In 2013 my brother, who was one of the editors of UCC’s Atlas of the Revolution, asked me would I be interested in making a contribution to the atlas, which was then in preparation. I had long admired the high quality of the work carried out by UCC’s geographers and cartographers in their previous atlases of Cork City, Iveragh and the Irish Famine. So it did not require much persuasion for me to say yes. In fact, I considered it a singular honour to be asked.
Given my track record I felt that the matter of those who disappeared during the Anglo Irish war and afterwards was an important one and that it would be a good idea of it were addressed in the atlas. My idea was to map the disappearances from all over Ireland. I could get the stats from my various sources and my brother could draw the maps on a county by county basis – and even within counties, as in the case of Cork, just as he had done for ambushes, the burning of RIC barracks and so on.
So I spent several months digging out the information and putting the piece together. At that stage I knew a lot about disappearances in Cork but not about elsewhere. However, the sources were the same. All I had to do was revisit the sources used in The Year of Disappearances but looking this time at disappearances that occurred outside of Cork. The feedback I got from UCC at this point, seemed to be welcome to the idea. There would be no room to get involved in individual cases. This was a mapping exercise. The article, I was told, would be short, no more than one or two thousand words. All I had to do was produce the numbers and write a short covering piece and my brother, the map man, would do the rest.
When I sent the piece in, Andy Bielenberg said he was impressed with it, so I assumed the whole thing was done and dusted. Maybe six or seven months passed – this process went on for almost three years, believe it or not – when UCC got back to me, probably through my brother, though I do have memories of talking to Dónal Ó Drisceoil and Bielenberg at various points. They had now changed their minds and wanted me to write about Sing Sing instead. This I did, shelving the mapping idea and writing something about the numbers killed in Knockraha and its role as a significant component of the disappearances overall in Cork and indeed in the country as a whole.
Correspondence on this went over and back for many more months, with UCC cutting my word count at every hand’s turn until I ended up with a piece that was not much longer than a caption for the photo of Sing Sing that they had hoped to include. I was naïve enough to think I might still make the cut when in January 2016 they finally got back to me to say that, while they liked what I had written, what they had more in mind was that I should write about ‘contested memory/local memory’ and the effect Sing Sing had on local folk opinion and on the local community. It was only then that I smelt a rat and that this looked very much like an attempt to portray the entire role of Knockraha as a piece of folklore, an overarching myth based supposedly on a handful of killings and that in reality Knockraha was no worse than many other parts of County Cork. So I politely declined on the basis of ‘fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me’. And so ended my involvement with the Atlas of the Revolution, which is, all told, a very impressive piece of work, though if I were the editors, I would have cut at least 100 pages of extraneous material from it.
So imagine my surprise this time last year when, at the West Cork History Festival, I saw Andy Bielenberg present much the same findings as I had done in my original piece for the UCC atlas. This came of course with no acknowledgement that he had borrowed my sources or that I had written the same thing only to have it be turned down by the editorial board who controlled the Atlas. I say ‘much the same’ since his overall picture is the same: that a lot of people disappeared, that disappearances in Cork comprised over half the those for the country as a whole, that the victims could be subdivided into military, police and civilians and that the overall numbers were over a hundred and that the vast majority of them occurred during the War of Independence with smaller numbers during the Truce and pre-Civil War periods.
Where we differ – and this is confirmed in his new paper which he has written in collaboration with Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc and with the help of Professor Jim Donnelly – is in the aggregate number. I found that 143 had disappeared while Bielenberg and Ó Ruairc only came up with 108. So how do we explain this discrepancy?
Well, the answer is simple. They decided to include only those for whom a grave was found – or at least where they believe a grave was found. Because it is quite clear that at least in some instances they were highly selective in deciding what constitutes evidence of place of burial. On the other hand, I included everybody whom I knew had disappeared, regardless of where a burial place was found or not. So I was always going to get higher numbers. On the other hand, I did not include anybody whose name I did not know – and anybody who has read The Year of Disappearances will know there were quite a lot of these, though I did include a few others I had uncovered since that book was published. But these are matters largely of semantics. The overall conclusions were the same and essentially we agreed on them.
