Massacre in West Cork (24 page)

When he asked in a House of Lords debate on 11 May 1922 what loyalists were expected to do, Sir Edward Carson summed it up:

After being faithful to British rule for all these years, and fighting your battles – and these are the men who did fight – surely it is not much to say: ‘What do you advise us to do? Do you advise us to stay here till we are shot, or till we die of our nerves as a consequence of this terrible treatment, or do you advise us to emigrate to England? And if we go there, how shall we be supported?’ What you are saying to these people really is: ‘We do not care what happens to you.’
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The picture Carson painted was not supported in
The Irish Times
report of a Protestant convention held in the Mansion House on the same day to discuss the future for Protestants in the Free State.
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It had been arranged before the murders in West Cork. It states there was little or no sectarianism in the south, but Sergeant Hanna, a British legal officer, noted that while murder would always be immediately condemned, the cruelty of taking a man’s livelihood tended to excite less protest among citizens.
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He said that they had been raised from the depths of despair by ‘the prompt and vigorous denunciations of those outrages by individuals throughout the length and breadth of the country’.
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But he also pointed out that, ‘Unless this campaign of murder, exile, confiscation and destruction of property comes to an end in Southern Ireland an exodus of Protestants must ensue.’

The convention sent a delegation to Michael Collins to find out if Protestants would be welcome in the new state. Collins answered yes, and promised to ‘restore everyone who had been a victim to their house and property. If that were not feasible – or wanted – Ireland would pay reasonable compensation’ via the British government to
bone fide
claimants. The level of compensation was increased on all claims by 10 per cent in 1925.
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After a meeting in the House of Commons between a delegation of southern Irish loyalists and eighty Conservative and Unionist Party members, the Irish Loyalist Defence Fund was set up with a central registration bureau in London on 9 May. It was established to help distressed loyalists fleeing from Ireland and the secretary issued a statement outlining the problem. Those being driven out were ‘British citizens of all classes and religion’ and:

… everyone who has in the past shown any sympathy or friendship for the British connection. Being ‘willing loyally to serve the Provisional Government … made their position worse as the Republicans are exercising terrorism over all those who support the Free State’. Houses had ‘been occupied by bodies of strangers, who are said to be Roman Catholic refugees from Ulster, but are, as a matter of fact, Communists. The Red flag is flying over many a country house’.
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The secretary was getting his information from those directly affected. Although there have been claims that this was ethnic cleansing, the victims themselves believed that the cause was nationality, class and politics rather than religion.
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He was writing immediately after the refugees had arrived from southern Ireland, when the raw facts were stuck in their minds, so this is likely to be a truer story than the somewhat more polished and ‘lawyered’ claims submitted to the grants committees. This same rawness is echoed in the ‘Memorial from Southern Loyalists’, which had been handed to Churchill, and circulated to the cabinet, two weeks after the meeting on 25 May. It concluded with the lines, ‘Ireland is now a country in which there is no restraint on the lawless, and a strong hostility towards the loyalists. A massacre is now only a matter of time.’
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The ‘Memorial’ was not discussed at the cabinet meeting. As has been seen, when discussing British reactions to the Dunmanway killings, the concerns of southern unionists were no longer central to the deliberations of the cabinet. Even though they had great sympathy with the loyalists, they had good reason to be sanguine, and in many ways the ‘Memorial’ was already obsolete as both factions of the IRA had taken steps to control the situation. In fact, when the ‘Memorial’ was raised by Churchill with Griffith, Duggan and O’Higgins at their meeting of 26 May, the Irish reply was that the situation had already improved.
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The 26 June 1922 House of Commons debate gives a good idea of British reaction to the general situation in Ireland. Coming four days after Henry Wilson’s assassination by the IRA, this highly emotional debate examines the situation in Northern Ireland and the South, and the refugee problems, and offers a range of suggestions as to how to proceed, ranging from complete reinvasion, through taking over Donegal for a more defensible border, or attacking the Four Courts with British troops, to hoping that the Irish would see sense before civil war broke out.
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There have been various estimates about how many claims for compensation were submitted by both nationalist and loyalist victims to the various British compensation committees. The Shaw Commission dealt with compensation claims up to July 1921, and as these included British Army, nationalists and loyalists, the total figures paid out came to £5,000,000, split 60:40 between the two governments, with the British paying out £3,000,000. The Irish Distress Committee initially dealt with post-Truce claims of loyalist refugees, before it was redesignated the Irish Grants Committee in 1924 and took on all claims. It was later replaced by a second Wood-Renton Committee after the Dunedin Report in 1926 made clear that some of the cases could not be concluded if the normal rules of evidence were used, not least because many of the records had been destroyed during the Civil War in Ireland. The Irish Grants Committee ceased to exist on 31 March 1925. In an appendix to its final report in January 1925 it stated:

Total Grants, Loans and Advances made on the Recommendation of the Irish Grants Committee from May 1922 to December 31, 1924.

