Massacre in West Cork (21 page)

If we accept O’Donoghue’s evidence, then the killings were carried out as a direct, targeted, ‘murderous reprisal’ for Michael O’Neill’s death. During the Civil War, the 4th Brigade in North Cork borrowed the concept of disproportionate reprisals from the Black and Tans when it threatened to kill ten Free Staters for every one of its men who was executed.
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O’Donoghue’s statement is critical in understanding what happened. This was a wildly disproportionate IRA reprisal for Michael O’Neill. Members of the IRA believed that the men they shot were members of the Anti-Sinn Féin Society.
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O’Donoghue’s evidence agrees with evidence from William Jagoe, who was also sought for murder on 26–27 April, and from Mark Sturgis.

On 10 June William Jagoe, who had been attacked in Dunmanway on the night of 26 April, had a letter published on page one of the Southern Star. He had been told that his targeting was as a result of being a Freemason and a contributor to the Orange propagandists.
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Jagoe denied that he was either a Freemason or a contributor to any loyalist cause and stated that his contributions were to the Free State election fund, the White Cross and the Belfast Distress Fund (Roman Catholic). He continued that he had received huge support from the people of the town after the attack, but signed himself W. J., which suggests he was still concerned for his safety. In a letter to the same paper the following week he was supported by Dunmanway-based Free State councillor McCarthy, who claimed the attack on Jagoe was a result of lies and jealousy and confirmed the support Jagoe had given to the pro-Treaty party.
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He was apparently not concerned about being offside with the electorate in the week of the 1922 general election.
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The main difficulty with these letters is that they do not explain whether their information was the result of local gossip or was coming from those who did the killing.

This testimony mentions two target groups: Freemasons and Free Staters. It is already known that the target in Clonakilty on 27 April was Tom Nagle, the caretaker of the local Masonic Hall burned down on the night. He was identified as a spy in 1921.
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Tom’s other job was as a process server for the British courts and he would have been an automatic target in the War of Independence. While either of his two jobs on their own would not have been significant enough to have him shot, the fact that he held both may also have attracted the attention of the killers. It must also be remembered that David Gray’s assassins called him a Free Stater. The Jagoe letter suggests that individuals were being targeted for what they did rather than their religion, and that the targeting was poor to say the least.
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On 25 May 1922 Mark Sturgis, who was one of the last civil servants working in the Irish Office, forwarded Winston Churchill ‘a list of the murders e.t.c., of loyalists, including soldiers and police, in Southern Ireland since the Truce’ for use in the meeting between the Irish and British Treaty signatories on 26 and 29 May.
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The list is culled from the newspapers. The person’s religion is usually mentioned if the person is Protestant. More importantly for this story, Sturgis also included a representative sample of people who had made an application to the Irish Distress Committee, which was set up in London to help refugees from Ireland. It later became the Irish Grants Committee. The sample includes eight people who had left West Cork as a direct result of incidents that took place at the end of April. It provides evidence of other victims and targets at the end of April and gives a good picture of the situation within a month of the Dunmanway killings. It is raw, unpolished data as close to the event as possible and shows a clear cause and effect between the killings and the flight.

The first person mentioned is ‘A. F.’ from the south of Ireland whose son was shot in his place at the end of the previous month (April). The seventy-year-old father of eleven sons and one daughter was a civil bill officer. His wife had been warned that he and his sons would be shot once the killers got hold of them. A couple of days later his sons received threatening letters even though they lived in different parts of Ireland. There can be little doubt that this is Thomas Nagle from Clonakilty.

Hewart and James Wilson had been living in Dunmanway. According to their statement in the Sturgis document:

There were six brothers in the family, four of whom served with His Majesty’s forces in the late War in the course of which two were killed. They were Protestants [Methodist actually] and at the end of the previous month [April] their house was attacked … and they were threatened with death unless they left the country at once.

Sturgis notes that the brothers were returning to Ireland so their names should not be disclosed by Churchill to the Provisional Government, presumably because they might be shot. Two of the Wilson brothers were in the British Army and two in the Australian Army.

Gilbert S. Johnston had served as a member of the Royal Air Force during the war:

On [Thursday] April 27th, at Bandon, he was brutally assaulted and threatened by six armed men who stated that they were members of the Irish Republican Army. He was told by these men that he was being thrashed because he was a Protestant and an ex-soldier and that if he did not leave the country at once he would be shot.

Robert and James Bennett were Protestants living in Ballineen:

Early on the morning of [Friday] 28th April a gang of armed men searched their house and intimated to their sister that they were looking for them with the intention of shooting them and a note to this effect was left with the sister.

The Bennetts worked as bakers in the town. As the only bakery in the town was Cotter’s, it is logical to assume that the Bennetts worked for it. When the bakery was finally burned in 1922, presumably they both lost their jobs. Once again people working in Cotter’s had been attacked. It will be remembered that Alfred Cotter was shot in 1921 for alleged spying and supporting the British. It is also important to note that James was a sailor in the Royal Navy during the Great War and another of his brothers, Walter, had joined the Royal Navy in 1913.
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‘Mr B. B.’ and ‘D. Cameron’ were also mentioned:

Mr B. B. resided in Southern Ireland in a small community where there were a number of Protestants. He himself having been discharged from the Army … A short time ago his house was raided by armed men, his brother most brutally murdered and he forced to leave Ireland at a moment’s notice.

D. Cameron was a 73-year-old Protestant from Crookstown Co. Cork and he was warned to leave the country.

The others in the sample include Edward Wynne, Cahir, Co. Tipperary; Mr Forsyth, Limerick; Hugh Broderick, Rathkeale; James Doynelain (Donellan?), Limerick; and Fergus Ferris, Milltown, Co. Kerry.

