In the Name of the Republic?
Correspondence
and reactions to the TV documentary on ‘Sing Sing’ and the Knockraha killings
broadcast on TV3 (Ireland) on 25 March 2013
When I was approached by the makers of the
TV documentary In the Name of the
Republic to make a contribution to the programme, I was initially very reluctant
to do so.[1] I
felt that anti-revisionist propagandists would not be able to resist the
opportunity to use the programme as an excuse for a bit of character
assassination.[2]However,
the programme-makers were persistent and persuasive and eventually, after I had
established that the documentary was not going to deal with the subject of dead
Protestants – the ARPs seem to be obsessed with dead Protestants to the
exclusion of almost everything else – I decided I would go ahead.
The programme dealing with the killings at
Knockraha, I felt, was fair and balanced – or at least as balanced as you can
make an item about secret executions and burials in which the starring role was
an underground vault in a graveyard where prisoners were held prior to
execution. Of course it was a war situation and appalling things happen in war
but the programme did not shy away from that either. The background and context
were well sketched in. The charge that the documentary was unbalanced does not really
hold up. The only two people who have written about the events in Knockraha,
Jim Fitzgerald and myself, both featured and we could hardly be said to sing
from the same hymn sheet – although I don’t think our views are as divergent as
some behind-the-scenes manipulators would have one believe.
But the most striking aspect of the
programme for the average viewer was the compassion and humanity the presenter
Eunan O’Halpin brought to it. My contribution was insignificant and rather innocuous.
I think I mentioned the killing of William Edward Parsons – which cannot be
disputed. I also mentioned that one local IRA man – a cousin of my mother’s as
it happens – released two prisoners. And I said that the total number of
prisoners claimed to have been executed in the area varied from around 30, from
the accounts given by Martin Corry, the local IRA captain, right up to 90 according
to the East Cork commandant Michael Leahy. I was on the programme for no more
than two or three minutes. The ‘S’ word (sectarianism) was not mentioned at
all, for the very good reason that it was not relevant. As I stated elsewhere there
is little or no evidence that Corry or any of the East Cork brigade were motivated by
sectarianism.
It turns out that my initial reservations
were well placed. For two days later John Borgonovo published an article in the
Irish Examiner[3]
in which he dismissed the programme on the basis that Corry was unreliable
while ignoring the vast amount of other evidence available that says that a
very significant number of people were secretly killed and buried at Knockraha.[4]
But the most striking aspect of the article was its sarcastic, rather snide
tone which I would associate more with ARP activists such as Niall Meehan than I
would with historians such as Borgonovo.
For I always had found Borgonovo to be rather a pleasant guy; he was
personable, enthusiastic about Irish history; he was always more than happy to
share what evidence he had with me. In short, we got on very well; we had
several long discussions over cups of coffee about matters pertaining to the
Irish revolution in Cork. So I was surprised – astonished even – by some of the
statements he made in his original review of The Year of Disappearances in History Ireland.While this is water
under the bridge, I was now surprised, given my minimal contribution to the
programme, that he would even bother to mention me in the context of In the Name of the Republic.
Yet he even managed to drag in the subject
of Protestant killings which was not dealt with at all. (Apart from the fact
that Mrs. Lindsay and Parsons were both Protestants – but their religion was
not alluded to in the documentary.) This was on a par with the experience of the
film crew on the day I was being interviewed in East Cork last June when they
were nearly run off the road by a very irate man in a large SUV who angrily
berated them for accusing the IRA of having killed Protestants. Since this was
never on the programme’s agenda you’d have to wonder where the man got his
information. Besides, the largest group of prisoners executed at Knockraha
appear to have been tramps and ex-soldiers and of course military prisoners.
Why is there nobody jumping up and down attacking people for saying these were
killed? Why is there nobody standing up for the tramps?
