Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc’s The Disappeared and the use of selective amnesia

 

Further battles in the war of the commas

 

‘A groundbreaking book, the first of its kind.’ So says the blurb of Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc’s new book. And on the face of it, you might be forgiven for thinking that this does seem to be the case. From looking through the text and the citations, you might think that nothing had ever been previously published on disappearances in Ireland. Despite having already written in detail about almost half the cases he deals with, not only do I not appear in the index, but references to The Year of Disappearances are splendidly noticeable by their absence.

However, like Schrödinger’s Cat, I am not totally invisible. I get two mentions in the book. In spite of quoting an Irish proverb: ‘Is mór an fhírinne agus buafaidh sí’ – ‘the truth is great and will prevail’, Ó Ruairc manages to use these mentions to tell two lies. So I guess I can’t say I have a hundred percent record of being blanked.

The first is a repeat of Niall Meehan’s slur that The Year of Disappearances is a work of fiction that I rewrote as non-fiction, to which Ó Ruairc adds helpfully that ‘how successful he was in this is questionable’. Anybody who had read The Year of Disappearances knows that this is simply a lie and that the novel I wrote on events in Knockraha some years earlier was an entirely different entity and was completed long before I engaged with The Year of Disappearances. (The background to this is laid down elsewhere in these pages.)  His second lie is that I took the claims of Martin Corry, who ran the ‘death camp’ at Knockraha, at face value when the entire premise of The Year of Disappearances was scepticism of Corry’s claims. (Now, it is true that, with the recent release Corry’s IRA pension application and those of a dozen other East Cork veterans I have revised that view on the basis that, between them, they mention so many people picked up and shot that there cannot be smoke without fire.) But at the time I wrote that book I was highly sceptical of Corry’s bona fides.

But begs the question: If The Year of Disappearances is an attempt at fiction gone wrong, why is it that so many of the details Ó Ruairc uses in his descriptions of disappearances in Cork have already appeared in my book or in this website? Is it possible that this material had simply been borrowed from my work without acknowledgement? This is like buying something at a car boot sale and persuading yourself that the seller is the owner. Perish the thought.

This is not plagiarism, of course, not in the technical sense. Nobody has any divine right to the historical record. It is just that it flies in the face of academic practice which is to give credit to those who uncover new material or make new discoveries. And seeing as these are guys who parade their doctorates as if they are medals won in a war, you would expect that they would adhere to what is standard practice, if not simply good manners. What you don’t do is imply that you discovered stuff yourself when somebody else had been there ahead of you.

However, it sometimes requires ingenuity to avoid mentioning me and in this Ó Ruairc demonstrates significant creativity. To give just one example:

·       This concerns the disappearance of William J. Nolan who was abducted and shot by the IRA as a spy just before the Truce of July 1921. On page 63 of his book, Ó Ruairc describes the abduction of Nolan from near his home in Cork on the morning of the Truce, 11 July 1921. Nolan was aged 17. He was the son of an RIC man and had applied to join the RIC himself and, perhaps not unsurprisingly, was believed to have been spying for the British. I was interested in Nolan because he had been brought up in my own parish of Glenville, where his father spent time as a policeman in the early years of the century. But it was what Ó Ruairc had to say about him that piqued my interest: ‘He [Nolan] had been abducted and executed by Patrick ‘Pa’ Scannell and other members of E Company, 2nd Battalion, Cork No. One Brigade.’ This is followed by a citation reference number 45. Strictly speaking, the statement is not true; Scannell was merely a member of the Company who executed Nolan. He worked in the GPO in Cork and was a sort of spy for the IRA. I don’t think he ever shot anyone in his life. But he was certainly part of the group who picked up Nolan.

·       Pa Scannell mentioned the killing of Nolan and that of several others in his IRA pension application. But here’s where it gets interesting: I’m the only one to the best of my knowledge to have a copy of part of Pa Scannell’s IRA pension application since it has yet to be released. And I only have it because my wife’s sister is married to Pa Scannell’s grandnephew who passed it on to me. I used it in an essay in these pages a few years ago. So when I read the above sentence in Ó Ruairc’s book, along with its citation reference 45, I wondered how could he avoid having to mention me as the source. So it was with great curiosity that I flipped on to the reference section to see what citation 45 referred to. What I found was that Ó Ruairc’s citation 45 refers to page 69 of John Borgonovo’s ‘Spies and Informers’ book, which doesn’t mention Pa Scannell at all. A line or two later O Ruairc does reference Scannell's pension application - which he states is in the 'IMA' which of course presumably it is - though he'd need X ray goggles to see it through the walls of Portobello Barracks. (If the file had been released it would have a proper archival citation number and not just IMA which presumably stands for Irish Military Archives.) Yet O Ruairc manages to quote it when annotating the sentence: 'Nolan's body appears to have been secretly buried and has never been recovered.' Which is fine, except that Scannell's documentation doesn't mention this either.

·         

Hermeneutics – ‘all a matter of context’

 

For all that, Ó Ruairc’s is a still an interesting book, though not necessarily for the reasons you might expect. There is no doubting his commitment and enthusiasm for his subject. He covered lots of deaths from all over the country, not just in Cork – though he did miss out on one or two. Anyone who is prepared to carve the name of a disappeared British soldier from over a hundred years ago on a stone and carry that stone all the way across a bog to mark the burial spot deserves credit. But the book confirms something I had long suspected: that what has been going on in Irish historical circles over the past decade is a sort of land-grab of the historical narrative to suit a pan-nationalist agenda. (Such an observation is not exactly rocket science to anyone who follows these matters.)

When The Year of Disappearances came out in 2010, I expected to get grief from people whose grandfathers (and sometimes grandmothers) fought in the War of Independence and who might be unhappy with what I wrote. Yet that didn’t happen. The grief I got came entirely from neo-nationalist historians and pseudo-historians. And chief among them at the time was Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc who, with the help of his friend Meehan, was like a dog with a bone pursuing what were often little more than grammatical errors to try to discredit the book.

I wasn’t sure where all this was coming from at the time, though Meehan was a well-known Sinn Fein propagandist. The political subtext is much clearer now and can be illustrated by the position Ó Ruairc takes on two topics, which he highlighted in a long article he wrote for the Irish Times on publication and indeed also in the book’s blurb. The first is that the ‘Old IRA’ of the 1920s disappeared many more persons than did the Provisionals between 1970 and 1990. Ó Ruairc uses this to establish equivalents between the two and that basically there was little to distinguish them. (This is the core argument of Danny Morrison’s pamphlet ‘The Good Old IRA’ which maintains that the Provisionals were simply a continuation of what went on during the War of Independence.) And it is true that ‘the bog job’ has a long and grim tradition, though I suspect that if you divide the number of disappeared by the total number of activists in each period that the Provos might still come out ahead.

But of course, there is more to life – or death – than disappearances. Ó Ruairc takes various politicians of the Fine Gael and Fianna Fail variety to task for the crime of suggesting that there was little equivalence between the two, that, while in 1920 the IRA had a mandate (the General Election of 1918 that overwhelmingly voted for Sinn Fein and independence), Provisional Sinn Fein, the public face of the Provisional IRA, never had more than 4% support in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and miniscule support in the Republic. There is also of course the little question of methodology such as kneecappings, punishment shootings and the large-scale car bombing of shopping centres and urban areas that led to hundreds of civilian deaths. Indeed, many of ‘the Old IRA’ who were still alive, such as Vinnie Byrne, one of Michael Collins’s Squad, disowned the Provisionals out of hand.[1]

This political dimension drives the book. This can be illustrated by the case of Edward Parsons. Since this is dealt with previously in these pages – ad nauseum some might say – the details need not concern us here. Suffice it to say that in the view of  Ó Ruairc is that Parsons, a fifteen-year-old Protestant kid and member of Cork YMCA who was abducted and executed in the spring of 1922, could not possibly have been tortured by hanging him from a beam on a barn on Corry’s farm, nor could this method of interrogation have yielded names that led other members of the YMCA, including William Dalton whom O Ruairc mentions, to be subsequently lifted, shot and buried. In other words he ignores three first-hand accounts of this episode in favour of a second-hand opinion of a man who was not even there to the effect that Parsons had been shot and buried at Lehanaghmore, south of Cork city. Therefore, he could not possibly have been killed at Corry’s. This selective use of second-hand evidence over much more reliable material has a political motivation pure and simple. We can’t have people going around saying that the Cork IRA tortured and shot Protestant teenagers in 1922, even if all the evidence is that they did. Even the merest suggestion that this might have some kind of sectarian motivation is enough to send our neo-nationalist historians into paroxysms of denial. (The reality of course is much more complex – there was both an espionage and a sectarian dimension to this.)

