Exorcising the dark, bloody secrets of IRA in West

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THE Bandon Valley is vibrant with beauty and violence. As a boy my father would bring me to fish illegally at Inishannon. On the way home he told me heroic tales of Tom Barry's Flying Column. But he never told me that in April 1922, an IRA gang had pulled 10 Protestants from their beds and shot them in cold blood.

Why? Partly because he did not know, partly because he did not want to know, and partly because he could not cope with the political problem such an event posed. As a republican he revered Tone's trinity of Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter. So when republicans regressed to tribal roots and killed Protestants he could not cope, retreated from reality, and repressed the memory.

There were times during the past 30 years when I wished I could have done the same. My thirst for the truth about how we treated southern rural Protestants in the period 1919-22 has brought me nothing but trouble. Sometimes from both sides at the same time.

They told me to let sleeping dogs lie. A fine motto if you are the top dog telling lies. But the republicanism that required me to side with the underdog, also required me to side with the silent Protestant dead. Kevin Myers broke that silence with a series of articles in the Irish Times in the early Nineties.

In the past 10 years we have had three classics on the period. Peter Hart exhumed the full facts in The IRA and its Enemies (1998); Joseph O'Neill examined the moral issues in his family memoir, Blood-Dark Track (2000); and Jasper Ungoed Wolfe explored the complex community relations involved in Jasper Wolfe of Skibbereen (2008).

In previous columns I praised Hart and Wolfe. Now I want to say a few words about Joseph O'Neill's book, prompted by Perry Donovan's powerful essay in Star Life, the bi-monthly magazine of the Southern Star. O'Neill is now famous as a favourite novelist of Barack Obama. But I doubt he will write a better book than Blood-Dark Track, which confronts both the bright and dark sides of his republican relations.

In 1997, as the Irish Republic searched for the bodies of missing IRA victims like Jean McConville, O'Neill was pondering his compulsion to find out the truth about West Cork Protestants whose bodies had been missing since 1922: "The urge to uncover the past, when it is a component of the inextinguishable and tormenting urge for justice, is extremely powerful, and the search for skeletons continued."

Let us hope O'Neill gets a DVD of Cork's Bloody Secret, tomorrow night's CSI documentary on RTE One. The title signals the team is not going to push any skeletons out of sight. But it exhumes these grim ghosts only to exorcise them in a powerful piece of public service broadcasting that will help to heal many wounds in West Cork.

Pat Butler came up with the concept of Cork's Bloody Secret. Fachtna O'Drisceoil presented the film and Sean O Mealoid produced it. They needed nerves of steel. Although I agreed to take part I was pessimistic. Previous attempts to tell the truth had failed because relatives of the victims were reluctant to speak freely.

But the CSI team found three courageous Protestants -- Donal Woods, Hazel Baylor and Charles Duff -- and two courageous Roman Catholic historians, Tommy Collins and Colum Cronin. The result is a rare film in which personal testimony transcends the tribal and ideological agendas of all sides.

It begins on the night of April 25th, 1922, four months after the Treaty, when an IRA group broke into the home of Thomas Hornibrook, his son Samuel and son-in-law, Captain Herbert Woods. Faced by armed intruders at dead of night, Captain Woods fired at them and shot dead the IRA group's leader, Michael O'Neill.

The three Protestants surrendered. The IRA group took them away to the hills and killed them in dire circumstances. Their bodies have never been found. In Blood-Dark Track, Joseph O'Neill gives them the only epitaph they have ever received: "These three dead Protestants were multiply entombed. Their violent deaths were not reported in the Irish newspapers; their bodies were buried in secret somewhere in West Cork; and their remains, unlike those of Northern Catholics, shot dead as informers, were never officially missed."

But it did not stop there. Over the following nights, the IRA shot 10 ordinary Protestant shopkeepers, farmers and clergymen. Hundreds of terrified Cork Protestants packed the trains and sought refuge in England and Northern Ireland. Similar scenes were taking place all over Ireland. At least 40,000 southern Protestants left.

