The Strange Case of
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
John Regan, Peter
Hart and the ‘Bandon Valley Massacre’
By Gerard Murphy
I listened with interest recently to an
interview with historian John M. Regan on Pat Kenny’s radio show in which he
argued quite eloquently, it seemed to me, on the differences between academic
and popular history. These arguments were further elucidated and expanded upon
in a pair of articles, one in the Journal of the Historical Society,
the other in History Ireland. Academic historians, according to
Regan, are Dr Jekyll, using scientific methodology to sift and study the
historical record, using evidence which must be verifiable, while public
histories – Mr Hyde, if you like – ‘popularize the past, but are conditioned by
the needs of the present’ and are not easily held to account.[1]
I remember when I first got interested
in Irish history in the 1990s – interested in the sense that I wanted to find
out what actually happened during the revolutionary period – I
was dismayed to find that many of the standard histories available, usually
penned by academics, were beautifully-written, almost philosophical essays on
socioeconomic issues with the dramatis personae and indeed the actual events
themselves demoted to the footnotes. In other words, they were of little or no
value if you wanted to find out what took place during those years. My reaction
at the time was similar to that of Greil Marcus on the release of Bob
Dylan’s Self Portrait album, a comment which I may add ‘would
not be printable in a family newspaper’ to borrow a phrase. The alternatives
were the older popular histories, written mostly in the 1950’s and then out of
print which were often splendidly unreliable and inevitably one-sided. But at
least their writers had engaged with the period – after all they had lived
through it and many of them had fought in the conflict(s).
John Regan elucidated the drift to
revisionism and the reasons for it, giving us a history of history, so to
speak. But his scattergun approach was to open fire on everyone, from Roy
Foster to Tom Garvan, from Dermot Keogh to Richard English. Clearly in John
Regan’s view everybody in the Irish history academy is wrong. When you consider
that many of the best writers that have come out of Ireland in the past
thirty to forty years have been its historians – putting novelists and poets
and indeed scientists to shame – you would expect John Regan would have some
serious data to back him up.
Instead, he does a very odd thing: He
turns his gun on Peter Hart and more specifically on Hart’s 1998 book The
IRA and its Enemies and, more specifically again, on one chapter in
that book, the one that deals with the Bandon valley murders of April 1922,
sometimes referred to as the Dunmanway massacre.[2] This is strange because if Regan is right and
the practice of Irish revisionism was to avoid writing too specifically about
the revolutionary years for fear of ‘incitement to hatred’ and bluffing through
with a combination of socioeconomic analysis and social history then Hart did
the opposite. If the ‘revisionist’ thesis was to pretend that these events
hardly happened at all, Hart went out among the people, interviewing Old IRA
men and elderly Protestants. Indeed he got in just in time before that
generation passed on to their eternal reward. I would take issue with some of
his approach and some of his conclusions but if anodyne evasion was the sin of
the revisionist generation then this was not something Hart could be accused
of. Indeed, in those terms – and these are the terms Regan sets out –
then The IRA and its Enemies was the least revisionist book to
come out of the academy in a generation. Hart got down and dirty with the
detail. But if you pat the dog of history and it turns around and bites you
then it is the history that is at issue, not the historian.[3]
However, be all that as it may, what if
Dr Regan is correct? His basic argument is that Hart’s research is flawed
because he was guilty of ‘elision’, that is to say of ‘ignoring problematic
evidence’ when it did not suit his thesis – his thesis according to Regan being
that the Bandon valley massacre was primarily motivated by sectarianism.
‘Others said that the killing had nothing to do with religion and everything to
do with spying against the IRA. Hart dismissed this,’ Regan states.[4] Now if this is
true it is a very serious allegation. If Hart ignored evidence that those shot
were ‘spies’ or ‘informers’ then he would indeed be guilty of ‘elision’ and
worse than that, he would be guilty of gross manipulation of data.