The Sturgis note shows that most of the forty-four killings between the Truce and 21 May 1922 involved Protestant ex-soldiers and Catholic ex-RIC.
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As the military was overwhelmingly Protestant and the RIC overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, this is not statistically significant. Of the civilian deaths, nine were the Dunmanway killings and there were four others.
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The Sturgis note lends support to the evidence of the Southern Irish Loyalists Relief Association that anyone with a British connection was being attacked. If this was a representative sample of the cases before the committee, then the IRA committed the beatings and killings.

In many ways Gilbert Johnston’s evidence is the kernel of the massacre. He states he was beaten up because he was a Protestant and an ex-soldier. He was not shot. Perceived active unionists were suspected (which is hardly surprising) and targeted (which is indefensible). It must be remembered that 27 April was the night that Michael O’Neill’s body was guarded by IRA officers in Bandon church and the night of the killings in Ballineen and Clonakilty. Is it reasonable to surmise that the six men who assaulted Gilbert Johnston could have travelled west on the main roads to both Ballineen and Clonakilty later the same night? Splitting the group of six in two could easily have accomplished all the killings on that night.

The Sturgis briefing note presents compelling evidence of the killings and the flight, and contributes to an understanding of these events. It widens the area of attack, increases the number of actual and potential victims, narrows the target group and provides direct evidence that some West Cork Protestants felt safe enough to return to Cork by 25 May.

We now turn to the story of Richard J. Helen. On the face of it, his case is simple. He had been identified as an enemy agent by the IRA in July 1921. He informed the Irish Grants Committee that he was captured on the night of 27–28 April 1922 in Clonakilty and walked towards to the edge of town, where it was presumed he was going to be shot. He is unique in this: everyone else was shot in their homes. Somehow he escaped from his captors, who apparently did not fire at him as he left. In his statement he said that he was a resolute supporter of the British flag and that he had received £225 compensation for dislocation to England.
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His claim was supported by an ex-RIC District Inspector Higmaw, who said he had provided valuable information.

But that is not the full story. Richard J. Helen lived with his sister Lissie on Sovereign Street in Clonakilty, according to the 1911 census. He was forty-two and she was forty-eight; both were single. On 20 April 1922 he proposed a motion at the Kilgarriffe (Clonakilty) Select Vestry which testified ‘to the extremely good feelings and friendship that always existed between Protestants and Roman Catholics in this parish and district’.
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The Southern Star also records on 20 May 1922 that he attended the Clonakilty race meeting, which presumably means he was in Clonakilty before that date to make it into the weekly newspaper. In 1926 Lissie Helen died and her brother R. J. Helen – chairman of the Urban District Council, member of the Clonakilty Racing Club and the local Farmers’ Union – was the chief mourner. Of his brothers and sisters only one lived overseas. The Southern Star records that the large funeral was a mark of the ‘esteem in which the deceased and the members of her family are held by the people of Clonakilty and surrounding districts’.
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Can the Richard Helen who was chairman of Clonakilty Urban District Council in 1926 be the same person who tells the Irish Grants (Wood-Renton 2) Committee that he was attacked in 1922 and dislocated to England? There is no doubt that he is, and this means that even though his period of dislocation was less than a month, his compensation for this was greater than €5,800 in today’s money. Four years later his ‘enemies’ wanted him as first citizen of their town. He died in Clonakilty in 1937.
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Is it possible that the evidence he gives to the Irish Grants Committee is exaggerated or possibly even fabricated in large part? The committee was very sceptical and it awarded him far less than he was expecting.

How are historians expected to approach the rest of the claims made to the British compensation committees if it can be shown that the first citizen of Clonakilty might not be telling the truth? His solicitor, Jasper Travers Wolfe, an officer of the court and TD, must have known that this evidence was suspect, but appears to have allowed him to proceed. What does this say for the value of other submissions? The reader will have to judge, but it is probably best to be highly sceptical about uncorroborated testimony from witnesses in this story, especially when the evidence is in their own interest.

There is another possible way that the attackers may have identified their victims of late April. Throughout the month of April 1922 the anti-Treaty IRA began to call themselves the Republican Party in West Cork and were organising themselves in Dunmanway. The ‘Dunmanway doings’ section of the Southern Star on 1 April noted that a meeting would take place the following Sunday, to be addressed by Harry Boland and the lord mayor of Cork, among others, and a republican collection would be taken up in the near future. It also noted that there was to be a pro-Treaty meeting addressed by Michael Collins and that the last time Michael Collins addressed a meeting in Dunmanway, it had been broken up by ‘the late [RIC] District Inspector Keeney’.
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The anti-Treaty meeting took place on 2 April and was presided over by Commandant Peadar Kearney, who apologised for the fact that neither Harry Boland nor the lord mayor of Cork had turned up, but on the platform were Professor Stockley,
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Mr O’Hanrahan of Dublin, George Ross and P. J. Crowley of Dunmanway.
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The meeting took place after mass and was regularly interrupted by applause and cheers, which shows that the cause had good support. On 8 April the Southern Star reported that a collection in aid of republican funds was being made and the response was ‘prompt and generous’. The pro-Treaty party was also collecting money for the election campaign, and on 22 April the Southern Star reported that the collectors in Clonakilty had been the victims of an attempted robbery in which the attackers ‘had fired some shots over their heads. The collectors had sturdily refused to part with the money and eventually the holders-up withdrew.’
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