Donald Woods directly confronts his self-imposed silence on the subject when speaking to another local historian, Colm Cronin: "We have been writing together on historical matter for four or five years now and I wonder why we never discussed these events of 1922?" Colm replies that many Catholics did not know the facts, and the hurt was so deep "they brought down a wall of silence around it".

Hazel Baylor speaks fluent Irish. She stands in the farmyard of the traditional farmhouse and points out where her uncle, Bertie Chinnery was shot dead. She says her mother had no hatred for his killers, and neither does she. You will have to see the film to feel her healing power.

Charles Duff comes from London, where he lectures on Shakespeare. He stands at the grave of his grandfather, David Gray, a chemist, who was shot dead in the doorway of his shop in Dunmanway.

After the murder the Gray family fled to England. It is Charles Duff's first time seeing his grandfather's grave and he has this to say: "I suppose I've thought a lot about how that family was once very happy and very united and it was a family, how on the grave it says 'worthy of everlasting remembrance' and how there hasn't been everlasting remembrance.

"They have been forgotten. But not today. Today they are remembered and I find that moving."

Most Irish people will welcome those healing words. But not all. The Tribal Patrol about which I wrote recently has already corrupted the existing Wikipedia entry on the Dunmanway Massacre. I have italicised their weasel words to point up how, from the opening paragraph, they try to sow sectarian seeds and thwart the noble vision of Wolfe Tone.

"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 26 April and 28 April 1922."

Hopefully the healing power of programmes like Cork's Bloody Secret are likely to leave these lethal tribalists behind.

Nothing will calm the fears of Northern Protestants faster than a Republic whose national broadcaster RTE engraves RIP on the graves of all the missing: Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter. Let us hope RTE continues to resist the tribalists.

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Oct 5, 2009 19:31:24 GMT @setanta said:

these arent secrets, we've been through this before and we've already dispelled the myths that they were killed coz of religion

Setanta sorry but you did not dispel anything, you tried to give us your version of events or rather the version of events that suits you best.

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Why then has the programme being hailed as exposing republican myths concerning these sectarian attacks?? Its not the British, it's RTE that have done so and I am sure they would have done much research before filming incase they were proved to be lying and not shoing the real truth.

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So you are saying this programme is wrong?? I find it rather shocking but not surprizing that you are dismissing what actually happened, is it because it will make your side not look like the good guys in your eyes??

Didn't Peter Hart's well researched book called The IRA and its Enemies point out that most of those killed were mostly old men or teenagers. For instance Alexander McKinley and Robert Nagle were both only 16 years old when they were murdered by the Irish Roman Assassins and their families wrongly thought that the youthfulness of the lads would save them from assassination.

Setanta please dont insult those that were killed by pushing the typical republican revisionist version of what really happened with the pogrom against Protestants in the republic.

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Yet in the years since the foundation of the state, the number of Protestants in the south had dwindled from 10 to 3 per cent of the total population. Most of those who left did so during the period described in The Story Of Lucy Gault, either frightened by IRA and vigilante attacks or unwilling to live in a state that would have a dominant Catholic ethos. In parts of County Cork, Protestants were subjected to a brutal campaign of sectarian violence. The ethnic cleansing of the Bandon Valley is one of the most odious chapters in our history, though I learned nothing about it at school. It took a Canadian academic, Peter Harte, to reveal the full savagery of the assault in his book The IRA And its Enemies.

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I am not playing the victim, I am speaking up for the victims against your denials. What is so wrong with that?

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Perhaps we should discuss thema ll but maybe lets start with the programme itself which is the opening thread. I asked you several questions concerning the programme makers but you have just brushed aside their findings because it doesnt sit to well with your beloved roman army.

RTE probes IRA massacre of Protestants by IRA in Cork
News Letter Monday October 5, 2009 Page 7
By Philip Bradfield

THE Irish state broadcaster RTE is showing a documentary into the murder of 13 Irish Protestants by the IRA in West Cork in 1922.
The massacre took place over three days and nights around the towns of Bandon, Clonakilty and Dunmanway in West Cork in April that year.

The RTE publicity for the documentary says that hundreds if not thousands of Protestants fled in terror as a result of the apparently sectarian onslaught.