So what does John Regan say about the
killings in the chapter of his book that deals with them? Broadly speaking, he
claims that those killed – they were all Protestants – were simple reprisals
for the shooting dead of Commandant Michael O’Neill of the IRA by an ex-British
army officer Herbert Woods. O’Neill was part of an IRA group who broke into the
home of Thomas Hornibrook, a Cork Protestant and loyalist, and Woods’s
father-in-law, on the night of 25/26 April 1922. This was nine months after the
cessation of hostilities between the IRA and British forces and four months
after the Treaty. It was also several months before the start of the Civil War.
Hart claimed the IRA was out for revenge for O’Neill’s death and that the
victims were picked almost at random and shot.[5] Regan writes that Hart ‘vehemently
argued that the massacre was bourne [sic] of sectarian hatred directed against
the religious minority by Roman Catholics in the IRA’.[6] But there was nothing ‘vehement’ in the
suggestion that these people were killed as reprisals for the killing of an IRA
man by a loyalist. It was merely an obvious deduction based on the evidence
available. I don’t think Hart even claimed in that chapter that the massacre
was born out of sectarian hatred. Indeed ‘vehement’ is hardly a word that could
be applied to Hart who was the mildest of men.
Regan writes that in 2010 his interest
in the case was piqued when he came across references to three British
intelligence officers being kidnapped and murdered near Macroom, especially
when he discovered that this event ‘coincided exactly with the ‘Bandon Valley
massacre’. He goes on to point out what he believes is a discrepancy between
Hart’s PhD thesis, upon which his book is based and the actual published
version which appeared some years later. In his PhD thesis (TCD 1992),
according to Regan, Hart ‘accepted’ that Frank Busteed, a well-known gunman and
member of the Cork No 1 Brigade, who had carried out many killings during the
War of Independence and the Civil War, was involved in the massacre. When the
book came out, ‘references to Busteed’s involvement were deleted’. Regan goes
on to accuse Hart of deliberately leaving out any references to Busteed’s
alleged involvement in the massacre on the basis that, because Busteed was an
atheist and his father a Protestant, the charge of sectarian killing would not
stick if Busteed was one of the killers.
Regan goes on to claim that it was very
odd that Hart did not link the massacre in the Bandon valley with the kidnapping
and execution of the three British IOs especially since they took place during
the same week and since one of the officers, Robert [sic] Hendy ‘was
Major (later Field Marshall) Bernard Montgomery’s battalion intelligence
officer and among the most senior ranking intelligence officers killed in the
period’. While Hart acknowledges that Busteed was involved in their murder,
‘nowhere in this massacre chapter does Hart discuss the possibility that events
along the BandonValley were connected by Busteed to those around
Macroom... It was this “elision” that allowed Hart to publish his unambiguous
narrative of sectarian massacre.’ Regan’s essential thesis is that it is likely
that it was information extracted from the three officers at Macroom that led
to the killings in the Bandon valley and that a list of ‘informers’ was
extracted from the officers and that those killed in Dunmanway, Ballineen,
Bandon and Clonakilty were on that list. In other words, the Protestant men and
boys shot during the last week of April 1922 were shot because they were spies.
Hart is accused of deliberately ignoring this connection.
He also accused Hart of a an even
graver ‘elision’ when he claims that he also deliberately left out a paragraph
from the British army’s intelligence report, published and distributed
internally after the conflict was over as part of ‘A Record of the Rebellion in
Ireland’:
'In the south the Protestants and those
who supported the Government rarely gave much information because, except by
chance, they had not got it to give. An exception was in the Bandon valley area
where there were many Protestant farmers who gave information. Although the
Intelligence Officer of this area was exceptionally experienced and although
the troops were most active it proved almost impossible to protect those brave
men, many of whom were murdered while almost all suffered grave material loss.'[7]
Regan states that this is a direct
reference to the Bandon valley killings[8] and since this is widely regarded as the most
reliable source from the British side of the intelligence war Hart is accused
of again ‘ignoring problematic evidence’ by failing to quote this in the
context of the events of 25-29 April 1922 – especially since he quotes it
elsewhere. (He edited the publication of the report in 2002.) All in all, when
taken at face value, Regan’s arguments might appear to add up to a serious
claim against Hart’s objectivity. But then Regan goes on to broaden his
argument, suggesting that there is in effect a conspiracy among academic historians
to support Hart’s ‘dubious’ analysis, while ignoring his own alternative view.
