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Weekend
Edition
November 11 / 12, 2006
"The Wind That Shakes the Barley"
Sends Revisionists Yapping at History's Heels
Ireland's
Freedom Struggle and the Foster School of Falsification
By NIALL MEEHAN
Ken Loach's 'The Wind that Shakes
the Barley', currently enjoying huge success at the Irish
box office and the winner of the 2006 Cannes Palm d'Or winner,
continues to stir up strong passions. The film depicts the struggle
between the IRA and British forces during the Irish War of Independence
and the civil war that followed the Anglo Irish Treaty of 1922.
In Britain, The Sun
called Loach's film "the most pro IRA ever".
Ruth Dudley Edwards, an Irish historian, asked in the Daily Mail
whythe "Marxist" film director Ken Loach
"loath[es] his country so much". Many critics
of the film cited the work of one historian in particular, Peter
Hart. I must declare an interest here. In the Irish Times
letters pages in the summer of 2006, Hart claimed that I "misrepresent"
his work, accusing him of stating that "ethnic cleansing"
directed at Protestants was a feature of IRA actions. In fact
I I did not state any such thing, though, had I done so, it would
have been an accurate observation since Hart did use precisely
that phraseology. The historian misrepresented himself and forgot
his own history. Had he consulted his university department web
site under "research", before putting pen to paper,
he would have seen that he researches "ethnic conflict and
cleansing" in Ireland. ( The correspondence is online at
indymedia.ie.)
Indeed one strand in the criticism
of Loach's film is that it does not deal with alleged IRA sectarianism
toward Ireland's Protestant community. In writing a largely favourable
review in History Ireland (Sept-Oct 2006), TCD historian
Brian Hanley commented briefly on the absence of such a treatment
in the film. Ireland's leading 'revisionist' historian, Professor
Roy Foster of Oxford University, [a Waterford man who achieves
the amazing feat in his standard history of Ireland of suggesting
that the Great Famine of the mid-1840s somehow didn't really
occur, Editors] invoked Peter Hart in his swipes at Loach. The
relevant text here is Hart's The IRA and its Enemies (1998).
Hart concluded that the IRA was sectarian and that the Irish
War of Independence was a battle for 'ethnic supremacy'. Hart
argued previously, (though he's now trying to haul his foot out
of his mouth), that the headline-provoking phrase "ethnic
cleansing"could be used to describe certain actions
by republican forces. In disagreeing with cultural critic Luke
Gibbons' rejection of the term, Foster agreed with Hart and,
by way of example, cited the "murder" of the
Protestant Pearson brothers in Offaly in 1921.
While giving one source for
his view, Alan Stanley's I Met Murder on the Way, Foster
omitted an alternative account by Offaly historian Patrick Heaney.
Heaney indicated that the Pearson brothers were combatants who
shot at and hit IRA members, were themselves sectarian in their
Protestant ascendancy outlook, and contacted British authorities
in Dublin Castle to inform on IRA activists. After the IRA weighed
the evidence, they decided to execute the Pearsons and then did
so. Heaney wrote on this subject some years ago, prior to Stanley's
account, which itself fails to address Heaney's work. Heaney
updated his account with corroborative material from the newly
released files from the Bureau of Military History in early 2006.
Pat Muldowney wrote on this subject in Church and State
magazine (Winter & Spring 2006), and it was released also
on the Internet, on Indymedia.ie. Perhaps Professor Foster was
unaware of these sources of information, a consistent pattern
of evasive behavior within 'revisionist' historiography, as we
shall see. From his academic perch Foster dismisses those he
deigns to term"local"--albeit unnamed -- historians,
who presume to criticize Peter Hart, about whom there is in fact
plenty to criticize. The historians Brian Murphy and Meda Ryan
have charged him with bias and distortion. How, Ryan asks, can
Hart claim to have interviewed an anonymous veteran of the famous
November 1920 Kilmichael ambush in Cork six days after the last
veteran died. She has not received an answer. Four of six issues
of History Ireland in 2005 were devoted to coverage of
the views of the antagonists. The BBC has covered the debate
(BBC radio, BBC online and BBC history magazine), and the controversy
has featured in Ireland's main newspapers. The History Ireland
debate is online at historyireland.com and it has been given
extensive coverage at indymedia.ie.
