Massacre in West Cork (37 page)

25
‘Editorial’,
The Irish Times
, 3 October 1922, p. 4. This was in direct response to the Southern Irish Loyalists Relief Association statement of September that year that there was such a well-organised system.

26
McMahon, P., 2008,
British Spies and Irish Rebel
s (Woodbridge, Boydell and Brewer), p. 91. Both were dismissed as pro-Irish by the British ‘diehards’ and Cope was slandered in the House of Lords as being an Irish spy.

10
P
ROTESTANT
F
LIGHT FROM
C
ORK

1
Keane, B., 2012, ‘Ethnic cleansing? Protestant decline in West Cork between 1911 and 1926’, History Ireland 20, no. 2, March.

2
‘Cork diocesan report’,
Cork Examiner
, 26 October 1922, p. 7; Dowse put the native Church of Ireland decline at 8 per cent.

3
The Irish Times
, 1 May 1922. The figures in this report have been described as ‘trainloads’ by some researchers, which is an obvious exaggeration.

4
‘Editorial’,
The Irish Times
, 2 May 1922, p. 4, col. 4. The other articles are on the same page.

5
Cork Examiner, 3 May 1922, p. 3.

6
Cork Constitution, 3 May 1922, p. 3.

7
The Irish Times
, 3 May 1922, p. 4.

8
Cork Examiner
, 6 May 1922, p. 4. Con Connolly’s specific reference to his allegiance to Michael Collins and maintenance of the amnesty may suggest that once certain members of the IRA had renounced Collins they felt that they were no longer bound by the Truce and ‘cleaned up unfinished business’.

9
Cork & County Eagle
, 6 May 1922.

10
It was suggested by Hart (1998), p. 283, that Ross was being petulant, which is unfair to his statement, as it was concerned to assure Protestants that they would be safe. A few months later, on 30 August, Ross was killed in a gun battle in Bantry while leading anti-Treaty IRA members who were occupying the post office.

11
The Irish Times
, 12 May 1922, p. 5. The Irish government replied on 31 May, acknowledging the problem, and committed to restoring to their homes anyone driven out.

12
Morning Post
, 12 May 1922.

13
‘Letter to Provisional Government 13 May 1922’: 
http://eppi.dippam.ac.uk/documents/22816
(accessed 16 July 2013).

14
As the Protestant population was much more urbanised than the Roman Catholic population, this is not surprising. See O’Flanagan, P., 1988, ‘Urban minorities and majorities: Catholics and Protestants in Munster towns c.1659–1850’, in Smyth, W. J. and Whelan, K. (eds),
Common Ground: essays on the historical geography of Ireland
(Cork, Cork University Press), pp. 124–48; Keane, B., 1986, ‘The Church of Ireland decline in County Cork 1911–1926’,
Chimera: the UCC Geographical Society Journal
2, pp. 53–9. O’Flanagan makes the point that Bandon as a Devonshire estate town remained semi-segregated up to the end of the nineteenth century. Evidence from 1911 confirms this. On South Main Street Protestants were head of the family in 31 houses (44 per cent) and Roman Catholics in 39 houses. Protestants made up 31 per cent of the 357 people living on the street and this seeming discrepancy is made up of Roman Catholic servants in Protestant houses and smaller Protestant families. If the town was unsegregated, the figure should have been 22 per cent, Census of Ireland 1911.

15
University College Cork, Boole Library and Archive, Bantry Estate Archive no. 1618 (25 November 1922–13 December 1922):
http://booleweb.ucc.ie/documents/Bantryhouse.pdf
(accessed 12 June 2012).

16
‘The recent horrors’,
Cork Constitution
, 1 May 1922, p. 5, col. 3.

17
Cork & County Eagle
, 20 and 27 May 1922. Clarina sold five other houses on Castle Street at the same time,
Southern Star
, 27 May 1922, p. 8, col. 5.

18
There have been suggestions that he was visited during this night by men intending to kill him, but his memoir makes clear that the only person to knock on his door was a terrified neighbour; Kingston, W., ‘From Victorian boyhood to the Troubles: a Skibbereen memoir’.

19
Ibid
. His journey to Dublin was fraught with danger and his account suggests a group of very frightened people travelling through a very unsettled country riddled with random violence. The train being ‘bombed’ at the tunnel at Glanmire Station in Cork and shots being fired at Limerick Junction by armed men on the platform are terrifying, but William does not suggest that the people on the train were attacked.

20
Ungoed-Thomas, J., 2008,
Jasper Wolfe of Skibbereen
(Cork, Collins Press).

21
A British Military Court of Inquiry found that she had been killed by the Auxiliaries; BMH WS 1652, Chief Supt. Henry O’Mara, p. 2.

