Post by leeside on Nov 25, 2010 11:49:35 GMT
Distorting Irish History, the stubborn facts of Kilmichael: Peter Hart and Irish Historiography
The Newfoundland historian Peter Hart, who died recently at the age of 46, stimulated a debate on sectarianism within Irish nationalism and on the nature and conduct of the Irish War of Independence (WoI).
He provoked controversy and subsequent research that has helped to clarify differences over the interpretation not only of Irish history but also of Irish society.
Professor Paul (now Lord) Bew of Queen's University Belfast (QUB), said of Hart’s landmark The IRA and its Enemies (OUP, 1998): ‘The first work on the Irish revolution which can stand comparison with the best of the historiography of the French Revolution: brilliantly documented, statistically sophisticated, and superbly written’.[1]
The weight of academic opinion afforded Hart numerous prizes and plaudits. Critics emerged, also, however, who concluded that Hart’s methodology was quite often slipshod, unreliable, and, in places, unbelievable.
When the detail was published it was characterised within the academy as inappropriate. QUB’s Fearghal McGarry put it, ‘Some of the resulting controversies fell within the realm of legitimate debate, but a lot didn’t’, but without informing us what, in his view, either did or did not (Irish News, 28 Aug 2010).
Hart’s argument provoked a debate on the conduct of academic historiography in Ireland and a perceived interrelationship with the requirements of public policy on the conflict in the North of Ireland. Consequently, Irish Historians divided in Hart’s wake, into pro, con, or (more often) wary of venturing above the parapet.
In this essay, I examine:
(a) the political context within which Hart's research was promoted and the reaction from within the academy to the emergence of a critique;
(b) the basis of Hart's interpretive framework;
(c) how evidence was shaped to fit that framework.
I conclude with a discussion of why demonstrable flaws in the research were ignored within professional historiography.
PART ONE Irish History Recreated
The controversy over Hart's research revived a debate thought to be over.
During the 1980s, Roy Foster, Oxford’s Carroll Professor of Modern Irish History, critiqued Irish nationalist historiography. He concluded in 1986, ‘We are all revisionists now’.[2] The ‘revisionist’ project undermines a narrative of Irish history in which British rule accounted for Irish misfortune. Not so, say revisionists, claiming evidential objectivity and sophistication.
We should blame, instead, more or less, ourselves alone. In a development of the idea that Irish nationalism was ‘Catholic’, during the 1990s the sectarian nature of unionist-dominated Northern Ireland was projected backwards into the outlook and practices of Irish nationalism during the early part of the Century. It was then brought forward to frame an understanding of Northern Irish politics and society. Foster cited Hart’s research in support of this connection (Times, 21 May 1998).
Hart’s findings energised two Irish newspaper columnists, Eoghan Harris in the Sunday Times and Kevin Myers in the Irish Times and Daily Telegraph. They were as contentious in their field as Foster is in his. Both journalists had been associated with left wing ‘Official’ Irish republicanism in the 1970s, that had split with the ‘Provisional’ kind in 1970.[3] They viewed the latter as rightwing sectarians out for religious war, but moved rightwards themselves, and increasingly anti-republican, as they advanced in years.
Murdoch rather than Marx beckoned Harris toward the Sunday Times, Irish edition. Like Paul Bew, who also had Official republican leanings in his academic youth, Harris became an advisor to the Unionist Party leader David (now also Lord) Trimble. He briefly advised the Orange Order.[4] Harris and Myers were connected in another way. Both their media careers suffered as a result of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s ministerial control of broadcasting censorship from 1973-77, though both later bought into O’Brien’s anti-nationalism that itself became a form of unionism.[5]
The consistent theme running through academic and journalistic arguments was that Irish nationalism is anti-Protestant. Hart, it appeared, proved it so. The idea undermined the democratic credentials of resistance to British rule in the north of Ireland. Resistance could not be portrayed as opposition to sectarianism if it was a form of sectarianism in itself.
Hart’s analysis was promoted in the political context pursued by the two journalists mentioned.
Immediately prior to the 1994 IRA ceasefire, a Cassandra like Kevin Myers cited a litany of violent events between the July 1921 Truce with Britain, thorough the December Anglo Irish Treaty and the start of the Irish civil war in June 1922. He remarked on ‘republicans’ destroying “protestant property” and reported, ‘the IRA mounted a pogrom of Protestants in the Dunmanway area’ in April 1922.
