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.