It is difficult to avoid coming to the conclusion
that this was just another excuse to hit the Protestant button in an effort to
tar me and the programme in the process. It looks as if Borgonovo is in danger
of being contaminated by too prolonged an exposure to Meehan and his ilk. He
also seems to confine himself too much to archives available in Ireland and, to
date at least, does not spend enough time on UK-based materials.[5]
Had this appeared on the internet or in
some obscure historical journal I would have ignored it. Far worse had been
said about me online by anonymous bloggers and our ARP friends – most of which
I have always ignored on the basis that there is no point in drawing attention
to a dog by examining its fleas. But this was the Examiner and all my
family,friends, neighbours, relatives and everyone I was brought up with and
went to college and school with took the Examiner as their daily newspaper. And
here I was, in my own family newspaper, being portrayed as some sort of dubious
charlatan, if not a downright liar. Because, to the uninitiated, both sides of
the argument look like they might carry equal weight. To people who could not
care less, Borgonovo might even look like he was right. When my brothers had to
remove the offending page from the Examiner so that my mother would not see it,
I knew I had to respond. I could choose to crawl under a stone and thus be
complicit in the damage to my own reputation or I could reply.
So, rather reluctantly because I am at
heart a man of peace and this is an unseemly business, I replied. It is
necessary to put the correspondence up here because, while Borgonovo’s article
pops up instantly on Google searches for the programme, my reply, as usual, is
much more difficult to find. Also my final letter on the subject was not
published at all – The Examiner presumably tiring of the game which had already
added enough to the gaiety of the nation. My first letter went as follows:
In the
name of … a selective rewriting of history?
Considering that I appeared only
briefly in last Monday night’s documentary on the War of Independence in Cork, In the Name of the Republic, I was
surprised to find that John Borgonovo had so much to say about me in his
response to the programme (Examiner,
27/3/2013). Also it would seem a little strange that he would bring up the
subject of the targeting of Protestants by the Old IRA seeing as it was not
mentioned in the programme at all, or why he should bother relating the strange
tale of a dog which was not mentioned either. I can only conclude that his
article was aimed at me as much as at the programme itself.
Mr. Borgonovo’s argument is that we
should ignore the accounts of IRA veterans such as Martin Corry when it comes
to killings carried out during the revolutionary period. Yet he knows as well
as I do that Corry’s is only one of many accounts that refer to the events
carried out at Sing Sing. He also says there is no governmental archival
evidence to support my claims for the disappearance of significant numbers of
people during the year of the ‘Cork Republic’. But that is to ignore the
evidence – and there is an awful lot of it – of the effective government of
Cork during that year, the IRA men themselves. This would be like trying to
write a history of the Soviet Union based on external perceptions of it while
ignoring actual Soviet records. But he is even wrong to state that there are no
governmental archival records to support such claims. There are over 80 missing
persons’ files in the Department of Justice records, many of which have not
been released. A good many of these refer to people who had lived in Cork.
Similarly, the papers of the Irish Grants Commission make many references to
the targeting of Freemasons in Cork city; some of these references are highly
specific. He also implies that we should ignore the records of non-governmental
agencies such as the Freemasons, the YMCA and various church records, even the
newspapers. So if he says his ‘extensive’ research has found no evidence of any
of this, all it means is that he has not looked hard enough or else that he is
turning a blind eye to what does not suit him.
Much of the ‘overwhelmingly
negative’ reception which, according to Mr. Borgonovo The Year of Disappearancesreceived, came from people who shared his
view that the Irish revolution was a wholly noble exercise with all the nasty
work being carried out by one side. Much of this commentary, as anybody who
followed it knows, consisted of what I call ‘pseudo-pedantry’, highlighting
minor, even typographical errors, while ignoring the main findings of the book.
More recent comments have been little more than an exercise in name-calling.