Events, he implied, were about to repeat themselves (Irish Times, 27 Aug 1994). After the collapse of the first (1994) IRA ceasefire in 1996, Myers wrote, ‘we are up to our necks in the direst trouble, and all options are hard... It is, alas, time to air the beds in the [internment camp in the] Curragh’.[6]
He wavered momentarily, admitting at one point in 1998, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ and ‘Wrong: totally and utterly wrong, wrong, wrong. It’s an unsettling, disorienting thing finally to realise that the prediction about which I have written thousands of words turns out to have been complete rubbish.’ Myers then effectively admitted, in the words of former Irish Times Editor, Conor Brady, that he had been ‘wrong about being wrong’ by reverting to his former position.[7]
Eoghan Harris did not admit to error. Prior to the IRA ceasefire in 1994 and after it momentarily collapsed, he warned of war spreading down from the North. He wrote, ‘Northern Ireland is slowly stumbling backwards towards barbarism on the scale of Bosnia’. Harris asserted in February 1996, ‘So we must brace ourselves for bombs in Dublin’.[8]
His ‘bottomless contempt for the goliath of the national bourgeoisie’ (the residue of a former political life) was vented at southern political leaders, but in particular at one architect of the process, SDLP leader John Hume, more so than at the other, Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams. Harris observed in 1996 that a ‘successful policy of demonising [republicans] down [South] was disrupted at a critical point in 1993 [when] John Hume threw the thug [Adams] a lifeline’.[9] In a summation of his feelings on the Irish peace process in June 1997, Harris observed,
‘It was a fraud from start to finish. A fraud when President Robinson limply shook the hand of Gerry Adams. A fraud when [Gerry] Adams held [Taoiseach, Albert] Reynolds and [John] Hume's hands in a vice outside government buildings. A fraud when [RTE newsreader] Bryan Dobson leaned across an RTE news studio to sentimentally shake the hand of [Sinn Fein’s] Lucillita Breathnach to celebrate the ceasefire. Munich was what was on my mind as I watched all these actors in the Sinn Fein play. Peace in our time, I thought, a lie then, a lie now. Those who think you can talk to Sinn Fein are as foolish as those who thought that you could talk to Hitler.’[10]
After the reinstatement of the IRA ceasefire in July, Harris observed,
‘we have no more reason to be grateful for the second ceasefire than a Jew would have to be grateful to a Gestapo guard who stopped beating him so as to fix the noose with which he proposed to hang him.’[11]
Hart’s book in 1998 provided evidence for conclusions awaiting deployment. Those who questioned Hart were considered ineffectual nitpickers, purveyors of what Roy Foster termed ‘nationalism with footnotes’.[12]
The context in which the book was publicised affected its reception. While historians McGarry and Foster criticise negative reactions to Hart’s work, they do not address the polemical manner in which it was promoted and defended, a promotion Hart appeared to encourage. For instance, in the Sunday Times (19 April 1998) on Tom Barry, the IRA commander of the successful 28 November 1920 Kilmichael Ambush, ‘Barry is still considered to be an idealistic figure, unlike the great majority of his comrades he was little more than a serial killer and thought of the revolution largely in terms of shooting people. His politics were very primitive’.
The promotional efforts of Myers and Harris stimulated a low-level culture war in which the evidential basis of Hart’s views was challenged. Sceptics questioned the weight of received opinion within which Hart’s work became a standard academic reference point. For example, with others, Foster cited Hart as a basis for dismissing Ken Loach’s portrayal of the IRA in The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006).
Hart ‘raised hell’ among (unnamed) ‘local historians’, noted the Waterford born professor. Foster also supported allegations of IRA sectarianism towards two Co Offaly farmers shot in June 1921. This was depicted in a contentious RTE documentary on the subject involving Eoghan Harris, that itself relied on Hart’s research to establish the notion of widespread anti-Protestantism.[13]
After the historian’s sudden unfortunate death Foster summed up Hart critics, as (again unnamed) ‘local historians and pietists’. UCD’s Diarmaid Ferriter endorsed Hart’s view that critics practiced ‘faith-based or creationist history’ (Irish Times, 31 July 2010). They were portrayed as an amalgam of rustic irreconcilables, ideological refugees from the wrong side of the collapse of the Berlin Wall and a monk from Glenstal Abbey. In Eoghan Harris’s unfortunate (and baseless) contribution, ‘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’ (Sunday Independent, 25 July 2010).
By accusing Hart’s critics of engaging inappropriately, his supporters (who dismiss the notion that they support anything other than, disinterestedly, their craft) had a reason for refusing to engage. One particular criticism, however, was dismissed as unimportant. McGarry again, ‘The inordinate focus on who did what at Kilmichael detracted from appreciation of the significance of [Hart’s] body of work as a whole’ (Irish News, 28 Aug 2010).
Criticism might be right, in other words, but it would be wrong to discuss it. Hart wrote of this event in 1998, that was central to his analysis overall, ‘my primary sources were interviews with participants and statements made by them, conducted and collected by myself and others’.[14] These ‘primary sources’ were anonymous and gradually attracted more attention than ‘who did what’.
