Barry Keane©
The publication of ‘Terror in Ireland’ in 2012 launched the latest round of a ‘civil war’ in Irish historical studies centred on the research of the late Professor Peter Hart.[i] In this war little quarter is given, or asked, and in the latest battle the engagements centre around a series of reviews and letters focussed on Eve Morrison’s chapter which reviews Hart’s analysis of the Kilmichael ambush. Some comment seemed inordinately critical of Ms. Morrison’s work and she has been robust in its defence. While the main arguments focus on the Kilmichael ambush which saw the West Cork Brigade Flying Column annihilate an 18 strong Auxiliary Police unit during the Irish War of Independence,[ii] their discussion in relation to the murder of 13 local Protestants in 1922 has introduced a seeming error and this brief note seeks to examine and clarify this.[iii] As always I welcome any comments, corrections, or clarifications.
Peter Hart reworked much of the same information on the Dunmanway killings through different articles over a ten year period and in some of the later articles he omitted details which he had explained in previous versions.[iv] As a result of some ambiguity between versions another minor controversy has developed between John Regan, Gerard Murphy and Eve Morrison[v] over the publication date of the official British history of the conflict called ‘Record of the Rebellion in Ireland’ and its relevance to Hart’s discussion of the Dunmanway murders. [vi] Despite excellent research by both Murphy and Morrison, the date of publication does not, in fact, appear to be relevant to Hart’s research.
The reason is this. In Hart’s 1993 article he says, ‘between January 1920 and 11 July 1921 at least 146 so called “spies” and '”informers” were dealt with in this fashion, and 61 more were shot between July 12th and May 1923’.[vii] This is a total of 207 and he argues in all his articles that this shows that the number of Protestant victims of the IRA in Cork was disproportionately high, (36%).This list of 207, by definition, includes the Dunmanway victims and Hart explicitly links the Hornibrook, Bradfield, and Woods deaths to the hunt for informers on page 299 of The IRA and its Enemies, his most well known work.[viii]
In his 1993 article he says, ‘all of these people were, in one way or another, outsiders, and were thus both suspect and vulnerable’ at the end of the relevant paragraph. The first sentence of the next paragraph says:
‘It might be suggested that Protestants and ex-soldiers were naturally hostile to the IRA, and more likely to be working with the police and military, and to be shot. This was not so. The authorities obtained little information from either group and in fact by far the greatest damage was done by people within the organisation, or their relatives’. [ix]
This is referenced to: comments by General Percival; Volume 2 of the British Army’s official Record of the Rebellion in Ireland; G. A. Cockrill; and an anonymous [IRA] brigade commander in Cork. In 1993 he was not aware that the original draft of the Record was actually written before the April 1922 Dunmanway killings. In fact his 1993 reference to it states that it was published in May 1922 and therefore he believed that its comments included all victims before that date, including by definition, the victims of the Dunmanway killings.[x] There should, therefore, be no doubt that the post truce Dunmanway killings are covered by the Record of Rebellion in Hart’s mind. While it has been proven, and Dr. Regan accepts, that the Record of Rebellion in Ireland does not actually include the Dunmanway murders Hart believed it did up to the time of his untimely death in 2010 as he did not subsequently revise this belief.
There is no doubt that John Regan was initially misled by the fact that the foreword of Vol. II of the Record of the Rebellion in Ireland states it was written in May 1922 into concluding that it included Dunmanway. So too was Peter Hart. It was only when a second copy of the record was released to the National Archives in Kew was it able to be shown that the relevant part of the document had been written before the April events. While Eve Morrison and Gerard Murphy have shown that the main text of the Record was written before the Dunmanway murders, but this interesting fact now turns out to be unimportant in the debate.
In a second related point Regan also states in his most recent commentary on this topic, West Cork and the writing of history, that:
The same possibility [that the record applies to the Dunmanway murders] should have occurred to Hart in the 1990s. But for reasons which should now be obvious, Hart could not cite [in 1998] the quotation referencing the Bandon informers and British intelligence (nor David Fitzpatrick’s references to it), without compromising his argument that Bandon Protestants were as uncooperative with Crown forces as reportedly their co-religious were elsewhere in Southern Ireland. [xi]
To be absolutely clear, Hart did cite the Record of Rebellion to make his argument in The IRA and its Enemies but left out its crucial qualification about the links between local loyalists and British Intelligence in his study area of the Bandon valley. On page 285 of the book he says that ‘the Protestant community in Bandon and elsewhere in Cork had, with few exceptions, been noticeably reticent during the tan war and provided far more frustration than support to the Crown forces’,[xii] and refers the reader to the next chapter where it is discussed on page 305. The discussion on page 305 is referenced (Fn91) to page 31 of Part ii of the Record of Rebellion. In the following footnote at the bottom of page 306 the reference (Fn 92, ibid, ii) for the actual quote from the Record that 'Protestants had little information to give' which Hart uses to confirm his sectarian thesis could be easily missed because the note glides into a long comment about Florence O’Donoghue’s view of informers.[xiii] It is this quote which was truncated to omit mention of exceptional Bandon cooperation with the security forces.
Summary:
The evidence shows Peter Hart believed that the Record of Rebellion in Ireland was printed after the Dunmanway murders. He used the Record of Rebellion to argue that Protestants (including the Dunmanway victims) had little information to give. His claim based on the Record of Rebellion has been shown to be the complete opposite of what the document actually said for his core study area of the Bandon valley in West Cork.[xiv] in that valley many of the loyalist farmers provided information and some were killed by the IRA as a result, while many of the others suffered ‘grave material loss’.[xv] Why Hart decided to omit this crucial qualification is a separate question but there should be no dispute about Hart’s inclusion of the Dunmanway victims in his statistics. As historians are clearly building arguments based on incorrect information it is better to correct it now before it further pollutes the historical record of these events.
[i] Fitzpatrick, D. (2012b). Terror in Ireland: 1916-1923. Dublin, Lilliput Press
[ii] Most of the discussion is included in papers on Academia.edu uploaded by John Regan http://dundee.academia.edu/johnregan (accessed 30 November 2013); Murphy G. (2012) ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde John Regan, Peter Hart and the ‘Bandon Valley Massacre’,weblog, http://year-of-disappearances.blogspot.ie/2012/02/strange-case-of-dr-jekyll-and-mr-hyde.html (accessed 30 November 2013).
[iii] My re-examination of the Dunmanway murders called Massacre in West Cork: the Dunmanway and Ballygroman killings will be published by Mercier Press in mid January 2014. Michael Laffin noted in 1999 that Hart’s list of 200 Protestant victims in the ‘Protestant Experience of Revolution in Southern Ireland’ (Walker and English eds., p.89) runs up to 1923. Laffan, M. (1999). The resurrection of Ireland the Sinn Féin Party, 1916-1923. Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press. p. 289
[iv] This is normal academic behaviour but it does mean that any critic should read his Trinity College thesis, a 1993 article in Cork: History & Society, Dublin, Geography Publications; a 1996 chapter ‘The Protestant experience of revolution in Southern Ireland’ in English, R., & Walker, G. S. (1996), Unionism in modern Ireland new perspectives on politics and culture, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, Macmillan Press; his 1998 book Hart, P. (1998). The I.R.A. and its enemies: violence and community in Cork, 1916-1923. Oxford, Clarendon Press and his 2003 compendium Hart, P. (2003), The I.R.A. at war, 1916-1923, Oxford, Oxford University Press and various article interviews and letters to gain a full understanding of his theory.
