GOING against the grain is good for the character. But that was not why I wanted Germany to win last week. I'd hoped it would help them heal two historical wounds.
First, I'd thought it would help heal the raw wounds left by the Wall. Second, I'd thought it was time this generation of Germans stopped looking over its historical shoulder. After all, alone among the nations of the world, it has faced up to its hard history.

Pity we can't do the same. It took 20 years of pressure by politicians like Paddy Harte and journalists like Kevin Myers before we could stomach the Somme. Is it going to take another 20 years before we admit that we treated thousands of Southern Protestants abominably in the period 1916-24?

* * *

This is not a subject I wanted to write about this summer. It stirs too many terrible memories. In fact I stopped writing about it a few years ago, hoping that a new generation of historians would handle it with care so that we could confront it calmly.

But I am forced to speak out by the gale of tribal garbage that has blown through the media on the back of Ken Loach's film, The Wind that Shakes the Barley. Suddenly, against all the academic evidence, the newspapers are full of amateur nationalist commentators announcing that, (a) there was no ethnic cleansing of Southern Protestants in that period, (b) that any Protestants the IRA shot were spies, and © that the IRA was no more likely to shoot Protestant "spies" than Roman Catholic "spies".

Garbage. Get the facts.

* * *

The facts can be found in Peter Hart's The IRA and its

'How come the IRA shot Mrs Lindsay, a Protestant, but let Fr Shinnick, a Roman Catholic priest, go free? And how come I never asked the ageing Tom Barry that awkward question although I drank with him for three years?'

Enemies, Violence and Community in Cork, 1916-1923. Hart is an academic Canadian historian with no Cork connections and with absolutely no axe to grind. This of course makes him a mortal threat to tribal myth-makers.

Hart's book, with its wealth of statistics and interviews with both IRA men and ageing Protestants, has been causing big problems for the bigots since it was first published in 1998. And no wonder. Like most Cork people who have read the book, I was shocked by its revelations - not least because at some level I realised that I had lied to myself for many long years.

How could I have swallowed the self-serving myths of so many old IRA survivors? Take the Upton Ambush. How were Mrs Lindsay or Father Shinnick "spying" when they reported seeing arrangements for an IRA ambush to the authorities? What else could any decent person do if they wanted to save lives? They could hardly have reported it to the IRA!

But even if we accept the IRA's sick labels, and agree that Mrs Lindsay and Fr Shinnick were "spying" (just as Jean McConville was "spying" by giving a drink of water to a British soldier), a big question remains. How come the IRA shot Mrs Lindsay, a Protestant, but let Fr Shinnick, a Roman Catholic priest, go free? And how come I never asked the ageing Tom Barry that awkward question although I drank with him for three years?

Because deep down I didn't want to know.

* * *

Hart's book dealt a deadly blow to nationalist delusions that the IRA were non-sectarian.

That is why it has been the subject of non-stop sniping by a cabal of nationalist mythologists. But while they may chip a tree or two, the broad wood of his work still stands.

It's a dark and bloody wood. Although Hart explicitly eschews the term "ethnic cleansing" to describe the experience of Southern rural Protestants from 1916-22, it is hard to find any other term. By 1924 their numbers were down by 40 per cent. We lost 100,000 decent Irish people who had done no harm.

Naturally nationalists like to think this decline was due to the Great War or RIC and other service dependents doing a bunk after the Treaty. Not so. Even when we excise those who died in World War I, or who left because they were identified with British administration (soldiers, RIC, civil servants), we are still looking at the loss of 60,000 Southern Protestants.

These were not the Ascendancy. They were mostly farmers, country shopkeepers and Dublin artisans. They were driven from their native land by letters of intimidation, the firing of shots and, in the Bandon area, by 10 innocent men being taken from their homes and shot dead in the space of a few days.

Face the facts. Between 1916 and 1926 thousands of ordinary decent rural Irish Protestants were pushed out of their farms and shops and forced into exile in Britain, Australia and Canada. For every 100 Protestants, 40 were forced to emigrate, leaving farms and shops behind to be bought in forced sales by those who had driven them out - and who from then on had a vested interest in hiding what really happened.

Although Hart does not call this "ethnic cleansing", he cannot avoid some comparisons which would be familiar to those who suffered under Hitler's fascists. "All the nightmare images of ethnic conflict in the 20th Century are here: the massacres and anonymous death squads, the burning homes and churches, the mass expulsions and trains filled with refugees, the transformation of life-long neighbours into enemies, the conspiracy theories and the terminology of hatred."

Thanks to Loach, conspiracy theories and tribal terminology have been given a new lease of life among the dying breed of Bandon bigots who bluster about all they suffered under the Black and Tans. But behind the bluster lies a bad conscience, both about what happened to local Protestants, and about how some of their forebears got their land when the Protestants left.

But the more the bigots try to hide what happened, the more they ensure that a more exacting generation of chroniclers than the current crop of consensus-mongers will dig up the bodies and figure out who got the farms that went cheap in the forced sales.

* * *

The Protestants were not the only people to be singled out by the IRA. Last week we held a moving but sanitised Somme ceremony. Here, in the words of an IRA man involved, is what happened to Mick O'Sullivan, a cattle drover, street-singer and ex-serviceman, who was shot for nothing more than being what the IRA called the "tramp class".