In his critical summary of Hart’s legacy, Jack Lane criticised those who adopted Hart’s ‘millenarian… spirit’ and who ‘responded to it as believers’.[15] Jeff Dudgeon, a Roger Casement scholar, questioned this view of Hart’s analysis. He also, unusually, engaged with some detail, but challenged petty minded ‘fact-checking’. Dudgeon asked his readers to acknowledge the inevitability of error and mentioned some of his own.[16]
Those who saw weaknesses in Hart’s presentation of evidence regarded them as more than trivial, however.
Take one of the first examples to emerge.
Brian Murphy, a Benedictine monk from Glenstal Abbey, reviewed The IRA and its Enemies in The Month (Sept-Oct 1998). Murphy, English born, Oxford educated, is a historian with impeccable credentials.[17] His words to the effect that Hart’s book was ‘important’ appeared afterwards on its dust jacket.
In the course of his review, Murphy considered Hart’s discussion of the 27-29 April 1922 republican killing of 13 Protestant civilians in West Cork. The unprecedented event climaxed Hart’s analysis. This occurred during the increasingly chaotic interregnum between Anglo Irish Treaty signing in December 1921, republican spilt in January and the onset of Civil War in June 1922. Hart had cited a sentence from an archived British intelligence analysis that was, he wrote, ‘by common consent the most trustworthy source we have’. It stated that, generally, Southern Irish Protestants were not guilty of informing because ‘except by chance, they had not got [information] to give’.
In other words Protestants were not active in support of British forces. Hart could then state with confidence that those shot in April 1922 were killed more or less at random ‘because they were Protestants’. The point was central to his argument. However, Murphy pointed out that Hart left out a sentence following, stating, ‘an exception to this rule was in the Bandon area’, where these loyalists were killed, and that those involved suffered greatly. The evidence available to him in his ‘most trustworthy source’ contradicted Hart’s conclusion and he omitted it.[18]
This example of misrepresentation of an archival source was not the first to emerge. It was difficult to elicit explanations of these and other anomalies. Take another example
In 2003 Meda Ryan published her critique of Hart, Tom Barry, IRA Freedom Fighter. Its title provided Hart with sufficient excuse to ignore her contention that Hart appeared to have interviewed an anonymous Kilmichael Ambush veteran after the last one died. It permitted him, however, to observe that Ryan’s analysis was not ‘rational’.
It was at this point, after a History Ireland interview with Hart (March-April 2005), in which Ryan was deemed irrational and in which Hart claimed that Murphy’s criticism was unpublished, that discussion became heated. A newcomer and neutral in the debate, Dr Andreas Boldt of Maynooth, in surveying the fallout in later editions of History Ireland (to Sept-Oct 2005), suggested to Hart that he should engage with the argument objectively:
’I take issue with the argumentative manner in which Peter Hart approaches his response… His language is emotional and aggressive…. I don’t believe that Hart is able to convince his ‘enemies’ by denouncing them; he has to argue with them, based on historical evidence and understanding of that time.’
Hart did not take the advice. As late as 2009 in History Ireland, the historian and former doctoral student colleague of Hart, Joost Augusteijn, recommended that Hart respond.[19]
Hart floated above his critics who, in peppering his academic flank with detailed criticism, could not knock him down to earth to deal with it. Doubtless, this was frustrating. By all accounts the late historian was a personable individual, far from a sense of his own importance and was generous with his time, expertise and advice. It may be wondered, therefore, why he did not acknowledge mistakes or address criticisms in a reasoned manner.
It may be that Hart did not have academically acceptable explanations. It may be also, that the academy had invested too much unquestioning belief in Hart to require him to explain his methods. Criticism was destined to be ignored and, where possible, suppressed.
Attention focused initially on Hart’s second chapter, The Kilmichael Ambush, and his penultimate Taking it out on the Protestants chapter, because they established his view that the War of Independence was an exercise in ethnic and sectarian revenge. Hart regarded the Kilmichael ambush commander, Tom Barry, as ‘vain, angry and ruthless’ (p. 32), a liar (p. 36) and as a ’serial killer’ (p. 100), who engineered a ‘massacre’ of surrendered British soldiers (p. 37).
Hart observed: ‘the culmination of a long process of social definition… produced both the heroes of Kilmichael and the victims of the April massacre’. As he put it, ‘one is as important as the other in understanding of the Cork IRA’ (p. 292). Hart went on to suggest in his final chapter, Spies and Informers, that the IRA shot imagined enemies at random, mainly Protestants and those they saw as ‘deviants’.
Those sympathetic to the Newfoundland historian claimed that his methodology brought to the surface nationalist secrets that were buried deep. The timing was fortuitous. Details of institutional Catholic management of industrial schools were being revealed in the 1990s. In addition, corruption at the heart of Irish politics, centred on the person of former Taoiseach Charles Haughey, resulted in the setting up of one judicial enquiry after another. Hart’s analysis appeared to reveal the historical unholy grail, a source of original Irish sin.
