‘Ireland since 1870’, in Roy Foster’s authoritative and classic-revisionist collection of essays on Irish history. In that chapter, Fitzpatrick observed that, ‘few attacks on southern Protestants were reported during the “Troubles”, though many vacant houses were burned’.154 Myers argued, to the contrary, that ‘[Tom] Barry’s men organised a pogrom of Protestants in the Dunmanway area in April 1922’. Myers pursued the issue the following month and persistently thereafter.155 Hart claimed that, ‘I did not even know [the April 1922 killings] had taken place until a year into my research’ (thesis, 372).156 It is therefore possible that Myers (whom Hart acknowledged and also cited in his thesis (377, 399)) was a primary inspiration (though Hart merely footnoted Myers in the book, 282, n. 67), and that Myers’s interpretation helped to alter Fitzpatrick’s former view. Myers was certainly mission driven, and he later made the extraordinary, sweeping assertion that, ‘[m]urdering people for their religion was what republicans had always done, especially in their most celebrated period 1919–22. Only the successful seizure of Irish historiography by Irish republicans has concealed this vital truth.’157 Both Myers’s and the academic community’s promotion of Hart’s history set off a low-level culture war because the academy refused to acknowledge criticism of Hart’s work, apart from issuing occasional, contemptuous dismissals. However, Myers’s statements often were highly questionable. For instance, his December 1989 column that addressed the April killings ‘pogrom’ also alleged that a ‘prime notion’ of Sinn Féin Cork Lord Mayor Terence MacSwiney (who died later on hunger strike in Brixton prison in 1920) ‘was to murder the Catholic bishop of Cork’. Myers had also asserted earlier that in September 1920, Alan Lendrum, Kilkee, 143 Field Day Review Co. Clare’s Acting Resident Magistrate, recently returned from fighting Bolsheviks in the new Soviet Union, was ‘buried up to his neck on a … beach, to await the incoming tide and death’. In addition, Myers claimed, Lendrum’s IRA captors, becoming impatient, dug up and reburied their victim nearer to the water’s edge, so as to hasten his demise. Lendrum’s tragic story so impressed Myers that he mentioned it four times, over five weeks, between May and July 1989.158 A year and a half later, in January 1992, Myers mentioned the story for a fifth and final time—when he admitted that, unfortunately, the grisly story was, he now admitted, ‘not true’, because the event in question had never happened. Instead, when the IRA attempted either to seize Lendrum’s car or to kidnap him, he apparently produced a gun and was shot dead. Lendrum’s body was secretly buried near a lake edge and, on discovery, was found to have clear water in his lungs, leading to the salt-water saga concocted by British propagandists.159 In that same January 1992 column, after representations from relatives, Myers apologized as well for his untrue allegation about Terence MacSwiney’s designs on the life of Cork’s Roman Catholic bishop. In fact, the story told by Myers, about Lendrum’s watery grave, had been immortalized way back in 1921, in Tales of the RIC, which had constructed a parallel, British propaganda, narrative of the War of Independence. In a chapter entitled, ‘R.M.’, the book had renamed Lendrum as ‘Mayne’ and had concluded with, ‘The next flood tide put an end to a torture the like of which Lenin and Trotsky could hardly exceed for sheer devilry’—a clever phrasing that linked Lendrum’s death to British propaganda efforts to associate Irish Republicanism with ‘Bolshevism’.160 Hart’s history elevated Myers’s observations on republican sectarianism to the plane of academic research, where critics of the republican sectarianism narrative received short shrift. Typically, in defending Peter Hart and his work, David Fitzpatrick has referred to sometimes ‘foul’ as well as ‘fair’ criticisms from those whom 144 he branded as unnamed ‘apologists for contemporary republicanism’. They engage in ‘counter “revisionist” polemic, often ugly and personally offensive’. Professor Eunan O’Halpin (also of TCD’s Modern History Department) likewise (if more vaguely) characterized critics of Gerard Murphy’s Peter Hart–inspired book, The Year of Disappearances, Political Killings in Cork 1921–22 (2010), as ‘ultramontane anti-revisionists, fastidious academics or hybrids with a foot in both camps’.161 Despite these and other efforts to exonerate Hart, the inexorable logic of criticism gradually undermined his historiography.162 Nevertheless, the attraction of the sectarianism thesis is such that some historians still support it, despite the lack of corroborating evidence, albeit often now in ways that appear more ‘fair and balanced’. For instance, Professor Ronan Fanning observed in Fatal Path (2013), ‘[a]lthough the scale of sectarian murders is the source of enduring historiographical controversy, there can be no doubt that at local level, most notably in Cork, the IRA targeted some Protestants simply because they were Protestants.’163 ‘[N]o doubt’?