Regan claimed, in an interview with Justine McCarthy last September, that
academic historians turn a blind eye to Hart’s ‘elisions’ because it suits them
to promote a so-called ‘sectarian’ view of the conflict.[9] ‘The evidence’,
he said later, ‘is like a big bowl of alphabet soup from which we only choose
letters spelling the words we want – the rest we leave behind. If nobody
notices, or notices and stays dumb, we are free to write as we please.’[10] In other words,
almost the entire academic community are part of a quiet conspiracy silently
backing Hart’s analysis and ignoring any alternative viewpoint.
So how does Regan’s alternative
analysis stand up to scrutiny?
Well, let’s begin with the last point.
Regan claims that Hart deliberately neglected to quote the British army
intelligence report in connection with the Bandon valley murders because if he
had done so it would have effectively stated that they were ‘informers’. Yet
the report states that it was Protestant farmers who gave information, while
most of the victims of the massacre were townspeople or villagers. But is the
intelligence report a veiled reference to the killings of April 1922 and why
did Hart not quote it in the context of the killings? Well, the answer to that
is very simple: the intelligence report could not have referred to the Bandon
valley massacre because it was written before these events
took place.[11] The
reference to Protestant farmers in the intelligence report refers to people
such as Warren Peacocke and others who were shot during the War of Independence, presumably for helping the British. It is Regan who is guilty of
‘elision’ in this instance for ignoring Hart’s statement that the report was
written in early 1922 - before the massacre - and for failing to check up the date of its publication.
In other words, the report is a red herring as far as the events of late April
1922 are concerned, other than to tar those murdered in April 1922 with the same
brush. On the matter of ‘informers’, the IRA in early 1922 had compiled a list
of people they believed to have given information locally. None of the victims
of the April 1922 killings were on that list, while the four spies named on the
notorious Auxiliary document (including one Protestant) found in Dunmanway
workhouse after the Auxiliaries departed were never touched.[12]
And what about the connection to Frank
Busteed? If Hart ‘accepted’ that Busteed had been involved in the killings when
he wrote his PhD in 1992 why did he change his mind by the time the book came
out in 1998? The answer to that, I’m afraid, is also pretty simple: Hart
learned a lot about the conflict in West Cork in the intervening
years. Busteed’s alleged involvement comes from his statement to Ernie O’Malley
that ‘we shot 5 to 6 loyalists, Protestant farmers, as reprisals’.[13] Yet it is clear
from the context that Busteed was referring in this instance to executions
carried out in Rylane, (in the 1st Brigade area in mid-Cork),
not in the Bandon valley. Local historians in the Donoghmore/Rylane area are
well aware that men were shot and buried in their area. My view is that
Hart only became aware of this in the intervening years.[14] Between 1992
and 1998 Hart carried out a number of interviews in West Cork. In those he
almost certainly discovered the real identity of the killers. Also Busteed, who
gave a substantial account of his activities to Sean O’Callaghan, and a shorter
account to Ernie O’Malley, does not mention that he ever carried out any
activities in the 3rd Brigade area, though he detailed almost
everything else.[15]
But Regan’s most important point is the
suggestion that it was information extracted from the three intelligence
officers who were captured and executed in Macroom on the same week that led to
the killings. How does this perfectly plausible thesis stand up to scrutiny and
why will academic historians not accept it? What about Robert [sic]
Hendy, who according to Regan was one of Montgomery’s battalion intelligence
officer and ‘among the most senior ranking intelligence officers killed in the
period’? Surely someone of such prominence might indeed know the names of
informants in Co Cork? In his talk in Trinity in September 2011 Regan referred
to him as a Captain Hendy. Yet Hendy was a mere lieutenant with a temporary
appointment as captain. Far from being ‘among the most senior ranking
intelligence officers killed in the period’ and ‘one of the most important
enemies of the IRA in Co Cork during the War of Independence’ Hendy was
of the same rank as most of the other officers who were shot for intelligence
work. He was not even the most senior ranking I/O killed in that part of Co
Cork.[16] And
his name was not Robert Hendy but Ronald Alexander Hendy, something Regan could
have discovered simply by googling him.[17]
But these are minor issues.
