Massacre in West Cork (23 page)

9
After the Killings

The British government was shocked but not particularly concerned by the Dunmanway killings, as can be seen from British cabinet papers for the period.
¹
General Macready, Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in Ireland, refers directly to the killings on 29 April 1922, but also says that the situation in the south is improving as the overall rate of violence had dropped dramatically with the Truce. Churchill reported on 16 May that the refugee problem was not large in volume, but if the situation became worse there might be a large stream of refugees. Lloyd George noted at the cabinet meeting of 30 May that there had been thirty-seven murders in the south from 6 December 1921 to 30 May 1922.
²
Churchill told the House of Commons:

The number of members of the Royal Irish Constabulary murdered since the signing of the Treaty on the 6th December, 1921, is 26, of whom 15 were Roman Catholics and 11 Protestants. The number of ex-members of the force murdered [across the whole of Ireland] since that date is eight, of whom five were Roman Catholics and three Protestants.
³

Lloyd George felt there was some merit in holding a judicial inquiry into the killings in Belfast, but that one in the south was neither necessary nor appropriate as the IRA had committed those killings, and the Free State was a dominion and so no longer part of the United Kingdom.
⁴
He had received information on the perpetrators of the southern killings from Michael Collins when they met in Downing Street early on the morning of 30 May. Churchill, who was also at the meeting, had the Mark Sturgis briefing note about the killings and the subsequent exodus with him. Lloyd George reported that Collins said the Dunmanway killings occurred as a result of the Belfast ‘pogroms’, and that Collins and Griffith were distressed and angry:

They talked of the extermination of the Catholics. I retorted that that was a great exaggeration, 80 Catholics have been killed, and 168 wounded since December 6th, 1921. They are considerable figures, but they do not justify Mr Collins’ description. It just happens that 72 Protestants have been killed, and considerable numbers wounded. We could get Mr Collins to talk of nothing else, and when we were at last able to point out that there had been 37 murders in the South, he replied that this was due to the excited state of feelings provoked by Belfast,
⁵
and that unless something were done the whole of Ireland would get out of hand.
⁶

Collins’ comment is significant. He spent the week of the murders talking with Tom Hales in Dublin to prevent civil war. It would be incredible if Tom Hales had not contacted Bandon to find out what was going on and Michael Collins, who was the local TD, did not ask him about it.

When asked why he was not giving protection to the RIC and the unionists, Collins had replied ‘he does in fact provide protection and prevents many outrages’, and behind ‘fanatical republicans who were pure in motive’ there were ‘desperate elements of the population who pursued rapine for private gain’.
⁷
There was concern on both sides that the situation could deteriorate, but there is no evidence at British cabinet level that there was any massive flood of refugees into the country from Ireland. There was undoubted political concern that if any such flow developed it could have a negative effect in the United Kingdom. (Churchill’s suggestion on 16 May that the British might have to set up a Pale around Dublin would probably have brought a few wry smiles around the cabinet table.)

If British reaction was sanguine, the immediate Irish reaction was of shock and an attempt to assure Protestants of their safety. Meda Ryan provides a wealth of verifiable information about the pro- and anti-Treaty IRA response to the killings across West Cork.
⁸
It is easy to turn these appalling personal disasters into allegations of increasing sectarian tensions and to claim the IRA was attempting to drive a defenceless minority away, but both the Methodist and Church of Ireland ministers of Dunmanway declared that they had neither been attacked (as reported in early news reports) nor had there ever been sectarian trouble in Dunmanway.
⁹

When the first reports had reached Cork on 28 April, Cork Corporation as its first order of business under the Lord Mayor’s Privilege declared that, while they condemned Michael O’Neill’s killing, they called on ‘our men of West Cork to show every conceivable restraint in the present trying circumstances [of Belfast]’ and tendered ‘our sincerest sympathies for the cruel and unusual murders’ of ‘Protestant fellow countymen’.
¹⁰

The motion was circulated to all public bodies, including Cork County Council, which objected to ‘an insinuation in the Cork Corporation resolution that the shootings of the Protestants were reprisals for Commandant O’Neill’s death’, but otherwise did not demur. The County Council did split the motion because it did not give sufficient mention to the death of Michael O’Neill, but there is no doubt that it condemned the killings. Most other public bodies, including Macroom and Skibbereen Urban District Councils, adopted the resolution verbatim.
¹¹