While some later returned, many others left the southern Irish state for good, says the broadcaster, which says that the killings were carried out by "rogue elements of the anti-treaty IRA" in the period between the War of Independence and the Civil War.

"In the decades that followed, a great silence shrouded these terrible events, a silence maintained equally by all sides of the community.

"A new generation grew up, some of them hearing only furtive whispers; others hearing nothing at all about West Cork's bloody secret.

"Eighty years later, most of those who know about the killings still fear to speak of them," says the RTE statement.

Now for the first time, in RTE's CSÍ programme, the silence is broken.

In the programme, Hazel Baylor takes her daughter Jenny back to the family farm to tell her about the murder of Hazel's grand uncle, Bertie Chinnery.

Charles Duff who was adopted as a child in Wales, only found out about his birth family in recent years.

He travels to his ancestral hometown of Dunmanway for the first time ever to find out about his grandfather David Gray, who was summoned from his bed and shot in cold blood in front of his wife.

CSÍ explores how fears of damaging community relations have contributed to the silence about Cork's bloody secret.

The programme also asks whether the killings were really sectarian in nature, and whether they were a symptom of a deep rooted anti-Protestant sentiment in the majority community.

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Oct 6, 2009 8:37:13 GMT @setanta said:

I know WASP. But RTE have been on this "myth" buzz for the last few years. The Coolcrease propramme was slated because they deliberatly misrepresented the facts and with-held information from multiple sources that proved it wasn't a sectarian massacre.
The "What If Lynch had of Invaded" was a nonsense programme based on a nonsense scenario. The underlying theme was "we're iclke teeny Oireland and the border and the EU are just the best thing ever".

It's more of the same.

Setanta why did you say this 'Now, do you want to discuss the specific event you opened the thrend with or do you want to expand it? Lets stay on track please.' after you posted the above, and why do you continue to apply different rules to yourself than you do to me???

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Haunted by ghost of IRA's bloody legacy

The birth of the State is a source of national pride, but it hides a shameful secret whereby so-called freedom fighters terrorised the Protestant population, says John-Paul McCarthy


Sunday October 11 2009

THE RTE documentary Cork's Bloody Secret, which last week told of the IRA's campaign against local Protestants in 1922, will stand as a landmark document in modern Irish history.

This deeply moving meditation on the sectarian cleavages which gave birth to the Irish State was a master class on the importance of local history, and also a testament to human courage and solidarity.

Hazel Baylor brings her daughter to the grave of her uncle, John Albert Chinnery, who was murdered at his farm on April 28, 1922, by local IRA toughs; and the way she talks, in Irish, about their family's loss was as muscular as anything de Valera could manage from the platform.

Charles Duff came back from Britain to tell the story of his murdered grandfather, David Gray, the chemist who was shot dead in the doorway of his home in Dunmanway on April 27, 1922.

Having been written out of our national story for decades, these brave men and women performed a signal service to modern Ireland in reminding us of the catastrophic human consequences that followed the emergence of the IRA after 1919, especially in Cork, with its large, and mostly helpless, Protestant minority.

Their humane meditation on their loss must shame the hardmen in the local history profession in Cork who insist on painting the events of 1919-21 as a kind of knightly joust between devilish Black and Tans and heroic Flying Column men who preached an impeccable kind of republican virtue.

The knock on the door at night told a different story.

The most amazing aspect of this whole debate is the way it shows an almost total ignorance of Irish history pre-1919.

Anybody who knows anything about the century prior to the formation of the State would never dare to ignore the sectarianism that shaped every aspect of the Anglo-Irish relationship.

To write the sectarian hatreds out of the record, that is to say those very hatreds that motivated the squalid murders assessed by Cork's Bloody Secret, is not just to offer a kind of bad history.

It is a kind of anti-history, since it asks us to ascribe a sweetly, virtuous mindset to a Catholic class that had defined itself unashamedly in sectarian terms since Daniel O'Connell's astonishing career in the 1820s, if not before that.

There are many more Chinnerys and Duffs languishing in paupers' graves throughout the Cork countryside, and anyone who wants to characterise these events as "unauthorised" excesses or flashes in so many local pans only reveals their ignorance of the culture that produced them.