What is the likelihood that it was information extracted from the three that
led to the West Cork killings? The timeline here is important. The massacre began on the night of 25/26 April when an IRA raiding party had
one of its members, Michael O’Neill, shot dead while breaking into the home of
Thomas Hornibrook near Ovens in the Lee valley. Hornibrook, his son and
son-in-law (who pulled the trigger) were subsequently executed. The next night,
April 26/27, the first of the Dunmanway murders took place, when James
Buttimer, Francis Fitzmaurice and David Gray, were shot dead on their
doorsteps. The shootings started just after midnight. The party who shot
these men were also went looking for several other Protestant men who lived in
the town and would have shot another, George ‘Appy’ Bryan, only that he managed to
escape. The remainder of the 13 killings took place over the following nights
further east along the Bandon valley and in Clonakilty. For good measure, the
IRA also came looking for former Crown solicitor Jasper Travers Wolfe and his
cousin William Wood in Skibbereen on the evening of 27 April but, lucky for
them, they were not at home.[18] William
Perrott and Arthur Travers of Clonakilty were also to have been shot that night
but managed to escape.[19]
The British IOs were captured in
Macroom on Wednesday, April 26, the day after the events at
Ovens. It appears they arrived in Macroom around 1.00 pm, went to a local hotel
for lunch and were captured at some stage after 4.00-4.30 pm.[20] Accounts vary
as to why they were in the town: in one, they were on a fishing trip, in
another they were on their way to Bantry and had dropped into Macroom for lunch.
There is no question though, from the British army inquiry onto the killings, that they were on an intelligence-gathering mission.[21]
John Regan’s contention is that
information was extracted from the three under interrogation and that this led
to the killings that began in Dunmanway that night. This means that the city
IRA would have to get their interrogation team out to Macroom
from Cork after 4.00pm, capture the officers, grill them by
whatever means necessary.[22] The
officers would then have to reveal the names within a couple of hours of being
caught. Presumably this would have had to have been relayed back to IRA
headquarters in Cork where a decision would then have to be taken to
shoot those whose names were so gathered. Those who would carry out the
killings would then have to get to Dunmanway, find the homes of the victims in
the middle of the night – as well as those of the other would-be victims – and
begin the shooting. And all before 12.15am when the first murder took place.
It is possible of course that members
of the 1st Brigade got the information from the British
officers, drove directly to Dunmanway – which according to Regan is only ten
miles away – try driving it; it is almost twice as far – identified the homes
of the victims and had them shot. So we have to look at it in a little more
detail. There are three versions of the Macroom episode in circulation. The
first came from Frank Busteed in which he claimed the officers were shot by
himself (accompanied by the Gray brothers and ‘Sandow’ Donovan) because one of
them was believed to have been Lieut. Vining, the intelligence officer of the
Manchester Regiment based at Ballincollig whom Busteed blamed for throwing his
mother down the stairs during a raid in 1921 thereby causing her death.
According to Busteed, his own brother Bill, who was stationed in the British
army at Ballincollig barracks, saw the officers head off with fishing gear,
contacted Frank who in turn contacted’ Sandow’ and the Grays who then set off
in search of the officers. They were discovered drinking in a pub near Macroom.
In this version of events, the IRA men joined the Englishmen for a few drinks –
Busteed believing he had Vining cornered – before they took them into the
countryside and executed them immediately along with their driver - and their
dog.[23]
The second version comes from Charlie
Browne, adjutant of the Macroom IRA. Browne said that it was his own men who
first noticed the army motor car parked at Williams’s Hotel in Macroom and
established that there were officers drinking inside. The Macroom battalion
then contacted Brigade HQ in Cork by telephone. HQ sent out a party
to take the men into custody. The men were found ‘making their way amongst the
townspeople’ and arrested sometime ‘after 4.00 or 4.30’. After another phone
call, HQ sent out a ‘firing squad’ – consisting, presumably, of the Grays,
Donovan and Busteed who ‘promptly’ executed them. ‘We sent out a firing squad
because the Macroom lads had cold feet,’ was how ‘Sandow’ Donovan put it.[24] Since most of
the Cork IRA leadership were in Dublin that week attending a conference,
Donovan was the effective leader on the ground.
