GERARD Murphy's 'The Year Of Disappearances -- Political Killings In Cork 1921-22' is very properly causing a major stir. Even more than Peter Hart's account of the IRA in the county, this book is revealing the terrible horror that befell the Protestants of Cork.

Moreover, it finally destroys any claim that a non-sectarian Republic could have resulted from the violence of 1916 onwards. In a society as confessionally divided as Ireland then was, with the general Catholic-nationalist and Protestant-unionist divide, political violence would inevitably lead to sectarian war.

Yet not merely does this State still celebrate the 1916 Rising as if it were a fine and noble thing, it is planning a swaggering bonanza in 2016 -- just as the remains of this pathetic, broken Republic are divided up between German banks and Chinese property dealers.

I've been writing a dissenting narrative about this period for most of my life and the response has been for me to be largely ignored by Official Ireland.

No matter. I can truthfully say that I invented the entire subject of historical journalism for the period 1914-23. Yet despite my work on the Irish and the Great War, I was not (of course) invited to participate in Sean O Mordha's acclaimed television series 'Seven Ages'.

Indeed, my exclusion by the 'Irish Times' from its supplement to mark the 90th anniversary of the Rising was one of several reasons why I resigned from that newspaper.

I say all this to establish my credentials here. Despite my knowledge, I've been astounded by Gerard Murphy's revelations, which clearly show that the campaign in Cork against Protestants and non-republicans was on a truly vast scale.

Most Belfast nationalists know of the terrible things that befell Catholics in the city in 1922. What happened in Cork was actually worse because it was accompanied by almost no chaotic street violence. It was a planned assault on a unionist community and executed with abominable method.

This villainy has been matched by the supine silence of Irish historians, to match their previous silence on Ireland the Great War. For Irish historiography has long been the academic wing of party-political republicanism, even though the main villains in Cork -- Corry, O'Donoghue and O'Hegarty -- who are at the centre of Gerard Murphy's book, should be well known to historians of the period.

The most sobering revelations concern Martin Corry, Fianna Fail TD for 40 years, a cheery psychopath and much-loved killer. How much the people of Cork knew about this vile Leeside Robespierre I cannot say. Many men -- and it is impossible to say what number -- were shot and buried at Corry's farm after being imprisoned in a nearby vault in Kilquane graveyard, which Corry called Sing Sing. As TD in the 1930s, he even jeered at James Dillon TD in Dail Eireann: "Come down and I will show you. I will show you a lot of things you never saw before. I would nearly show you Sing Sing. I am sure the Deputy would have to be very fascinating before he'd get out of it."

On St Patrick's Night in 1922 -- ie after the Truce and before the Civil War -- six members of the Young Men's Christian Association in Cork were abducted and executed at Corry's farm. That same week, half a dozen loyalist farmers were similarly disappeared in west Cork.

OVERALL, from the summer of 1920 to the start of the Civil War, 33 Protestants were shot in Cork city proper, while another 40 were killed nearby -- a total of 73 Protestant victims from a small minority community. From around 1921, IRA units murdered or "disappeared" at least 85 civilians. Some 26 were killed after the Truce, thereby making a mockery of the date that this State now chooses to commemorate the dead of all our wars -- July 11. As chilling as anything has been the toxic legacy amongst middle-class Cork Catholics, who until recently thought it chic to make jibes about a Protestant community which has never properly recovered from these terrible days. What you might call An Interim Solution.

We might have learnt all this long ago. A farmer bought some of Corry's land in the 1960s and dug up several skeletons in a mass grave. These were handed over to the local gardai at Watergrasshill, after which they vanished without trace. What a surprise.

Look. You cannot use violence in a divided society without militarising politics, after which, society's psychos and zealots feel authorised to kill their political opponents. The fundamental issue is not the dead of Cork or west Belfast: it is the use of violence to achieve political ends. It doesn't work. It kills people, but it doesn't get you what you want.

Moreover, killing innocents is not some aberration that only occurs at the end of a prolonged period of violence. The first victims in the opening minutes of 1916 -- which this Republic is dementedly determined to pretend was a poetry festival and for which it is preparing another grisly jamboree in 2016 -- were all innocent unarmed Irish people, killed in their native city. But then why not? Killing Irish people in their native cities is, after all, what our "republicans" do best of all. Step forward, Cork, 1921-22.

kmyers@independent.ie

- Kevin Myers

Although clearly written, this is not an easy book to read. The main problem lies in its structure: Murphy takes the reader through a retracing of his own journey researching the book, keeping the narrative apace with the author’s unearthing of new evidence. The result is that events are treated in a piecemeal fashion: for example, the murder of 15-year-old Edward Parsons is returned to over and again, as new theories or possibilities emerge. Instead of a coherent, balanced narrative, what emerges is a confusing muddle.