1918 Election
The debate in relation to what
happened in West Cork during the 1916-21 period and the consequent
overlapping with critical commentary on The Wind that Shakes
the Barley is part of a deeper debate about Ireland's political
and social formation. There's been a meandering debate in the
Irish press about the validity of the violence, (of which, it
has to be emphasized) by the standards of the twentieth century
wars of national liberation, there was a tiny amount. British
refusal to recognise Sinn Fein's overwhelming electoral victory
in 1918 lead to the War of Independence of 1919-21, the Anglo
Irish Treaty of 1921, the civil war of 1922-23 and the enduring
partition of the island of Ireland. [The problem is that these
days Ireland's anti-nationalist social democrats are terribly
embarrassed by terms like "national liberation" or
"colonial oppression" or--God help us--"class
struggle" or "British savagery" of which there
was an abundance, and so deprecate the whole Independence struggle
and somehow wish it hadn't happened, or if it had happened it
should have been fought out over cups of latte with the antagonists
whacking each other with damp copies of Irish Times special supplements
on education. AC.]
During the 1970s the teaching
of history in Irish schools and colleges was an early casualty
of the paranoia of the elite, as they gazed in horror at increasing
violence in Northern Ireland, particularly after the civil rights
movement there was shot off the streets by British paratroopers
in Derry in 1972. The partition settlement of the early 1920s
was in crisis because the six-county British enclave in northern
Ireland was dysfunctional at every significant level.
Given the obvious fact that
Irish history appeared to justify the use of violence against
colonial or British sectarian government it seemed safer to kick
the very idea of historical narrative into to the dustbin.. of
history. This was supposed to de-politicise history. Naturally,
it had the opposite effect.
But this modern modishness
was a cry from a conservative establishment terrified at the
prospect of violence in the Six Counties undermining the established
and stable structures of 26- county society in the south. At
one point in the mid 1970s the Irish government in Dublin was
spooked at the thought that Harold Wilson's British Labor government
was planning to leave Northern Ireland. A government elite was
amenable to destroying the ideological underpinning of its existence
(the national struggle), because the ideology of the nation (32
counties) undermined the stability of the state (26 counties),
that itself legitimised the sense of nationhood. It was a bind.
For War of Independence IRA,
read Provisional IRA. For south then, read north, as in Northern
Ireland, now. DrConor Cruise O'Brien, the leading ministerial
force behind state censorship of broadcasting and the onslaught
on the brittle nature of the 'official' nationalism of the Republic
of Ireland, threw his weight behind a re-tread of Irish history.
The establishment's door was thrown open, to career-enhancing
revisionism in the history departments of Irish universities.
As minister in the 1973-77 Irish government, Conor Cruise O'Brien
exercised ideological control though censorship and enforced
reorganization in Irish broadcasting. Ministerial colleagues
in charge of the army and the police ensured a vigorous physical
control of the populace.
O'Brien was himself fully in
sympathy this. On page 355 of his 1998 memoir My Life and
Themes he relates his police special branch driver telling
him how police allegedly discovered the whereabouts of a group
of maverick republicans who had kidnapped Dutch industrialist
Tiede Herrema in 1975:
"One of the gang had been
arrested, and we felt sure he knew where Herrema was. So this
man was transferred under Branch escort from a prison in the
country to a prison in Dublin, and on the way the car stopped.
Then the escort started asking him questions and when at first
he refused to answer they beat the shit out of him. Then he told
them where Herrema was". O' Brien adds, "I refrained
from telling this story to Garret [Fitzgerald] or Justin [Keating
- both ministerial colleagues] because I thought it would worry
them. It didn't worry me".
Some members of the Irish police
tried to tip off cabinet ministers to the existence of a group
in the Gardai (Irish police) whose task it was to systematically
beat confessions out of suspects. Dr Fitzgerald revealed some
years later his attempts to bring this subject up at the cabinet
table, but also his failure. During this 1973-77 period, the
biggest mass murder of the troubles occurred, the Dublin and
Monaghan bombings of 1974. Allegedly, British security forces
were involved in directing unionist paramilitaries in the Ulster
Volunteer Force. The British government refused to cooperate
with an enquiry, under Mr Justice Barron, set up by the Dublin
government many years later. Barron noted this lack of cooperation
and also that the Irish police investigation was incompetent
and curtailed within a short period of time. Barron also noted
that the Dublin government was uninterested in pursuing the matter,
either through police enquiry or with the British government.
They had other priorities, such as the teaching of history.
When Dr O'Brien brandished
his tolerance for police torture in 1998, Irish newspapers did
not comment on it. The Sunday Times reported it in its
"culture" section. Near the end of his relatively brief
tenure of office, in 1976, Dr O'Brien revealed to the late Bernard
Nossiter of the Washington Post that he intended to imprison
the then Editor of the Irish Press, Tim Pat Coogan. Coogan
recalls:
"Bud Nossiter was the
Washington Post's London correspondent and he had come to Ireland
to do a piece on some anti-terrorist legislation which was before
the Dail Irish Parliament at the time. Because of the situation
in Northern Ireland, the law proposed to curb the kind of material
newspapers could print. .....
"Bud showed up in my office
unexpectedly. He told me I had better watch out. He had asked
the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs for an example of the sort
of material which the proposed law would curtail. The Minister,
Dr. Conor Cruise O'Brien, pulled open a drawer filled with clippings
from the Letters to the Editor column of the Irish Press. Bud,
coming from the paper that broke Watergate, was naturally stunned
at the thought of prosecuting people for exercising the elementary
democratic right of writing to a newspaper. But it turned out
that it was not the letter writers whom it was planned to hit,
but me, the editor."
Irish Voice, October 27 1992
Coercion helped to stabilize
a new consensus among the elite, one that re-defined the relationship
between Ireland and Britain.
Enter Roy
Foster
This is where Roy Foster came
in. Terry Eagleton commented in his review of Foster's biography
of the poet WB Yeats:
"Foster is not terribly
at home with ideas and abstractions. If Yeats had too many of
them, his biographer has too few. He is shrewd, pragmatic, civilized
and ironic, averse to big pictures and grand theories. This is
one reason he is a favored son of the Anglo-Saxon establishment,
which likes to think small. Another reason is that, as a commentator
on Irish affairs, he tells the British by and large just what
they want to hear about the place ... "
In fact, Foster has scrupulously
concealed beneath the suavities of his coruscating prose style
an enormous chip on his shoulder. Like the members of many an
ousted governing caste, from Malaysia to Zimbabwe, he harbors
a smoldering resentment of the native anticolonial movement.
Republicanism in his view is less a logical extension of Enlightenment
democracy than a bigoted ethnic conspiracy to sideline posh Prods
like himself. When an argument touches on this sore point, as
Irish arguments often do, he finds it hard to keep his scholarly
cool.
There is, for example, a notable
difference in tone between his dispassionate treatment of Yeats's
autocratic ideas and ridiculous posturings, and the sneery sardonicism
that lurks just beneath the surface when he describes a Gaelic
congress or festival. If Gerry Adams had written for himself
the kind of breathtakingly arrogant epitaph that Yeats did, one
suspects that Foster's response to it would not be quite so kid-gloved.
He writes occasionally of "extreme" politics, meaning
those who threaten his own interests. Yeats's own far-right views
are not granted such an epithet.
The Nation December 8, 2003
If I were to take issue with
any of the above, it would be to point out that while Foster
may write from the vantage point of a sensibility in tune with
British condescension toward things Irish, reference to his religion
and social standing, "posh Prod", may obscure
the extent to which he reflects prejudices that are quintessentially
Irish and that gain sustenance and support from within the Irish
body politic. The standard feature of such approaches tends to
see sectarianism as an internal Irish disease and British responses
as an attempt to regulate it in as fair a manner as possible
in highly disagreeable circumstances. Notwithstanding the obstacle
of a constitutionally Protestant monarch, or perhaps by subsuming
WASP superiority into the argument, Britain was seen as administratively
plural and diverse, the Irish as singular and perverse in their
obsessional hatreds ( said hatred including, inexplicably, things
British). We are dealing with anglified Irishness that is overtly
'patriotic' in relation to its class interests, but not demonstrably
in relation to the political and historical sequence that gave
those class interests an independent state in which to flourish.