The military sent a search party to
Macroom the following day, when the IRA denied that the abduction took place.
They returned the following day (28 April) and established that the men had in
fact been kidnapped in the town. They were given a tour of Macroom Castle to
find that the men were not being held there – though three other prisoners
were.[25] A
prolonged stand-off took place over the following week when the British
military returned with four armoured cars and eight Crossley tenders.[26] This is famous
in IRA lore when Donovan faced down a furious Brigadier (later Field
Marshal) Montgomery at Macroom castle. Montgomery, believing the
men were still alive, demanded their release. The British even picked up known
IRA men in the city either as hostages or because they thought they might have
information.[27] Ultimately
the IRA gave the British to believe that the three men had been shot as spies
on 28th April and their bodies buried. The British evacuation
of Cork was held up for three weeks as a result.[28] A few years
later the bodies were recovered from the lands of a farmer at Kilgobinet,
Clondrohid some four miles west of Macroom where it seems the execution took
place.[29]All
the British reports on the incident claim the men were held for two days before
being shot.
So which version is correct? This is
important because if either of the IRA’s own accounts of the story is correct,
the four, Lieuts Henderson, Hendy and Dove, and their driver, a Private Brooks,
were shot out of hand with only the most cursory interrogation and were
unlikely to have given any list of informants. Regan states that they were held
for 48 hours before being executed – which is to accept what the British were
told rather than the accounts of the IRA men themselves.[30] Yet the British
admitted that they had no proof of this.[31] If they were held for several days as the IRA
told the British, they could have had such information extracted from them. But
even if this was the case it is difficult to see how men from the 1st Brigade
could have got down to Macroom from Cork, in the late afternoon of the 26th,
carried out the necessary interrogations, made their way to Dunmanway and
identify the homes of those they wanted to shoot in the middle of the night in
a town they would have been unfamiliar with. But perhaps they were responsible
for the killings that took place on the later nights, in Kinneagh, Ballineen,
Clonakilty and near Bandon? Perhaps. But the Kinneagh assassins at least were
travelling around by horse and trap, so they were moving slowly, suggesting the
killers were locals.[32]
Either way, if the IRA had interrogated
the men they did not make a very good job of it. Because among the men they
captured was Lieut. G. R. Dove, the IO responsible for identifying the IRA
hideout in Clonmult in East Cork where an entire flying column was wiped out in
February 1921. Dove was one of the men Busteed believed had thrown his mother
down the stairs. Yet he does not seem to have realized he had caught Dove,
insisting instead that Vining was the principal target. Since his account was
first published in the early 1970s, while the men involved were still alive, it
can hardly be dismissed as wholly inaccurate.[33] The only way that information extracted from
the three was what led to the murders in West Cork would be to use one British
version of events and ignore others and also ignore local accounts and, since
‘Sandow’ was effectively bluffing Montgomery, the value of this is questionable
to say the least. If the IRA men had extracted valuable information from the
three then you would have expected that either the garrulous Busteed or the
more reticent Sandow would have at least hinted at it in their accounts to Sean
O’Callaghan and Eoin Neeson, respectively. It is hard to imagine that if
Busteed and his fellow executioners had extracted the names of a whole ‘spy’
circle out of the three officers that they would not have said so at some
point.
This brings us to the troubling point
of the identity of the killers. This is a matter of some sensitivity
in West Cork. But their identity is known locally and they are believed to
have been locals – admittedly with connections to the 1st Cork
Brigade. Peter Hart did not name them and I am not going to do so either
because nobody has admitted on paper that they did it. It is quite clear,
however, that in some cases their identity was known to the families of the
victims – which would have been highly unlikely if they had come directly from
Cork or Macroom.[34] There
is nothing to suggest that Frank Busteed was one of them.