—and yet, no source given either. However, Fanning preceded his comment, quoted above, with this sentence: ‘Favourite targets of the IRA’, in Tom Bartlett’s words, ‘apart from soldiers and policemen, were informers or “touts”, a catch-all category that appears to have included the likes of tinkers, tramps, ex-servicemen and Protestants.’ But what, then, was Bartlett’s source on page 403 of his celebrated textbook, Ireland, a History (Cambridge, 2010)? Surprisingly (or not?), no note clutters his narrative on pages 402–405. However, Bartlett’s introduction to that chapter indicated a principal source, David Fitzpatrick’s, The Two Irelands (Oxford and New York, 1998). Arguably, Bartlett’s scholarly debt was appropriate, given that his own chapter was titled, ‘The Making of the Two Irelands, 1914–45’. More important is that Bartlett’s identification of the IRA’s ‘favourite targets’ may have originated in Fitzpatrick’s text.164 Perhaps Bartlett was referencing in particular Foster’s essay opened (169) with, ‘‘‘History is more backward in Ireland than in any other country”, wrote J. R. Green’s Anglo-Irish widow iercely in 1912.’ The unnamed distinguished historian deined in relation to her husband was Alice Stopford Green, a Protestant who participated on the Republican side in the War of Independence, see BMH WS 1242 A. K. Wordsworth. Her niece, Dr Dorothy Stopford did so also in a medical capacity on behalf of the IRA in West Cork, Mary Walsh, BMH WS 556. See, Leon Ó Broin, Protestant Nationalists in Revolutionary Ireland: the Stopford Connection (Dublin, 1985). 144 Brian Murphy review The Month, September 1998; Meda Ryan, Tom Barry; Niall Meehan, Brian Murphy, Troubled History, a 10 th Anniversary Critique of Peter Hart’s the IRA and its Enemies (Aubane, 2008). See ive issues of History Ireland, vol. 13, no. 2–6 (see also n. 32). 145 Charles Townshend, email to author, noting, ‘the unusual fact that there were no meetings involved’, 19 May 2008. 146 It continues. See Margaret O’Callaghan, ‘Propaganda Wars: contexts for understanding the debate on the meanings of the Irish War of Independence’, Journal of the Old Athlone Society, vol. 2, no. 9, 2013, 68, 69, 70, in which Conor Cruise O’Brien and Peter Hart’s work was, respectively, ‘viliied’ and ‘demonised’, instead of being, merely, criticized. In addition, Charles Townshend’s work is ‘brilliant’ and David Fitzpatrick’s ‘path breaking’. In a review of Charles Townshend’s, The Republic, Marianne Elliot construed criticism of Hart as ‘viliication’, Times Higher Education, to which I responded, 3 & 17 October 2013. Examining Peter Hart 147 Roy Foster, New Statesman, 4 December 1998. In 2006, Foster complained that Declan Kiberd gave ‘an inaccurate and inadequate impression’ of the competition, after Kiberd observed, ‘for years some who explored the blind-spots of Irish nationalism were awarded the [Ewart Biggs] prize’. Foster then listed some winners, including Hart, IT, 7 July 2006. 148 Senia Paseta, English Historical Review, vol. 115, i. 460, February 2000, 246; Paul Bew, Canadian Journal of History, Aug 1999, vol. 34, no. 2; Eunan O’Halpin, Times Literary Supplement, 6 November 1998. Other positive academic responses are noted in Troubled History, Meehan, Murphy, eds. 149 See Niall Meehan, Kerby Miller, ‘“For God and the Empire”, an Irish Historian’s Rapid Rise, Strange Fall and Remarkable Resurrection’, Field Day Review 7, 2011, 151–69. Fitzpatrick’s un-sourced observation (95), that ‘Adulterers, homosexuals, tinkers, beggars, ex-servicemen, Protestants: these were the many dangerous and potentially dangerous lethal labels for Ireland’s inhabitants in the revolutionary period.’ If so, then it is peculiar that both Bartlett and Fanning, for whatever reasons, omitted Fitzpatrick’s startling suggestion that the IRA systematically targeted adulterers and homosexuals.165 Fitzpatrick’s notable claim in turn may have relied (although it was not referenced) on an observation, also un-sourced, made by Peter Hart in 1993, that the IRA had attacked a combination of ‘unmarried mothers, adulterers and mixed (Catholic and Protestant) couples’.166 Essentially, most Irish historians, building on and adapting each other’s words, have written that the IRA were sectarian, bigoted, and viciously so, because that assertion has become a necessary article of a political faith that subsists without benefit of the veneer of evidence that Hart’s 1998 history once appeared to provide. By contrast, acknowledging that ‘Roman Catholic’ was a more dangerous label in the new Northern Ireland area than was ‘Protestant’ in the South never seems to have occurred to Hart or Fitzpatrick or to those who referenced their observations. For many years, Professor Fitzpatrick promoted without question Hart’s 1996 essay claim that what happened in Cork in 1922 ‘might be termed “ethnic cleansing”’. On two specific occasions, however, Fitzpatrick failed to note that, in Hart’s later essay collection entitled The IRA at War (2003), he retreated from his 1996 ethnic cleansing claim, and instead stated clearly that, ‘What happened in Southern Ireland did not constitute ethnic cleansing’. Paradoxically, Hart’s 2003 book also contained the 1996 essay containing his original ‘ethnic cleansing’ observation. Indeed, the contrasting arguments are made within merely nine pages of each other. On the two occasions when Fitzpatrick cited Hart’s 1996 claim, repeated in Hart’s 2003 book, he ignored Hart’s new view. I pointed out the error publicly to Professor Fitzpatrick on each occasion—and also privately.167 Not until 2013 did Fitzpatrick finally acknowledge Hart’s change of mind; he did so in a footnote, in an essay on Protestant population decline, that analyzed the twentieth-century history of County Cork’s Methodist congregations. Fitzpatrick introduced his acknowledgment, however, by restating in his text Hart’s 1996 (and 2003 republished) ethnic cleansing claim, in the context of disparaging what he termed the ‘vicious ad hominem attacks on Hart and his allies’. Only then did the acknowledging footnote follow. And Fitzpatrick concluded his discussion by arguing, without irony and with ultimate chutzpah, that, ‘[t]he spectre of Protestant extermination has distracted debate about revolutionary Ireland for too long, and should be laid to rest. The inexorable decline of Southern Protestantism was mainly self inflicted.’168 Fitzpatrick’s 2013 analysis overturned the assertions that he (and others) had been making for more than fifteen years, based largely on the work of his student, Peter Hart. Now, however, it appears that Hart’s claim (or, rather, its refutations) had ‘distracted debate’. Its continued investigation threatened to de-legitimate revisionist historiography. Fitzpatrick’s new analysis of Cork’s Methodist community, which partly returned him to his 1989 position (which Kevin Myers had assailed), put the subject to rest for him—at least intellectually. Whether it has otherwise done so, however, is unclear. On 11 January 2013, when Fitzpatrick spoke about his Methodist research at the annual Parnell Lecture in Magdalene College Cambridge, he surprised his audience by prefacing his remarks by singing a song, a ballad entitled, A New Revenge for Skibbereen: ‘Twas in the month of April in the year of ‘22 We took it out on the Protestants; we could only catch a few In Bandon and Dunmanway, Kinsale and Skibbereen Their colour it was Orange and they trampled on the Green 145 Field Day Review Old Buttimer came down quaking ‘What do you want’?, says he ‘Come out or we’ll make ye, we want your drapery’ The missus tried to argue ‘Go to bed old women’, says we We sprayed his brains with bullets that Ireland might be free We visited Tom Bradfield[169], we dressed up in Khaki Says he, ‘You’re welcome officers’ A fine snug farm had he We gave him a grand court martial And sentenced Tom for to die We tried a note around his neck It read ‘convicted spy’ Farewell to all ye Protestants, so prim and dry and tight Ye thought ye owned old Ireland Yet ye fled without a fight From Bandon and Dunmanway, Kinsale and Skibbereen Ye scuttled out of the County Cork and never since was seen ‘Twas revenge for Skibbereen Based on their remarks after Fitzpatrick’s performance, it appears that the members of his ‘amazed’ audience believed this sectarian doggerel to be a genuine republican ballad. Fitzpatrick responded to the audience as follows (the square-bracketed words below were spoken by others): Well, I think at this stage Chairman I need to make an admission. One of the most