22
Gregory and Murphy (1978), pp. 348–55. The incidents include threats, attacks at her home, the ongoing dispute over her land, the requisitioning of her family home at Roxboro, the departure of her brother and his family to England, the attack on the Talbots (which resulted in the death of Mrs Talbot, and Mr Talbot ending up in a Dublin nursing home), the poor attendance at de Valera’s Gort and Galway meetings, the capture of Galway by MacEoin, the killing of more Protestants in Cork, an untrue rumour that two Protestant gamekeepers had been asked to leave and the theft of the dentist’s car.

23
National Archives, Kew, CO 739/14/15/16 (16); Hodder refers in her letter to the fact that the Woods family are Protestants and suggests both class and sectarian elements in the killings and the local response; Coogan, T. P., 1990,
Michael Collins: the man who made Ireland
(Niwot, Colo, Roberts Rinehart), p. 359.

24
Peter Hart says that Mabel Williamson had written a letter which was intercepted by the IRA and as a result she was ordered out of the country: Hart (1998), p. 297. Alice Hodder makes much of the fact that Mrs Williamson (who was seventy-five) was a Cork native, but she was in fact born in India, as was her daughter according to the 1901 census. She was visiting Alton in England for the 1911 census. Her husband, Colonel Robert Williamson, was at home in Mallow.

25
Major Noel Furlong moved to Skeffington Hall in Leicestershire. His horse, ridden by his son Frank, won the Aintree Grand National in 1935 and 1936. His wife, Rosemary, was a member of the Murphy brewing family and was a Roman Catholic, which meant that the children would be Roman Catholic if they complied with the
Ne Temere
decree. Furlong had been a member of the South Irish Horse, but this had not stopped him trying to get out of Grand Jury duty along with Henry Longfield in 1913;
Southern Star
, 6 December 1913, p. 1. For evidence of Furlong at Riverstown:
http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/pages/1911/Cork/Riverstown/Hermitage/407830/
(accessed 18 July 2013).

26
Many of the letters in the National Archives, Kew, CO 739 14/15/16, are from a series of well-attended public meetings held in England by the Truth about Ireland League throughout the year, in support of compensation claims from refugees and condemnation of British government policy. Churchill understandably rejects the condemnation and declines to reinvade, which is one of the proposals of the league.

27
  
http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1922/may/11/situation-in-ireland#S5LV0050P0_19220511_HOL_40
(accessed 4 May 2012).

28
The Irish Times
, 12 May 1922.

29
It was suggested that this lack of interest in lesser crimes was more by omission than a deliberate stance on the part of the public, in that these events tended to get overlooked in troubled times rather than any suggestion of support according to the speaker Sergeant Hanna,
The Irish Times
, 12 May 1922, p. 5.

30
The Catholic hierarchy, the Irish government and the Dáil were specifically mentioned to applause.

31
 
http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/1926/en/act/pub/0019/print.html
sec2 (accessed 8 July 2013); House of Lords debates, 22 August 1922 and 15 July 1922, in which the people most affected by the burning of the ‘Big Houses’, including Lord Mayo, teased out the extent and effects of the Irish revolution. See also Keane (2013b).

32
The Irish Times
, 10 May 1922.

33
The term ‘ethnic cleansing’ is inappropriate. If there was any group targeted, it was Protestant unionists whose loyalty to Britain was the issue. Hart states that, ‘In their view Protestant Unionists were traitors’ but does not address the logic of his own comment that it was justifiable for the unionist sub-set of the Protestant community to be seen by republicans as traitors: Hart (1998), p. 291.

34
National Archives, Kew, CAB 43/2, p. 275. The opening lines of the ‘Memorial’ point out that the ‘Sinn Féiners are armed, the loyalists are not’ and it goes on to observe: ‘It seems almost miraculous that up to this all the Protestants and loyalists have not been massacred. It is a moral certainty that they will in the near future.’

35
National Archives, Kew, CAB 43/6, p. 90. Churchill states, ‘Their fears may be exaggerated, but they are real.’

36
Wilson, the former Chief of the General Staff, had retired in February 1922. He refused to talk to Lloyd George over the Truce and Treaty until just before he became both a Conservative member of parliament and military advisor to the Ulster government. He had just returned from unveiling the Great Eastern War Memorial at Liverpool Street Station when he was shot outside his home in London’s Eaton Square on 22 June 1922; House of Commons debate, 26 June 1922, vol. 155, cols 1693–1811:
http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1922/jun/26/irish-office-etc
(accessed 26 July 2013).

37
National Archives, Kew, CAB 24/173, ‘The position of loyalists in the Irish Free State’. ‘It also reported that the
Southern Irish Loyalists Relief Association
have recently [1925] brought to our notice a large number of cases of continued persecution and suffering among loyalists who have remained in the Free State.’