Montgomery
But it is not merely a matter
of attitudinising. It is necessary for the proponents of such
a view to leave bits out of the story, for fear that it would
lead to a conclusion, and conclusions are dangerous things.
This could not be more clearly
evinced than than in Foster's animus against Sinn Fein President
Gerry Adams, which he combined with a lamentable assault on
Angela's Ashes author, Frank McCourt , in the New York
Times:
Evelyn Waugh once remarked
that to the Irishman there are only two ultimate realities, hell
and the United States. The McCourt version postulates that you
have to experience the first in order to be redeemed by the second.
Thus the McCourt oeuvre, apparently trading in misery, actually
sells on synthetic moral uplift.
This supercilious condescension
could be envy, could be a problem with American culture, Irish-American
culture, with Irish culture, or could be all four. In the same
piece Gerry Adams is derided for not opening himself up to prosecution
by detailing participation in the IRA. This is, says Foster,
like "a biography of Field Marshal Montgomery that leaves
out the British Army"
Perhaps the comment on Bernard
Law Montgomery, the son of an Ulster clergyman, and arch irritant
of another jumped up colonial, General Dwight D Eisenhower, is
misplaced and should have been directed by Foster at his mirror.
Brian P Murphy observed in
relation to Foster and the Kilmichael Ambush of November 1920,
the one that changed the course of the Anglo Irish War of 1919-21:
Roy Foster, in his Modern
Ireland, despite dealing with Cork in late 1920, does not
mention the Kilmichael Ambush. He does quote from "an English
Brigade Major" who said, "I think I regarded all civilians
as "Shinners", and I never had any dealings with any
of them". Foster, however, does not advert to the significant
fact that this Brigade Major was Bernard Montgomery, of Second
World War renown, who was based in Cork, nor does he cite the
previous sentence of Montgomery that "personally my whole
attention was given to defeating the rebels and it never bothered
me a bit how many houses were burned".
Foster, who turns up his nose
at "prefabricated ideas", is at home fabricating prejudice.
A failure to entertain pertinent but uncomfortable facts is a
feature of revisionist historiography. If Hart is guilty in his
The IRA and its Enemies, then it could be said that he
learned his trade from an apt instructor. So impressed was Professor
Foster with Peter Hart's study of the IRA in West Cork in 1998
that he chaired the jury that unanimously awarded Hart the Ewart
Biggs prize for his book published that same year ("Awarded
in memory of the British Ambassador to Ireland who was assassinated
in Dublin in 1976 [by the IRA]. The prize was established in
1977 [by the late Jane Ewart Biggs] and aims to create greater
understanding between the peoples of Britain and Ireland, or
co-operation between the partners of the European Community.
It is awarded to a book, a play or a piece of journalism that
best fulfils this aim.")
One of the great claims of
the revisionist historiography that emerged out of the Irish
Kulturkampf of the 1970s was that it is objective and free of
bias. It is the alternative to Irish nationalist history. Eagleton
again on Foster's tellingly entitled The Irish Story: Telling
Tales and Making it Up in Ireland:
"Foster, the great demythologiser
of Ireland . . . like most demythologisers . . . remains ensnared
in a few myths of his own. He cannot, for example, free himself
of the old-fashioned liberal prejudice that political commitment
is inevitably reductive. Though 'the Irish story' is needlingly
partisan, its author tends to believe that partisanship, like
halitosis, is what the other fellow has."
The Guardian (London) October
27, 2001
The critic and author, Seamus
Deane, pointed out: "by refusing to be Irish nationalists,
(revisionists) simply become defenders of Ulster or British nationalism,
thereby switching sides".
Revisionist history enters
the realm of the absurd. Instead of the Irish being the victims
of sectarian rule, they become responsible. Unionists or loyalists,
who operated sectarian politics in the name of an explicitly
Protestant British overlordship, become its victims.
Persecution
Steven King, an advisor to
one time Ulster Unionist Party leader, David Trimble, wrote on
the Loach film under the headline "pure and utter propaganda"
in the Irish Examiner. King suggested that in the film,"the Irish capacity for oppressing each other is blithely
dismissed". This was not a comment on unionist politics,
but part of an assertion that in Cork, where the film is set,
"many a Cork Protestant was shot in pure sectarian reprisals".