I’m afraid Mr. Borgonovo’s article falls into the latter category, consisting
as it does of a combination of personalized attack (‘the sight of Murphy’), sly
innuendo (‘an eminent zoologist’) and getting his facts wrong. (For the record,
my book was published in 2010, not 2011, am I not a zoologist, eminent or otherwise,
and he misrepresents what I claim about the Freemasons. Also I’m not sure that
archaeologists would like to be referred to as ‘paranormal investigators’.)
You would have to ask how is he in a
position to question any of my findings if he can’t get right even the simplest
facts about me in such a short article. He even has the blatant audacity to
claim that it was his research that found the identity of the Protestants known
publicly to have been shot by the IRA in the city, when the majority of them
were found by me. Similarly, who carried out all the footwork to establish the
discrepancy between Martin Corry’s claims on ‘missing’ Cameron Highlanders and
regimental records? Who found the unreleased ‘missing persons’ files? None
other than your ‘eminent zoologist’. I would have thought that the first and
most basic rule of academic work in any field is to give credit where credit is
due. As for my evidence for the killing of Protestants in Cork city, everything
that I have managed to uncover since the book came out suggests that it stands
up. Of course I am not going to be forgiven in some circles for unearthing such
uncomfortable truths. But such is life.
Yours etc
The heading on the letter was written by
Examiner staff and it alluded, presumably, to the accusation by ARP activists
that The Year of Disappearances
represented a ‘selective rewriting of history’ on my part. It also alluded, or at
least I like to think it did, to who was actually being selective in this
debate. On this issue Borgonovo is caught between a rock and a hard place. This
was why I was astonished at his original review of The Year of Disappearances. How could he say that my book was ‘not
a work of serious scholarship’ when he must have known that I could come back
on him with a list as long as your arm which showed that his own scholarship on
the matter was infinitely inferior? Because there are elements to his book Spies and Informers, which is still being
promoted by Niall Meehan which are far more selective than anything you will
find in The Year of Disappearances.
To give one example, Borgonovo writes of an incident early in 1921 when the
British commander in Cork, General Strickland stormed into the office of Ernest
Clarke, a Cork stockbroker and a Protestant. The original account, written by
Clarke’s daughter, goes as follows:
Shortly after this scandal [the
burning of Cork by British forces] General Strickland held an ‘eye wash’
enquiry from which the press was excluded. His report to the UK Government was
also suppressed. One day he stamped into my father’s office and in his
extremely rude brusque manner said ‘Look here, Clarke, you are trusted by both
sides: it’s your duty to give me information.’ Father, looking him in the eye,
calmly said ‘I will not inform against
my own countrymen: it is your duty to
control the rabble your Government has let loose in Ireland. Good Morning.’
Going purple in the face, the General stormed out, crossed the Mall to
Grandfather’s office and received virtually the same reply.[6]
Borgonovo quoted this account in an effort
to bolster his evidence that there was a conspiracy among senior loyalist
business people in Cork city to supply information on IRA activities to the
British. But he only quoted the first part, Strickland storming into Clarke’s
office. He never mentions Clarke’s reply or that of his father, nor does he
even bother to put it into his footnotes.
I would wager that there is not a single line in the entire 400-odd
pages of The Year of Disappearances
that is anywhere near as selective as this – in fact the reason the book is so
long is that I tried to give every side of every argument, which structurally
may not have been a good idea but evidence is more important than structure. Borgonovo
refers to Clarke’s daughter as ‘Cork Unionist, Olga Pyne Clarke’.[7]
I’m sure she was technically a unionist in the sense that she belonged to the
Protestant minority but he was a pejorative term in the way Borgonovo used it.
‘I called out to Father that there was another aurora borealis’ Clarke wrote.
‘He replied ‘No, it’s the damn British burning Cork.’ Picking her up in his
arms he took her to a nearby hill. ‘You will see history’, he said. [8]
All in all, these are not exactly the views of an ardent ‘Unionist’ but they
are the views of a great majority of Cork Protestants who feared and detested
British forces even more than they did the IRA.