unfair and unkind claims made about my lamented former student Peter Hart was that he had falsified historical evidence in pursuit of the thesis. In my opinion he did nothing of the kind. What he did was to exaggerate evidence of sectarianism, which was particular in violent manifestations to a couple of fairly brief phases, and to over-dramatize what occurred in a manner which has misled all but the close readers of what he actually wrote. But I do not wish to lay myself open to this accusation so I have to confess that the genesis of the ballad was that I 146 wrote it yesterday morning. [Laughter, ‘oh wonderful’] I hasten to add I did not write the tune, which I presume plenty of people here despite my poor performance would have been able vaguely to identify as the Galtee Mountain Boy. No, I see many perplexed and amazed at the claim.’ [‘You have almost silenced your audience’].170 Fitzpatrick’s revisionist views of Irish republican intent and of the dynamics of Protestant-Catholic relations, ‘in song and in story’, differ in form from Peter Hart’s prose. Though more orthodox in expression, Hart’s content was in tune with his mentor’s performance. Both suffer a common evidential weakness, however, in that it is against them. Southern Protestants did not in general experience sectarian attacks because republicans did not generally engage in them. 150 In the Irish Times, Cassandralike columnist Kevin Myers anticipated the IRA ceaseire on 31 August 1994 by writing (27 August) that the Truce in 1921 had led to sectarian bloodletting. Violence in Belfast against thousands of Catholics was predicated by Myers on IRA attacks on Crown forces, while in the south in April 1922, ‘[t]he IRA mounted a pogrom against [ten] Protestants in the Dunmanway area’. He observed, ‘Hundreds of Protestants were put out of that part of West Cork’. Myers carried on relentlessly in opposition to the Peace Process, though he wavered momentarily, admitting at one point, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ and ‘Wrong: totally and utterly wrong, wrong, wrong. It’s an unsettling, disorienting thing inally to realise that the prediction about which I have written thousands of words turns out to have been complete rubbish.’ Myers then efectively admitted, in the words of former Irish Times Editor, Conor Brady, that he had been ‘wrong about being wrong’, by reverting to his former position, IT, 15 April 1998, also in Conor Brady letter to IT, 17 January 2007. Myers was also wrong in his 27 August 1994 article in stating that anti-Treaty leader Eamon de Valera ‘stayed silent’ about the April killings—see Macardle, 705. 151 The Independent (London), 5 May 2001. 152 IT, 23 May 1990. Examining Peter Hart 153 IT, 12 Jan 1995 (Hart thesis available TCD Library, 29 Jan 1996), 25 May 1998. Myers’s initial promotion of Hart’s Kilmichael analysis led to a six-month controversy on the letters page. The letters were later collected in a pamphlet, Kilmichael, the False Surrender, a discussion with Pete Hart Pádraig Ó Cuanacháin, D. R. O’Connor Lysaght, Dr. Brian Murphy and Meda Ryan and, Jack Lane, Brendan Cliford, Why the Ballot was followed by the Bullet (Aubane, 1999). The pamphlet included an unpublished (by the IT) letter from Meda Ryan questioning for the irst time Hart’s interview dating. 154 David Fitzpatrick, ‘Ireland since 1870’, in Roy Foster, ed., The Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland (Oxford 1989), 246. 155 IT, 19 Dec 1989, 9 Jan 1990, 7 Jan 1994, 27 Aug 1994, 20 Sep 1994, 12 Jan 1995 (‘Soon — I trust — Peter Hart’s brilliant account of the IRA war in West Cork will be published.’), 12 July 1995, 29 May 1998 (‘it is obligatory to read Peter Hart’s The IRA and its Enemies. It is a masterpiece.’), 2 Jun 1999. 156 An admission not included in the book at this point. 157 Kevin Myers, Watching the Door, a memoir 1971–78 (Dublin, 2006), 87. Myers’s support for Hart is outlined in more detail in Meeehan, ‘Distorting Irish History’ [One], at www.academia. edu/357237/, 6–8. 158 IT, 30 May, 22 June, 3 & 6 July 1989 159 IT, 29 January 1992. See, Eoin Sheehan, ‘Telling Tales: the story of the burial alive and drowning of a Clare RM in 1920’, History Ireland, vol. 18, no. 1, Jan–Feb 2010, 36–37; also Pádraig Ó Ruairc, ‘Death of Alan Lendrum’, www.waroindependence. info/?page_id=139 (accessed 22 Nov 2013). 160 Anonymous, Tales of the RIC (Edinburgh, 1921), 75. Another class-conscious and typically anti-Semitic chapter concluded by identifying a ‘Gaelic organiser’ named ‘Padraig O’Kelly’ as in reality ‘a Jewish Bolshevik agent’, recently ‘suddenly disappeared from Glasgow when the police began to get unpleasantly attentive’, ‘A Jew in Gaelic Clothing’, 261. 