In the Irish Examiner,
I wrote a defence of the film and pointed out some home truths
with regard to British responsibility for racist and sectarian
attitudes--attitudes, which, incidentally, Peter Hart excised
from a book he edited on a British intelligence assessment of
the conflict, without informing the reader.
In response to, and in disagreement
with my approach, researcher Robin Bury referred to Hart's work.
Bury said that republican persecution forced Protestants to flee
their homes, farms and businesses.
In developing his argument
in the Irish Examiner, Bury acknowledged "the assistance
of Dr David Fitzpatrick of TCD" (who supervised Peter Hart's
PhD thesis that became his 1998 book) and referred to "the
3,143 files" submitted to the Irish Distress Committee.
Bury quoted from "the Presbyterian journal The Witness"
and cited WT Cosgrave in the Dail in June 1922 to the effect
that "inoffensive Protestants of all classes are being driven
from their homes".
Does this criticism check out?
An examination of Bury's sources is a useful test case for the
accusation of republican sectarianism.
'Diabolic'
Taking the last point first,
the Cosgrave remark cannot be found in the minute book of Dail
Eireann (the Irish parliament), though, curiously, Robin Bury's
Reform Society previously ascribed the exact same remark
to the Church of Ireland Gazette. A movable quotation
for every occasion perhaps.
Furthermore, The Witness
was a private journal published in Belfast, not a Presbyterian
Church publication. Bury quoted the editorial: "the plight
of the Protestants [is] sad in the extreme. They are marked,
they are watched, they are raided; some have been dragged out
and shot like beasts". The editorial was in fact based on
a report from "the Honourable HM Pollock, DL, MP, the Minister
of Finance in the Northern Parliament...". This was not
mentioned by Bury. It is stretching credulity to regard as objective
a report from a unionist politician, who was in office while
the well-documented persecution and oppression of the nationalist
population in the North of Ireland was in train.
In any case the "truth"
of the Sinn Fein claim of non-sectarianism was actually admitted
in the editorial, though backhandedly: "their vengeance
falls upon all who hinder them without regard to creed or class".
However, "Protestants are loyal and law abiding, and feel
it as a duty which they owe to God and their own conscience to
support the forces of the Crown". The lengthy diatribe mixed
political acuity and sectarian paranoia: "Sinn Fein is now
a diabolic agency out to destroy the British Isles and the British
Empire".
This material is merely evidence
of propaganda.
Mr Biggs
There is, however, evidence
of persecution of Protestants, and from a very interesting source
in the London Times in late 1920:
"The only damage to loyalists'
premises has been done by the police. In July [1920] they burned
the stores of Mr G.W. Biggs, the principal merchant in Bantry,
a man highly respected, a Protestant, and a lifelong Unionist,
with a damage of over £25,000, and the estate office of
the late Mr. Leigh-White, also a Unionist. Subsequently.., the
police fired into Mr. Biggs's office, while his residence has
since been commandeered for police barracks. He has had to send
his family to Dublin and to live himself in a hotel. Only two
reasons can be assigned for the outrages on Mr. Biggs, one that
he employed Sinn Feiners, the other a... statement of his protesting
against Orange allegations of Catholic intolerance."
This account was in one of
three letters to The Times from J Annan Bryce, aged 77,
of West Cork. Annan Byce was a former Scottish Liberal MP, Far
East British colonial functionary, and brother of a British Chief
Secretary to Ireland. Annan Bryce's second letter mentioned his
wife Violet, who in 1916 "opened at Glengarriff the first
convalescent home for [British] officers in Ireland":
" as reported in the papers
today, my wife was arrested at Holyhead [in Wales], deported
to Kingstown, lodged in Bridewell there, and released without
charge after four hours' detention. Such arrests are of daily
occurrence in Ireland, where any and every interference with
liberty had been legalized by recent legislation, but I am not
aware under what authority they have become lawful in Great Britain.
My wife had been invited to address a meeting in Wales about
[British] reprisals, a subject on which she is a competent witness.