1. Total number of applications received: 21,801 [6,000 nationalist].

2. Grants and loans made to refugees in relief of distress: £73,298 14s. 1d.

3. Advances on claims under Irish Land Act, 1923: £26,320.

4. Advances on decrees or claims for compensation in respect of pre-Truce injuries: £117,261 10s.

5. Advances under the Irish Free State Damage to Property (Compensation) Act and other post-Truce claims: £197,184.
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This secret report to the cabinet analyses the various groups of claimants and emphasises that the people who suffered personal injury before the Truce did so for their active opposition to the revolution.
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There can be no doubt as to the experience, personal integrity and sympathetic attitude of the committee members. Equally significant is a comment from as late as 1925 that ‘Loyalists who had remained in the Free State’ continued to suffer persecution: this is rarely referred to in any of the histories of the period or in any of the newspapers, so it is difficult to find the source for these claims. It is possible, given the wholesale rejection of post-1925 claims, that some or all of the later claims may have been less than honest.

The 4,000 claims made to the second Wood-Renton Compensation Committee after 1925 included those of Roman Catholics (many ex-RIC) and Protestants. Half were rejected at the first examination.
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The 25,800 claimants also included English and other loyalists who had been caught up in the rebellion, so the maximum number of native claims (including many who did not leave) is unlikely to be greater than 15,000, which would represent 4.5 per cent of the total Protestant population of the Free State area in 1911.
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Overall, the evidence from the period of the Dunmanway massacre points to attacks on loyalists, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, not on any particular religious group. Of course many loyalists were Protestants. If there was large-scale cleansing, or revolutionary dispossession, of loyalists then the motive was political. Even this ‘political cleansing’ was neither absolute nor particularly targeted. If it had been, then Rev. Ralph Harbord, Rev. John Charles Lord and Richard J. Helen should have been forced to leave as well. Harbord had been shot, and Rev. John Charles Lord had been implicated as the centre of a ‘Bandon Anti-Sinn Féin Society’. However, both continued to serve as clergy and leading members of society in West Cork until their deaths many years later. Similarly, Helen remained a leading citizen in West Cork until his death in 1937. This suggests that the events of 1922 were exceptional, rather than part of a systematic attempt to drive out the Protestant minority.
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Conclusion

It would be impossible for England to restore peace to Ireland without the employment of an army of at least 200,000 and an expenditure of many millions. Even then it would be an armed occupation. The people would never be sympathetic to English rule. They must shape their own destinies, and if the task is hard it will at least explain to them some of the difficulties which have harassed England in its attempt to govern Ireland.

Major W. E. de B. Whittaker, 19 September 1922
¹

It is important to present as much evidence as possible about the sequence of events so that the reader can make up their own minds about what happened during the Ballygroman and Dunmanway killings. Even though these killings occurred in the same week and are linked, there is a difference between the Ballygroman events and those in Dunmanway. Whether the executions of the intelligence agents in Macroom had any bearing must be left to one side until (if) further evidence of a connection is found.

The evidence of Michael O’Donoghue provides an explanation as to why the ten Protestants in West Cork were targeted after Ballygroman. The 3rd Brigade of the IRA had developed powerful communications and intelligence systems during the War of Independence, so it is possible that these names were on a list in the possession of the local IRA and this is why they were killed. It is also possible, but unlikely, that the killings were sectarian reprisals dressed up as ‘informer’ executions. Whether the men selected were actually spies and informers is not relevant to the fact that they were suspected by the members of the IRA of being so, according to Michael O’Donoghue. Yet, they were not attacked during the War of Independence, which suggests that there was insufficient evidence against them, or that the men in charge of the IRA refused to take action against them, or that the evidence was found after the Truce. Some of the killings may have been random, some may have been copycat and some may have been personal. Nobody knows for certain.

What does seem to be certain is that the killings were carried out by elements of the IRA and that they were in reaction to the death of Michael O’Neill. It is clear that the individuals at the head of the Bandon IRA had either been shot (Michael O’Neill) or were missing in Dublin at the crucial moment when it was decided to take revenge for O’Neill’s death. It is significant that respected local commanders (Connolly in Skibbereen and Ross in Bantry) were able to maintain control of their areas without apparent difficulty and that order was restored once Tom Hales returned to Bandon.

The killings caused understandable panic among Protestants in West Cork, and some locals pursued ancient land grudges against both Catholics and Protestants under cover of the war. However, when push came to shove, those doing the shoving were faced down by both sides in the Civil War and people were restored to their property if they wanted to be.
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This was a savage period in Irish history; there is no denying it. Terrible atrocities occurred on all sides. Innocent people were caught up in the events, but suggesting that a main impetus of the War of Independence and the Civil War on the republican side was latent sectarianism effectively misses the point. This was, first and foremost, a struggle for self-determination. The leaders on the Irish side never lost sight of this, no matter in which direction they were dragged by events, or by elements in the movement.

What was conceded by the greatest empire the world has ever known was messy and incomplete but grudgingly accepted. Those who believed in the republic above all else took up arms against the settlement and quickly realised that the Irish people had made up their minds that the settlement would have to do for now. As it turned out, the Treaty was ‘a stepping stone’ to real freedom, but at the time nobody was certain of this.