The real issue is that I was far too easy
on Borgonovo when my own book came out three years after his. I made a
conscious decision not to highlight its many shortcomings and only drew attention
to them when there was no choice but to do so, such as his attempt to pass off
the Anti-Sinn League campaign of undercover British forces of late 1920 as some
sort of counter-revolutionary movement emanating from local loyalists. My only
reference to the above piece of fancy footwork concerning Strickland was a
single line in a footnote hidden away in 40 pages of footnotes at the back of
the book.[9]
Perhaps the relative merit of the two books is an issue to which I should
return at some stage.
As I said, all this disputation is unseemly
and should be unnecessary. One should not have to waste one’s time on his kind
of trivia – though maybe that is the point of the exercise. Anyway, the story
was not over yet because Borgonovo was back with another salvo, this time
falling back on the oldest trick in the trade of the academic pedant attacking
a rival: quoting from other people’s negative reviews.[10]
(Not a good idea either, because anybody who has ever written a book on a contended
area such as this one is bound to get adverse criticism. As for people in glass
houses …well.) Needless to say, there were no quotations from the more positive
reviews The Year of Disappearances
received and even the ‘negative’ reviews, which Borgonovo quoted, were not that
negative at all when seen in retrospect. For when I went back to look at them I
was rather surprised – and slightly ashamed perhaps, considering how I reacted
at the time, that they did have a lot of rather positive things to say. So the
following letter went back to the Examiner. (When an interview with Aidan Higgins on the same paper on
the same day mentioned Beckett’s famous quotation I could not resist including
it.) This letter went unpublished, though I did not lose any sleep over that. It
was time to draw a line under it. But here it is for the record.
In
the Name of the Republic?
I am sure the readership of the Irish Examiner must have a wry smile at
the sight of two grown men tearing strips off each other over events that
happened nearly a hundred years ago. While not wanting to take from the
entertainment value of this debate I should point out that the ‘overwhelmingly
negative’ reviews which Mr. Borgonovo states my book received had other
interesting things to say as well. Dr Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid, for instance,
stated in the Irish Times that the
book’s suggestion ‘that Cork IRA men violently targeted the life and property
of Southern loyalists in response to sectarian violence in Northern Ireland
also coincides with emerging work in the treatment of Irish Protestants in
Connaught and Munster’. While Prof Fitzpatrick stated that my book ‘exposed the
ubiquity of serious factual errors and self-justifying distortion in much
republican testimony’. And he said other, rather more encouraging things which
modesty prevents me from repeating. [What
modesty prevented me from repeating was mainly Fitzpatrick’s statement that the
book was ‘something more original, more probing, more scholarly and altogether
more exciting’ than previous attempts.] Of course, self-praise is no
praise, but if my ‘harshest critics’, can make statements like this then, for
all my manifest faults – and Mr. Borgonovo assures us I have many – I must have
got something right.
So let me propose a simple solution.
Anybody interested should read both our books, The Year of Disappearances and Spies,
Informers and the Anti-Sinn Fein Society, and decide for themselves on
their relative merits. They would be supporting bookshops which, God knows,
need support and we might both even make a few bob in the process.
What any of this has to do with In the Name of the Republic,of course,
is still beyond me, though I can hazard a guess. However, rather than joining in
the mud-slinging maybe I should raise the tone of the debate by quoting the
well-known Beckett line that you carried on yesterday’s Examiner: ‘The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing
new.’
Yours sincerely
And that was that so far as the Borgonovo
business was concerned.