.. She has been able to see the effect of the policy of reprisals,
and has suffered from them in her own person. Her garage has
been burned she had been repeatedly threatened with the burning
down of her house, and on one occasion was in imminent danger
of death from the rifle of a policeman"
Reprisal burnings, killings
and torture became a feature of British prosecution of the War.
The burned a city (Cork), towns (Fermoy) and villages (Balbriggan).
And they burned creameries. In fact they burned property that
in the main was held by Protestants, who owned most of the significant
property. It is what happened when soldiers of the Essex Regiment
ransacked Bandon, otherwise known as "the Londonderry of
the South". The British also burned hundreds of small homesteads
owned or occupied by those assumed to be republicans or their
supporters. Tom Barry recounted in his great book Guerrilla
Days in Ireland (1949) that a counter burning strategy was
required. The IRA systematically burned property owned by "Britishers",
that is owned by those they saw as actively collaborating with
their enemy. It had the desired effect from a republican perspective,
as the rateable valuation of the 'Britisher's' property was far
in excess of the hovels in the possession of the republicans
and their supporters. Howls of outrage aimed at the British authorities
came from supporters watching their ample properties going up
in flames. It put an end to the British reprisal burnings, much
to republican relief as they were fast running out of property
owned by 'Britishers'.
Writing in 1949 Tom Barry noted
British attempts to whip up sectarian fear by publishing the
religion of a spy executed by the IRA if he was Protestant, and
ignoring it if he was not. John Borgonovo's Spies, Informers,
and the "Anti-Sinn Fein Society is published by Irish
Academic Press in 2006. It examined IRA actions in the Cork City
area. Borgonovo, from San Francisco, stated
Overall, my research revealed
no IRA campaign against the city's Protestant, unionist and ex-servicemen
institutions and leaders.
Among Cork's executed "spies",
clear evidence linked some of them to the crown forces, while
others were shot without any explanation. Today it is impossible
to establish guilt in many cases. British records about informants
are fragmented, incomplete, and often unreliable. IRA records
were destroyed during the conflict for security reasons. However,
surviving documentation indicates the Cork city IRA only targeted
civilians it believed were passing information to the crown forces.
The Cork city Volunteers certainly
had the means to identify local citizens working with British
forces. Volunteers systematically intercepted mail, tapped phone
lines and monitored telegraphs around the city. Republican spies
and sympathisers could be found in key workplaces throughout
the town. IRA intelligence officers closely watched British bases
and personnel. One IRA spy penetrated the British army's Cork
command at its highest level, and had access to sensitive information
that we must assume included the identities of local civilian
informants. Her story can be found in Florence and Josephine
O'Donoghue's War of Independence, which I edited.
Irish Times July 14 2006
The murderous activities of
the infamous British Auxiliaries (staffed by former British Officers,
paid £1.00 per day) and Black & Tans (staffed by former
ordinary ranks, paid 10 shillings a day) lead to a decision by
the IRA to confront these elite British forces. On November 30,
1920, Tom Barry commanded 36 IRA riflemen at the Kilmichael ambush,
in which an entire force of Auxiliary officers were killed (one
was left for dead and survived, though incapacitated). This successful
action helped to change the course and character of the conflict,
to the advantage of the Irish side.
False Surrender
In an argument that gained
an enormous of media publicity, Peter Hart questioned the longstanding
account of an Auxiliary false surrender at Kilmichael, leading
to the deaths of IRA volunteers who stood up from their positions
to take this apparent surrender. Hart accused Tom Barry of "lies
and evasions" and alleged that Barry had ordered a massacre
of unarmed prisoners. This was an important part of the development
of Hart's thesis that ethnic hatreds lead to shootings of uninvolved
Protestants in West Cork. In History Ireland one can read
argument and counter argument. Hart suffered accusations of censorship
of evidence and deliberate distortion, as well as questioning
by Meda Ryan of Hart's claim to have interviewed an anonymous
veteran of the ambush six days after the last veteran, Ned Young,
died on November 13, 1989. It is said that history enables the
dead to come alive, but they do not usually report post mortem.
