Massacre in West Cork (19 page)

… the truth was that, as British intelligence officers recognised 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 to this was in the Bandon area, where there were many Protestant farmers who gave information. Although the Intelligence Officer of the 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 the remainder suffered grave material loss
.
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Hart leaves out the section I have indicated in italics in the quotation above and it seems that this exclusion must have been deliberate.
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This omission did not fatally damage Hart’s analysis, but it encouraged Brian Murphy and Niall Meehan to re-examine Hart’s other sources. Meda Ryan, who initially focused her research on Hart’s treatment of the Kilmichael ambush, where he had called Tom Barry little more than a serial killer (language which was certain to inflame passions in West Cork), was subsequently also highly critical of Hart’s analysis of the Dunmanway killings.
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Meehan and Murphy criticised twelve areas where they had serious concerns about Hart’s work.
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As some of the complaints are trivial, and others require reference to a relatively inaccessible thesis and a host of other articles by various authors, the key arguments tend to get lost in the forest of detail. This doesn’t mean that the criticisms were wrong, however, just difficult to follow.
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The obvious nationalism of many of his critics allowed Hart to ignore much of their work and his untimely death in 2010 should have brought an end to the controversy, as there was nobody left to debate. However, the controversy continues. John Regan of the University of Dundee, who had been a friend and colleague of Hart’s, entered the debate in recent years to criticise Hart’s use of elision: the selective quotation of documents to build an ahistorical argument which is propaganda rather than history.
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David Fitzpatrick rejected these criticisms as ‘dismissible, for the most part, as the fantasies of cranks’, in response to Regan’s 2012 article in
History Ireland
, which summarised his critique of Hart’s methodology.
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Fitzpatrick suggested that many of the chosen examples of ‘elision’ are not significant or are footnotes that had gone astray. He declared that Regan’s article ‘adds to an unseemly chorus’ of ‘suggestions and innuendos [that] have long been circulated by bloggers and republican apologists with the result that the popular reputation of Hart and other historians may have been corroded’.
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In my view, the debate about Hart’s methodology and his theory has polluted examination of the actual history. While researching this book, much of my time was taken up re-examining Hart’s research on the topic. I have already published some of my detailed analysis of his work, which is freely available on Academia.edu or on my website ‘Protestant Cork 1911–26’.
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In one way Hart should be thanked for placing an obscure field of study inhabited by only dusty demographers, military historians and hagiographers centre stage in modern Irish history. Whether the subject deserves its exalted position is another matter. Hart’s history and historiography have become such a battleground because they were so different to the traditional view of the war in Cork, were misused by others to pursue their own agendas and showed, when they were examined by the ‘cranks’, that there was a lot to be cranky about.

Hart’s history of individual events in relation to Ballygroman and Dunmanway is substantially accurate; he shows that there was an unauthorised and illegal attempt between 26 and 29 April 1922 to punish and drive out mostly Protestant unionists (a political group) by some members of the IRA in response to the murder of Michael O’Neill. However, nationalists and Roman Catholics did not close ranks against local Protestants and divide up the spoils, as he claimed.
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If anything, the opposite was the case. When Hart strays into speculation about motive, based on questionable use of sources, his work becomes ahistorical, and when questionable quotes are underpinned by anonymous interviews, these sections cannot be called history.
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Those who defend Hart’s history cannot deny that he was less than fair to the reader in his work. Information which would damage his theory was omitted from the quotations he himself selected. Why he chose to do this is a separate question. None of the criticisms of Hart mean that everything he wrote is incorrect, but these criticisms force the reader to return to the sources to check that he accurately reports the facts. Sometimes he does; sometimes he does not. Sometimes it may be accidental; sometimes it cannot be anything other than deliberate. Telling the unvarnished truth is one of the cornerstones of academic research; what, then, is the reader expected to do when it comes to Hart? Ultimately, the reader will have to decide for themselves as to the value of his work.

In some ways, Gerard Murphy’s view in his reassessment of the Dunmanway murders in The Year of Disappearances, that these were unauthorised killings, comes closest to the traditional view. However, Murphy also suggested a link with his claims of the IRA’s pursuit of ‘teenage boys’ and also Freemasons in Cork city. He speculated that the prime anti-Treaty IRA targets were William Jagoe, the leader of the local Boy’s Brigade, and William Morrison, the local schoolteacher, for being ‘connected to young people’ in Dunmanway.
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William Jagoe had a slightly different interpretation of why he was targeted on the night of 26 April. Murphy also speculated that the similarity of Ballineen victim Gerald McKinley’s name to that of Rev. McKinley, who left Cork city around this time, demonstrated a connection between his claims of a vendetta against Freemasons and the Dunmanway killings. However, Murphy now believes that internal church politics were responsible for the departure and that there was no link between the murder of Gerald McKinley and the departure of Rev. Harold McKinley.
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Suggestions by Owen Sheridan and Jack Lane that the Dunmanway attacks were carried out by British agents to prompt a re-invasion rest on the testimony of Alice Gray, who recalled that when her husband was shot the killers said, ‘Take that you Free Stater’, several times, and on the evidence of Robert Nagle’s mother, who said that she had not recognised the killers of her son in Clonakilty, one of whom was unmasked.
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According to this theory, ultra unionists – possibly organised by Sir Henry Wilson (the new military advisor to the Northern Irish government, who was assassinated by the IRA a few weeks later) – arrived in West Cork and carried out the killings. While there is no doubting Alice Gray’s recollection, or Nagle’s mother’s statement, there is no evidence trail leading to the British or to Henry Wilson. It is even possible that David Gray was shot in error, as he lived next door to James Buttimer, who was shot twenty minutes after Gray, according to the inquest report in the
Cork & County Eagle
.