It seemed to be in tune with southern Ireland’s increasingly liberal, modern and middle class sensibility. Hart’s use of anonymous informants reinforced the sense that he was exposing truths that could not otherwise be uttered. The alternative view of evidence not subject to verification was ignored.
In the 1990s the search was on for evidence of specifically republican sectarianism. A historian central to the project contradicted previous thoughts. TCD’s David Fitzpatrick suggested in 1998, though without evidence, that, in addition to targeting Protestants, the IRA also went after adulterers and homosexuals during the War of Independence. However, nine years earlier, Fitzpatrick noted that Protestants, including loyalist ‘diehards’, suffered ‘few attacks’, apart from the burning of ‘many vacant houses’.[20] Followers in the footsteps of Oscar Wilde and Charles Stuart Parnell were entirely unremarked upon. Fitzpatrick’s earlier observations attracted the attention of Kevin Myers.
Myers had written for ten years on themes related to Peter Hart’s research. It was a subject on which he felt some passion. In his 2006 memoir on the conflict in Northern Ireland, he wrote
‘Murdering people for their religion was what republicans had always done, especially in their most celebrated period 1919-22. Only the successful seizure of Irish historiography by Irish republicans has concealed this vital truth.’[21]
Clearly the journalist was intent on seizing it back.
Myers had his prose picked apart regularly in a process exposing a somewhat error-strewn point of view. In 1989 Myers told the tale of reportedly the only Protestant killed in Clare, in September 1920. After capture, it was reported that Alan Lendrum, Kilkee’s Acting Resident Magistrate, recently returned from fighting Bolsheviks in Russia, was ‘buried up to his neck on a nearby beach, to await the incoming tide and death’. Becoming impatient, his IRA captors dug up and reburied their quarry nearer the water’s edge, so as to hurry matters along. The story so impressed Myers he mentioned it four times over five weeks (Irish Times, 30 May, 22 June, 3, 6 July 1989).
18 months later Myers covered it for a fifth time. Here, he admitted the story was ‘not true’ (29 January 1992) because the event it described never happened. As the IRA attempted to either seize Lendrum’s car or to kidnap him, he produced a gun and was shot dead.[22]
Myers’ admission of error was obscured, however, by another one. His 29 January 1992 Irishman’s Diary column was dominated by an apology to Terence McSwiney’s daughter. She had pursued Myers for having alleged on 19 December 1989 that one of the former Cork Lord Mayor’s ‘prime notions was to murder the Catholic bishop of Cork’. That also was not true. Myers was a modern day victim of British propagandist Basil Clarke and his colleagues in Dublin Castle, who worked for the British government’s Publicity Department.
They concocted the McSwiney and Lendrum stories, and others, that did much to arouse unionist ire in the North of Ireland. They were agreeable to unionist leaders, however, in that the propaganda diffused Irish, British and US allegations of unionist sectarianism.[23] The propaganda was regurgitated by Myers, either because it was so expertly concocted as to be still believable, or because there was a pre-disposition to believe fantastic stories of that kind.
Significantly, in the 19 December 1989 column containing the untrue McSwiney allegation, Myers also alleged that one of ‘[Tom] Barry’s men… organised a pogrom of Protestants in the Dunmanway area in April 1922’. Myers pursued the story on 9 January 1990 and on and off for a number of years. It was the genesis for much that was to follow.
That column began with Myers taking issue with David Fitzpatrick, ‘one of the most brilliant and revolutionary historians this century’, for suggesting that ‘few attacks on Protestants’ occurred during the conflict. Myers then detailed what he thought were some. Perhaps the journalist helped engineer the historian’s change of mind, discussed earlier. Perhaps it also induced a fresh state in Peter Hart, Fitzpatrick’s then PhD pupil. Myers 19 December 1989 column featured as a source of information on the April 1922 killings in Hart’s 1992 TCD PhD thesis. Hart’s 1998 book replicated the doctoral research almost word for word, though Myers’ controversial and publicly ‘contradicted’ contribution was redacted, somewhat.[24]
Myers became something of a public relations agent for the young historian. In 1995 he wrote, ‘Soon - I trust - Peter Hart's brilliant account… will be published… [and] establish new standards of demythologizing’ (12 January1995). After publication, ‘The IRA and its enemies… must be the most masterly study …, [reading] it is obligatory... It is a masterpiece’ (29 May1998).[25] Myers did not mention his influence on the project.
The 29 May 1998 column’s view of Tom Barry provoked a controversy that never went away. Peter Hart concluded six months of newspaper correspondence on 10 December 1998, before Meda Ryan could raise an interview-dating oddity she had encountered.[26] Thwarted, she decided to include the material in her 2003 biography of Tom Barry.
At that point it was clear that questioning of Hart’s methodology was beyond mere nit picking. It was also clear that the broad academic community did not wish to discuss revelations about Hart’s methodology. I will discuss them now.