[v] Morrisson E. (2012) ‘Reply to John Regan’, Dublin review of Books, Ms. Morrison states ‘For a start, it is in fact easy to establish that the Record of the Rebellion is not referring to the April 1922 events. It was published before those events took place. The full set of the Record of the Rebellion with accompanying notes on its compilation and printing were declassified by the National Archives at Kew in 2001. - See more at: http://www.drb.ie/reviews/reply-to-john-regan#sthash.SFzbewNO.dpuf
[vi] Record of the rebellion in Ireland in 1920-1 (Volume II, 1922), Jeudwine papers 72/82/1, Imperial War Museum
[vii] Murphy, G. (2012) ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: John Regan, Peter Hart and the ‘Bandon Valley Massacre’ Blog, http://year-of-disappearances.blogspot.ie/; Regan J. (2012) The History of the last atrocity, Dublin Review of Books http://www.drb.ie/more_details/12-06 22/The_History_of_the_Last_Atrocity.aspx Murphy states of the Record that ‘It went to the printers on April 13, two weeks before these events. WO 141/93’. Whether it did or not Hart explicitly links the Hornibrook deaths to the pursuit of informers in The IRA and its enemies. In the 'Spies and Informers chapter on page 293 he says 'Even excluding policemen the IRA killed twice as many Irish men and women before July 1922...' and goes on the say 'These were the victims of a second acknowledged civil war: the war against spies and informers'. At the bottom of page 295 he states, ‘At least 204 civilians were deliberately shot by the IRA in Cork in the course of the revolution, the vast majority of whom were alleged to be spies and informers’ and on page 299 he states, ‘The pursuit of informers led to vendettas against whole families like the Goods, Bradfields, Cotters, Sweetnams, Hornibrooks, Beales, Blemins, and Woods’. Three of these families are victims of the Dunmanway murders [Hornibrook, Bradfield, and Woods] while the other four are suspected informers in 1921.
[viii] To be strictly accurate the figure he uses in the chart on page 304 of The IRA and its enemies is 204 and 36% of that figure is 73. In the main text of the book he does not explain how he arrived at it but he slightly changes the figures between his 1992 thesis, his 1993 chapter in Cork: History & Society , his 1996 article The Protestant Experience of Revolution and the 1998 book. In the 1911 census Protestants made up 8.9% of the population of Cork County. Gerard Murphy, Andy Bielenberg, John Borgonovo, Eunan O’Halpin, Padraig Óg O Ruairc and I have all failed (separately) to come up with a figure greater than 35 (17% of 204) or so for Protestant ‘spies and informers’ shot while the total number of Protestant civilians killed in Cork was 50, or so, between 1919 and 1923; see also Keane B. (2013) ‘Protestant Civilians killed in Cork 1921-1923’, website https://sites.google.com/site/protestantcork191136/protestant-civilians-killed-in-cork-1921-1923 which itemises 47 deaths.
[ix] Hart P. ‘Class, Community and the Irish Republican Army in Cork, 1917-1923’ in O'Flanagan, P., Buttimer, C. G., & O'Brien, G. (1993), Cork: history & society. Dublin, Geography Publications, pp. 963-981, see especially p. 979; Hart (1998) P. 285; In Fn 80 on the same page Hart refers the reader to the next chapter where he repeats the comment on P. 305. See discussion below.
[x] Hart (1993) p. 985 Footnote 61
[xi] Regan J. (2013) West Cork and the writing of history’, Dublin Review of books, http://www.drb.ie/reviews/west-cork-and-the-writing-of-history#sthash.O807nCrM.dpuf; See also Regan, J. M. (2012). ‘The “Bandon Valley Massacre” as a Historical Problem’, History.97, 70-98.
[xii] Hart (1998) p.285
[xiii] Hart (1998) p. 305 Footnote 91 & p. 306 Footnote 92
[xiv] Murphy, B. P., & Meehan, N. (2008), Troubled history: a 10th anniversary critique of Peter Hart's The IRA and its enemies. [Millstreet], Aubane Historical Society; Keane B. (2014) Massacre in West Cork, Cork, Mercier Press due Jan 2014
[xv] See also Fitzpatrick, D. (1977). Politics and Irish life 1913-1921: provincial experience of war and revolution. Dublin, Gill and Macmillan. P.31