The second main theory about why the men shot in April 1922 were killed is the informer theory. This suggests that their names were on a list of ‘helpful’ citizens found in the Dunmanway workhouse after it was evacuated in late January 1922. The theory is controversial, because its main proponent, Meda Ryan, has not furnished a copy of the list for scrutiny by any other historian. As a result the theory deserves close examination. There are now three pieces of evidence of varying quality to support this theory and these will be considered in detail here. The first is Pat O’Brien’s BMH witness statement, the second relates to the murder of Patrick Cronin in Dunmanway in August 1921, and the third is the Dunmanway Dossier discussed by Meda Ryan in her biography of Tom Barry,
Tom Barry: IRA Freedom Fighter
.

Pat O’Brien’s BMH statement from Dunmanway shows that the IRA had obtained direct evidence as early as 1921 from the Auxiliaries’ own list as to who was pro-British in this area:

The Auxiliaries’ C[ommanding] O[fficer] was de Havilland and Brownie was the I[ntelligence] O[fficer]. He instituted a very perfect intelligence system and … drew up lists of all the houses in the Dunmanway Battalion area, both friendly and hostile to the British régime … However, any of his investigations … were with us just as soon, thanks, to Florence J. Crowley, the Clerk of the Union.
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There is a similar story in the Southern Star’s 1971 ‘Black and Tan diary’ series about how Crowley gathered and passed on the information to Pat O’Brien.
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As the clerk of the workhouse and a ‘friendly’ angler, who drank in the workhouse with the Auxiliaries, Crowley aroused no suspicion when he regularly went fishing at Manch Bridge. Once there, he left the information in O’Reilly’s cottage and Pat O’Brien would pick it up.

This means the IRA had a list of ‘friendly’ houses before the end of the War of Independence, and there is no doubt that the Auxiliaries were not loved in Dunmanway. On the face of it, Pat O’Brien’s evidence shows that the April 1922 victims may well have been identified as friendly to the British interest during the War of Independence and this is why they were targeted, but unless an actual list is discovered there is no direct evidence to connect one set of facts with the other.
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Headquarters in Cork regularly asked for lists; for example, on 2 June 1921 headquarters requested the very discreet collection of the names and current addresses of all resident magistrates, justices of the peace, crown solicitors and petty sessions clerks, and there is no doubt that some of the victims would have appeared on this list.
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One list may be of particular significance. Without attempting to create another conspiracy theory, J. Buttimer from Sovereign Street in Clonakilty was named as an enemy agent by the West Cork Brigade in July 1921. James Buttimer, who was shot in Dunmanway, was this man’s uncle. As this has been the least understandable of these murders (the man was eighty-two and a member of the pro-Home Rule All for Ireland League), this information provides a possible explanation for his death. It may be only a coincidence or it may be highly significant that two of the murdered men were called J. Buttimer. In my view it suggests that once a family had been identified as ‘hostile’ by the murderers, then a male member of that family was shot in reprisal for Michael O’Neill’s death. While this provides a motive for this killing, any reasonable person would have to conclude that this was no justification for it.
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William Jagoe, a Dunmanway merchant, provides further information about IRA targeting of individuals identified as informants after the Truce. William had been sought out to be murdered on 26 April. He discusses the murder of Patrick Cronin in Dunmanway in August 1921 as part of his compensation claim in 1927. Jagoe had been told on the night Cronin was killed that ‘Truce or no Truce he [Jagoe] was one of seven men marked down for assassination’ in the town for collaborating with the British. Patrick’s murder was also the subject of a compensation claim by Mary T. Cronin in 1927. Patrick Cronin’s parents, who had been dependent on him, were awarded £400.
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Meda Ryan’s core claim is that an Auxiliary intelligence diary (notebook, actually) left behind in the Dunmanway workhouse along with other documents identified all but two of the men shot in 1922 as ‘informers’ or ‘helpful citizens’.
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Photographs of the diary were donated to the BMH by Flor Begley in 1947 and are easily accessible to any visitor at the Military Archives in Cathal Brugha Barracks in Dublin.
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In 1971 Flor Crowley, when writing a series of articles for the Southern Star,
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got this diary on loan from ‘a man whose IRA rank in 1921 and earlier entitled him to hold and preserve all enemy documents coming into the possession of the IRA of those days. This one came into the possession of the IRA in a peculiar way.’
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According to Crowley, it came into the man’s possession in early 1922, along with ‘a lot of “paper” left behind by the Tans’.
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There have been some suggestions that the diary was found when the workhouse was repaired in the late 1920s, but as the building was burned to the ground in mid-summer 1922 this seems unlikely. Crowley’s 1971 series identified only four named informers: two IRA men who had information beaten out of them, one paid informer and one loyalist. He also states that ‘strangely the names of the [previously] known informers are never mentioned’.
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He did not give the four men’s names and this has led to much of the controversy and speculation surrounding the diary, but they are legible in the photographed version. On 27 November Crowley wrote about the loyalist’s motives: