Videos by Niall Meehan
Reporter Brendan O'Brien - Producer Paul Larkin-Coyle - also on YouTube, at https://youtu.be/VtMB... more Reporter Brendan O'Brien - Producer Paul Larkin-Coyle - also on YouTube, at https://youtu.be/VtMBDfepae4.
This important documentary revealed new evidence of British collusion with loyalist forces to cause the bombings and also involvement in other loyalist (in effect British) violence. It added to pressure on the Irish state to officially inquire into British collusion and into its own inaction in relation to the bombings. A Tribunal of Inquiry was set up in December 1999 under the late Justice Liam Hamilton. His successor Justice Henry Barron reported in December 2003 (link here, https://www.relativesforjustice.com/the-barron-report-into-the-dublin-monaghan-bombings/). Barron reported that his investigation was hampered by refusal of full cooperation from British authorities. The programme complements the Yorkshire Television First Tuesday documentary shown two years earlier, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Suwm8YGaqjM. 18 views
Path breaking documentary on British involvement in 17 May 1974 Dublin-Monaghan bombings, when 34... more Path breaking documentary on British involvement in 17 May 1974 Dublin-Monaghan bombings, when 34 people were killed (also at https://youtu.be/Suwm8YGaqjM). See also 1995 RTÉ Prime Time, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtMBDfepae4. Interviews with relatives-survivors, Edward O'Neill, Martha O'Neill, Paddy Doyle, plus former British Sec of State for NI Merlyn Rees, Lt Col George Styles, Commandant Patrick Trears, Colin Wallace, Fred Holroyd. The documentary increased demands for an official inquiry into the bombings. It helped Relatives of the Forgotten (as they were known for a period) escape from official indifference and police harassment. A Tribunal of Inquiry was set up in December 1999 under the late Justice Liam Hamilton. His successor Justice Henry Barron reported in December 2003 (https://www.relativesforjustice.com/the-barron-report-into-the-dublin-monaghan-bombings/). Barron reported that the investigation was refused full cooperation from British Authorities. 5 views
Radio coverage of RTÉ's attempt in 1992-3 to maintain self-censorship under Section 31. The stati... more Radio coverage of RTÉ's attempt in 1992-3 to maintain self-censorship under Section 31. The station's independence had been eroded from 1971 to the mid-1970s. Minister Conor Cruise O'Brien's interventions and 1976 amendment were decisive. An under pressure RTÉ extended O'Brien's ban on Sinn Féin spokespersons to SF members in any capacity. In 1990 SF member Larry O'Toole challenged a ban on speaking for strikers in the Gateaux factory, Dublin, where he worked. O'Toole won in the High Court in July 1992. RTÉ refused to comply. O'Toole won again in December. RTÉ appealed to be censored in the Supreme Court in March 1993 and lost. This compilation includes visual material on tensions within RTÉ. It also clarifies remarks by Conor Cruise O'Brien and RTE News Director Joe Mulholland. Three additional TV segments are on YouTube - listed at https://youtu.be/cDPbFtfD8RI. See also,
www.academia.edu/34075119/, www.academia.edu/51140266/, www.academia.edu/25202543/, www.academia.edu/35030894. 68 views
Latest addition by Niall Meehan
Sunday Independent BBC NI Sunday Life Belfast Telegraph Examiner Phoenix Times Higher Education, 2023
Updated 17 July 2024.
Rev (the late) WG (Billy) Neely founded the Church of Ireland Historica... more Updated 17 July 2024.
Rev (the late) WG (Billy) Neely founded the Church of Ireland Historical Society (COIHS). He acted as its secretary and convenor. He co-edited books on church history. Such was his prestige, when Neely died the society promoted a ‘WG Neely Prize’ in honour of its 'founder'.
Today, reference to WG Neely's role is invisible on the society's website. Pages on Neely and the prize were deleted or falsified. See also https://www.academia.edu/s/36345f7040
PDF pages show: before and after COIHS erasure examples; BBC & Sunday Life initial news reports; Sunday Independent (Dublin) letters 13, 27 August, 17 September, 2023; News Letter (Belfast) letters 18, 26 September 2023, Irish Examiner 7 October 2023, 5 July 2024; Phoenix 25 August 2023, 14 June, 12 July 2024; Times Higher Education (London) 12 October 2023; Sunday Life 22 October, 10 December 2023, 2 June, 16 June 2024; Belfast Telegraph 15 June, plus KRWLAW press statement 10 December 2023 on settlement Eddie Gorman case against Church of Ireland, Scouts Association.