On 8 May the District Council in Bandon declared that:

… these cruel shootings were contrary to every conception of justice and liberty and to every sentiment of religious and moral obligation to one another … many of the men who were most ‘wanted’ in that strenuous time were sheltered and supported by their Protestant neighbours.
¹²
There was no more need for fear or alarm. The trouble was at an end, and they hoped to live with their Protestant neighbours in the same friendly spirit as in the past.
¹³

Roman Catholic parish priests in Bandon, Castletown Bere and Dunmanway all roundly condemned the killings in the strongest terms.
¹⁴
Some of the priests’ language is bizarre, especially in Bandon and Dunmanway, where oblique reference is made to the fact that while these men were not true Christians they were still entitled to be left alone.

As part of a direct forceful condemnation of the killings, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Cork, Dr Daniel Cohalan, had telegraphed the parish priest in Enniskean to cancel planned confirmations on Sunday 1 May, stating that celebrating the sacrament would be in ‘unseemly and painful contrast with the feelings of insecurity and panic in the Protestant community’. He concluded that while the Roman Catholic bishops could not offer physical protection they could offer moral protection, and he demanded that all such attacks stop immediately.
¹⁵
Understandably, the Protestant community might have appreciated his words, but the words were largely ineffectual on the men of the flying column, just as his excommunication of the IRA after Kilmichael was unsuccessful.
¹⁶

More effective was the IRA’s own response. Guards were placed on many vulnerable homes across West Cork, starting with Skibbereen and Bantry as soon as the first hint of the killings reached these areas. When Tom Hales and Tom Barry returned, the protection was extended to their areas also.

Tim Pat Coogan also notes that Diarmuid O’Hegarty (the Irish cabinet secretary) accepted liability ‘for the large and increasing number of persons who have been driven from their homes by intimidation’, and repeated assurances were given to the Church of Ireland by Michael Collins that the government would secure ‘the restoration of their homes and property to any persons who have been deprived of them by violence and intimidation’.
¹⁷

Even before the killings, the IRA in Dunmanway issued a notice in the
Southern Star
stating: ‘In the case of claims to land from which claimants [sic] predecessors have been evicted, the claims must be submitted to the Republican Courts. Claimants will not be permitted to take the law into their own hands.’
¹⁸
The Dunmanway anti-Treaty IRA under Peadar Kearney acknowledged that there was a problem – people were evicting alleged ‘land-grabbers’. It made it clear that illegal seizure would not be tolerated. Its members were democrats and they understood the need for the rule of law.
¹⁹
Inherent in democracy is the right to private property, and this notice explicitly acknowledges this. If the anti-Treaty IRA committed the killings, and there is little doubt it did, it appears that land was not the motive.

Many of those who had ‘evicted’ Protestant and Catholic ‘land-grabbers’ in Cork had been arrested, lodged in the county jail and refused bail by 19 May, when
The Irish Times
reported that the police were determined to put a stop to such practices.
²⁰
The matter had been raised in Dáil Éireann on the same day and Minister for Agriculture Patrick Hogan said, ‘There is an attempt being made to deal with the land problem by way of confiscation … It was bad enough when this thing was dictated by mere greed, but when notices like this are served on Protestants–’. He was immediately ruled out of order by the shocked Ceann Comhairle (the speaker), who clearly did not want this allegation pursued. This forced the anti-Treaty side to condemn land confiscations in general, and removed one of its main attractions to the landless who were supporting it. Anti-Treaty TD Art O’Connor replied on behalf of the opposition:

I do not approve of the confiscation of the lands of any individual. The only parties in this country who have any power to order lands to be dealt with in any particular way for the benefit of any individuals, or of the community in general, are the Government of the Republic and that is Dáil Éireann.
²¹

All this suggests that the IRA leadership on both sides had regained complete control over the region twenty days after the last of the killings. In West Cork on 27 May the Southern Star, under a heading ‘Claims to Farms’, carried a notice from Dáil Éireann that ‘anyone against whom claims are made should immediately send a written report to the registrar of the District Court, to the O.C. Police for the area, or to the local barracks’.
²²