So why would a professional historian favour poor information over more reliable information? The answer is simple: by moving the killing of Parsons away from Corry’s, you manage to discredit Corry and at the same time dismiss The Year of Disappearances and the history of Knockraha written by local historian Jim Fitzgerald as ‘folklore’. In the reference section he does not credit Jim Fitzgerald with being the author of his own book! entitling it rather as ‘Anon., History and Folklore of Knockraha’, with the emphasis presumably on the folklore. By claiming that Parsons was never killed at Corry’s you put the cat back in the bag. If Parsons was killed at Lehanaghmore, then a 15-year-old Protestant was never strung up at Corry’s, nor did he confess to having been a spy. Therefore, there was no spy ring operating out of the YMCA – which, Corry stated, consisted of ‘senior and junior’ wings, exactly how the YMCA was run. (How could Corry get to know this otherwise? I would doubt that a rural farmer out in Knockraha would have known what the YMCA was, or that it even existed.) And by not being killed in the manner he was he could not have given away another half dozen names which – and again we have to rely on IRA pension applications to put some bones on this – were subsequently rounded up and killed. And of course, if Parsons had not confessed and given the information he did, then a whole community of Protestant YMCA members did not flee Cork city in the late spring and early summer of 1922. By transferring Parsons’s death to Lehanamore, Ó Ruairc manages to kill a lot of unwanted birds with one stone.[2]

 

One of my many crimes

There is, however, a funny side to all of this. Among the crimes I am being accused of by Ó Ruairc is ‘inaccurate transcriptions of documents.’ This is a repeat of a claim he and Meehan put out at the time The Year of Disappearances was published. Now he repeats it, citing the Sunday Tribune of 16 January 2011 in support of this. (Amazing that he can cite this while managing to avoid mentioning Year of Disappearances as the source of much of his material concerning Cork disappearances.) In 2011, just after my book came out and frantically scratching for errors in it, they came across a quotation I used from the Ernie O’Malley Papers in which I quoted Cork IRA veteran Connie Neenan to the effect that three members of Cork YMCA were shot by the IRA and their bodies buried in the Frankfield area around the time of the Truce.

Ó Ruairc argued that the ‘3 were friends, they confessed their trackings and they were killed’, which I wrote, was a mistranscription and that it should have read ‘Both kids confessed their trackings and they were killed.’ I wrote ‘3 were friends’ on the basis that O’Malley routinely used numerals as a shorthand in transcribing his interviews. At the time, I conceded that Ó Ruairc might have been right, even though the quotation is unambiguously about YMCA members. Ó Ruairc used this to pretend that no members of the YMCA disappeared in this period and that the those referred to were two ‘spies’ Nolan (above) and Begley captured and shot on the eve of the Truce. However, there is now convincing evidence that three YMCA boys did disappear – just that it took place not ‘just before the Truce’ as Neenan asserts but a some weeks earlier.

It was a storm in a teacup designed to catch me out. And with the help of an unwitting reporter in the Sunday Tribune, Ó Ruairc got his ‘win’. Now he returns to the scene of his big triumph as though he had won the Eurovision Song Contest: ‘Author Owns up to Errors in IRA Death Book’ (Sunday Tribune, 16/1/2011). If I may be allowed to quote what I said myself at the time in reply to Ó Ruairc:

Perhaps I should take it as a compliment that someone with Mr O’Ruairc’s considerable scholarly skills could only find three relatively minor errors in a book of 141,000 words – one of them based upon the transcription of a single letter. To write a book of 335 plus pages and make no mistakes is surely a superhuman feat – even with the best editorial help. But I would not be naive enough to think we have heard the last of Mr O’Ruairc and his friends on this. I’d imagine there must be other errors in the text. It’s probably only a matter of time before Mr O’Ruairc comes back on these with all guns blazing. The above points are real of course. But they are so trivial that the temptation is not to bother to defend them – with obvious results.

(For those who are not bored to death by this tedious replay of trifles, see my replies to Ó Ruairc of 5 October 2011 in these pages for a detailed account of how this farce was played out.) And that’s how it rested. As it turns out, he was wrong in his interpretation of O’Malley’s writing: it was three then, it is three now. He was just doing little dodge to pretend that YMCA teenagers did not disappear.

But the only reason for mentioning it here is that O’Malley’s handwriting is notoriously difficult to interpret, particularly since readers were not allowed to bring cameras or take copies of the text which is held in UCD’s archives. (An exception seems to have been made for Ó Ruairc, since he continued to pester both myself and my publisher for a year or two afterwards with photos of the offending line.)

The reason this is funny now is that Ó Ruairc has just fallen into the same trap when he had to wrestle with O’Malley’s handwriting for his current book. Describing the case of the killing of Lieutenant Seymour Vincent in Glenville, in northeast Cork, Ó Ruairc quotes the O’Malley Notebooks and someone called ‘Jim Bronagh’ that the information leading to the recovery of Vincent’s body was sent in by ‘a local loyalist’ who said that Vincent was buried in Linehan’s Bog near Glenville which the writer claimed was owned by one ‘Daniel Hickey, the notorious rebel farmer’. Ó Ruairc goes on to quote ‘Jim Bronagh’ (called Jim Bronach elsewhere in the text) that it was ‘that fecker Daly’, the man who shot Vincent (while he was trying to escape), who wrote the letter so that he could claim the £50 reward that Vincent’s family had offered for information.

Ó Ruairc’s account of the disappearance of Vincent is largely correct, even if he leaves out some salient points such as that Vincent was suffering from his nerves ever since the Battle of the Somme and had deserted from the British army and was in fact avoiding an army detachment when he went awol. (Military Intelligence also stated that he was not one of their agents – something Ó Ruairc also manages not to mention, though I pointed this out a number of years ago.) Dan Daly – whose family were my near neighbours – was indeed the man who shot Vincent. But he was not the man who claimed the reward. Every year, on the day of Glenville Sports in mid-summer, Dan Daly and one or two other Old IRA veterans would climb over the wall of the Church of Ireland graveyard in Glenville where Vincent is buried and say prayers at the soldier’s grave. This is not exactly the behaviour of someone who had claimed a reward for information on a man he had killed.

But who sent in the letter if Dan Daly didn’t? The author of the letter, who described himself as a ‘racked loyalist’ and was only semi-literate, was none other than the man on whose land he claimed the body was buried, ‘Daniel Hickey, the notorious rebel farmer’. (Linehan’s bog was not owned by Hickey. But it was just over the ditch from his farmyard and the burial spot was only a hundred yards from his house.) Dan Hickey was known to all and sundry as ‘The True Son’ and was a colourful character noted for writing ‘poetry’ and exaggerated accounts of his own life. It was said of him that he used to go around the town of Fermoy for years afterwards wearing Vincent’s wristwatch. Everyone in Glenville knows that it was The True Son who sent in the letter and claimed the reward for finding Vincent’s remains.

But how did ‘Jim Bronagh’ manage to claim that it was Dan Daly? Almost certainly, he didn’t and what happened was that Ó Ruairc fell into the trap of mistranscribing O’Malley’s handwriting and that ‘that fecker Daly’ was in fact ‘that fecker Hickey’. ‘Jim Bronagh’, whose name Ó Ruairc also got wrong – twice – was in fact Jimmy Brennock, the O/C of the Rathcormac Company of the IRA. I knew Jimmy Brennock when I was growing up. He was a buyer for the Irish Sugar Company in the 1960s and used to vet the beet crops sown by my father when I was a child. Jimmy lived in just outside Rathcormac village, a few miles from Dan Daly. They served together in the same IRA company and would have met every Sunday after Mass and gone every year to Kilcrumper Graveyard for the annual Liam Lynch Commemoration. It is highly unlikely he thought Daly reported on Vincent’s remains. In other words, Ó Ruairc fell into the trap that is O’Malley’s writing twice in the same paragraph. In the war of the commas, what goes around, always comes around.

 

---

[1] Ó Ruairc’s links to Sinn Fein activists is clear from his acknowledgements. Among those he thanks, is ‘Dr Niall Meehan’. Meehan was head of journalism at Griffith College for many years spokesman and was a general dirt gatherer for neo-nationalist pseudo-history. He had ‘revisionists’ always in his sights with his ‘four legs good, two legs bad’ narrative.  Ó Ruairc calls him ‘a tenacious researcher and campaigner’. That much is certainly true.

 

[2] Parsons was abducted as a spy in the spring of 1922 in the same week as his friend and fellow YMCA member Thomas Roycroft. Parsons was shot, and his body buried after being tortured by hanging him from a beam of an outhouse on Martin Corry’s farm in Glaunthaune. This is confirmed by a number of IRA veterans as well as by neighbours. Ó Ruairc and Bielenberg cite a southside Volunteer Stephen Harrington who claimed when interviewed by Free State forces that Parsons had been killed and buried in Lenenagh. It is likely that it was Roycroft that Harrington was referring to since he was a neighbour of both and nobody has ever claimed Roycroft for Knockraha.