These flaws notwithstanding, some of the less lurid aspects of Murphy’s work fit well with the overall picture of what those at the sharp end of the Irish revolution experienced. His brief survey of the large-scale transfer of mostly Protestant-owned property on Cork’s southside after 1923 hints at a larger narrative of southern Protestant migration in the post-revolution period. The suggestion that Cork IRA men violently targeted the life and property of southern loyalists in response to sectarian violence in Northern Ireland also coincides with emerging work on the treatment of Irish Protestants in Connaught and Munster. As Murphy has demonstrated, terrible things undoubtedly took place in the Rea and across Cork city and county. The grotesque horror of Sing Sing and the skeletons unearthed close to Corry’s farm speak to that.

Good article.

'Priests feted IRA killers' Jailed terrorist accuses RC Church of collaboration

A former senior IRA member,in prison for murder,claims he witnessed collaboration between Roman Catholic priests and IRA terrorists to commit murder,and says such contacts must be known ''to the hierarchy''

Sean O'Callaghan,who joined the IRA at the age of 15 in 1970 and committed two murders in 1974,says ''he fell for the big lie'' after hearing the nationalist cause ''sermoned and preached from pulpit and Dail.''

He tells in an article in The Spectator out today,how he and his fellow IRA members who had killed an RUC Special Branch officer were treated a ''heroes'' by priests who protected them. The Irish Roman Catholic Church ''will fight a long and dirty war'' to pursue its own agenda and retain control over its flock,he says.

Mr O'Callaghan,a former senior member of the IRA's Southern Command who is now serving two life sentences,says he was born into an Irish Catholic family in 1950s rural Ireland. He suggests the Irish RC Church is ''a rather unique form of criminality'' which ''consistently conspired with the worst elements of extreme nationalism to produce a dogma based on the racial purity of a mythological 'Irish race''.

The RUC detective inspector he and two others murdered was an Irish Catholic seen as having ''betrayed his own.'' O'Callaghan says.

Two of the killers were driven within a couple of hours to a Catholic parochial house where Provisional IRA people often stayed.

''We were greeted joyously,showered with holy water and prayers and fed like kings...We were the heroes of the moment in that house.'' The next day the two priests checked the road ahead as he and his fellow murderer were driven to another house. O'Callaghan says his own and others experience proves that the two priests were not an exception. ''The contacts between the Irish Catholic Church and the Provisionals were far too extensive for all of this to be unknown to the hierarchy.

''I was there when priests collaborated with Provisionals,in the name of God and nationalism,to procure and commit murder....The Irish Catholic Church is still well entrenched within nationalism.''

Recently, IRA memorial services have been held in Roman Catholic chapels in Ballinderry-East Tyrone.

Sing Sing IRA underground 'torture chamber'
vault Knockrea cemetery Co Cork.jpg

Good find that picture, something that most certainly needs to be widely circulated.

Hart's book still causes a bitter reaction among ultra-nationalists. It challenges perceived nationalist wisdom that the IRA did not wage war on ordinary Protestants -- unless of course they were spies. But as Hart shows, the bulk of spies came from within the ranks of the IRA itself -- just as in the Provisional IRA.

Although he stops short of using phrases like "ethnic cleansing", Hart shows there was a strong streak of sectarianism in the IRA's campaign against alleged "spies", a campaign widened to include warnings against ex-servicemen, Jews, disorderly women and what the IRA called the "tramp class".

The culmination of Hart's book is a chapter titled 'Taking it Out on the Protestants'. This tells the story of the Dunmanway massacre of April 25, 1922, when members of the IRA pulled 10 ordinary Protestant shopkeepers, farmers and clergymen from their beds and shot them in cold blood, an atrocity movingly re-visited by RTE in a recent documentary Cork's Bloody Secret.

Hart's account makes it clear that the IRA campaign tore the Protestant heart out of Cork city and county. "Thousands more left permanently in 1921 and 1922, rapidly reducing the population of Cork to half its pre-revolutionary size. Those who stayed were frequently subjected to a regime of boycotts, vandalism and theft. Most of these people returned within a few months but many did so only to settle their affairs, sell their land and leave for good."

Who were these persecuted Protestants? Anglo Irish landlords, as nationalists like to believe? No, Hart says, they were just like their Catholic neighbours. "They came from a variety of stations of life: businessmen, farmers, a lawyer, a curate, a post office clerk, a farm servant. None were poor save James Greenfield, and a few were quite prosperous. Most lived somewhere in between, in middling circumstances."

As Hart shows, these sectarian incidents were not confined to Cork. Future historians may provide a fuller picture county by county. But the results were the same all over southern Ireland: the enforced exodus of at least 60,000 ordinary Irish Protestants, which deprived town and country of some of its most decent and productive citizens and left us culturally and socially poorer.

Hart sums up why we let it happen. "Beneath the welter of pretexts and suspicions, beneath the official rhetoric of courts martial and convictions, the IRA were tapping a deep vein of communal prejudice and gossip: about grabbers, Black Protestants, and Masonic conspirators, dirty tinkers and corner boys, flyboys and fast women, the Jews at No 4 and the disorderly house at No 30."