"He was a very raggedy individual, a kind of tinker and hard nail. We were up early in the morning and there were hail stones at 7 o'clock. They brought on the spy, but I heard one shot only. A placard was pinned on him ('Spies and Informers Beware'). A shower came then. We were looking over the bleak [black pine bog road. We could see the village (Rathmore) a mile away. Now when the shower was over and I looked out and sure enough the spy was gone. Holy God says I what's wrong with the spy. We searched around for him and we found him over across the ditch and his coat was pulled up as if he was trying to ward off the shower. I jumped out on the road then. Then he was properly finished off."

Hart has told us where the bodies are buried. The bigots want to hide them in a bog of shame. But we will never heal until we defy the bigots, dig up the bodies, and give them a decent burial.

Eoghan Harris

Many years ago in Cork I knew such a Cooneyite family.

* * *

Back in the fifties, as a boy, I worked for my father in his small wholesale grocery business in James St. This was before the days of cash and carry and there were few personal callers to break the monotony. So I well remember the rainy day when I was packing tea and looked up to see I was not alone.

Standing patiently inside the draughty door, waiting for me to finish my task, were a small family of what I would have called country people. But these figures seemed from a far-off time: a tall angular man with a short beard in a plain black coat, a tall handsome woman in a brown bonnet and a long brown coat that almost touched the ground, a young girl, my age, with blue woollen gloves, blue coat, and plain black buttoned shoes, whose modest gaze could not disguise her delight at the rare treat of being up in town.

Later my father told me they were called Cooneyites. I have never forgotten their aura of invincible innocence. It was the start of my life-long respect for low-church Protestants. Tildy Pearson would have looked like the girl with the gloves whom I saw in my father's store so many years ago, and who thanked me with a sweetness which still breathes its benediction after almost50 years.

To attack a family like that calls to high heaven for atonement. Alan Stanley's book helps make historical amends, not only to the Pearsons, but to the 50,000 Protestants who were bullied, frightened and burned out of their modest farms, both before and after the Truce, and whose story has been suppressed by nationalists.

And thereby hangs a complex tale.

* * *

First a few facts. Between 1911 and 1925 the number of Protestants in the South fell by a massive 34 per cent with a sharp peak between 1920-24 when about 10,000 Protestants left Ireland. In his forthcoming book, with the appropriate working title Buried Lives, Robin Bury has factored in the deaths of World War One and those who left with the British garrison.

That still leaves 50,000 Irish Protestants, modest artisans, small farmers and shopkeepers, run out of the country. This may have encouraged the emigration of some 10,000 Protestant artisans from Dublin. Among those who left were Pearsons of Coolacrease.

* * *

Naturally you will have no trouble figuring out why Southern nationalists might not want to hear about these tribal intimidations by the IRA. These stories subvert our smug assumption that the only sectarians are Loyalist sectarians. But the Pearson atrocity was not an isolated incident but part of a persistent pattern of persecution, intimidation and murder - what might charitably be called "erratic ethnic cleansing".

Increasingly, in my experience, Roman Catholic nationalists can cope with these truths. Admittedly

a minority of mad nationalists, still believe

that admitting these atrocities gives "ammunition" to Paisley & Co. Actually

the opposite is true. Northern unionists are always relieved when Southerners admit

to such atrocities. It means that we have no hidden agendas.

But what is truly amazing is the sort of well-heeled Southern Protestant who will claim to be speaking in the name of ecumenism or the peace process or whatever they believe will go down well with people in certain circles.

Actually most Dublin Protestants don't know anything about the atrocities against their rural co-religionists in places like Cork, Carlow and Longford. And most don't want these tragedies dragged up because it is socially inconvenient. But their cowardly desires do not close the case. As Yeats says, buried men thrust their way back into the public mind. Besides, many rural Roman Catholics well remember secrets whispered at home.

The Pearsons suffered in silence. So did thousands of Protestants in modest circumstances. And I have a hunch that the persistent self-suppression of this dark history and the policy of keeping the head down must have done some damage to the Southern Protestant psyche.

* * *

Martin Mansergh has some title to being the top Southern Protestant in denial. And it has left its mark. Last week, in his Irish Times column, he said something which pins down the peculiar psychology of many Southern republican Protestants.

"The grounds of my family home in Tipperary, let when my father was young, was the scene of the murder in 1931 of Garda Supt Curtin, who had allegedly threatened some local volunteers with the law. This led to the introduction of draconian legislation in the final months of the Cosgrave administration in 1931 and to a split in the Labour Party. A faded cross on the wall by the gate marks the spot. Close by, I have planted a beech tree, given to me five years agoby Gerry Adams, as a 'Treeof Peace'." This makes me sick for three reasons. First, the bad politics of the phrase about the "draconian legislation" of the Cosgrave government. Second, the repugnant spectacle of a republican Protestant planting a tree given him by Gerry Adams. Third, because it provides a rotten role model for any young Protestant Irishman.

* * *

Let me, from my Roman Catholic nationalist background, put the matter simply. The Pearsons family did not deserve what was done to them, and neither did the 50,000 artisans and farmers who were driven out of their homes and across the world. Facing our tribal past helps us understand the fears of Northern Protestants - and is good for our souls. That is why I reject the right of posh Protestants to plant some green plastic Tree of Liberty with Gerry Adams.

Any such tree is rotten to the roots and will bear only bitter fruit.

Peace starts with a prayer for the Pearson boys.

Eoghan Harris