On the same day it reported the removal of ‘restored’ families from farms they had taken. In Castletown-Kinneigh, the Northridge farm had been occupied along with parts of the Hosford and Wood farms.
²³
The Irish Republican Police had ‘compelled Ds. Sullivan to vacate a holding at Manch Bridge to which he was unofficially restored a few weeks ago’. In another case, local auctioneer Henry Smith had purchased a Mr Salter’s farm at Kilronan for £2,600.
²⁴

The Irish Times
argued throughout 1922 that what was happening in the south and west was not sectarianism but greed, and agreed with Michael Collins’ analysis of 30 May. Its leader on 3 October is a good example:

We can detect no signs of a ‘well organised system’ in this campaign of destruction. The ex-Unionists have not been the only victims. They have been the chief victims, because their local isolation and their relatively high standard of prosperity have made them easy marks for lawlessness and greed.
²⁵

The Irish Times
continued by pointing out that the vast majority of ex-unionists had not fled, that they were willing to tough it out, and that as Irishmen they were willing to serve the new state. In his analysis, Paul McMahon shows that, despite a wide range of pessimistic reports being fed into the British cabinet (and to Churchill in particular), neither Alfred Cope (who was in Dublin working with General Macready on the withdrawal of British troops) nor Lionel Curtis (who arrived in the country on 17 September 1922 to see for himself) could support the pessimistic view expressed in the reports above. Cope went as far as to state that ‘loyalists were not especially victimised’.
²⁶

10
Protestant Flight
from Cork

The Protestant population of County Cork declined by 43 per cent between 1911 and 1926. The West Cork figure was 30 per cent. These figures might be read as suggesting that the War of Independence had driven Protestants out of the county. However, my research has shown that most of this decline was a result of the British military withdrawal.
¹
According to the Church of Ireland Bishop of Cork, Cloyne and Ross, Charles Dowse, ‘We could not have wondered had panic seized our people, and a wholesale exodus followed as a result of these events. But such was not the case. With splendid bravery the vast majority held their ground, and went on quietly with their work.’ This was despite the fact that, according to his address to the diocesan synod in 1922, many of the best and brightest had been forced to leave.
²

There is no doubt that the Dunmanway killings resulted in the flight of some of the Protestant population from the area. On 1 May
The Irish Times
was reporting that ‘more than 100 persons left the district and travelled to Cork leaving in most cases female relatives to look after their homes during what, they hope, will only be a temporary absence … so hurried was their flight that some had neither handbag or an overcoat’.
³

The following day another Irish Times article entitled ‘Sisters in sorrow’ commented on a meeting at Amiens Street (Connolly) Station between a Dunmanway Protestant woman going to Scotland to give her nerves a rest, and a Belfast Catholic woman returning to Belfast a month after her house was burned. Another article on the same date noted that ten Protestant families arrived from Cork into Belfast on Friday 28 April 1922. They had been left to fend for themselves until helped by a member of the Royal Black Preceptory who took in seven families. The writer also notes press reports that large numbers of southern Protestants were in Rosslare, heading for England.
The Irish Times
didn’t mince its words in its editorial on the same day: ‘Nine innocent persons have been done down – apparently for no other reasons than they were Protestants. The public conscience is shocked by this hideous – and in Southern Ireland – unprecedented outbreak of sectarian violence.’
⁴
The paper went on to blame the power vacuum for the breakdown of order, and demanded that the Provisional Government take control of the country.

The Cork Examiner noted the flight from West Cork on Wednesday 3 May in a brief report,
⁵
and the
Cork Constitution
reported that the preliminary meeting for the Protestant Convention heard that ‘until the recent tragedies in County Cork hostility to Protestants by reason of their religion has been almost, if not wholly, unknown in the twenty-six counties in which Protestants are a minority’.
⁶
On the same day
The Irish Times
reported:

A certain number of refugees from Southern Ireland has arrived in London driven thence by the reign of terror which prevails in some parts of that area. Many of them are accompanied by their families and all agree in the belief that there is no visible prospect of a safe return to their homes. Tradesmen, farmers and professional classes are included in the arrivals …
⁷