See also web links below:
https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/sunday-life/news/ex-cops-case-against-church-of-ireland-over-paedo-minister-disrupts-stereotypical-narrative-around-historical-clerical-abuse/42087769.html;
https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/sunday-life/news/animal-minister-sexually-abused-me-and-other-boys-in-the-vestry-of-belfast-church-says-ex-ruc-man/42087765.html; PLUS
BBC NI News broadcast link (plus website BBC story):
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=575654724350125;
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-63066301.
History Ireland, 2023
Accounts of the 1912 and 1920 Belfast shipyard expulsions detail tens of thousands of Catholics f... more Accounts of the 1912 and 1920 Belfast shipyard expulsions detail tens of thousands of Catholics forcibly driven from their places of employment, followed by being burned out of their homes. As Emmet O'Connor points out and details in this book, Protestants, mainly socialist trade unionists, were expelled too. As O'Connor details in depth, their plight and that of Catholic victims is quite often rationalised into obscurity. So-called 'rotten Prods' are, by and large, forgotten Prods. (... see review, attached) Plus a letter by Pat Muldowney on a remark by Simon Kingston of the West Cork History Festival on a History Ireland Hedge School podcast.
Pamphlets by Niall Meehan
Aubane Historical Society, 2022
𝗥𝗘𝗛𝗔𝗕𝗜𝗟𝗜𝗧𝗔𝗧𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝗣𝗘𝗧𝗘𝗥 𝗛𝗔𝗥𝗧 plus 𝗘𝗧𝗛𝗡𝗜𝗖 𝗖𝗟𝗘𝗔𝗡𝗦𝗜𝗡𝗚 from 𝗕𝗢𝗦𝗡𝗜𝗔 to 𝗕𝗘𝗟𝗙𝗔𝗦𝗧 via 𝗪𝗘𝗦𝗧 𝗖𝗢𝗥𝗞 - two essays... more 𝗥𝗘𝗛𝗔𝗕𝗜𝗟𝗜𝗧𝗔𝗧𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝗣𝗘𝗧𝗘𝗥 𝗛𝗔𝗥𝗧 plus 𝗘𝗧𝗛𝗡𝗜𝗖 𝗖𝗟𝗘𝗔𝗡𝗦𝗜𝗡𝗚 from 𝗕𝗢𝗦𝗡𝗜𝗔 to 𝗕𝗘𝗟𝗙𝗔𝗦𝗧 via 𝗪𝗘𝗦𝗧 𝗖𝗢𝗥𝗞 - two essays. The first critiques Eve Morrison's Kilmichael: the life and afterlife of an ambush (2022). It reveals new information on Peter Hart's IRA and its Enemies PhD examination in TCD and on Fr John Chisholm's role in the Kilmichael Ambush controversy. The essay details Chisholm's claim that he alone wrote Towards Ireland Free (1973), not ostensible author Liam Deasy. It also critiques Morrison's mistaken comparison of criticism of Peter Hart with Haifa University Israel's politically motivated withdrawal of an MA awarded to Teddy Katz. The second essay looks at the origin of Hart's 'ethnic cleansing' terminology, unionist propaganda and southern Irish Protestants. It details Henry Patterson's changing views on the subject and 1994 Ulster Defence Association (UDA) ethnic cleansing proposals, based on 'Irish Ulster' and 'British Ulster' re-partition maps produced by QUB's Liam Kennedy in 1986. Related discussion at, https://www.academia.edu/s/04ed9902d7.
4 March 2023: new material inserted pp18-19, inadvertently omitted original publication. August 2023, fixed typo p9 ('did report' changed to 'did not report' - clear from context); on p18 'Morrison explained' to 'Morrison speculated' (more accurate term). 30 September 2024 deleted p14 second use of 'in 1937' in a sentence. October 2024, p19 Barry's 1974 'Deasy' critique out soon after Deasy died, not the day he died (corrected), fixed typos, clarified language, various pages.
Aubane Historical Society, 2020
The essay accompanies and expands on a talk at Belfast's Feile an Phobail (at https://www.youtube... more The essay accompanies and expands on a talk at Belfast's Feile an Phobail (at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdrpAi-Z3bk). It analyses research by Anne Dolan, Terence Dooley, Diarmaid Ferriter, Brian Hanley, Fearghal McGarry, Eunan O’Halpin and Tim Wilson, published between 1986 and 2018.