161 David Fitzpatrick, review of John Borgonovo, The Dynamics of War and Revolution, Cork City 1916– 1918 (Sallins, 2013), History Ireland vol. 21, no. 5, Sep–Oct 2013 (and letter responses, author, Fitzpatrick, vol. 22, nos 1-3, at www.academia. edu/5027882/); ‘Introduction’, David Fitzpatrick, ed., Terror in Ireland, 1916–1923 (Dublin, 2012), 5. Eunan O’Halpin, ‘Problematic Killing during the War of Independence and its Aftermath: Civilian Spies and Informers’, in Mary Ann Lyons, James Kelly, eds., Death and Dying in Ireland, Britain and Europe (Sallins, 2013), 343. O’Halpin’s accompanying note lists Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid’s Irish Times review, Eugenio Biagini in Reviews in History, David Fitzpatrick in Dublin Review of Books and Pádraig Ó Ruairc in History Ireland. The last is a mistake and should have stated John Borgonovo. O’Halpin possibly missed my review at www.academia. edu/372431/. 162 It was, as Fitzpatrick observed, ‘corroded’, ‘Dr. Regan and Mr. Snide’, History Ireland, vol. 20, no. 3, May–Jun 2012. 163 Ronan Fanning, Fatal Path: British Government and Irish Revolution 1910–1922 (London, 2013), 194. 164 And, by extension, in Hart’s 1998 book, which Bartlett also cited, in note 4. 165 The Irish separatist and former British colonial oicial, Sir Roger Casement, was condemned to death for treason in 1916. British government oicials showed clemency campaigners explicit homosexual material in Casement’s diaries and successfully undermined their campaign. See Angus Mitchell, an adherent of the ‘forgeddiary’ theory, ‘Casement’s Black Diaries: closed books reopened’, History Ireland, vol. 1, no. 3, Autumn 1997. This is not a point that exercized Fitzpatrick. 166 ‘Class, Community and the Irish Republican Army in Cork, 1917– 1923’, in Patrick O’Flanagan, Cornelius Buttimer, eds., Cork History and Society (Dublin, 1993), 977. I have been unable to trace an origin for the ‘homosexuals’ reference. Participation in punitive ‘mixed’ marriage expeditions by IRA oicers Charlie Browne and Frank Busteed against their own parents was not documented by Hart. 167 Níall Meehan, ‘Distorting Irish History Two, the road from Dunmanway: Peter Hart’s treatment of the 1922 “April killings” in West Cork’, Spinwatch, 24 May 2011, www.academia.edu/612672/; ‘Terror in Ireland 1916–23, David Fitzpatrick, ed., review by Niall Meehan (including David Fitzpatrick, Eve Morrison, responses)’, www. academia.edu/1871818/. David Fitzpatrick, ‘History In a hurry’, www.drb.ie/more_ details/11–03–17/History_ In_A_Hurry.aspx (accessed 18 June 2012); ‘Introduction’, David Fitzpatrick, ed., Terror in Ireland, 1916–1923, 4. Peter Hart, ‘The Protestant Experience of Revolution in Southern Ireland’, in Richard English, Graham Walker, eds., Unionism in Modern Ireland (Dublin, 1996), 92; same essay in Peter Hart, The IRA at War (Oxford, 2003), 237; contrast with ‘Ethnic Conlict in Ireland’, 246. Niall Meehan, David Fitzpatrick emails, 12, 23 December 2012. 168 David Fitzpatrick, ‘Protestant Depopulation in Revolutionary Ireland’, in Irish Historical Studies, XXXVIII, November 2013, 643, 659. 169 The ‘old [James] Buttimer’ mentioned was an April 1922 killings victim (although there is no evidence that his drapery business was a motive). ‘Tom Bradield’ was previously discussed as one of two cousins (the other was named T. J.) who were killed as admitted spies during late January 1921 by, respectively, Denis Lordan and Tom Barry. Both Bradields thought the armed men to whom they divulged information were British, the irst time to Denis Lordan by accident, the second to Tom Barry by the latter’s design. This is the same Tom Bradield referred to earlier in note 116, and in a previously cited Times (London) report of 27 January 1921. A third Bradield cousin, John Bradield, was the inal victim of the 1922 April/Bandon Valley killings. Barry related his encounter with Tom Bradield in his memoir. He decided on foot of his publisher’s request, out of deference to ‘these traitors’ descendants’, not to name those executed, although he pointed out that their names were accessible in press reports. Tom Barry, 105, 109–10. See BMH WS 0470 Denis Lordan, where Bradield is named. 170 David Fitzpatrick, ‘The Spectre of Ethnic Cleansing in Revolutionary Ireland’, Parnell Lecture, Magdalene College Cambridge, 11 January 2013, recording of lecture in author’s possession. 147