John Regan makes a big case out of the
fact that Hendy was the chief intelligence officer in Cork at the time. But
this has to be seen in perspective. He was brigade I/O of an intelligence
operation that had been wound down since the end of January. The British army
was on the eve of departure. There was no effective intelligence presence in
the South by the middle of April – something which is perfectly plain from the
military reports from Cork emerging from General Macready’s office from
mid-February onwards which are little better than an amalgamation of newspaper
cuttings. Hendy might in charge of a skeletal staff at that stage. But most of
the intelligence office in Cork had been disbanded. Major Percival who ran the
intelligence office in Bandon had by now also departed. Besides, would these
men have known anything about the Bandon valley? The Bandon valley was
controlled by the Essex Regiment during the conflict and these were also gone.
These three had served with other regiments in and around the city. (Henderson
and Dove would have known the Macroom area, which was why they were picked to go
that day.) Then there is the little question that, if most of the most
important ‘spies’ that the British used were Catholics and often members of the
IRA and their families, then why was it that only Protestant names were
extracted from the captured officers?
In this scenario it is unlikely that
the captured British officers, none of whom had served with the Essex Regiment
who operated in West Cork, divulged the names of supposed ‘informers’. If the
IRA men were not even sure of the identity of the men they had captured, how
likely is it that they had managed to extract a list of their informants within
hours of capturing them? And even if they had extracted a list of informants
from the officers then all the evidence suggests that they would have been quietly
lifted and shot rather than being the victims of an undisciplined bloodbath
like the one that took place in the Bandon valley that week.[35] Only one of
those targeted during the week of the massacre claimed to have given
information but he was being taken away, presumably to be executed, when he
managed to escape.[36] We
don’t know if he would simply have disappeared. What we do know is that he was
not shot down on his own doorstep like most of the others.
But even if the victims were all spies
then why did local republicans, led by Seán Buckley, the upstanding local
officer of the 3rd Brigade equate the midnight shootings with
those of the Black and Tans and equivalent sectarian shootings of Catholics in
Belfast? Why were nationalist and republican members of Bandon District Council
able to pass resolutions to the effect that ‘it was up to every man, both
civilian and soldier, to hunt down and trace those night murderers.’ Why did
Tom Hales, the commandant of the 3rd Brigade threaten the
perpetrators with summary execution if there was a repeat of the killings? At a
meeting of the same Council, of which Michael O’Neill’s brother was a member,
held a fortnight later, two votes of sympathy were passed: To the O’Neill
family for the loss of their son, but also ‘to the relatives of those who lost
their lives under such regrettable circumstances. The fact that they were
Protestants is significant. During the recent troubles many of them had
sheltered our brave men from the fury of British assassins.’ Seán Buckley went
on to state that he could bear personal testimony to this: ‘many of the men who
were most wanted in that strenuous time were sheltered and supported by their
Protestant neighbours and he would like that to be generally known, because
there was, he was sorry to say, a sort of tradition that because people were
Protestant they are of necessity anti-national… he would like it known that if
any of our people had still it in their minds any shadow of doubt as to the
loyalty if those people to the Republic that they should disabuse themselves of
it.’[37]
It seems to me that Peter Hart’s thesis
– which I also questioned by the way – that the Dunmanway killings were simple
reprisals for the shooting of Michael O’Neill, is a lot more plausible than
Regan’s above.[38] After all, Michael O’Neill was
the only Volunteer to be shot dead by a Cork unionist. In IRA eyes
this amounted to an appalling outrage. Michael O’Neill’s colleagues in the 3rd Brigade
were hardly going to sit back and do nothing about it. Jack Buttimer, who was
close to those alleged to have carried out the killings said: ‘the Dunmanway
people were against us, very strongly against us in the town, but there were
certain families loyal, who were the truly good ones in the Tan war’.[39] A disproportionately high number of Protestants
were shot by the IRA across the country, most of whom were almost certainly
innocent, though no doubt a minority did pass on information. I would argue
that many were shot merely for being perceived as being ‘loyal’ or, in the
months before the Truce, out of the need to put pressure on the British in the
face of British military superiority. People like Seán Buckley and Tom Hales
could not be described as sectarian. The Sinn Fein leadership always tried
distance itself from the anti-Protestant sentiments associated with the AOH and
elements within Home Rule nationalism. Richard Mulcahy refused to go along with
1st Southern Division demands that Freemasons and other
loyalists be shot as reprisals for British execution of IRA men.[40] Hales’s men released all their loyalist – mostly
Protestant – hostages after the Truce. The gratitude of West Cork Protestants
to Buckley was such that for many years afterwards they voted for him and, by
extension, for Fianna Fáil. But describing Protestant victims of shootings as
‘spies’ without evidence to support it is itself a form of retrospective
sectarianism, even if it is often disguised by reams of spurious erudition.