Locally, Con Connolly, leader of the Skibbereen IRA, warned on Friday 5 May: ‘it has been brought to our knowledge that threatening notices have been sent to Protestants warning them to leave this district under pain of death … we will do all in our power to protect the lives and property of all citizens irrespective of creed.’
⁸

The same report also provides direct evidence from Bantry of cause and effect between the killings and Protestants fleeing the area.
⁹
Commandant Gibbs Ross, the leader of the local brigade, stated that ‘there was no necessity for the wild stampede that took place. Parties that did apply and seek such protection at the barracks did receive it, and ample provision was made and steps taken to ensure that the wave of human destruction did not enter this particular Brigade area.’
¹⁰

On 12 May
The Irish Times
quoted a leading article in the
Morning Post
asking did Lloyd George ‘form a mental picture of a crowd of refugees streaming into this country with their harrowing stories of murder, outrage, and arson? … It may at any time reach the dimensions of a flood. We are only at the beginnings of the Irish Trouble.’
¹¹

The
Morning Post
of the same day had a very pessimistic view of what the future held, stating that ‘the true government of Ireland at the present time is a secret society in close touch with our enemies’.
¹²
On the following day the British government wrote to the Provisional Government of ‘a large and increasing number of persons who have been driven from their homes in Ireland by intimidation, or even by actual violence, at the hands of men acting openly in defiance of the authority of the Provisional Government’.
¹³

In West Cork this was mostly an urban flight, and it represented approximately 100 to 150 families across the area.
¹⁴
Some fled to Cork and Kinsale, some to Bantry (according to the Bantry estate archives in University College Cork), some to Dublin and Belfast, and some to England.
¹⁵
The
Cork Constitution
reported: ‘Many persons from Dunmanway, Ballineen, and Bandon left their homes and proceeded by the Rosslare Mail [train] to England, others went by Dublin and Holyhead and all together the exodus was a very large scale [sic].’
¹⁶

The same paper puts a figure on the number who fled, stating that it was ‘upwards of 100’, which was 0.8 per cent of the 1911 West Cork population. This was a lot in one weekend but certainly no ‘pogrom’. The majority of native West Cork Protestants had returned or remained in place by 1926, and this is especially true in the rural areas.

The
Cork & County Eagle
and
Southern Star
also recorded the effects of this Protestant exodus. On 20 May the ‘Dunmanway doings’ section of the
Southern Star
noted ‘that some of those who had fled in late April had returned but many had sold up and left’. Clarina (Clara) Buttimer, James’ wife, had instructed six houses in Dunmanway to be sold on 8 June, while Killowen Cottage – where John Bradfield was shot – was sold on 15 June.
¹⁷
In the same month David Gray’s Medical Hall in Dunmanway had re-opened under the management of Mr Owen. Later on Miss B. Peyton (who now owned the house where Alexander Gerald McKinley was shot in Ballineen) sold and left on 21 December 1922. However, it must be noted that other Protestant and Roman Catholic houses and farms were for sale before the killings for a variety of reasons – including giving up farming, retiring, moving to better farms in the east of the county – and retired British military were returning to ‘the mainland’, as can be seen from the sales advertised during the month of April 1922. The number of advertisements doubled in May and June, but this increased them to only eight in the unionist
Cork & County Eagle
, where most Protestant advertisements from the area would be expected to be placed. It is possible that houses were sold without being advertised.

It is clear that by 29 April many of the Protestant males in the area decided that discretion was the better part of valour and fled as a direct result of the killings. In his memoir, William Kingston – who was a friend, cousin and junior partner of Jasper Travers Wolfe, the crown solicitor for West Cork – gave a detailed account of his own departure from the area after the Dunmanway attacks. His own view was that the country was ‘sitting on top of a volcano’. As it was ‘rumoured that there was to be a general massacre of Protestants’ and ‘rumoured that the shootings … were that night [28 April] to be carried out in Skibbereen … few men slept in their own beds … or … they had a well planned means of escape’.
¹⁸

On 29 April he joined many other West Cork Protestant males on the train to Dublin, where a few weeks later he witnessed the destruction of the Four Courts from his brother’s house in Glasnevin.
¹⁹
On 30 June Kingston even managed to pick up some of the papers that had been blown on the wind the three kilometres to Glasnevin from the explosion at the Public Records Office in the Four Courts.