Over nearly thirty years, historians mistakenly depicted the IRA's killing of Kate Carroll in April 1921 in Monaghan as sectarian. Carroll was one of three women the IRA executed between 1919-21 during the War of Independence, out of approximately 196 in total.
The essay discusses errors of fact and of interpretation, and also how treatment of Carroll's death represents a symptomatic failure by revisionist historians in Ireland. The essay reproduces for the first time an explanation of why Kate Carroll was killed. The information had been in the possession of one of the historians discussed in the essay, but was not detailed in his available research on the subject.
The essay also discusses the phenomenon of historians’ interest in alleged sectarian attacks on Protestants in southern Ireland, compared with relative disinterest in anti-Catholic pogroms in and around Belfast in the new territory of Northern Ireland, whose 100th anniversary falls in 2020-22.
Niall Meehan is the author of The Embers of Revisionism (https://www.academia.edu/34075119). 31 August 2023, typo corrected p2, some sentences re-written, pp2-3. Earlier, in noting historians who mistakenly concluded that no Protestants were elected to the senate, I wrote that six were. That should have been five (p3, see n17).
The EMBERS of REVISIONISM, 2017
The EMBERS of REVISIONISM
Essays critiquing creationist Irish history and Roy Foster on Ken Loac... more The EMBERS of REVISIONISM
Essays critiquing creationist Irish history and Roy Foster on Ken Loachʼs The WIND that SHAKES the BARLEY
Niall Meehan & Brian P Murphy
Contents
THE EMBERS OF REVISIONISM Critiquing Creationist Irish History - Dr. Niall Meehan
Introduction – enter Conor Cruise O’Brien
PART I MAKING SPACE FOR REVISIONISM
PART II THE SOUTH
2.1 ‘Catholic Bourgeoisie’
2.2 Southern Economy
2.3 ‘Wonderful Catholics’, ‘Good Little Protestants’
PART III REVISIONISM AND THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE
3.1 Deceived Schoolboys
3.2 Journalists and History
3.3 Left, Right
3.4 Reporting History
3.5 Tales of the RIC
3.6 Academic Tales
3.7 Protestant Views
3.8 Adulterers and Homosexuals
3.9 Kilmichael Interviews
3.10 April Killings
3.11 Ethnic Cleansing Retreat
PART IV CONCLUSION
The WIND that SHAKES the BARLEY
Historical reflections on Roy Foster’s criticism of Ken Loach’s 2006 film
Dr. Brian P. Murphy osb
INTRODUCTION
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO THE FILM
THE CROWN FORCES
DEMOCRATIC MANDATE AND REFERENCE TO IRAQ
SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC ISSUES
SECTARIANISM
SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE WRITING OF IRISH HISTORY
Southern Star letters on the West Cork History Festival
Niall Meehan essay begins:
Introduction – enter Conor Cruise O'Brien
Historians who search for enhanced knowledge of past events never do so in a vacuum. Inevitably, societal pressures infiltrate the historian’s thought processes. When the subject matter of history comes closer to the present, politics intervenes. This is especially so in Ireland where the past is never past, but instead is considered the political present in retrospect.
Attempts to control the presentation of Irish history redoubled after 1970. This was due to official apprehension that nationalists and republicans in revolt against sectarian rule in Northern Ireland might influence southern popular consciousness. The consequent attempt to revise and to reverse a nationalist version of Irish history, so as to alienate southerners from northerners, was actively pursued by Conor Cruise O’Brien. He operated prominently in four areas of Irish life: government, politics, academic history and journalism. Their interaction was central to the relative success within academia of the revisionist project.
In revising Irish history O’Brien revised also his 1960s self. Before tacking to the right during the 1970s, he contributed three important articles to London’s New Left Review (NLR). They contained observations and sentiments he would later either ignore or disavow.
The first in 1965 challenged Cold War neo-colonialism, a subject of which O’Brien had direct personal experience. In 1961 he was forced out of his UN role in the province of Katanga in the newly independent, former Belgian, Congo. He had opposed the violent attempts of Western interests and white-ruled Rhodesia to partition off and turn Katanga into a client state. O’Brien wrote in the Observer on 10 December that year, ‘My resignation from the United Nations and from the Irish Foreign Service is a result of British Government policy’.