 

 

Cold Case Collins

A number of people have asked me in the past week what I thought of Cold Case Collins, the documentary screened on RTE 1 to commemorate the death of Michael Collins a hundred years ago. Apart from a minor irritation – I can’t stand the docu-drama format of actors re-enacting historical events – I was gratified to see that what facts as could be established around the events at Bealnablath were confirmed and that the many myths and legends surrounding Collins’s death were given short shrift. I would have been even more gratified however if I had been included in the credit notes at the end of the programme because it seemed to me that ninety percent of the evidence used in the film must have lifted directly from my book The Great Cover-Up. This extends from putting Florrie O’Donoghue at the centre of events, to the exoneration of Emmet Dalton, to the fact that there were several groups of IRA men, not just one, at Bealnablath on the day. Even the idea of two Gardai investigating the killing two years afterwards was borrowed, though I allowed them their real names and published what they found – or what they believed they had found, even if it contradicted some of what I believed myself. In fact, the entire programme, bar one salient detail, seems to have been entirely culled from my book.

As most people who know me are aware I was trained as a scientist. It is drilled into scientists to always give credit to those who made the prior discoveries on which our own are based – we stand on the shoulders of giants and all that kind of stuff. I try to operate on that basis and make every effort to give credit where credit is due – even if I may not like a particular individual. If you use somebody else’s findings, then you are honour bound to cite your sources. This does not seem to be the case in history circles, however, at least in Ireland, or at least that has been my experience of them. People seem to think they can take your research and pass it on as their own without giving any credit for it. Though it is not strictly speaking plagiarism it is still a form of deceit and should be a complete no-no in any knowledge-based enterprise. In the case of Cold Case Collins it even extended to the stack of books written on Collins on the table in front of the panel of experts in which mine is notable by its absence even though it is the only coherent book published on Bealnablath in the past thirty years and has to have been the principal one used in the programme. Or at least if it is present, it cannot be seen. Maybe it was a sort of literary Schrodinger’s Cat, which makes things even worse. It’s all quite extraordinary.

Then again, it could have been a lot worse. A number of academic historians have borrowed my sources on an industrial scale to set up an entire data base while at the same time taking every opportunity to attack me for having used those sources in the first place – while themselves deliberately misinterpreting them. So I was expecting some snide commentary. It didn’t come – apart perhaps from one from Caoimhe Níc Dhábhéid in which she was cheerfully dismissive of books written on Collins’s death, while she herself took the trouble to appear on a documentary about Collins’s death! I suppose we should be grateful for such small mercies.  The bottom line is that my book saved the documentary makers from having to carry out half a decade’s worth of research. Or alternatively, it saved them from making a totally rubbish programme. To borrow its contents without acknowledging its existence is pretty bad manners, to say the least.

But this is all beside the point. The important thing is: did the programme shed any new light on the death of Collins? The short answer is that it did – a little. A forensic examination of the cap Collins wore on the day carried out for the programme showed a tiny entry bullet hole on the lining of the cap behind the left ear, as well as the larger exit wound on the right. This confirmed what I had found when I tracked down a note written by Dr Patrick Cagney who examined the body in Shanakiel Hospital on the night of the killing in which he said he found a small entry hole on Collins’s skull in the hair-line at the back of his left ear. While this adds nothing new to the story, it does confirm that bit of it. The bullet that killed Collins was travelling left to right and at roughly the same elevation as Collins’s head. So the shooter, wherever he was to Collins’s left, was level with his head.  Almost everything else in the programme was a reprise of what is in The Great-Cover-Up.

However, I also had the feeling that there was more to the story than meets the eye and that some information which is also in The Great Cover-Up was left on the cutting floor. The programme makers brought in Dr Audrey Whitty from the National Museum which has the custody of the Collins artifacts to discuss them, which she did. Dr Clara Boland of Forensic Science Ireland, who found the entry hole in the cap, then said that she looked forward to examining the artifacts Dr Whitty spoke of. She mentioned his greatcoat and his death mask as well as the cap. However, the latter two never surfaced in the programme again, suggesting perhaps that she did examine them but that the programme makers decided to let them out of the final cut. The death mask is uncontroversial and was briefly commented on though it could have been used to dismiss the idea – often mooted and even hinted at in the programme – that Collins might have been shot through the forehead. But the greatcoat is important.

Yet it was ignored by the programme. However, there may have been a good reason for this. Because what the coat – which is on public display in the National Museum – shows, is that there are bloodstains still visible on the right shoulder and on the collar and the epaulettes on the right-hand side but none at all on the back or on the left. Even a cursory examination shows that most, if not all, of the bloodstains are to Collins’s right. This of course corresponds to the holes in the cap and to the direction the bullet was travelling but it should really have been dealt with.

Likewise, there is no mention of the two photographs of the site taken by Agnes Hurley the morning after the ambush which clearly show the track of Collins’s blood along the road where he went down. The bloodstain lies parallel to the direction of the road and is around two metres long and demonstrates categorically that the bullet that killed him must have come from someone who was further up along the road from where he was standing, rather than from the IRA men who were firing from across the hill. It also confirms exactly where Collins went down, so there should be no further debate on that point – and yet one of the contributors still placed the spot he died as some twenty yards to the south of this.

I can see why the programme makers decided to leave out these details, however. Because if the bullet came down the road from someone who was some distance to the south of Collins but at roughly the same elevation as his head then it cannot have come from any of the IRA men across on the hill. In fact, the bullet was coming from where no IRA men are supposed to have been hiding, if IRA accounts are to be believed. This also fits the scenario described by Joe Dolan, Collins’s personal bodyguard, who told a newspaper the following day that he noticed a sniper crawling on his hands and knees down the road towards Collins’s immediately before he was shot.

To give that evidence – which seems to me to be incontrovertible – would be to open up a whole new can of worms and the programme declared at the beginning that it would not do that. However, the can of worms does exist, whether the programme made reference to it or not. Instead, they sort of waffled that the bullet must have come from across the hill when even their own evidence said that that could not have been the case.

In summary, the documentary was worthwhile, even if it was selective – though with the Florrie O’Donoghue ‘episode’ it did leave the matter open to interpretation, which I think is fair enough. There is more to this than meets the eye. I was happy enough with the programme though I would have made it differently – as a straight documentary with none of the mock-ups. The Great Cover-Up was vindicated, even if no such a vindication was even hinted at. As someone once said you can achieve anything so long as you don’t try to claim credit for it. Also of course the last word has not been written on Bealnablath. But least the right questions are now beginning to be asked – and I’m sure people are busy trying to answer them.

 

 

A Most Reliable Man

At the end of 2020 I released new a book on Amazon.com. It is called A Most Reliable Man. Due to various glitches it did not show up on Amazon.co.uk searches if you searched from a location in Ireland though it showed up to those resident in the UK. (Ours is not to ask why.) However it is searchable on the other Amazon outlets. As a result of Brexit and customs and trade tariffs and what not, I suggested it was probably still easier to get it from Amazon.de. 

This is just a brief update to say Hurray! It has just appeared as available on Amazon.co.uk. I'm almost afraid to flag it since it appeared twice, in December and January, before vanishing again. But, touching wood and all that, as of today, 1 May 2021, it does appear that you can buy it from Amazon.co.uk, which is both cheaper and easier.

Anyway, why should you want to buy the book in the first place? Well, basically if you want to know what actually happened in Ireland during the War of Independence. Because from a strictly historical point of view, along with a companion volume, which I hope to have out at some stage in 2022, it may well be the most significant book I will have written, at least in terms of shedding new light on historical events. Though narrow in focus in one sense – the career of one man – it rights many historical wrongs since its implications extend to pull in many of the events of the Irish revolutionary period. It allows us to view the War of Independence, particularly in Cork, in a completely new light.

Most people with an interest in the period will be aware that many unanswered questions surround the conflict in Cork, widely regarded as being the most active area in the country. If we look at the next most active area, Dublin, there are far fewer unanswered questions. Historians are in general agreement when it comes to events like Bloody Sunday, Michael Collins’s intelligence war, the campaign against the DMP detective branch and so on. You will not hear historians cutting each others throats over Bloody Sunday for instance.

Not so in Cork. In Cork, leaving aside well-known events like the burning of the city, there are at least as many anomalies as there are agreed facts. Or at least there are ‘facts’ that are often foisted on us by various political and historiographical players but these ‘facts’ are often based on ignoring the anomalies. Despite two very detailed and accurate histories of the conflict by the late Peter Hart and William Sheehan there are still a whole range of things that are not adequately explained in published works. To give just two examples. Why were so many civilians shot as ‘spies’ in the city, when British records suggest most of them were innocent? Why was it that the leadership of the Cork No.1 Brigade arrested with Terence MacSwiney in August 1921 were all released by the British within days, even though the British knew who most of them were? And why did the British effectively stage a coup in the IRA in order to have Seán O’Hegarty appointed as O/C of the Cork No.1 Brigade?