Kingston’s often-quoted journey through Ireland bears testimony to the very disturbed nature of the country, as people split into ‘Free Staters’ and anti-Treaty IRA. He also provides some evidence that local Protestants were emigrating out of the area during 1920 and 1921 to escape the increasing levels of violence, but suggests that there was a strong element of ‘wait and see’. He makes it clear that it was only after the killings of April that some people lost confidence in their own safety. Kingston emigrated in 1922. One of his main motivations was to see the world, rather than simply being driven out of West Cork, and he returned to Ireland in 1924. If Kingston’s memoir is combined with the evidence from Jasper Travers Wolfe’s biography, it gives a much clearer picture of what happened in West Cork during this period.
²⁰
He never implies that this was a large permanent exodus, and all the evidence suggests that the migration flow in West Cork for the entire War of Independence period was less than 10 per cent of the 1911 population.

Possibly a more famous example from another part of Ireland is that of Lady Augusta Gregory – Irish literary icon and founder of the Abbey Theatre – who refused to leave her home at Coole Park in Gort, County Galway. On 10 April she had been threatened with shooting by Malachai Quinn over some of her land on which he was demanding first refusal. She had replied that she sat at her desk in the evenings between 6 and 7 with the blinds drawn up. Quinn’s wife had been killed by the Auxiliaries outside Gort on 1 November 1920, which might explain – but does not excuse – the threat.
²¹
Lady Gregory’s journal records sixty-one incidents and rumours between 22 April and 15 May 1922. Understandably the diary shows a terribly disturbed period in which the pro-Treaty and anti-Treaty IRA found it difficult to maintain law as individuals with real grudges, old scores or perceived slights took advantage of the split. However, when her two grandchildren came across armed men, probably anti-Treatyites, in the woods at Coole, it turned out that they were guarding the estate from intruders of any sort. The diary also shows that even at this early stage the anti-Treaty side was melting away. By 1 May she felt brave enough to decline two anti-Treaty offers of help in her land dispute and to ‘leave it to the law’. Because her journal is a diary and she is receiving information from all over the country, it creates a graphic day-by-day image of the very real (and the imagined) risk at this time.
²²

Ultimately, much more lethal to her chance of keeping her house at Coole was Lady Gregory’s increasing poverty, caused by the loss, through land purchase, of the rents that backed up the great house; the house was sold to the Land Commission in 1927. Lady Gregory passed away in 1932. In what can only be described as an act of vandalism, the house itself was pulled down in 1941.

In her famous letter to her mother, Alice Hodder clearly refers to the targeting of ‘Protestant loyalists’ and ‘loyalists’ as opposed to simply Protestants.
²³
The examples she gives of people who had fled are the Williamson family from Mallow, who were ordered out in six hours, and the Hayes family of Crosshaven House, whose son went to England as a precaution.
²⁴
In both families the fathers were justices of the peace, which meant a declaration of unionism in the eyes of republicans. The rest of the Hayes family remained in Crosshaven House until 1973, while the Hodder family still live in Fountainstown House. Despite Alice Hodder’s graphic account and her obvious revulsion at what happened to Captain Woods, these families decided to stay.

Hodder wrote that Johnny Derant was evicted in Fountainstown, but when he reported the matter to the Irish Republican Police in Carrigaline he was immediately reinstated. Meanwhile, Kingston of Gort, Grennan of Fountainstown, Nicholson of Hoddersfield, McLocklan and Frank Hayes were all visited by the Republican Police, who told them to ignore notices to quit if they got them and to inform the regular IRA, which would presumably provide any necessary protection. Alice Hodder was convinced that the impetus for the evictions came from the Trades Union Council in response to farmers reducing wages because of the post-war recession. She concludes by saying that Noel Furlong (of Riverstown) was ordered out and went.
²⁵
There is an obvious fear in her letter that killings like the Dunmanway killings might happen elsewhere, but it is clear that both sections of the IRA were determined to maintain order from 28 April. When the letter finally made it to the Colonial Office on 29 June it was obsolete, as Lionel Curtis observed, but it is one of few direct eyewitness reports in the file.
²⁶