In exile from Ireland from 1962-68, O’Brien was associated with the ‘new left’. He opposed United States involvement in the Vietnam War, racism plus police violence in the US and Apartheid in South Africa. A 1967 NLR essay explained O’Brien’s role in exposing how the CIA funded and manipulated Encounter magazine (through the Congress of Cultural Freedom). O’Brien recounted also Encounter’s failed attempt to silence him. Another 1967 essay warned that ‘counter revolutionary subordination’ of intellectuals by the state in western society was a threat to ‘scholarly integrity’.
O’Brien was a committed supporter of resistance to US forces in Vietnam. Some years earlier he had supported the Algerian fight for independence from France. At a 1967 symposium on the Vietnam War O’Brien clashed with Hannah Arendt, who had remarked, ‘As to the Viet Cong terror, we cannot possibly agree with it’. O’Brien responded,
'I think there is a distinction between the use of terror by oppressed peoples against the oppressors and their servants, in comparison with the use of terror by their oppressors in the interests of further oppression. I think there is a qualitative distinction there which we have the right to make.'
In December 1967 O’Brien was front-page news in the Irish Times, that reported his arrest while demonstrating against the war, and being kicked by a policeman. In May 1968 O’Brien condemned police attacks on, and harassment of, the militant, armed, Black Panther Party.
O’Brien linked his Irish and international perspect-ives in his second NLR contribution, ‘The Embers of Easter’, on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Rising against British rule. It was a robust anti-imperialist inter-pretation of Irish history. O’Brien had a connection there too. His uncle, the pacifist Francis Sheehy Skeffington, was executed during the Rising on the orders of a later found ‘guilty but insane’ Cork-born, Anglo-Irish British officer, Captain J.C. Bowen-Colthurst.
To great fanfare, in December 1968 O’Brien joined the small but then vibrantly and newly left-wing Irish Labour Party. Under a soon to be abandoned slogan, ‘The 70s will be socialist’, he was easily elected to the Dáil (Irish Parliament) at the June 1969 general election. O’Brien’s triumphant return to Ireland coincided with the emergence of civil rights demands that became a civil rights revolt in Northern Ireland. He was quickly in the thick of opposition to the North’s ‘Orange state’ .... [the rest in PDF]
"An analysis and critique of the controversy and debate surrounding the publication in 1998 of a ... more "An analysis and critique of the controversy and debate surrounding the publication in 1998 of a history of the War of Independence in West Cork. The allegation that sectarianism was a feature of Irish republican ideology and action during the period 1920-22 is examined in the context of claims made in Peter Hart's 'The IRA and its Enemies' (OUP 1998). Niall Meehan's essay examines problematic anonymous interviews. By comparing Peter Hart's 1993 PhD thesis 'The Irish Republican Army and its Enemies' (TCD 1993) with Hart's 1998 book 'The IRA and its Enemies', some anonymous interviewees cited by Hart may be identified.
Problems arising out of this identification are discussed, for example whether two IRA veterans of the the November 1920 Kilmichael ambush were alive when Hart claimed to have interviewed them anonymously. The cover of 'Troubled History' features the 18 November 1989 'Southern Star' coverage of the death of Ned Young, the last Kilmichael veteran to die. Hart's thesis and book claim an interview with an anonymous Kilmichael veteran one day later.
On the chapter, 'Taking it out on the Protestants', questions are posed with regard to information in the thesis that is withdrawn from the book. For instance a possible perpetrator of the 'April killings', April 26-29 1922 near Dunmanway West Cork, is named in the thesis, but excised from the book. Other significant changes are noted, also.
The essay is part of a projected larger study, examining the effect of the Troubles post 1968 in Northern Ireland intruding on the history of the War of Independence between 1919-21. In addition, the ramifications of censorship perfected by Conor Cruise O'Brien in the 1970s in southern Ireland will be examined in this wider context.