Brian P Murphy's recently published
study, The Origin and Organisation of British Propaganda in
Ireland (2006), examined the extent to which Hart had relied
on material published by a Propaganda Department in Dublin Castle
(the seat of British administration) under Basil Clarke. Clarke's
philosophy of news manipulation was sophisticated in that it
relied, as he put it, on propaganda by news, not by views, leading
to verisimilitude, or "the appearance of truth". David
Miller of spinwatch.org, editor of Tell me Lies, on news
manipulation of the conflict in Iraq, contributes a foreword
to the Murphy study, in which he commented on the significant
contribution of the Dublin Castle propaganda team to the British
tradition of news manipulation and news management.
Murphy also, in an appendix,
outlined how Peter Hart systematically misused source material.
For instance, Hart left out of his account of the Dunmanway killings
of April 1922 a British admission that Protestant loyalists in
the area were systematically supplying information. In fact they
were also organised in paramilitary style in aid of British forces.
Hart's attempt to elide reference to his censorship in his subsequent
editorship (2003) of the British intelligence assessment, called
The Record of the Rebellion in the 6th Divisional Area,
lead an Irish Times reviewer to accuse him of being "disingenuous".
Censorship
In addition, as Murphy pointed
out, Hart committed a new act of censorship in his editorship
of The Record. He failed to inform the reader that he
left out an entire section of the British intelligence assessment
on "The People". It stated, in part:
"Practically all commanders
and intelligence officers considered that 90 per cent of the
people were Sinn Feiners or sympathisers with Sinn Fein, and
that all Sinn Feiners were murderers or sympathisers with murder.
Judged by English standards, the Irish are a difficult and unsatisfactory
people. Their civilisation is different and in many ways lower
than that of the English. They are entirely lacking in the Englishman's
respect for truth . . . Many were of a degenerate type and their
methods of waging war were in the most case barbarous, influenced
by hatred and devoid of courage."
Aside from the act of omission,
here is proof of British racism and, though being aware of IRA
shootings of informers, there is no accusation that the IRA harboured
sectarian thoughts or feelings, or more importantly, that they
gave expression to them in action. Hart referred to the Record
of the Rebellion as "the most trustworthy source"
available. Quite.
Tax evasion
However, back to the task at
hand. An examination of the British government's Irish Distress
Committee is next on the list of sources submitted by Bury.
An interim report in November
1922 stated: "of the 1,873 cases approved for emergency
relief, about 600 were Protestant and just over 1,000 Catholic".
Persecutors of Protestants persecuted more Catholics than Protestants,
it would appear. The ending of colonial administration and economic
devastation, contributed to in no small measure by the burning
of factories towns and cities by British forces, and civil war,
lead to the departure of many. This included many Protestants
who were part of the edifice of colonial government, or who were
fearful as a result of their activities on behalf of the Crown.
It also included those who believed British propaganda to the
effect that republicans would treat Protestants in the same way
as Roman Catholics were treated in the North of Ireland by the
new unionist administration there. The unauthorised killings
of former loyalist agents near Dunmanway in April 1922 heightened
this fear considerably, as the anonymous perpetrators did not
announce the reason for the killings publicly. It was as a result
of Peter Hart's claims of ethnic cleansing that the linking of
the deceased names to a British Auxiliary intelligence diary,
left behind after their evacuation of Dunmanway, was published
in 2003 in Tom Barry IRA Freedom Fighter, by Meda Ryan.
As an example of the fear generated
by the killings, the Protestant founder of the Skibbereen
Historical Society, Willy Kingston, who had willingly taken
part in illegal Sinn Fein Courts, including inviting arrest by
defying the British authorities openly, and who supported the
aims, if not the methods, of republican separatists, fled West
Cork with a large number of mainly male co-religionists in the
aftermath. He returned soon afterwards to practice law in the
town, became quite prominent, setting up the historical society,
and survived contentedly into old age, eventually dying in 1965.
His experience was, I suggest, typical and confirms the outlook
of most southern Protestants who developed an allegiance to the
newly independent Irish state alongside other citizens of what
became the Republic of Ireland. More to the point, the state
was capable of winning their allegiance, unlike what happened
in the North of Ireland where Roman Catholics or nationalists
were excluded systematically through forms of overt and covert
discrimination and naked repression. The southern state could
evolve because its citizens were capable of developing a largely
secular civil society and discourse. The North was not, because
it could not. It was set up as an exercise in sectarian control,
in which majority rule, the normal signal of legitimacy, rendered
society politically fixed and immutably sectarian.