But what was clear in the talk Bielenberg gave at the West Cork History Festival in 2019 and now in his paper is that every effort is being made to downgrade Knockraha as a killing field and to cast doubt on the accounts of Martin Corry and others in the area that at least 27 persons and possibly more were killed and disappeared in the area. Bielenberg and Ó Ruairc pick and choose their evidence carefully to suggest that Corry exaggerated wildly and that nothing near 27 or higher was killed there. ‘Corry’s testimony needs to be handled more critically by historians and it seems sensible at this point to treat some of his assertions with some scepticism’.
All fair enough. But this is nothing new since I spent much of The Year of Disappearances treating Corry’s claims with scepticism. But how do the numbers stack up? Let’s keep this simple. Let’s just focus on Corry’s most conservative number – 27 – and not the sometimes much bigger numbers that other veterans claimed were killed in the area. Because the fact is that Bielenberg and Óg Ó Ruairc’s own figures are half way to that number anyway. I count 18 individuals who may well have ended up in Knockraha or Glaunthaune from their own numbers.
Now it does not look like this from the way they present it. Several people are named as having been killed and buried in ‘The Rea, Co Cork’. But we are not told that the Rea is part of Knockraha. Others are described as having being buried in ‘Southside, Cork City’ but no evidence is provided to support some of these. On the other hand, Corry told Ernie O’Malley that since Knockraha was the official place of detention for the entire Brigade Sean O’Hegarty sent most of his prisoners down to him for execution.
Interestingly, Bielenberg and Óg Ó Ruairc also inadvertently confirm one of the more obscure claims made with regards to the Knockraha area, that two women, probably from Carrigtwohill, were abducted, killed and buried as spies by the local IRA. They found a letter to the Minister of Home Affairs in a file concerning Mrs Lindsay, a Protestant lady who was killed, that two women had been shot at ‘Reinslough, east Cork’. This is also in the Knockraha area.
Also, James and Fred Blemens, a Protestant horticulture instructor and his son who were abducted at the end of November 1920 are described as being buried in ‘Carroll’s Bog’. This is because Mick Murphy, the O/C of the 2nd Battalion of the Cork Number 1 Brigade said they were. It was I who first suggested that Carroll’s Bog in this instance may refer to the area that later became the Cork Municipal Dump to the west of Douglas Village to the south of Cork city. However, Carroll’s Bog is also the name of the wetland area – which includes a small pond – at the eastern end of the Rea of Knockraha and lies within the bounds of the parishes of Leamlara and Watergrasshill and where several killings took place at the beginning of the conflict.
At the time I wrote The Year of Disappearances I opted on balance for the former. However, the recent release of the Brigades’ activity series by Irish Military Archives has made me question this assumption. The abduction of the Blemenses was a big operation, involving two cars and fourteen men. Would the IRA have gone to that trouble if all they had to do was march them a mile out the road and dispose of them there? Would they have buried the Blemenes within half a mile of Douglas Village where anyone walking their dog might have come across the grave? It can be inferred from the correspondence of Florrie O’Donoghue and his wife over the summer of 1921 and from other disappearances where people were mistakenly believed to have been drowned in Cork Harbour that the standard practice was to transport prisoners from the southside of the city eastwards and then take them across the harbour by boat before moving them to Knockraha. The implication is that many – though by no means all – of those abducted in the city were moved to east Cork for execution. And if you go through the Brigade activities series that may add up to quite a number of people. Corry’s real crime, in the view of anti-revisionist historians, is not that he exaggerated the numbers killed but that he let the cat out of the bag. This is the real reason why he has to be discredited.
Whatever way you cut it, their own figures suggest that the numbers killed at Knockraha were not insignificant. And this does not include those who have never been identified but who almost certainly died there. And since this leads us into the area of military intelligence officers going missing, it is almost impossible to prove. But it almost certainly went on.
But the real question is: what has emerged since The Year of Disappearances was published to either support or diminish the likelihood that there were significantly more disappearances than those named either by myself or others writing more recently on the subject – who are basically piggy-backing on my research while at the same time criticizing me for carrying it out? The answer is a lot more than might be suspected from Bielenberg and Óg Ó Ruairc’s paper.