Hart uses the IRA's own account of the shooting of Mick Sullivan, a street singer and cattle drover, to make a poignant point about what happened to the wrong "type" in the eyes of the IRA. "He was a very raggedy individual a kind of tinker and hard nail. We were up early in the morning and there were hailstones. They brought on the spy, but I heard one shot only. A placard was pinned on him (Spies and Informers Beware)."

Tragically, hundreds of Cork servicemen came home to find themselves objects of suspicion. As Hart says: "The IRA pursued the same 'types' in 1922 and 1923 as they had in the Tan war -- 44 per cent of civilians shot by the IRA after July 1921 were Protestant and 20 per cent were ex-soldiers.

For most of my life, these forgotten victims lived at the margins of public memory. Peter Hart's monumental achievement was to dig up these buried bodies. Without such a reckoning there can be no reconciliation, and the conscience of a country can never be fully at peace. In that light, John A Murphy's raw reaction to Hart's death in his email to me deserves to be quoted in full.

"Wherever one stood in the debate, Hart was an original, a pioneer -- coolly challenging accepted nationalist narratives, the personification of history as critical investigation versus history as unchallengeable tablets of stone. Signs by, he incurred the venomous hostility of An Phoblacht et al. He was unflappable, charming and brave. But I don't have to tell you. At 46, he is a bright light, prematurely quenched. I hope his erstwhile opponents will have the generosity to acknowledge that."

So do I, but I doubt that they will do so. Both Kevin Myers and myself believe the savage polemics directed at the physically frail Hart by ultra-nationalist lobby groups took a toll on this mildest of men.

Hart was an historian with no axe to grind except the blade of truth. But judging by the Wikipedia entry on the Bandon Valley massacre, adjusted regularly by his ultranationalist opponents, they have forgotten nothing and learned nothing.

The egregious entry runs as follows -- I have italicised the weasely words: "The Dunmanway massacre was the killing of 10 Protestants, mainly informers but also including two relatives of informers, and the disappearance and presumed death of another three in and around Dunmanway, Co Cork, between April 26 and April 28, 1922."

Peter Hart's name will be still revered by new generations of Irish historians, when these weasel words are long forgotten. A Canadian by birth, he will be forever an honorary Irishman by virtue of his sterling service to this State: he told us the truth that sets us free. Ar dheis De go raibh a anam uasal.

Eoghan Harris

Sunday Independent

Telling the truth is not part of their being,especially if it might take away the image they have worked on over the centuries. Having said that as you can see there are a few exceptions. I do believe there are a few decent Irishmen out there who do speak out and tell the truth. Unfortunately the vast majority don't.

This has been the case (more or less) since the cinema came into being. The old black and white movies followed the same line. Think the RC church saw the potential of the movies in promoting a good image of themselves and their followers wheras the Protestants were shown in a different way ie Elmer Gantry etc.

Also the Irish policeman in America was shown in the early films in another 'broth of a boy' way. Yet in a book I read about the Mob in American it mentioned how the Italians formed themselves into gangs because when they went to the police (who were Irish) to complain about the hassle they were getting from the Irish gangs they did nothing about it. And they complained about the RUC here. And as well the Irish ran the police and their own got first preference. And again they pointed the finger at the RUC about the number of Protestants in their ranks.

Theres no doubt about it they know how to 'sell' themselves and the world in general takes it on board.

I remember the film the Patriot Games, were the IRA were seen as highly professional operatives prepared to fight fire with fire with armed men (something that very rarely ever happened), that film caused uproar within certain sections of Irish-American circles as it supposedly showed the IRA in a bad light.

I read a book called 'The Outsider'. There was a movie made of it. Never seen it and never heard of it being in the cinema or TV. So did a search and found out it was made in 1980. Just wondering how they were portrayed in it, as it was about a plastic paddy from Boston who is reared on tales by his Granda of the wonderful ira but when he goes to Belfast to 'fight' for the 'cause' he finds out its not the way he thought it would be and the men are not what he thought they would be. Don't know what way it leaned. But just wondering why it never got into the cinemas and tv. Here a piece about it. Think this guys a yank

This is a real sleeper about an Irish-American vet who, on returning to the USA after Viet Nam, decides to go to Ireland and fight for the IRA. His desire to do so is based on the stories told to him by his grandfather (Stirling Hayden) about fighting the Brits. The magic of this film is its realism. I swear you can feel the damp chill of a overcast Dublin day as you watch this movie! It reminds me of THE BLADE RUNNER in its darkness, however THE BLADE RUNNER is a fictional setting and THE OUTSIDER isn't, unless you've never been to that area of the world. I've been to Scotland and I'm telling you I don't know how they bottled that climate and make you feel you're there. I have gotten off on the realism and I've almost forgotten, this film has one of the most heart wrenching endings I've ever seen. Craig Wasson who stars has done some other films that have great plots and endings. Remember THE BODY DOUBLE? Same surprises as that and this too, is believable. It's not the cheap pulp writing trick of sneaking someone in at the last minute that you've never heard of or has never been revealed by the plot, some presumed long dead uncle that saves the day at the last minute. Although, it would be very difficult to predict this ending the plot does give you all the information and fore-shadowing you need to embrace it in the end. Good Movie!