A pale and handsome young man once stood up in the British House of Commons to talk about these incorrigible sectarian tensions.

He dismissed the notion that Irish Catholics treated their Protestant neighbours with natural courtesy, and said "there is an old hereditary feud of blood -- there has been a transfer of property founded upon conquest -- and again, upon violent punishment for sanguinary rebellions, which is still unforgotten, and which lies at the root of the existing discord. Could you remove the immediate cause of debate, you would not thereby get rid of this fundamental difficulty."

The speaker was a young William Ewart Gladstone in 1836, channelling the mindset and the self-pity of the rural Irish Catholic class -- the very mindset that, by their own admission, animated the IRA in Cork in 1922.

Cork's Bloody Secret provoked many old ghosts and it was hard not to think of the great Protestant contribution to the Irish language during Hazel's moving remarks, a proud tradition that ranged from William Carleton through Douglas Hyde and TK Whitaker.

One also recalled the fact that de Valera let it be known through Maurice Moynihan in the 1980s that he felt deep shame in his old age when confronted with some of his speeches from the 1918-22 period, especially his speeches denouncing the RIC as a force of traitors, speeches which he knew provoked the sorts of outrages which destroyed Hazel's family.

These regrets can be found in Moynihan's editorial notes in his great book, Speeches and Statements by Eamon de Valera.

The great historian of the French Revolution Thomas Carlyle also pushes his way into this debate, since he wrote an extraordinary book about Ireland during the famine era.

Having spent some time in the family church at the Beecher estate at Ballygiblin in Cork in 1849, Carlyle wrote about his fears for honourable Irish Protestants and the storms he saw on their horizons: "I feel how decent English Protestants . . . might with zealous affection like to assemble here once a week, and remind themselves of English purities and decencies and gospel ordinances in the midst of a black howling Babel of superstitious savagery -- like Hebrews sitting by the streams of Babel . . . Weep ye by the stream of Babel, decent clean English-Irish."

Carlyle was wrong to call Cork Protestants English-Irish, since they were just Irish at the end, and he was wrong to predict much future weeping. Their's was to be a tradition of silence, rather than tears.

As Hazel says in her interview: "Thainig tost mor agus ta an tost sin fos ann inniu."

This was not the voice of Babel; rather the lonely murmur of abandonment, death-like in the leafless trees.

John-Paul McCarthy teaches Irish history at Exeter College, Oxford

- John Paul McCarthy

Sunday Independent

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Eoghan Harris

Sunday October 11 2009

My phone rings non-stop after CSI: Cork's Bloody Secret. Most of the callers are Roman Catholics and republicans from west Cork. They are thrilled to see the end of the last taboo -- telling the truth about what happened to hundreds of ordinary Irish Protestants after the Treaty.

Why did it take so long to speak out? At first fear seems to have been a real factor in isolated rural areas. Later came a decent desire not to disturb the status quo. In recent years an empty ecumenism persuaded Protestants to postpone giving witness.

Comfortable city Protestants conspired to prolong that silence. Some simply hadn't a clue about the sufferings of their country cousins. But some were silent because they had settled for the cushy role of Protestant republican.

I believe the major force in persuading Protestants to speak to CSI was Bishop Paul Colton's 2008 conference entitled Protestants, the War of Independence and the Civil War in County Cork. Some 150 Cork Protestants shared tragic family memories. After that the walls of silence could not stand long.

Expect some bitter old tribal nationalists to emerge to nit-pick. But most Irish people seemed relieved that those who suffered have finally found their voice. Certainly the majority community showed solidarity by tuning into CSI in large numbers.

Cork's Bloody Secret had 276,000 viewers and secured 21.8 per cent of audience share. This is a phenomenal audience for an Irish-language programme. Attention on that scale is a form of atonement.

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Setanta if part is mere speculation then surely the whole programme could be deemed speculation. Funny you didnt say it was speculation concerning the ira but it was pure speculation concerning the points you dont want to believe.

The fact the ira placed guards at Protestant houses according to the programme, would this not suggest the ira knew these were simply sectarian murders and would it not suggest that these killings could go very much against them concerning sympathy etc although they would have supported the killings in the first place.