This is not the end of this story. Researchers who revisit the killings in future years may uncover more evidence. The IRA pension applications are still unavailable, and Ernie O’Malley’s notebooks are a valuable source which are slowly becoming accessible to the general public.
³
Buried – like the Mark Sturgis note – in the British and Irish archives, there are probably other documents that will add to our knowledge.

One thing is very clear – these killings were a direct result of the way the War of Independence ended and the divisions that the Treaty caused within the IRA. Once the IRA lost its discipline and cohesion then anything could happen. One of the tragedies of the War of Independence was that in many ways it was not necessary. If there had been a British willingness to countenance independence within the empire after the 1918 general election, then there would have been no need for Dan Breen and Seán Treacy in Tipperary to force the issue by starting the war in 1919.
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The war was fought because the British would not even consider allowing the words ‘Irish Republic’, and the Irish republicans would accept nothing less.
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It took the creative genius of South African Prime Minister (and ex-Boer ‘terrorist’) Jan Smuts to find a way out of the impasse when he arrived for the imperial conference in 1921. This republican ideal was also the primary impetus of the Civil War as the ‘diehards’ rightly recognised that what was conceded in the Treaty was not what they had fought for.

Two years before Ireland’s declaration of a republic in 1949, independence within the British Commonwealth was granted to India and Pakistan by the socialist Earl of Listowel, the Secretary of State for India in the Attlee government.
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However, it is unlikely this would have happened without the example of Ireland to guide the minds of the Labour government.
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This had been explicitly referred to by the Secretary of State for India, Samuel Hoare, when he had introduced the Government of India Bill in 1935.
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In 1948 Churchill – who had found it almost impossible to countenance an Irish Republic – called for an orderly retreat from the subcontinent, a call in direct contrast to the seething opposition that he had expressed to Indian demands from 1929 to 1935 and that had led to his resignation from the Conservative Party front bench. Events change all minds.
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Only fools would suggest that all the men and women of West Cork who fought the War of Independence were as pure as the driven snow.
¹⁰
Tom Barry acknowledged in
Guerilla Days in Ireland
that there was sectarianism among Roman Catholics and among Protestants but the IRA’s intention was to fight the British. It concentrated on this and refused to allow itself to be distracted from its course by anyone – including Tom Barry himself, who wanted to hand over the ‘ranches’ – large dairy farms – to the landless. He was ignored.

However, there is clear evidence that at least two people in 1921 were involved in passing information to the Essex Regiment in Bandon. Others either revealed themselves or were identified as informants. It appears from Michael O’Donoghue’s evidence and the July 1921 intelligence report in the Florence O’Donoghue papers in the National Library that the selection process for killing in April 1922 was based on lists in the possession of the IRA. While it seems that the lists were not from the diary left in the workhouse in Dunmanway, there is clear evidence from Flor Crowley’s activities that the IRA had sufficient capability to gather any list it wanted.

The events at Ballygroman – and subsequently in Dunmanway, Ballineen, Clonakilty and Bandon – were a dark stain on the reputation of the Bandon IRA. They were shocking because they were so out of character with the conduct of the war before they occurred. There was a genuine fear among Protestants that the motive was a response to the ‘pogroms’ of Belfast and that no Protestant could be safe as a result. This perception was unwittingly confirmed by nationalist leaders who made a clear linkage between these events. Cork County Council even went as far as denying that Michael O’Neill’s death had anything to do with the Dunmanway killings. If it did not, then the only possible reason was Belfast.

As Herbert Woods had clearly broken the law when he killed Michael O’Neill, and the Hornibrooks apparently helped him resist arrest for a time while the house was surrounded, then the family should have been brought before a public court of law and tried to decide if they had a murder charge to answer. On the other hand, there seems to be no justification at all for the Dunmanway killings. Even if each and every one of the men shot was an informer in the War of Independence, the British had signed a treaty of peace and were leaving. While many on the anti-Treaty side were highly sceptical of British intentions, the War of Independence officially ended when the British surrendered Dublin Castle on 16 January 1922. However, if the anti-Treaty side had repudiated Collins, then some members of the local IRA may have decided that the Free State amnesty no longer applied – the full truth may never be known.

It seems 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 for the murder of Michael O’Neill. Overall, however, nationalists and Roman Catholics did not ‘close ranks against’ local Protestants and divide up the spoils, as Peter Hart claimed.
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While people may try to downplay or to exaggerate these killings, they are equivalent to events such as the Ballyseedy massacre of 7 April 1923, when nine members of the anti-Treaty IRA were tied to a land mine by Free State soldiers in revenge for a trap mine laid in Knocknagoshel on 16 March. Eight were blown to pieces or murdered by the Free State forces after surviving the initial blast, and the ninth, Stephen Fuller, was blown clear. It is his version of events that is now accepted as correct.
¹²
The Free Staters lost their moral authority by this action, and the same happened with those members of the Bandon IRA most likely involved in the Dunmanway killings. In neither case were the perpetrators brought to account.
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I believe that I have come as close to the truth as I can. The case is unlikely to be proved beyond reasonable doubt at this stage, but these killings have the arrogance of unfettered military power at their centre. There is still the unfinished business of the final resting place of Woods and the two Hornibrooks. Uncovering this must be the next, and final, part of this story.