However, the ARP brigade also had to have their
say. In a long, typically meandering piece, Borgonovo’s friend Niall Meehan
attacked the programme in his inimitable way as ‘one of the weakest television
history programmes recently conceived’.[11]
He stated that ‘it is a criticism of revisionist Irish history,
such as exemplified by this example, that it generalizes from exceptions’ (sorry, all this convoluted syntax is Meehan’s, not mine, but I
think we get the message). Then he goes on in the next two paragraphs to do
exactly that when he pulls in two examples of where British forces killed
civilians (one of them a Protestant) and then tried to pass off the killings as
having been carried out by the IRA. Yet I don’t think that even Niall Meehan
himself believes that 99% of IRA killings were not actually carried out by the
IRA themselves. Besides, these occurred in Tipperary and Navan, respectively. There
were plenty British atrocities up and down the country. But the programme was
about what happened in Knockraha. Besides, exceptions only prove the rule.
Like Borgonovo, he then manages to find an
excuse to drag me into the fray by claiming that The Year of Disappearances has been ‘heavily criticized for
entering the outer reaches of speculative history’. If that is the case, then
why in the years since it came out has its alleged ‘speculative history’ not
been proven to be false?[12]
He says ‘Murphy accused the IRA of murdering and drowning Protestants’. But
historians don’t accuse anybody of anything. They merely present evidence. What
was I supposed to do, ignore the evidence, like John Borgonovo had done,
despite having uncovered some of it himself? Meehan further states that ‘Murphy articulated
his long held view that Corry may have executed or been party to executing up
to 90 in [the] area.’ Yet this could hardly be my ‘long-held view’ since I only
discovered this statement of Michael Leahy’s in Ernie O’Malley’s notebooks a
few weeks before being interviewed for the programme. My ‘long held view’ was
that between 27 and 35 are likely to have been buried in the area. All Leahy’s
account suggests is that this may have to be adjusted upwards rather downwards
as Meehan suggests.
He goes on to suggest that ‘counter
argument is available locally in the form of UCC’s John Borgonovo’. Yet
Borgonovo barely acknowledged the existence of Sing Sing in his work on the War
of Independence in the south; I don’t think it is mentioned at all in his two
main books on the period. As I said above, counter argument, if that is what is
being proposed by Mr. Meehan, was amply represented by Jim Fitzgerald and
myself, the only two people to have written on the topic. Yet Meehan can claim
that ‘Borgonovo’s overall analysis, which O’Halpin and Murphy silently
partially relied upon, did not fit and he was excluded’. This is an
extraordinary claim in view of the fact that in Spies and Informers and in his book on Florrie O’Donoghue’s
writings Sing Sing is studiously avoided. Besides, if we ‘silently’ or
‘partially’ relied on Borgonovo’s work then how could we be called
‘revisionists’ if the definition of ‘revisionist’ in Meehan’s lexicon is
anybody who disagrees with the central tenet of ‘four legs good, two legs bad’
so beloved of nationalist martyrology.
Meehan then goes on to state that other
veterans interviewed by Jim Fitzgerald in order to corroborate Corry’s account
were deliberately left out of the portions of the tapes broadcast on In the Name of the Republic. He is
clearly trying to imply that if they had been included their testimony would
contradict that of Corry. In fact, there are several hours of these tapes, the
only correcting the others make of Corry are in minor details; most of the time
they agree with him. Jim Fitzgerald only reported in his book what the others corroborated.[13]
It just so happens that in the short excerpts of the tapes broadcast they were
not speaking. In other words, this is not all some dastardly plot to tell
mistruths.
Some of this of course results in a level
of unintended comedy. Like when Meenan transmogrifies the Marian shrine at
Corrin outside Fermoy into ‘this large monument to the fallen leader of
republican forces, [Liam Lynch]’, a claim which I’m sure would have been
somewhat at odds with the intentions of Dr T.P. Magnier of Fermoy who had it
built in 1933 in memory of the year of the Eucharistic Congress. It is now
complete with all fourteen Stations of the Cross. In another ‘review’ in The Phoenix
magazine he writes– or at least someone with a very similar prose style writes
– with a perfectly straight face that The
Year of Disappearances is a novel. If it is, it must be the first novel
ever written that has annotations on almost every sentence to some archival
source or other. I suppose it’s a case of when all fruits fail, welcome the
convenient lie. I predict though that the claim that this is all fiction is a
pool in which over the coming years Meehan will have plenty scope for fishing
for red herrings. We’ll just have to wait and see.