And there are a great number of other issues dealt with here, from betrayed ambushes such as Clonmult and Upton to the fact that officers of the Cork No.1 Brigade refused to pass on to Dublin peace feelers being made by the British in Cork in May 1921. So plenty to chew on for the interested party. Not all these questions will be answered in the first book, of course. Some of them will have to wait until the final volume. But many of them will be answered, if not completely, then at least a lot of new light will be shed on them. There are whole rafts of stuff uncovered here that nobody has even been aware of up to this point.

This does not of course overturn the overall narrative of the War of Independence in Cork or elsewhere, since the British had already conceded much of what turned out to be Irish sovereignty before the conflict even began. The IRA ‘won’ because they managed to survive long enough for the politics to catch up with reality. Had the IRA been defeated over the second half of 1921 – which was certainly the wish of some of the personalities who appear in this narrative, these personalities themselves would never have been heard of – which would almost certainly also have been their wish.

In short, this book, A Most Reliable Man and the following volume – so far, I have not come up with a suitable title for it – provide answers to a great number of questions, some of which were not even posed before now, as well as shedding light on others. It can be truly described – and I’m not  losing the run of myself here – as ground-breaking, in that it opens a lot of new ground. If nothing else, it debunks quite a lot of poor and lazy history. Of course, as one of our greater scribes put it, ‘the naked truth is still taboo’. But that does not mean it is not true – or not embarrassingly naked for that matter.

However, I think my readers deserve an explanation for why I chose to put this out through Amazon and not through a terrestrial publisher – especially since in the weeks before Christmas, Easons in Cork carried a whole shelf-full of The Great Cover-Up, the first volume of this trilogy. So it’s not like there’s no interest in any of this. Modesty forbids me from quoting the comments made by publishers when they were shown the MS of the new book. Let’s just say they were largely positive.

Despite this, no publisher would take it on. I’m sure there are many reasons for this and if I live long enough I may get around to writing about them. Put simply, historical debates are never really about the past. They are always about the present. I stumbled on things, particularly in The Year of Disappearances, that did not go down well in certain quarters. The result is that the most common sound I hear nowadays is the sound of doors being slammed in my face. (Which is why you will not see any ‘dirty-faced revisionists’, in troll-speak, in any of the commemoration programmes hosted by RTE for the centenary of various events.)

This is not a good state of affairs from any point of view. I love bookshops. Even more, I love to see the stocks of my own books dwindle from shelves. Book sellers such as Waterstones have been very good to me over the years. Unfortunately, you’ll not find this book in Waterstones, much as I would like it to be otherwise. Physical copies will not be looking at you from shelves asking to be purchased. And there are bigger problems. Self-publishing a book means it will probably not be reviewed. It will get no air time on telly or radio. In the context of this I will make one prediction: every effort will be made to ignore the book. You will not read about it in the newspapers or hear about it on the history programmes on the radio. It will be a case of ‘I you cannot bring bad news then don’t bring any.’

But the book deserves a readership and if it finds one it will be through word-of mouth. Because if you want to understand the Irish War of Independence, you cannot afford not to read it. (Or maybe you don’t want the truth at all. In that case, avoid it like the plague – take a lot of no notice, as an old neighbour of mine used to say.) But if you like the book and if you think the evidence it presents is substantial, tell your friends about it and keep the reviews coming to Amazon’s website. We should be grateful for whatever meagre pickings the digital Universe can bring us.

Happy New Year

 An update - 6 April 2021

 

This is just an update on what has happened – or rather what has not happened - since the new book was released in early December. As I predicted, it has been pretty effectively ignored, although a curious thing happened a few weeks ago. I got an email from a student of the School of History at UCC who was looking for permission to reproduce a photo from The Years of Disappearances. I had no issue with this. The guy sounded interested and mannerly and even gave me his phone number. He was writing a thesis, he said, on one of those who disappeared in 1920-21. All was going well until I suggested that he get a copy of the new book because there was a section in it that was of direct relevance to him. Then, like Bill Murray’s waiter, I never heard from him again. He never even bothered to thank me for permission to use the pic. One thing I can’t stand is bad manners. But I’d imagine in this case that he got wrapped on the knuckles by his lecturers for even daring to contact me, so he I suppose he has to be forgiven.

But just for pig iron I decided to send off copies of the book for review to the books editors of the Irish newspapers on the basis that I noticed during the first and second Covid lockdowns that the books pages began to carry reviews of self-published works – something which would not have been normal practice. I guess that the reason for this is that they still have book review pages to fill and the publishing houses are delaying the production of new books so there is – literally- a gap in the market. I sent copies off to the Irish Times, the Irish and Sunday Independent, the Sunday Times (Irish edition), the Irish Examiner, the Sunday Business Post, History Ireland and the Belfast Telegraph. It will be very interesting to see if any of these, particularly the Examiner and the Irish Times which regularly carry commemoration pieces for the centenary of the revolutionary years – in fact the former has a regular online supplement devoted solely to the period – will review it or simply chuck it into the bin. In other words, are they actually interested in history as it happened or interested in reproducing historical pablum, particularly since I mentioned in a cover letter that, apart from anything else, the book sheds significant new light on events such as Clonmult, Upton, the death of Tomas MacCurtain, the arrest of Terence MacSwiney and events surrounding 1916 itself. Surely they could not pass up on such a treasure trove. We shall see. It will tell a lot about the way the commemoration of the centenary is being presented in the media.

 

An interesting side-issue: Arguing over asterisks – the finer points of pseudo-history

The only other thing that happened was that a poisonous review appeared on Amazon on The Great Cover-Up, my book on the death of Michael Collins.  It was by somebody calling himself ‘Chris’ and was clearly designed to damage the new book. ‘Chris’, whose prose style showed a remarkable similarity to that of Sinn Fein spokesperson on history Niall Meehan, respectfully described in today’s Irish Times (20/04/2021) as ‘Dr Niall Meehan, head of the journalism and media faculty at Griffith College’, starts with a bang.

‘Disappointing!’ ‘Chris’ writes. ‘Poor! Looked forward to reading the book….’ – though he did not look forward enough to have bought the book when it came out three years ago.

 He then goes into pseudo-pedantry mode.

 ‘I did not have to wait long to become suspicious’ He complains about the first chapter which describes the most important piece of new evidence that has emerged in the 100 years since Collins was killed – the fact that the bullet which killed Collins could not have come from any of the positions where the known IRA men were firing from. But ‘Chris’ ignores all this. Rather he becomes ‘suspicious’ because Florrie O’Donoghue is mentioned on page 2. But not only is he mentioned on page 2 but he is also mentioned in the Prologue – on page 1 to be exact – where it is made quite clear that the book came out of a larger examination of the career of O’Donoghue. So it should be pretty obvious that O’Donoghue is a key figure from the start.

‘Chris’s’ methodology can be seen in the following quotations which he takes out of context: ‘The author conveniently states: 'The man who organized and ordered the ambush told me that one of the ambush party was so armed' (with the Mauser rifle)....very convenient!’ It is not exactly rocket science to see that I hardly met the man who organized the ambush and that this is a quotation in the book. Whoever ordered the ambush was well and truly dead before I ever began to be interested in Bealnablath, yet ‘Chris’ pretends that the man, whoever he was, told me himself.

Then ‘Chris’ goes on: ‘author makes comments on page 174 and then contradicts himself on page 176. On page 174 'Highly trained and experienced snipers where a rarity in the IRA' but on page 176 'There was no shortage of ex-British Army marksmen fighting with the IRA in Kerry'. Again this is picking lines out of context and being deliberately misleading. Highly trained and experienced snipers were indeed a rarity in the IRA, as the next sentence goes on to explain: ‘The IRA’s way of death was usually rough and ready: revolvers shotguns and close-up killing’. I don’t think any historian of the period – obviously ‘Chris’ is an exception – will disagree that this is essentially true. But it is also true that there were several well-known ex-British army marksmen fighting with the IRA in Kerry, particularly in the Civil War. Con Healy of Tralee in the War of Independence, John ‘Gilpin’ Griffin and Fred and Pat Healy in the Civil War are given as examples. So both statements happen to be true when read in context.

‘Chris’ then goes on to complain about words and phrases used. He cites ‘I heard’, ‘reading between the lines’, ‘though does not state directly’, ‘might’ and ‘may’. He is right of course. ‘I heard’ is used four times, ‘reading between the lines’ is used once, ‘might’ and ‘may’ are used 67 and 66 times respectively. But this no more than a consequence of using the English language. Anybody can do this; the word ‘the’ is used over 8,000 times.

And on he goes, searching for pseudo-contradictions, a bullet here, a wound there, in a story which has more real contradictions than almost any in Irish history. (Try writing about the death of JFK while avoiding contradictions.) He says I misquote Emmet Dalton. But of the examples he used of these ‘misquotations’ were not uttered by Dalton at all. And so it marches on in its drivelly way.