The Newfoundland historian Peter Hart, who died recently at the age of 46, stimulated a debate on sectarianism within Irish nationalism and on the nature and conduct of the Irish War of Independence (WoI).
He provoked controversy and subsequent research that has helped to clarify differences over the interpretation not only of Irish history but also of Irish society.
Professor Paul (now Lord) Bew of Queen's University Belfast (QUB), said of Hart’s landmark The IRA and its Enemies (OUP, 1998): ‘The first work on the Irish revolution which can stand comparison with the best of the historiography of the French Revolution: brilliantly documented, statistically sophisticated, and superbly written’.[1]
The weight of academic opinion afforded Hart numerous prizes and plaudits. Critics emerged, also, however, who concluded that Hart’s methodology was quite often slipshod, unreliable, and, in places, unbelievable.
When the detail was published it was characterised within the academy as inappropriate. QUB’s Fearghal McGarry put it, ‘Some of the resulting controversies fell within the realm of legitimate debate, but a lot didn’t’, but without informing us what, in his view, either did or did not (Irish News, 28 Aug 2010).
Hart’s argument provoked a debate on the conduct of academic historiography in Ireland and a perceived interrelationship with the requirements of public policy on the conflict in the North of Ireland. Consequently, Irish Historians divided in Hart’s wake, into pro, con, or (more often) wary of venturing above the parapet.
In this essay, I examine:
(a) the political context within which Hart's research was promoted and the reaction from within the academy to the emergence of a critique;
(b) the basis of Hart's interpretive framework;
(c) how evidence was shaped to fit that framework.
I conclude with a discussion of why demonstrable flaws in the research were ignored within professional historiography.
PART ONE Irish History Recreated
The controversy over Hart's research revived a debate thought to be over.
During the 1980s, Roy Foster, Oxford’s Carroll Professor of Modern Irish History, critiqued Irish nationalist historiography. He concluded in 1986, ‘We are all revisionists now’.[2] The ‘revisionist’ project undermines a narrative of Irish history in which British rule accounted for Irish misfortune. Not so, say revisionists, claiming evidential objectivity and sophistication.
We should blame, instead, more or less, ourselves alone. In a development of the idea that Irish nationalism was ‘Catholic’, during the 1990s the sectarian nature of unionist-dominated Northern Ireland was projected backwards into the outlook and practices of Irish nationalism during the early part of the Century. It was then brought forward to frame an understanding of Northern Irish politics and society. Foster cited Hart’s research in support of this connection (Times, 21 May 1998).
Hart’s findings energised two Irish newspaper columnists, Eoghan Harris in the Sunday Times and Kevin Myers in the Irish Times and Daily Telegraph. They were as contentious in their field as Foster is in his. Both journalists had been associated with left wing ‘Official’ Irish republicanism in the 1970s, that had split with the ‘Provisional’ kind in 1970.[3] They viewed the latter as rightwing sectarians out for religious war, but moved rightwards themselves, and increasingly anti-republican, as they advanced in years.
Murdoch rather than Marx beckoned Harris toward the Sunday Times, Irish edition. Like Paul Bew, who also had Official republican leanings in his academic youth, Harris became an advisor to the Unionist Party leader David (now also Lord) Trimble. He briefly advised the Orange Order.[4] Harris and Myers were connected in another way. Both their media careers suffered as a result of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s ministerial control of broadcasting censorship from 1973-77, though both later bought into O’Brien’s anti-nationalism that itself became a form of unionism.[5]
The consistent theme running through academic and journalistic arguments was that Irish nationalism is anti-Protestant. Hart, it appeared, proved it so. The idea undermined the democratic credentials of resistance to British rule in the north of Ireland. Resistance could not be portrayed as opposition to sectarianism if it was a form of sectarianism in itself.
Hart’s analysis was promoted in the political context pursued by the two journalists mentioned.
Immediately prior to the 1994 IRA ceasefire, a Cassandra like Kevin Myers cited a litany of violent events between the July 1921 Truce with Britain, thorough the December Anglo Irish Treaty and the start of the Irish civil war in June 1922. He remarked on ‘republicans’ destroying “protestant property” and reported, ‘the IRA mounted a pogrom of Protestants in the Dunmanway area’ in April 1922.
