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
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.
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.
‘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.