There is something disturbing, if not malevolent, about the way Hart has been
attacked since his death on the basis of a handful of footnote errors and the
alleged ‘elisions’ outlined above. Reading some of the commentary that has come
out on this subject – a veritable Tower of Babel of inaccurate and mendacious
distortion - you would be forgiven for thinking that there is a lot more of
this kind of thing going on now than was going on then and that the
‘sectarianism’ such commentators decry is, often as not, in the eye of the beholder.
It is hard to understand why a
professional historian like John Regan would put his name to such an amalgam of
bluffing and dissimulation. There is something terribly sad about this. Why
would such an obviously intelligent man let himself wide open to refutation by
failing to check even the simplest facts? It beggars belief that he did not at
least get the details right before going on lecture tours and talking to
journalists and attempting to carry out what is in effect a character
assassination of Hart. Such are the resources now available online that he
could have checked most of these points without ever even leaving his desk.
Whether he let his inner Mr Hyde completely get the better of his Dr Jekyll is
a moot point. It seems to me that he is merely a mouthpiece for the kind of
politically-motivated historical distortion which in recent years has greeted
every published account of the travails suffered by Southern Protestants during
the revolutionary period. There is a lot of slippery footwork going on here:
‘Hart’s interpretation is of course valid, mostly it is factual, but what it in
doubt now is whether it is historical.’ [41] This statement of Regan’s, I’m afraid, says
it all.
For this is the second attempt in the
last few years to try to tar the victims of the Bandon massacre with the label
of ‘spy’ – which they were not even labelled with at the time. (The first was
based on equally spurious evidence – the suggestion that they were named on the
Auxiliary dossier that was found in Dunmanway workhouse after the Auxiliaries
who had occupied it left. The ‘spies’ named on the dossier were never harmed,
while the Dunmanway victims were not named in it at all.) The past should be interpreted
in its own terms. People should be innocent until proven guilty, not the other
way round. Whatever about contemporary propagandists peddling this kind of
nonsense, it is surprising to find a professional historian trying to do the
same. Seán Buckley and Tom Hales were closer to the truth than many of those
who would wish to overturn history. Hart’s interpretation of these events may
need to be changed if new information becomes available. Until it does,
however, it is still the best show in town.
[1] John M. Regan, ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: The
Two Histories,’ History Ireland, January/February 2012.
[2] John M. Regan. ‘The Bandon Valley Massacre’
as a Historical Problem’ History, The Journal of the Historical Society,
Vol 97 (1), pp70-98.
[3] Peter Hart, The IRA and its Enemies,
Violence and Community in Cork 1916-1923, (Oxford, 1998).
[4] Regan, ‘Dr Jekyll’ op cit.
[5] Hart, op cit.
[6] Regan,
‘The Bandon Valley Massacre.’
[7] A Record of the Rebellion
in Ireland (Intelligence Report). Published as British
Intelligence in Ireland 1920-21, ed. Peter Hart (2002)
[8] Or at least he says that ‘it is difficult to
identify any event other than the April massacre for which the Record’s
description applies’. Regan, ‘The Bandon Valley Massacre’.
[9] Sunday Times, 9/10/2011.
[10] Regan, ‘Dr Jekyll’, op cit.
[11] It went to the printers on April 13, two
weeks before these events. WO 141/93.
[12] Hart, The IRA and its Enemies.
[13] Frank Busteed, O’Malley, P17b/112.
[14] See PJ Feeney, Glory O, Glory O, Ye
Bold Fenian Men (1996), Tim Sheehan, Execute (1993).