Events, he implied, were about to repeat themselves (Irish Times, 27 Aug 1994). After the collapse of the first (1994) IRA ceasefire in 1996, Myers wrote, ‘we are up to our necks in the direst trouble, and all options are hard... It is, alas, time to air the beds in the [internment camp in the] Curragh’.[6]
He wavered momentarily, admitting at one point in 1998, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ and ‘Wrong: totally and utterly wrong, wrong, wrong. It’s an unsettling, disorienting thing finally to realise that the prediction about which I have written thousands of words turns out to have been complete rubbish.’ Myers then effectively admitted, in the words of former Irish Times Editor, Conor Brady, that he had been ‘wrong about being wrong’ by reverting to his former position.[7]
Eoghan Harris did not admit to error. Prior to the IRA ceasefire in 1994 and after it momentarily collapsed, he warned of war spreading down from the North. He wrote, ‘Northern Ireland is slowly stumbling backwards towards barbarism on the scale of Bosnia’. Harris asserted in February 1996, ‘So we must brace ourselves for bombs in Dublin’.[8]
His ‘bottomless contempt for the goliath of the national bourgeoisie’ (the residue of a former political life) was vented at southern political leaders, but in particular at one architect of the process, SDLP leader John Hume, more so than at the other, Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams. Harris observed in 1996 that a ‘successful policy of demonising [republicans] down [South] was disrupted at a critical point in 1993 [when] John Hume threw the thug [Adams] a lifeline’.[9] In a summation of his feelings on the Irish peace process in June 1997, Harris observed,
‘It was a fraud from start to finish. A fraud when President Robinson limply shook the hand of Gerry Adams. A fraud when [Gerry] Adams held [Taoiseach, Albert] Reynolds and [John] Hume's hands in a vice outside government buildings. A fraud when [RTE newsreader] Bryan Dobson leaned across an RTE news studio to sentimentally shake the hand of [Sinn Fein’s] Lucillita Breathnach to celebrate the ceasefire. Munich was what was on my mind as I watched all these actors in the Sinn Fein play. Peace in our time, I thought, a lie then, a lie now. Those who think you can talk to Sinn Fein are as foolish as those who thought that you could talk to Hitler.’[10]
After the reinstatement of the IRA ceasefire in July, Harris observed,
‘we have no more reason to be grateful for the second ceasefire than a Jew would have to be grateful to a Gestapo guard who stopped beating him so as to fix the noose with which he proposed to hang him.’[11]
Hart’s book in 1998 provided evidence for conclusions awaiting deployment. Those who questioned Hart were considered ineffectual nitpickers, purveyors of what Roy Foster termed ‘nationalism with footnotes’.[12]
The context in which the book was publicised affected its reception. While historians McGarry and Foster criticise negative reactions to Hart’s work, they do not address the polemical manner in which it was promoted and defended, a promotion Hart appeared to encourage. For instance, in the Sunday Times (19 April 1998) on Tom Barry, the IRA commander of the successful 28 November 1920 Kilmichael Ambush, ‘Barry is still considered to be an idealistic figure, unlike the great majority of his comrades he was little more than a serial killer and thought of the revolution largely in terms of shooting people. His politics were very primitive’.
The promotional efforts of Myers and Harris stimulated a low-level culture war in which the evidential basis of Hart’s views was challenged. Sceptics questioned the weight of received opinion within which Hart’s work became a standard academic reference point. For example, with others, Foster cited Hart as a basis for dismissing Ken Loach’s portrayal of the IRA in The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006).
Hart ‘raised hell’ among (unnamed) ‘local historians’, noted the Waterford born professor. Foster also supported allegations of IRA sectarianism towards two Co Offaly farmers shot in June 1921. This was depicted in a contentious RTE documentary on the subject involving Eoghan Harris, that itself relied on Hart’s research to establish the notion of widespread anti-Protestantism.[13]
After the historian’s sudden unfortunate death Foster summed up Hart critics, as (again unnamed) ‘local historians and pietists’. UCD’s Diarmaid Ferriter endorsed Hart’s view that critics practiced ‘faith-based or creationist history’ (Irish Times, 31 July 2010). They were portrayed as an amalgam of rustic irreconcilables, ideological refugees from the wrong side of the collapse of the Berlin Wall and a monk from Glenstal Abbey. In Eoghan Harris’s unfortunate (and baseless) contribution, ‘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’ (Sunday Independent, 25 July 2010).
By accusing Hart’s critics of engaging inappropriately, his supporters (who dismiss the notion that they support anything other than, disinterestedly, their craft) had a reason for refusing to engage. One particular criticism, however, was dismissed as unimportant. McGarry again, ‘The inordinate focus on who did what at Kilmichael detracted from appreciation of the significance of [Hart’s] body of work as a whole’ (Irish News, 28 Aug 2010).
Criticism might be right, in other words, but it would be wrong to discuss it. Hart wrote of this event in 1998, that was central to his analysis overall, ‘my primary sources were interviews with participants and statements made by them, conducted and collected by myself and others’.[14] These ‘primary sources’ were anonymous and gradually attracted more attention than ‘who did what’.