But there are some giveaways. ‘Chris’, like Meehan, appears to have rather an obsession with Peter Hart and seems to be set on destroying Hart’s reputation: ‘The author quotes historian Peter Hart who tried to fabricate events in relation to the Kilmichael ambush which were proved [sic] to be false/untrue and yet the author gives him creedence [sic].’ Hart is mentioned just once in my book, on p.75, where he is quoted: ‘Most of the anti-Treaty officers were IRB men, and didn’t care what the Supreme Council told them.’ Anybody who has read it will recognize that this is a key statement in the context of the book. Because it came from Peter Hart is neither here nor there. I quote scores of people in the book.

But the allegation that Hart ‘tried to fabricate events in relation’ to Kilmichael which were proven ‘to be false/untrue’ is verging on the farcical since it was Hart’s critics who tried to fabricate events around the ambush. Anybody who doubts this need only look at Eve Morrison’s podcast on her forthcoming book on Kilmichael, Kilmichael: The Life and Afterlife of an Ambush, in which she forensically shreds the arguments made by Hart’s critics in relation to the ambush.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buVryG55kqs  

Not only did they lie but they knew they were lying – after they went into TCD calling for his head for alleged misrepresentations which they should have known from reading his PhD thesis were not there.

Of course, ‘Chris’ tries to lay a few false trails, praising Dalton along the way, as if to suggest that he (‘Chris’) is actually some sort of Fine Gaeler/Free Stater. But nobody will be fooled by this. Finally, he gets to an actual valid point – though the evidence he uses to support it refers to something else. ‘This suggests that there may have been another element there on the day who had a motive to see Collins dead.’ (Oops, even ‘Chris’ finds himself using the word ‘may’.) But maybe that was the whole point of the exercise.

People wonder why I bother to engage with this kind of specious nonsense, which is the equivalent of arguing over asterisks. Why would I reply to someone like ‘Chris’, who, if he wants to defend O’Donoghue, chooses to hide behind a pseudonym? It is all too easy to laugh at this amateurish nonsense. Some of us laughed at Hart’s critics when they went into Trinity College to try to get Hart stripped of his PhD – posthumously – based on the above fabrications. But people laughed at Donald Trump too when he went searching for Barack Obama’s birth cert. They weren’t laughing at him on the run-up to last November’s US elections. If the kind of stuff produced by ‘Chris’ is what passes for truth in the new Ireland, then we’d all better watch out.

 

 

 

The Killing of Edward Parsons

History by Attrition

Adventures in the Historical Jungle

Introduction

In a recent article in The Guardian entitled ‘The war on history’ Antony Beevor wrote what must be obvious to anyone with an interest in the subject: that history ‘has long been a battleground for the perpetuation of nationalist myths and political attempts to reshape the past.’ Then he adds the good news: ‘in recent decades there have been encouraging developments, with many more international conferences and foreign academics recruited by universities. All of this has helped to reduce the tendency of countries to view the past uniquely from their own patriotic perspectives’. But then he goes on to tell us that this movement is now in decline with ‘governments of all shades still long[ing] to impose their versions of the past through education, pressure on the media and if necessary outright censorship and even legislation. He goes on to cite France, Turkey, Russia and Ukraine as contemporary examples of this. The motivation for twisting historical interpretation to suit current political ends may vary from one country to the next but the result is the same: there are things which cannot be said, or at least must not be said.[1]

Could any of this apply to Ireland? Ireland is of course a daisy in the bull’s belly of world history. However, it is a daisy munched by much the same species of bull, if one may be allowed to mix one's metaphors. If so, in Ireland, the problem would appear to lie not with the government, who tend to stay out of these matters for the most part, but rather with more shadowy forces who want to manipulate the historical back-story for their own ends.

Beevor’s piece brought to mind a conversation, or should I say, an exchange of text messages I had with a friend back in September. It all started one Saturday morning when he texted me: ‘You figure prominently in the latest edition of History Ireland,’ he said. ‘What’s the gist of it?’ I texted back. ‘“Destructive” might be the best way to describe it.’ So I trotted off to the local Easons. And there it was: the first article of the September/October 2017 edition of History Ireland. It was entitled ‘Gerard Murphy, disappearing Freemasons and the limits of ideological revisionism.’ I was not quite sure what to make of the term ‘limits of ideological revisionism’ but clearly, since I had big words attached to my name and I was named in the title, it must have been something important. The article in question was by Dr Andy Bielenberg of UCC’s Department of History. He was not a happy camper. What’s more, the article also attracted editorial comment from the editor of History Ireland. If the comments were carefully phrased – possibly reflecting the gaze of the legal eagles – they were not unsubtle. The gist of it was that it would appear that I was a creator of ‘alternative facts’, ‘bogus conclusions’ and ‘fake history’. In other words, I was effectively being branded a liar, at least in historical, if not in absolute, terms.[2]

What’s more, the ‘bogus conclusions’ I was guilty of arriving at were based on ‘a spectacular misinterpretation of sources’ and of ‘shifting the burden of proof to other historians’. Presumably, I was also one of the ‘certain bloggers’ who ‘persist in pushing a sectarian thesis’. Presumably, also, this was the reason why I was now an ‘ideological revisionist’. And if that were not bad enough, my book The Year of Disappearances had, apparently, a ‘Gothic appeal [which] does not extend to historians, who have slated it in damning reviews’. To make matters worse, the book apparently ‘started out as a work of fiction before being transformed into a work of non-fiction; aspects of the book evidently never quite made the necessary transition’. Clearly I was in a different place to ‘most historians of the Irish revolution who research and access actual evidence’. Phew.

I was used to this sort of thing arriving usually courtesy of online cranks and keyboard warriors. And such online distortion can be safely ignored since everyone knows it for what it is. What was new about this latest broadside was that it was written in ‘Ireland’s premier history magazine’ and by a professional historian. But could it all possibly be true? Did I, for instance, research and access evidence that was not actual? Had my book been ‘slated . . . in damning reviews’ by historians? Was it really a work of fiction in the guise of non-fiction? Was it full of fake facts masquerading as history and based on a spectacular misinterpretation of sources, and pushing a sectarian thesis? These are all, of course, big claims and require a response. But far more interesting was: why produce such a diatribe in the first place? And why bother to produce it now, in effect drawing attention to a book that was as good as out of print. And why draw attention to a blog that is safely ignored by 99.9999% of the human population? Because the reality of all this is that, bar a handful of history buffs, nobody is the slightest bit interested in these endless and tedious historical debates. For the overwhelming majority of people, this is the equivalent of counting angels on a pinhead. So why stir the pot of a non-event? While initially I could not quite figure out the reason for it, the clear intention was to do as much damage to my reputation as possible.

I could see why Bielenberg might be so intemperate. He could, for instance, be simply taking revenge for my criticising his Cork Spy Project, which he published along with Irish American academic Professor James S. Donnelly in 2016, a criticism that was entirely justified on the basis of what was being produced in the project. But why would the editor of History Ireland step back from his role as impartial judge and wade into the fray? I knew over the years that his advice to correspondents was to avoid any tendency to be snide and to try to avoid playing the man, rather than the ball. So why was he doing exactly that now? I was as confused as anybody else. However, I was left with little choice but to address the issues. Otherwise, I would be conniving in the damage to my own reputation. And all one has, at the end of the day, is one’s good name. So what follows is an analysis of the various charges set out against me. I suppose I should have done this years ago. But as Bob Dylan said: ‘You have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice’. Clearly, you also have to pay if you don’t.

The substantive issue

The substantive issue in Bielenberg’s article relates to the alleged disappearance of Freemasons in Cork in 1921/22. This has been dealt with in detail in a previous blog (November 6^th 2017) and need not concern us here. That blog also deals with the supposed issue of ‘shifting the burden of proof onto other historians’. Suffice it to say that Bielenberg exhibited such audacious double standards in his article that taking his arguments apart was as easy as ripping toilet paper. There is nothing to see here, other than the standard historical practice of sifting evidence as far as it goes and then hoping that one’s research will stimulate others into following it up – a practice employed by Bielenberg and by most historians. The writer of an investigative book has to stop somewhere. Otherwise, no history book would ever be finished.

Researching and accessing evidence that was not actual?

I don’t think anyone can seriously claim that the evidence accessed in The Year of Disappearances is not actual evidence. To the best of my knowledge, there is not a single piece of spurious evidence cited. In fact, the main fault I find with the book is that there is too much evidence and that the book tries to cover too many bases. On the other hand, there is hardly a sentence that does not cite some source, all of which can be verified by any historian who wishes to go to the trouble of doing so. There are 41 pages of citations and notes at the end of the book and they are all . . . well . . . actual.

A work of fiction?

This canard was first given life by Sinn Féin’s Niall Meehan in an online review when the book came out. I never bothered to rebut it since it was clearly propaganda and was an effort to stir the pot; indeed it was so transparent that it looked like a joke. However, when respectable professors of history and ‘Ireland’s premier history magazine’ repeat it in print, the whole thing becomes more sinister and calls to mind Goebbels’ dictum that if you repeat a lie often enough it eventually becomes the truth. So now it has to be addressed.