Exceptional
In the South the unauthorised
Dumanway killings that took place in the interregnum between
the Treaty split (with Eamon DeValera and Michael Collins on
opposite sides) and subsequent Civil War, were exceptional, not
sectarian in intent in any case. All sides of republican opinion
condemned them, as they broke the provisions of an IRA amnesty
for spies and informers. Contemporary Protestant church commentary
noted the exceptional nature of the killings.
The Protestant population in
southern Ireland did decline sharply with the pullout of colonial
administration. University College Cork's history Professor emeritus,
John A Murphy, commented "active persecution [is] the least
plausible" explanation of Protestant population decline,
adding, "The notion that tens of thousands of Protestants
were compelled to flee their shops and farms is Paisleyite myth-mongering."
Murphy is ordinarily sympathetic to Hart's research. He is dismissive
of the notion that Irish Protestants were persecuted as such,
noting that they continued to enjoy, on average, a relatively
higher socio economic status than members of Irish society generally.
The main pressure keeping the
Irish Distress Committee functioning throughout the 1920s
was the shadowy Southern Irish Loyalists' Relief Association,
whose leadership consisted largely of titled individuals residing
in, and who were mostly born in, England.
In 1930 The Southern Irish
Loyalists' Relief Association asked the Irish Distress
Committee to destroy letters from southern Ireland seeking
payments. Considerable amounts had been dispensed, including
to absentee landlords whose tenants were reluctant to pay rent.
The autumn 2006 Church & State magazine commented,
"There may be a number of explanations for this, ranging
from tax evasion to fraud." The authors also speculate as
to whether it may have been evidence of an attempt by Britain
to preserve a fifth column within the newly Independent Irish
state. More research is needed on the role of this fascinating
body. Church and State (Autumn 2006) magazine announced
that they would continue to publish on this organisation.
Bury concluded his criticism,
"to deny that some saw the Protestant community as unwanted
in the new Ireland denies historical reality". This may
be a case of "some" accepting the loyalist thesis
stating that a Protestant is quintessentially British. Robin
Bury regularly speaks on behalf of the Reform Society,founded by Dublin and Wicklow Orange Order members.
The Orange Order is an ultra Protestant sectarian organisation.
Perhaps Robin Bury is comfortable with this depiction of Irish
Protestants. A frequenter of Reform Society conferences,
that calls on Ireland to join the British Commonwealth and wants
Ireland to join a 'British Isles' (sic) federation, is the British
Ambassador to Dublin, who is also apparently a patron of the
organisation.
The criticism of The Wind
that Shakes the Barley is essentially an attempt to foist
a reverse of unionist behaviour in Northern Ireland on to republican
forces during and after the War of Independence. It is, in my
view, a foolish exercise doomed to failure. There was significant
and extensive Protestant support for the republican position
during the 1916-21 period, which, as its name suggests, tended
to criticise and to oppose an overt identification with the Roman
Catholic Church or religion. There were of course bigoted nationalists
and bigoted Roman Catholics. But republican policy, by and large,
was not. Republicanism is accused of sectarianism by inference
and innuendo, not, so far, by evidence. By its own standards
of judgement by empirical test, much revisionist historiography
is found wanting. It ends up appearing as far, far shallower
than the bogeyman nationalist narrative it created for itself
as a target to destroy. In so far as it bases conclusions on
the concoctions of Basil Clarke and his colleagues in Dublin
Castle, it does not so much produce propaganda as reproduce it.
Evidence suggests that British
policy was overtly sectarian and that Britain attempted to create
sectarian tension at every level of society, including through
media manipulation, as it was a means of maintaining control
through 'divide and rule'.
Loach's award winning film
wandered into the historical and sectarian crossfire that I have
outlined here and it emerges unscathed with its narrative and
historical integrity intact.
Niall Meehan is head of the Journalism & Media
Faculty, Griffith College, Dublin. He can be reached at niall.Meehan@gmail.com
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