In his critical summary of Hart’s legacy, Jack Lane criticised those who adopted Hart’s ‘millenarian… spirit’ and who ‘responded to it as believers’.[15] Jeff Dudgeon, a Roger Casement scholar, questioned this view of Hart’s analysis. He also, unusually, engaged with some detail, but challenged petty minded ‘fact-checking’. Dudgeon asked his readers to acknowledge the inevitability of error and mentioned some of his own.[16]
Those who saw weaknesses in Hart’s presentation of evidence regarded them as more than trivial, however.
Take one of the first examples to emerge.
Brian Murphy, a Benedictine monk from Glenstal Abbey, reviewed The IRA and its Enemies in The Month (Sept-Oct 1998). Murphy, English born, Oxford educated, is a historian with impeccable credentials.[17] His words to the effect that Hart’s book was ‘important’ appeared afterwards on its dust jacket.
In the course of his review, Murphy considered Hart’s discussion of the 27-29 April 1922 republican killing of 13 Protestant civilians in West Cork. The unprecedented event climaxed Hart’s analysis. This occurred during the increasingly chaotic interregnum between Anglo Irish Treaty signing in December 1921, republican spilt in January and the onset of Civil War in June 1922. Hart had cited a sentence from an archived British intelligence analysis that was, he wrote, ‘by common consent the most trustworthy source we have’. It stated that, generally, Southern Irish Protestants were not guilty of informing because ‘except by chance, they had not got [information] to give’.
In other words Protestants were not active in support of British forces. Hart could then state with confidence that those shot in April 1922 were killed more or less at random ‘because they were Protestants’. The point was central to his argument. However, Murphy pointed out that Hart left out a sentence following, stating, ‘an exception to this rule was in the Bandon area’, where these loyalists were killed, and that those involved suffered greatly. The evidence available to him in his ‘most trustworthy source’ contradicted Hart’s conclusion and he omitted it.[18]
This example of misrepresentation of an archival source was not the first to emerge. It was difficult to elicit explanations of these and other anomalies. Take another example
In 2003 Meda Ryan published her critique of Hart, Tom Barry, IRA Freedom Fighter. Its title provided Hart with sufficient excuse to ignore her contention that Hart appeared to have interviewed an anonymous Kilmichael Ambush veteran after the last one died. It permitted him, however, to observe that Ryan’s analysis was not ‘rational’.
It was at this point, after a History Ireland interview with Hart (March-April 2005), in which Ryan was deemed irrational and in which Hart claimed that Murphy’s criticism was unpublished, that discussion became heated. A newcomer and neutral in the debate, Dr Andreas Boldt of Maynooth, in surveying the fallout in later editions of History Ireland (to Sept-Oct 2005), suggested to Hart that he should engage with the argument objectively:
’I take issue with the argumentative manner in which Peter Hart approaches his response… His language is emotional and aggressive…. I don’t believe that Hart is able to convince his ‘enemies’ by denouncing them; he has to argue with them, based on historical evidence and understanding of that time.’
Hart did not take the advice. As late as 2009 in History Ireland, the historian and former doctoral student colleague of Hart, Joost Augusteijn, recommended that Hart respond.[19]
Hart floated above his critics who, in peppering his academic flank with detailed criticism, could not knock him down to earth to deal with it. Doubtless, this was frustrating. By all accounts the late historian was a personable individual, far from a sense of his own importance and was generous with his time, expertise and advice. It may be wondered, therefore, why he did not acknowledge mistakes or address criticisms in a reasoned manner.
It may be that Hart did not have academically acceptable explanations. It may be also, that the academy had invested too much unquestioning belief in Hart to require him to explain his methods. Criticism was destined to be ignored and, where possible, suppressed.
Attention focused initially on Hart’s second chapter, The Kilmichael Ambush, and his penultimate Taking it out on the Protestants chapter, because they established his view that the War of Independence was an exercise in ethnic and sectarian revenge. Hart regarded the Kilmichael ambush commander, Tom Barry, as ‘vain, angry and ruthless’ (p. 32), a liar (p. 36) and as a ’serial killer’ (p. 100), who engineered a ‘massacre’ of surrendered British soldiers (p. 37).
Hart observed: ‘the culmination of a long process of social definition… produced both the heroes of Kilmichael and the victims of the April massacre’. As he put it, ‘one is as important as the other in understanding of the Cork IRA’ (p. 292). Hart went on to suggest in his final chapter, Spies and Informers, that the IRA shot imagined enemies at random, mainly Protestants and those they saw as ‘deviants’.
Those sympathetic to the Newfoundland historian claimed that his methodology brought to the surface nationalist secrets that were buried deep. The timing was fortuitous. Details of institutional Catholic management of industrial schools were being revealed in the 1990s. In addition, corruption at the heart of Irish politics, centred on the person of former Taoiseach Charles Haughey, resulted in the setting up of one judicial enquiry after another. Hart’s analysis appeared to reveal the historical unholy grail, a source of original Irish sin.