What the preface to The Year of Disappearances actually says was that I had written a novel based on the operation of Sing Sing, the underground vault used by the IRA to hold prisoners prior to execution during the War of Independence in East Cork. This was based on the experiences of a number of my relatives who helped guard prisoners in Knockraha and dig graves under Martin Corry’s command. What happened was that one of the publishers to whom I submitted the novel suggested that I tackle the disappearances of people in Cork as a historical project, something that I was extremely reluctant to do. She did not suggest that I rewrite the novel as non-fiction. The novel was finished at this stage and did not get re-written into anything. The editor in question then moved to another company and half a dozen years later Gill & Macmillan eventually published the final historical work under the title The Year of Disappearances.

So the suggestion that The Year of Disappearances is some sort of a rewrite of a previous novel is specious. It is a convenient fabrication, and to prove that this is the case, all one has to do is read the two. The novel, which I had to publish myself, is called The Kindness of Strangers. They have little in common other than the fact that both are set in the War of Independence, and the early chapters of The Year of Disappearances deal rather quickly with Sing Sing before moving on. What we have here is simply a piece of propagandist distortion being repeated.

‘A Gothic appeal [which] does not extend to historians’

This is the most interesting point since it brings us to the heart of what is actually going on. However, in order to look at this it is necessary to go back over the reception the book received when it was published. Furthermore, most people reading this will probably not have read The Year of Disappearances, so perhaps a brief summary of the book itself will not go astray.

What the book did in essence was to pull a variety of skeletons out of the historical closet which had remained undisturbed for nearly a hundred years. The first section of the book deals largely with Knockraha and ‘Sing Sing’, the underground vault used by the IRA in East Cork to hold prisoners prior to execution. This might sound Gothic but the book rather quickly skips over the details – primarily because I had already covered them in the novel. Indeed, it approaches the claims made about Sing Sing with no small amount of scepticism. Sing Sing served largely as a departure point to look at the many cases of disappearances that took place in Cork during the revolutionary period.

The substance of the book was the so-called ‘intelligence war’ between the IRA and British forces in Cork city. This involved looking at the strengths and weaknesses of IRA and British efforts in Cork and looking – insofar as it was possible to look, given that such material is by definition murky – at those who were shot in the city as spies. Almost 40 individuals suffered this fate. Most of these were ex-soldiers. Six were Protestants, though another six Protestants – whom we are sure of – were killed in the city and environs during the Truce and Civil War periods. One of the myths the book demolishes is the idea that an Anti-Sinn Féin League (ASFL), consisting of a cabal of Protestant business people was targeting the IRA in the city. These ASFL were in fact undercover police and military assassination squads – something that is proven in some detail in Chapters 14 and 15 of the book.

The 'Actual' Evidence

Probably the most important person in the book is Florence O’Donoghue. O’Donoghue was head of IRA intelligence in the city and was therefore at the very centre of this ‘intelligence war’. His claim that nobody was shot as a spy unless sufficient evidence had been found to convict him is belied by the fact that British records of the time state that only one of those shot in the spring of 1912 was in fact a spy – and he was an unreliable one. And this is not just a single claim: the IRA’s inability to target the right person is a theme repeated many times in both police and military correspondence during the first half of 1921. There is a clear disparity here, one that had been all but ignored by those historians who want to paint a rosier picture of the conflict.

Central to the story is the fate of James and Fred Blemens. These were neighbours on the Old Blackrock Road, Cork of Josephine Marchment Brown, O’Donoghue’s future wife. The Blemenses were lifted in late 1920 and were never seen again, having been shot as spies by the IRA. Two and a half months later, James Beal, James Blemens’s son-in-law, was found shot dead in Wilton on the outskirts of the city. A recent TV documentary on the subject suggested that British Intelligence in the form of the Blemenses were ‘closing in’ on the O’Donoghues, so they had to be killed.[3] The fact that the O’Donoghues and the Blemenses lived only two doors apart, and that Florrie O’Donoghue appears never to have been suspected by the British, suggests that if the Blemenses were spies, they were spectacularly incompetent ones. Three members of one family are killed; one of the most senior officers of the IRA, who is known to the British since his name appears in a report from late 1920, lived two doors away – O’Donoghue appears to have moved in by this stage – and the British do not seem to connect the two! If James and Fred Blemens and James Beal were spies, they were not making much of a fist of it.

The book then looks at a number of disappeared teenagers, all of whom had connections to either the RIC or the military and who were probably working as runners or spies of one kind or another. Among them were at least three Protestants members of Cork YMCA, William Edward Parsons and Thomas Roycroft and one other I have become aware of since who disappeared, almost certainly killed by the IRA. Parsons is a central figure in the book since John Borgonovo in his Spies and Informers book written a few years before mine suggested that, based on the accounts of several city IRA men, it was the capture of Parsons that led to the subsequent apprehension of the supposed ‘circle’ of Protestant spies. Borgonovo’s thesis was that these constituted the Anti-Sinn Fein League of alleged ‘spies’ – notwithstanding the fact that the ASFL moniker belonged to another body entirely.[4]

When I established that Parsons – who was indeed a 15-year-old member of the YMCA – had been abducted and shot a year later, in March 1922, that meant that if there was any truth in the suggestion that it was his confession that led to the capture/execution of the alleged ‘spy ring’ this must have taken place on the spring of 1922 rather than in the spring of 1921. There is a severe paucity of information in the latter period since the IRA was by then in control of Cork and was imposing its censorship on the press. It is not possible to establish the extent of what happened. However, what we do know is that Thomas Roycroft disappeared on 9 March 1922, William Parsons disappeared on 20 March and, in between the two, on 17 March, no fewer than seven different newspapers report the further disappearance of six ‘prominent citizens’ who are described only as ‘supporters of the Treaty’. Who these were or what happened to them remains unknown. It is, however, at least plausible to connect all three episodes. (The third YMCA boy who had connections to the army was also abducted during the Truce period.) Clearly the IRA men backdated the killing of Parsons and the others to make it look as if it had happened during the War of Independence – probably to confer the respectability of wartime on it.

It was also clear from Valuation Records (Rate Collection Records) that there was a large turnover of the Protestant population of the south-east suburbs of the city, mainly in the Blackrock/Douglas areas, over the revolutionary period. This was not evident in other parts of the city. A lot of Protestants left suddenly. This could not be described as ‘ethnic cleansing’ or anything like it since in many cases they were replaced by other Protestants, and some of the departed Protestants came back after the Civil War was over. What it did imply, though, was that something nasty happened to Protestants in the south-eastern suburbs of Cork city in 1921/22.

Many of the accounts of IRA survivors suggested a Masonic connection to the above alleged ‘spy ring’. So I researched Freemason records in Dublin to see if there were any indications that some of its members may have disappeared. To my surprise, I found that 32 members had been ‘struck off’ the membership rolls over the period, most of them members of Lodge 71, of which James Beal was a member. Increased accessibility to genealogical records has allowed Barry Keane to establish that all but six (possibly seven) of these individuals had survived the revolutionary period. (I found around half of the 32 a few years ago and published that fact at the time. I have updated my blog to reflect this – though I can hardly update the book unless I go around to the handful of bookshops which may still have a copy and start ripping out pages.)

There were some other important facts presented in the book. The identity of two of the more significant British spies in Cork is one of them. There is an entire section on a British army round-up at Rathanisky House, a few miles outside Cork, which was down to the work of a British undercover agent, a Mrs McKay, who, though a Protestant, was not shot as a spy, even though it appears that the veritable dogs in the street knew that she was one. Another was O’Donoghue’s cousin and employer, Michael Nolan, who had long been an RIC informant and who was similarly not executed, though it is also clear that his work was known to members of the IRA.

My book then attempted to establish from British compensations records the likelihood that someone was a ‘spy’ or otherwise. If someone received 100 percent compensation from the British government – rather than 50:50 or 100 percent Irish compensation, this meant that, in the opinion of the RIC and the military, they were deemed to be ‘British supporters’, that it to say people whose loyalty was to Britain. If you want to find those who passed on information, you are likely to find them among this group, and unlikely to find them among those who received 50:50 or 100 percent Irish compensation. The latter were not deemed to have been loyal enough to merit full British compensation since the RIC – who were consulted in these cases – either had no reason to believe they were loyal or because they had no information to that effect. In other words, those who received Irish compensation at either 50:50 or 100 percent are unlikely to have been ‘spies’. Although this is outlined in some detail in Chapter 53 of The Year of Disappearances, this has not prevented a host of more recent historians from claiming that any kind of compensation suggests that someone must have been a spy. Since most civilians who lost their lives were compensated by one or other or often both sides, this would mean that they must all have been spies. Clearly this is impossible since, if this were the case, it would mean that there were almost as many spies as there were combatants. The fact that most had ‘spy labels’ attached to their bodies should be treated with similar scepticism.