But whatever the topic, with Meehan, it always comes
back to Protestants. And don’t be fooled by his recent advocacy on
behalf of the Bethany House survivors. Meehan’s aim is not to defend
Protestants. It is rather to claim, against all the evidence, that they were
never targeted in 1919-23. All you have to do to know this is to browse through
his copious writings on the subject, almost all of which are available online.
He even manages to conjure up the ghost of Peter Hart into the argument by
stating that the programme – I kid you not on this one – ‘did not delve into the theory first introduced into Irish
historiography by Peter Hart in 1993, 1996 and 1998, that the IRA targeted
Protestants for extermination’. If the programme did not mention Protestants or
‘delve into’ such a theory – which is of itself a rather extreme distortion of
what Hart had to say – then why bring up the subject? Is this monomania or
politically-motivated propaganda or perhaps a combination of both? Only Niall
Meehan can tell us that.
All in all, the reaction to the programme from
this quarter was a reflection of the levels at which much historical discourse now operates
in Ireland. Meehan is like the wind; he will continue to do his own thing and
blow his own particular, often anonymous, breath over matters historical.
Borgonovo is a relatively young man. He has the potential to be a good
historian. He is a clear thinking and straightforward writer who does not get
bogged down in the kind of arcane intellectualization that bedevils the thought
processes of some historians in this area. As a full-time historian though,
like John Regan before him, he is surely doing himself no favours by aligning
himself with the purveyors of this kind of cheap propaganda.
[2] I was of course right. See
the anonymous ‘review’ in The Phoenix
magazine of April 5 2013 for what is a typical example of this kind of stuff.
[3]Borgonovo, Irish Examiner 27/3/2013. http://www.irishexaminer.com/analysis/separating-fact-from-folklore-226559.html
[4]Michael Leahy, Martin Corry, Edmund Desmond,
Sean Culhane in the Ernie O’Malley notebooks. Also see the accounts of half a
dozen other Knockraha veterans as collected by Jim Fitzgerald in his book Foras
FeasaNa Paroiste, in addition to those of Martin Corry. In fact, Fitzgerald
used these men to authenticate Corry’s accounts. Ernie O’Malley in On Another Man’s Wound, pp 302-303 makes
an explicit reference to these killings. There is even a reference to the use
of Sing Sing ‘from which many’s the spy and criminal were executed ’ in the
Irish Folklore Commission manuscript collection of 1936. Plus of course all the
families living in the area are perfectly aware of what had gone on there and
have many hair-raising stories from that time. Dismissing all of this as Corry’s
‘overstatement’ is nonsense, as anyone from East Cork will tell you.
[5]I have not see his new book though I’d imagine
this is an issue which he may correct over time.
[6]Olga Pyne Clarke, She Came of Decent People, (London 1986) pp51-51.
[7]John Borgonovo, Spies, Informers and the Anti-Sinn Fein Society’.The Intelligence War
in Cork City 1920-21 (Dublin 2007).
[8]Clarke, op.cit p51
[9]For the pedants amongst us it is in footnote 23
on page 361 of The Year of Disappearances.
[10]Irish
Examiner 8/4/2013. http://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/letters/dealing-with-the-historical-facts-227599.html
[12]Bar a handful of pedantic, almost typographical
errors of the kind that would be found in almost any book, pointed out by
Padraig Og O’Ruairc and David Fitzpatrick which were addressed in the 2nd
edition and which are now, as a consequence, redundant.
[13]James Fitzgerald, Foras Feasa na Paroiste, A History of Knockraha Parish 2nd
Ed (2005). For anybody who doubts this, the copies of the tapes will soon be
available in the Cork City and County Archives.