[15] Sean O’Callaghan, Execution, (London 1974),
Frank Busteed, O’Malley P17b/112.
[16] That distinction goes to a Captain Thompson
of the Manchester Regiment who was killed by the IRA in late 1920 near
Ballincollig.
[17] cairogang.com even has a photograph of Hendy,
along with much information on his disappearance. He was given a temporary
appointment as I/O to the 17 Infantry Brigade on 28 January 1922. Dove and
Henderson were battalion I/Os. War Office to PGI, 29/9/1922, CO/739/11. He
was also listed as Lieut R.A. Hendy in the British army’s commemoration
services held in late 1922 in Kilmainham hospital.
[18] Jasper Ungoed-Thomas, Jasper Wolfe of
Skibbereen, pp141-144. (Cork 2008).
[19] ArthurTravers CO 762/121 and William Perrott,
CO 762/121.
[20] Eoin Neeson, The Civil War in Ireland p59.
[21] For fishing trip see O’Callaghan, for Bantry
see Hart, p280 and the Irish Times 1/5/1922, for an
insinuation of intelligence gathering Patrick J. Twohig, Green Tears
for Hecuba, pp334-344 (Cork 1994). The British command in Cork publicly
stated they had no idea that they had gone to Macroom, though General
Strickland thought otherwise. War Office to PGI, 29/9/1922, CO/739/11.
Strickland Diary, 26/4/1922, Strickland Papers, IWM. The British army inquiry
into the event can be found in WO 35/180C
[22] ‘Sandow’ Donovan, one of the men involved in
the execution, told his nephew Donal O’Donovan that he refused to go to New
York to capture and torture ‘Cruxy ‘Connors, a well-known informer in Cork.
‘Ask me to shoot a man but not to torture him’ Donovan is reported to have told
Sean O’Hegarty.
[23] Sean O’Callaghan, Execute, (Cork 1974).
[24] Patrick J. Twohig, Green Tears for
Hecuba, p137-141 (Cork 1994), Eoin Neeson, The Civil War in Ireland p59.
[25] Draft Statement on the Macroom Incident (nd),
WO35/180C.
[26] Ibid
[27] Freeman’s Journal, 8/5/1922.
[28] Paul McMahon, British Spies and Irish
Rebels p67 (Woodbridge 2008).
[29] See cairogang.com for details of the
disinterment. Some locals believed the men had been forced to dig their own
graves, though this may just have been lurid rumour. R.W.Williams CO 762/152.
[30] General Macready told Hendy’s father that
they had been executed two days after being captured and that they had been
‘drugged in the inn’. F.J.R. Hendy to Churchill, 30/5/1922, CO739/15.
[31] CoC Ireland to Chief Imperial Staff,
7/7/1922. WO35/180C.
[32] Hart op cit.
[33] O’Callaghan op.cit. Busteed’s
account of the killing, whatever its drawbacks, was the one accepted in Cork
city by anyone with an interest in the affair, even before O’Callaghan
published his book.
[34] William Jagoe, CO 762/4, Hart, p273-274.
[35] There were many instances of disappearances
during this period, some of whom are reported in my book The Year of
Disappearances. On at least two occasions for instance in early July
the Fishguard-bound mailboat was boarded in Cork Harbour and
‘some of the passengers kidnapped, taken ashore and removed in motor cars to an
unknown destination.’ Who were these men? What happened to them? We will almost
certainly never know: Snr Officer, Haulbowline to Admiralty, 4/7/1922, ADM
116/2135. Southern Star, 19/8/1922.
[36] Richard Helen, CO762/33.
[37] Southern Star 13/5/1922.
[38] I believed at the time of writing The
Year of Disappearances that some of the killings, in particularly
those of the two teenagers assassinated in their beds may have been connected
to events in the city and to the capture and torture and execution of another
teenager Edward Parsons a month earlier.
[39] Jack Buttimer, O’Malley P17b/112.
[40] Murphy, The Year of Disappearances,
Chapters 55 and 56.
[41] Regan,
‘The Bandon Valley Massacre’.