Ironically, there was even an example of this in the same edition of History Ireland – a prize-winning essay by a young man from County Cork.[5] The essay, which is very evocative of the time and deserved its prize, contains one striking claim – which may not be the fault of the young man in question since it appears in a separate box. In the case of one David Cummins, an ex-soldier and a Protestant and who was shot in County Tipperary in 1921 as an alleged ‘spy’, the box claims that Cummins’s mother received £600 from the Compensation (Ireland) Commission and that liability was ‘agreed 50/50 in terms of British responsibility. This compensation’ – or so the box tells us – ‘makes it more likely that he was a spy.’ In fact, it does the opposite, since what it implies is that when the RIC was consulted about the case, they could not establish whether or not he was a British supporter. Yet this spurious claim has been repeated as fact in the case of many civilian deaths by historians such as Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc, Barry Keane, and Andy Bielenberg and James S. Donnelly right throughout the Cork Spy Files. Is it any wonder that the young lad got a bum steer? In short, I don’t think you could call any of this ‘Gothic’. It is mere investigation.

‘Pushing a sectarian thesis’?

So by writing about all this was I in fact pushing a sectarian thesis? In other words, what has all this got to do with sectarianism? Not an awful lot, I would have thought, other than the fact that Protestants constituted a significant subsection of IRA victims in Cork. The book was about espionage, not sectarianism. The word sectarianism does not even appear in the index – which, by the way, I did not compile. And what has it to do with ‘the toxic legacy of the Northern Ireland troubles’ which, apparently, has ‘cast a long enough shadow over the discipline’? Considering that Northern Ireland gets only one mention in the book – in the context of the targeting of Protestants in the Free State in 1922 which was often in retaliation for attacks on Catholics in Northern Ireland, something that the IRA themselves claimed at the time – this seems a rather excessive claim. Even David Fitzpatrick, in his review of the book, viewed it as a ‘missed opportunity’ to look at sectarian motivation behind the killing of Protestants.

What I was interested in was who was working for the British or otherwise, and whether or not the IRA was justified in killing the people they did. Of course, it is possible to put a sectarian interpretation on events. The Protestants of the south-eastern part of Cork city did not flee for no reason. There had been plenty of mutual suspicion between members of the main churches for centuries. Mutual sectarianism was part of the way of life in much of Ireland at the time, especially rural Ireland. But if this is a marginal issue in the book, why has it got these commentators so riled that they are prepared to attack me in print for something that is only tangentially related to the topic in question? This, I believe, is the real question.

Slated by historians in damning reviews?

The Year of Disappearances contained a lot of embarrassing historical detail that many people did not want to hear, particularly those who would prefer a whitewashed version of Irish history. What I was trying to do was open the door for further research on these topics. What has happened, of course, is that in some quarters every effort was now made to close the door again. If a historian lifts a stone and finds a snake under it he has a duty to describe that snake. If he put the stone back and quietly walks away and pretends the snake does not exist he becomes so compromised he should probably not even call himself a historian. Yet this kind of thing has been going on for decades in Cork.

When the book came out, it caused some controversy but not a great deal – at least not from people who were interested in the truth. In East Cork, for instance, where I expected a negative reception, I got praise from almost everyone I spoke to or who contacted me on the topic. Everyone knew appalling stuff had gone on around Knockraha. They also knew nobody was talking or writing about it. The general feeling was relief that at last someone was prepared to tell the truth about one of the uglier aspects of our history. Omèrta was being broken. People knew that human remains lay under the furze and briars of the Rea. This needed to be said and not glossed over as some people have been trying to do ever since. With every tranche of the Military Pensions applications being released, more details of this are emerging. To say this never happened or that almost nobody was killed is, apart from anything else, to brand an entire parish and a company of the IRA as a pack of liars. People living in that area know the truth.

So what about the claim that the book was ‘widely slated’ or, as Bielenberg put it, ‘damned’ by historians? It is true that the reviews were mixed, but, as we shall see, this merely reflected the position of those who ‘reviewed’ the book, most of whom had an axe to grind. But what about all these ‘highly critical reviews’ by ‘prominent historians’?

Let’s begin by defining what is a historian. There are many definitions. It might be anyone who writes a history book. But, for the sake of argument, let’s make it simpler; let’s put it in its narrowest context: that a historian is someone who has a degree in history – that would of course preclude me and very capable historians such as Tim Horgan, Meda Ryan, Tim Pat Coogan and a host of others, but that’s not the point. I presume members of the History Department at UCC would agree that an honours degree from that department would enable one to call oneself a historian. In that case the ‘slated’ argument goes immediately out the window. Because the first person to review the book was Eoghan Harris and he has an honours degree in history from UCC, as does the second reviewer of the book, John Paul McCarthy, who, in addition, holds a PhD in history from Oxford. Both are native Corkonians, a significant advantage in reviewing a book such as this one. Of course they are dismissed as ‘revisionists’ by the little Green men, but any historian worth his or her salt should be a revisionist if he/she is open to new evidence. Both Harris and McCarthy were generous in their praise of the book. And therein lies the problem.

Because it immediately become apparent that the very fact that The Year of Disappearances got a positive review by Eoghan Harris in the Irish Examiner and an equally positive one from McCarthy in the Irish Independent meant that I had walked right into the crossfire of the war between Eoghan Harris and republicans. The latter hate Harris and this war had gone on for years before I inadvertently stumbled into the fray. I knew right away that being praised by Harris meant that, by definition, I was going to be attacked by those who disagreed with him.

I did not have to wait long for the counter-reaction – from which I went on to learn all kinds of new and intriguing things about myself and the book – things like those repeated above by Andy Bielenberg.

First up was a long and detailed ‘analysis’ by an anonymous reviewer An Sionnach Fionn, on Amazon.com. Anonymous reviewing of course is like throwing dirt at a wall and hoping some of it sticks, and it usually should be ignored. However, since Bielenberg is still repeating the claims a decade later clearly some of it did stick. An Sionnach began: ‘I cannot find words to describe how offensive I find this book . . .’ ‘It must rank as one of the worst examinations of Ireland’s struggle for freedom’ – as if we should all shut up about Irish atrocities and focus only on British ones. It goes on with the usual old guff about ‘ethnic cleansing’ – something I never claimed happened in Cork city. ‘The book is little more than a thinly disguised revisionist tract’. Readers were advised to consult John Borgonovo’s book instead and so ‘avoid the simplistic and naïve anti-historical fringe of British historians and their ilk’. (These, by the way, are Antony Beevor’s balancing foreign academics.) An Sionnach Fionn was actually the first to imply that I had converted my novel into a work of non-fiction, a theme soon taken up in more ‘detail’ by Meehan. According to An Sionnach, I began my publishing career as the author of ‘two rather turgid novels’ – which was also news to me since both my early novels are short and to the point. Turgid they certainly are not. ‘Fiction writing remains his forte.’

Next up was Niall Meehan on a variety of websites – though his bird finally perched on The Irish Story website. Meehan first treats us to a potted history of Ireland, in which ‘the residual Six County statelet of Northern Ireland’ figures prominently, with sectarianism and denials of sectarianism being the catch phrase at every hand’s turn. He goes on to link me with Peter Hart, who, apparently, ‘invented evidence and misrepresented archival material in order to establish his case’, a charge that would soon be directed at me. Of course, Hart, a Canadian and another of these foreign ‘anti-historical’ historians, did no such thing. What he did do was list sectarianism among the factors that had a bearing on who was targeted. He merely went looking for the truth – truths that people like Meehan did not like – and for this, his name continues to be blackened. Yet anyone who knows anything about the Ireland of fifty years ago and further back will know that where disputes were concerned, sectarianism – on both sides – was never far away.

Anyway, Meehan went on for fully 35 drivel-laden pages in which all the major findings of the book were ignored in favour of minor fault-finding or, in many cases, fault-creating exercises. No hyphen or inverted comma or lack thereof was ignored. The book apparently contained ‘no list of primary sources’ and just a ‘thin bibliography of published material’. In fact, as we have seen, it contains 41 pages of primary sources and some 160 works are cited in the bibliography. The book – once again – ‘began life as a novel’ and ‘should be treated as fiction until better evidence is available’. What An Sionnach Fionn and Niall Meehan had in common was that they spent more time on criticizing Eoghan Harris and John Paul McCarthy’s reviews than they did in looking at the book itself. It was as if they were looking into a mirror and seeing a distorted image of themselves. So determined were they to deny any hint of apparent sectarian motive that they ended up seeing it everywhere. Padraig Óg Ó Ruairc who also reviewed the book along similar lines, said: ‘Murphy believes that the IRA abducted teenagers from Unionist families during the conflict to put pressure on the British.’ This is daft stuff and bears about as much relation to what is in the book as black does to white.