It seemed to be in tune with southern Ireland’s increasingly liberal, modern and middle class sensibility. Hart’s use of anonymous informants reinforced the sense that he was exposing truths that could not otherwise be uttered. The alternative view of evidence not subject to verification was ignored.
In the 1990s the search was on for evidence of specifically republican sectarianism. A historian central to the project contradicted previous thoughts. TCD’s David Fitzpatrick suggested in 1998, though without evidence, that, in addition to targeting Protestants, the IRA also went after adulterers and homosexuals during the War of Independence. However, nine years earlier, Fitzpatrick noted that Protestants, including loyalist ‘diehards’, suffered ‘few attacks’, apart from the burning of ‘many vacant houses’.[20] Followers in the footsteps of Oscar Wilde and Charles Stuart Parnell were entirely unremarked upon. Fitzpatrick’s earlier observations attracted the attention of Kevin Myers.
Myers had written for ten years on themes related to Peter Hart’s research. It was a subject on which he felt some passion. In his 2006 memoir on the conflict in Northern Ireland, he wrote
‘Murdering people for their religion was what republicans had always done, especially in their most celebrated period 1919-22. Only the successful seizure of Irish historiography by Irish republicans has concealed this vital truth.’[21]
Clearly the journalist was intent on seizing it back.
Myers had his prose picked apart regularly in a process exposing a somewhat error-strewn point of view. In 1989 Myers told the tale of reportedly the only Protestant killed in Clare, in September 1920. After capture, it was reported that Alan Lendrum, Kilkee’s Acting Resident Magistrate, recently returned from fighting Bolsheviks in Russia, was ‘buried up to his neck on a nearby beach, to await the incoming tide and death’. Becoming impatient, his IRA captors dug up and reburied their quarry nearer the water’s edge, so as to hurry matters along. The story so impressed Myers he mentioned it four times over five weeks (Irish Times, 30 May, 22 June, 3, 6 July 1989).
18 months later Myers covered it for a fifth time. Here, he admitted the story was ‘not true’ (29 January 1992) because the event it described never happened. As the IRA attempted to either seize Lendrum’s car or to kidnap him, he produced a gun and was shot dead.[22]
Myers’ admission of error was obscured, however, by another one. His 29 January 1992 Irishman’s Diary column was dominated by an apology to Terence McSwiney’s daughter. She had pursued Myers for having alleged on 19 December 1989 that one of the former Cork Lord Mayor’s ‘prime notions was to murder the Catholic bishop of Cork’. That also was not true. Myers was a modern day victim of British propagandist Basil Clarke and his colleagues in Dublin Castle, who worked for the British government’s Publicity Department.
They concocted the McSwiney and Lendrum stories, and others, that did much to arouse unionist ire in the North of Ireland. They were agreeable to unionist leaders, however, in that the propaganda diffused Irish, British and US allegations of unionist sectarianism.[23] The propaganda was regurgitated by Myers, either because it was so expertly concocted as to be still believable, or because there was a pre-disposition to believe fantastic stories of that kind.
Significantly, in the 19 December 1989 column containing the untrue McSwiney allegation, Myers also alleged that one of ‘[Tom] Barry’s men… organised a pogrom of Protestants in the Dunmanway area in April 1922’. Myers pursued the story on 9 January 1990 and on and off for a number of years. It was the genesis for much that was to follow.
That column began with Myers taking issue with David Fitzpatrick, ‘one of the most brilliant and revolutionary historians this century’, for suggesting that ‘few attacks on Protestants’ occurred during the conflict. Myers then detailed what he thought were some. Perhaps the journalist helped engineer the historian’s change of mind, discussed earlier. Perhaps it also induced a fresh state in Peter Hart, Fitzpatrick’s then PhD pupil. Myers 19 December 1989 column featured as a source of information on the April 1922 killings in Hart’s 1992 TCD PhD thesis. Hart’s 1998 book replicated the doctoral research almost word for word, though Myers’ controversial and publicly ‘contradicted’ contribution was redacted, somewhat.[24]
Myers became something of a public relations agent for the young historian. In 1995 he wrote, ‘Soon - I trust - Peter Hart's brilliant account… will be published… [and] establish new standards of demythologizing’ (12 January1995). After publication, ‘The IRA and its enemies… must be the most masterly study …, [reading] it is obligatory... It is a masterpiece’ (29 May1998).[25] Myers did not mention his influence on the project.
The 29 May 1998 column’s view of Tom Barry provoked a controversy that never went away. Peter Hart concluded six months of newspaper correspondence on 10 December 1998, before Meda Ryan could raise an interview-dating oddity she had encountered.[26] Thwarted, she decided to include the material in her 2003 biography of Tom Barry.
At that point it was clear that questioning of Hart’s methodology was beyond mere nit picking. It was also clear that the broad academic community did not wish to discuss revelations about Hart’s methodology. I will discuss them now.