Untitled Flashcards Set

In Hart’s picture of Cork, what was explicitly called revolutionary violence was implicitly about the settling of old scores, material interest, or ethnic tensions. Suspicions of informing to the authorities fell easily on Protestants and ex-soldiers, who the IRA sometimes shot, he maintained, ‘not because of what they did but because of who they were’.³⁸ Protestants targeted by the IRA often felt their religion was a factor in the attacks in Cork, and evidence from County Monaghan also points to sectarian violence and the targeting of army veterans.³⁹ John Borgonovo has maintained that the IRA in Cork City had established a sophisticated intelligence gathering system and aimed for certainty when killing informers. As occurred in Longford and Clare, the IRA leaders in the city took action to prevent sectarian killings and sanctioned violence only against civilians who were ‘actively anti-Irish’, although local volunteers did not always seek formal approval before acting.⁴⁰

The most heated debates about the War of Independence and Civil War concern the rules of military engagement and sectarian killing. In 1920, one week after Bloody Sunday, a group of IRA volunteers ambushed and killed seventeen Auxiliaries—an offensive, mobile corps of gendarmerie—at Kilmichael, near Macroom, in Cork. In his memoirs, the IRA leader Tom Barry maintained that some of the Auxiliaries staged a false surrender, and this led to the high number of fatalities. Hart, however, contended that the surrender was genuine and the volunteers gunned down Auxiliaries who had their hands up.⁴¹ This controversial interpretation jarred with the traditional take on things, and a number of historians placed it under the microscope and found inconsistencies in Hart’s evidence that have not been satisfactorily explained. Yet, the traditional version requires considerable faith in an account written by one man, Barry.⁴² It is unlikely the matter will be resolved; both versions of events rest on volatile testimonies recorded decades after the event, factors that few contenders in the debate have properly addressed. All wars come to be defined in some way by flashpoints, but the extent of the debate surrounding this single event, albeit a very well known one, has absorbed much scholarly energy that might be better spent elsewhere. Was the Kilmichael ambush generally representative of the war? Hart’s story is not provable but is plausible. For practical reasons the IRA usually took no political prisoners and sometimes killed men who surrendered. Prisoners were shot at Dromkeen in Limerick and drowned in Roscommon. Overall, however, one study of the encounters between the IRA and the British forces has maintained that, ‘after successful ambushes, the volunteers usually chose to simply disarm their prisoners and let them go’.⁴³

More controversy was generated by Hart’s careless use of the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ when discussing the ‘Protestant exodus’ from southern Ireland in 1920–2. He stopped short of arguing that actual ethnic cleansing occurred in Ireland, nonetheless his use of the term was deliberately provocative.⁴⁴ Again, the debate largely revolved around a key flashpoint. In April 1922, an IRA commandant was shot dead by a Protestant civilian while he attempted to seize his car. Over the following two nights, thirteen Protestant civilians were killed in villages in the area surrounding Bandon, Cork. These were revenge killings, Hart argued, that targeted the victims simply because they were Protestant.⁴⁵ Some historians differ, maintaining that the IRA had discovered intelligence that indicated that the victims were informers and they were killed for military reasons. This debate has produced an antagonistic discussion between John Regan and David Fitzpatrick regarding Hart’s interpretation and ‘elision’ of his sources.⁴⁶

Leaving aside the vexed and unresolved question of whether the victims were informers, there are a number of factors that indicate the ethnic cleansing argument is not valid. Ethnic cleansing is not defined in international law, but it may be broadly described as the use of force or intimidation designed to remove people of a certain ethnic, racial, national, or religious group from an area. When Hart discussed ethnic cleansing, he conflated motivation and effect. Even if we accept his view that the Bandon killers acted out of a hatred for Protestants and a desire to teach them a lesson, the effect of the killings may have been for Protestants to leave the region in fear, but this is not necessarily what was intended, and there is no evidence to suggest that it was. Scale is also important. Ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, which took place when Hart was writing and influenced his choice of the term, entailed a ‘widespread or systematic attack on a civilian population’.⁴⁷ In southern Ireland, the Bandon killings appear to have been exceptional and republican leaders took actions to prevent similar episodes reoccurring. Many Protestants who left the region later returned. Finally, research by David Fitzpatrick and Andy Bielenberg on Protestant communities in Cork indicates that, while some Protestants undoubtedly fled in fear, population decrease during the Irish Revolution was in line with long-term trends. There may have been an upturn in the numbers leaving in the years following the First World War, but a number of these were ‘would-be’ migrants who were unable to move during the war. When the period 1914–18 is taken into proper consideration, there are consistencies in the trend.⁴⁸

Indicative of the rude health of public history in Ireland, key debates have taken place beyond the academy, in the magazine History Ireland, and in television and cinema, such as the RTÉ programme Hidden History and the feature film The Wind that Shakes the Barley. The latter, which won the 2006 Palme d’Or, received hostile criticism in some British newspapers for its favourable portrayal of the Irish War of Independence.⁴⁹ Yet Loach’s film was no romanticized picture of Irish heroism. Benefitting from the presence of Donal Ò Drisceoil as historical advisor, the film explored state terrorism, but also conflicts within republican ranks and the devastating effects of divisions during the Civil War. The film also brought to the fore social conflicts and labour agitation which, some historians found overstated onscreen, but had been neglected in existing portrayals of the conflict in film and in text. In April 1920, a general strike was called in support of political prisoners on hunger strike in Mountjoy jail and the next month railwaymen refused to transport British forces or munitions, an embargo that lasted till December. The Crown forces also targeted labour newspapers and the halls and members of the ITGWU.