So what about the professional academics who reviewed the book? With one notable exception, it became quite clear that most of these had a republican agenda and set out to try and do as much damage as possible in an effort to counter Harris’s and McCarthy’s praise. There was a problem though: how do you ignore all the elephants in the room, the actual information the book contained, from Corry’s death chamber to the date of Parson’s abduction, to O’Donoghue’s employer and cousin being a British agent? The answer was either to ignore the evidence or damn it with faint praise on the basis that much of it was supposedly known already – which it was not. And of course you could also distort it.

John Borgonovo, whose own thesis was superseded by the book, was understandably lukewarm in his review in History Ireland. While admitting that I had found ‘a series of impressive nuggets’ – more ‘nuggets’ by the way than had been produced by any previous study of the War of Independence in Cork – he was generally dismissive. Sean MacBride’s biographer, Caoimhe Nic Dhábhéid, then gave it a mixed review in the Irish Times. At least she acknowledged Corry’s Sing Sing and the importance of O’Donoghue in the narrative. However, you would have to wonder how much of the book she actually read when she stated that the Anti-Sinn Fein League, ‘a murder gang of renegade Auxiliaries the most likely culprits’, are ‘seemingly passed over in favour of a spy ring operating out of either the YMCA or the Freemasons and possibly comprising prominent Protestant businessmen.’ Considering that one of the most important points of the book was to show that the AFSL was indeed composed of a murder gang of undercover British operatives and not prominent Protestant businessmen and that there is a whole section of the book devoted to this point, this seems a very strange interpretation of it. (Her claim would have been true in the case of John Borgonovo’s book, of course.)

Nic Dhábhéid’s review was not entirely negative however. After all, it is a significant creative achievement to dismiss a book as detailed as The Year of Disappearances without looking at the evidence. I should have ignored the review. However, and this was a big mistake, I wrote to the Irish Times when I would have been better off to keep my trap shut, suggesting that I thought the review was politically motivated. The newspaper published the letter several weeks later, leaving out the offending sentence. But then, almost as if to prove that I was right, Niall Meehan was in right away to back up Nic Dhábhéid – a phenomenon that happened so often with so many ‘reviews’ that the whole thing resembled a sort of daft Punch and Judy show. What I was to learn was that, by some mysterious alchemy that was I never quite able to get a handle on, I never seemed to get the last word in any of these ‘debates’. The end result of all of that was that I decided to start this blog as the only way I could see to get the truth out. So if the editor of History Ireland and others complain about ‘certain bloggers’, they have nobody to blame but themselves.

The other result of the bun fight with Nic Dhábhéid was that her postdoctoral supervisor in Cambridge, Professor Eugenio F. Biagini, decided to wade in in her defence. He threw in the usual canard that ‘Murphy decided to turn his projected novel into a history book’ and that, needless to say, the results were ‘patchy’ and ‘confusing’. However, ‘some parts of the book are actually meticulously researched’! Considering that I do not remember researching some parts of the book more than others surely this is down to the amount of material available. As usual, little or nothing is mentioned about the actual findings of the book. Biagini did come up with one concrete detail though: ‘Murphy mentions gaps in Cork Grammar School’s records for 1922 as an indication that the headmaster had probably destroyed the relevant documents to protect his pupils from further attacks: however, these records contain so many other gaps for the whole period from the school’s foundation in 1881 through to 1949, when it moved to its current premises, that their non-existence for 1922 seems more part of a pattern than a suspicious exception.’

This is a very interesting claim because when I was researching the book I went to considerable trouble to try to find the rolls books of Cork Grammar School for the period. Considering that at least three Protestant teenagers went missing, it seemed at least logical to see if this had any effect on Cork’s leading non-Catholic secondary school. Eventually I tracked down the rolls and they were in the possession of another historian who was then carrying out some local history work in Cork. When I contacted her – we have friends in common – she was able to tell me that the records were intact except for the period from 1912 to 1926 for which no records survive. The distinct impression I got was that this was the only gap. Biagini states that he got his piece of information from Dr Ian d’Alton, who has something of a track record in trying to minimize the sufferings of Protestants in the South of Ireland. Knowing how nasty some of these debates become, I did not want to drag my friendly historian into it, so I did not respond to Biagini’s claim at the time. However, I have no reason to believe she was lying to me.

The only other academic to review the book and one whom I would have expected to be broadly supportive was Professor David Fitzpatrick of TCD. I think it is fair to say that he disliked the book but more for reasons of structure, language and pedantry than anything else. His review was largely an effort to throw me under the bus in an attempt to defend Peter Hart from the circulating vultures. Again, he managed to avoid mentioning any of the real findings of the book, comparing it to the work of Tim Pat Coogan, managing in the process not only to get in plugs for his own work, but promoting his wife’s work as well – even if the book did ‘contain a great deal of detailed and interesting information’ and ‘drew together many unexpected connections between disparate documents’. ‘More systematically than any previous student, [Murphy] has revealed the ubiquity of serious factual errors and self-justifying distortion in much republican testimony such as that collected by the Bureau of Military History or [by] Ernie O’Malley.’ ‘Murphy has produced something more original, more probing, more scholarly and altogether more exciting’. I guess it was a case of finding something for everyone in the audience. Still, Fitzpatrick has more than made up for this by replying to Bielenberg’s recent attack on me when he showed that Bielelberg’s own figures, when you subtract the numbers of ex-soldiers killed, show a distinct sectarian bias of IRA attacks on Protestants, even in the pre-Truce period. You win some, you lose some.

And David Fitzpatrick did make one pertinent point. He claimed the book was ‘hurried history’ and in a sense this is true. There is always the fear that when you find new evidence, particularly if it is of an explosive nature, someone else may have got there ahead of you. If it was perfectly obvious to me, for instance, from reading their Irish Grants Commission applications, that Bridie McKay and Michael Nolan were British agents, then it would have been perfectly obvious to anyone else. There are many instances in the book where my biggest fear was that someone would beat me to the punch and publish all or parts of this material before I would. After all, there was nothing to stop people catching a cheap flight to London to find this material – and it’s even easier now with a lot of new material coming online.

If you’re merely gathering uncontroversial data – say for some academic treatise – you can afford to take your time, wallow in the habitual, the banal, to borrow Patrick Kavanagh’s phrase. But if you are working in a controversial field where you know others are working, then there is always a fire under you. This of course has its own dangers: that you overheat the pot and burn the dinner. However, the alternative is to wait. And how long do you wait? Maybe the right thing to do is to wait until you are pushing up daisies. However, that it not much of an option – particularly in a situation where others are producing distorted historical ‘facts’ to suit their own agendas. And if you’re pushing up daisies, they’ll take that as an opportunity to dance on your grave – pace Peter Hart. So it was a case of publish or die.

And so it went on: people who had their own dog in the race either praising the book to the skies or damning it to hell, while mostly ignoring the facts. Interestingly, the article that most accurately reflected the actual contents of my book was by Mary Leland in ‘An Irishwoman’s Diary’ in the Irish Times – probably the fairest thing anyone has written on the book and the closest to its spirit. But generally? Of course the book was ‘universally panned’ – by those who set out to universally pan it.

However, the real test of a book such as The Year of Disappearances is the support it got from readers, particularly from readers who had a reason to be interested in it, such as those who had family connections with the revolutionary period in Cork. I was contacted by people whose family members had disappeared, by relatives of my own and neighbours whose forefathers had been involved in running Sing Sing, by the families of RIC men, army men and IRA men, some very prominent. I have a file of this correspondence, all of it positive. As recently as last summer, a man came up to me in a bookshop in Cork to thank me for finding his grandfather. Elderly people who were still alive at the time contacted me to pass on what they had remembered from the period – some of which has led to further, very interesting research. One elderly Protestant man, who has since died, phoned to tell me that it was pretty much accepted in the Protestant community around Blackrock that Protestants were being fingered and as a result many of them fled.

Conclusions

The net result of all of this is that I am being accused of pushing ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’ when it was clear that I was right all along when I stated in my previous blog that it was my accusers who were doing exactly that. This is simply part of a prolonged campaign, first against Peter Hart and now against me, in a vociferous attempt to deny that anything that might even be vaguely construed as sectarianism ever happened. In other words, what is going on is precisely what these supposedly ‘objective’ historians accuse others of doing: allowing contemporary Northern concerns to influence historical interpretations, a case of the political tail frantically wagging the historical dog. This is where the real ‘ideological revisionism’ lies; this is applied history and a particularly virulent strain of it. Russia, Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Ukraine, France. You can add Ireland to that list, if it is not on it already.

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[1] The Guardian Review, 3 February 2018.

[2] History Ireland, September/October 2017.

[3] Aimsir an Ghatair, TG4, October 2012.

[4] John Borgonovo, Spies, Informers and the Anti-Sinn Féin Society: The Intelligence War in Cork City 1920-1921 (Dublin 2008).

[5] History Ireland, September/October 2017.