The first number I can remember reading for those slain in the massacres was 35,000. Then Robert Kee in his book said 12,000. On morning TV a schools programe gave the number as 2,000. At this rate in another lot of years it will not have happened at all 
It will be interesting to see what these professors make of the depositions given by the victims at the time,or should I say what they decide to tell us. 
Accounts shine light on massacre of 1641
Published Date: 01 November 2010
THE mystery surrouding one of Ireland's most controversial periods of history is set to be untangled in what has been termed the world's oldest public inquiries.
Depictions of events of 1641 often adorn the banners of Orange lodges
but the events have always been murky with reports of the numbers
of Protestants killed by republicans ranging from 12,000 right up to
200,000.
The violence was widespread throughout Ireland with Protestant planters robbed, forced from their homes and, in some cases, murdered.
But now for the frst time the accounts of what really happened are available online after academics spent three years painstakingly transcribing 19,000 pages of depositions from people who took part in all sides of the rising.
And, like most inquiries, the team behind the project is very diverse led by the universities of Cambridge and Aberdeen as well as Trinity College, Dublin.
Trinity have described the rising as "one of the least understood
massacres in European history, in which many thousands of men, women and children lost their lives".
The depositions make brutal readings at times with witness accounts of savage mass murder.
One example examines the story of Eleanor Price, a widow and mother
of six from Co Armagh, who was imprisoned by insurgents before five
of her children were drowned, along with other settlers, in the River Bann at Portadown Bridge.
The account describes how the rebels "then and there instantly and
most barbarously drowned the most of them: And those that could swim
and come to the shore they either knocked them in the hands and so after drowned them, or else shot them to death in the water".
The uprising by Irish Catholics in October 1641 followed decades of tension between settlers and the native Irish.
Professor John Morrill, from the University of Cambridge, one of the
project's principal investigators and chair of the management committee, said the events of 1641 transformed Irish history.
"GK Chesterton once wrote that the problem with the English conquest of
Ireland is that the Irish cannot forget it and the English cannot remember it," he said.
"Now, for the frst time, the Irish will be able to read about what
happened in full and the English will have complete access to an
episode that they have frequently overlooked."
The next stage of the project will be analysing the depositions, it is set to start next March and last for a year and will examine the reliability of the depositions.
