In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Killing in Cork and the Historians
  • Stephen Howe (bio)

Across most of the 1970s, eighties and nineties, much of the writing of Irish history seemed consumed by a single great debate. Extending over most periods and topics in the country’s past, dispute raged between adherents of an ‘orthodox’ nationalist view which had grown to dominance over the previous century and their critics, usually labelled ‘revisionists’. Even though many, perhaps most, historians refused to accept such labels – at least as applied to themselves – and much research and publication could not readily be assigned fully to either camp, the perceived schism dominated public perception and was both intensely politicized and, often, highly personal and vitriolic.

More recently, and certainly by the advent of the new millennium, the old conflicts appeared to die down: just as, not at all coincidentally, did organized violence in Northern Ireland. There had long been those who spoke of ‘post-revisionism’ and of new kinds of history going ‘beyond revisionism’; now they seemed quietly to have triumphed. Histories of the disputes began to appear, as anthologies of the main contributions to them had done rather earlier.1 Their publication could be seen as in itself marking an end, the drawing of a line under a battle which had been fought to the point of mutual exhaustion.

That sense of an ending was, in part, deceptive. At least one historio-graphical battlefront has witnessed no ceasefire, no decommissioning, agreement or intellectual power-sharing. It relates mainly to one small corner of Ireland – the south-west corner – and to a brief span of time in the early 1920s. But its echoes and implications have gone far wider in both space and time, and far from fading away the sounds of war have grown ever louder.

County Cork, even more than Dublin, was in many ways the storm-centre of what some call the Irish Revolution from 1916 onwards, and especially of the ‘War of Independence’ in 1919–21 and to a lesser extent of the Civil War which rapidly followed. In 1917–23, seven hundred and forty-seven people are known to have been killed in Cork as a result of political violence; and more, perhaps dozens more, simply vanished under circumstances which make it likely that they had been killed. (As we shall see, the issue of probable or possible disappearances has recently become the subject of considerable controversy.) This was a far higher proportion of the population than anywhere else except Belfast. One hundred and eight Royal Irish [End Page 160] Constabulary (RIC) personnel and ninety-three members of British military forces were killed in Cork: approximately a third of their total fatalities in each case.2 In Cork, far more than anywhere else, the conflict involved several ‘proper little battles’, clashes between two organized armed groups as opposed to assassinations – though the latter were still far the more common causes and circumstances of violent death. And County Cork’s war became by far the most memorialized and celebrated part of the Irish revolution, nationally and indeed globally as well as locally, with a strikingly high proportion of the conflict’s memoirs, local histories, commemorative sites and ceremonies, ballads and more being centred there. All this, with the intensity of local pride – but also, beneath the surface, local bitterness – which the events of the early 1920s commanded in Cork popular memory, helps to explain why, ninety years on, dispute over what happened there has drawn such attention and evoked such emotion.

The first major locus for controversy was the Kilmichael ambush of 28 November 1920. The West Cork IRA’s Flying Column under Tom Barry killed seventeen ‘Auxiliary Police’ – members of a paramilitary force recruited from former army and RAF officers. Sixteen lay dead at the ambush spot.3 A seventeenth, Cecil Guthrie, escaped but was caught and shot by other IRA men two days later. An eighteenth, H. F. Forde, badly wounded and left for dead, survived but was crippled for life.4 Three of the IRA ambushers were also killed: Michael McCarthy, Jim O’Sullivan and Pat Deasy. Why, though, were there no survivors (or so the IRA believed), no wounded, no prisoners among the...

pdf

Share