[See also, under 'papers':
Distorting Irish History [One], the stubborn facts of Kilmichael: Peter Hart and Irish Historiography, Nov 2010
Distorting Irish History Two, the road from Dunmanway: Peter Hart’s treatment of the 1922 ‘April killings’ in West Cork, May 2011]
[Download PDF below]"
Papers by Niall Meehan
The discussion of this important 1985 publication is a by-product of my review of David Fitzpatri... more The discussion of this important 1985 publication is a by-product of my review of David Fitzpatrick (ed.) Terror in Ireland, 1916-1923 (2012), at https://www.academia.edu/1871818/, plus response by David Fitzpatrick and Eve Morrison. Further comment from me is at https://www.academia.edu/1994527/ - the latter also addresses 'The Good Old IRA' pamphlet.
History Ireland v27 n1 Jan Feb 2019, 2019
Historians in southern Ireland, who examine the interaction of religion with social and political... more Historians in southern Ireland, who examine the interaction of religion with social and political policy, tend to fixate on the Roman Catholic Church. Southern Protestants plus their socio-economic, political and religious interactions within wider society are often ignored. Though over 90% of southerners were, for a long period, Roman Catholic, were other denominations as irrelevant as this absence of consideration appears to suggest?
I look here at a much relied upon, pioneering and, generally, highly astute account, J.H. Whyte’s Church & State in Modern Ireland, 1923-1970 (1971). Whyte interviewed ten clergymen including five bishops, all Roman Catholic, in a book devoted to that church’s role in independent Ireland. These geographical and denominational limitations produced avoidable interpretive weaknesses.
Take Article 44 of the 1937 Constitution, on religion. Article 44.1.2 recognised the ‘special position of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Roman Church as the guardian of the faith professed by the great majority of citizens’. It recognised also, in 44.1.3, the Church of Ireland, Presbyterian and Methodist churches, the Religious Society of Friends, Jewish congregations and ‘other religious denominations existing’ at that time.
The affirmation of a ‘special position’ represented, said Whyte, ‘One more instance of the movement … to enshrine Catholic principles in the law of the land’. It marked, ‘the culmination of [a] process’ in which ‘the Irish state appeared wholly committed to the maintenance of Catholic values’.
Whyte ignored published evidence from the Church of Ireland that should have qualified his observations. Due to unavailability of archival records, the extent of consultation with the Roman Catholic Church in framing Article 44 was unclear in 1971. Evidence of consultation with the Church of Ireland was available
Spinwatch, 2018
In November 2016, the Guardian published a celebratory obituary, online, of the Sussex University... more In November 2016, the Guardian published a celebratory obituary, online, of the Sussex University sociologist Brian Taylor, who had died aged 66. In May 2017, as a result of a decision by Readers' Editor Paul Chadwick, the newspaper took it down, but did not explain the decision to readers.
My intervention in February 2017 led to the decision to delete the obituary. I did not ask for deletion. I asked the paper to add important information that was missing. Censorship was not a satisfactory response to the problem with the obituary. Correspondence with the newspaper, the suggested insert and the original obituary, is contained in the attached PDF (plus two related Guardian articles from the 1990s).
Published by Spinwatch, Public Interest Investigations: https://spinwatch.org/index.php/issues/more/item/5995-why-did-the-guardian-take-down-the-sociologist-brian-taylor-s-online-obituary
by Margaret Urwin and Niall Meehan
On 1 December 1972 at 7.58 and 8.15pm, as the Irish Times r... more by Margaret Urwin and Niall Meehan
On 1 December 1972 at 7.58 and 8.15pm, as the Irish Times reported, ‘Two [car] bombs in Dublin city centre killed two [CIE workers], injured 127 other people, and dramatically changed the course of the Dáil crisis over the Offences Against the State (Amendment) Bill’. The legislation permitted a court to accept as proof of IRA membership the uncontested word of a garda chief superintendent.
The bombs were the second in a series of three in Dublin between November and January. They prevented a general election by collapsing Fine Gael opposition to the controversial measure. British involvement was suspected by then Taoiseach Jack Lynch. However, his government ensured that an MI6 agent John Wyman and Patrick Crinnion, Wyman’s mole in garda HQ, arrested nearly three weeks later, were freed prematurely.
A ‘third man’, whose role was hidden, led gardaí to Wyman. Gardaí told the Taoiseach about him. The Department of Justice, under then minister Desmond O’Malley, must also have known. Judge Henry Barron’s 2004 report on the 1972-73 bombings, that considered the Wyman-Crinnion scandal, ignored his existence. The Irish Press reported initially the arrest of two British agents, in addition to a garda member ‘employed in a clerical capacity at garda headquarters’ (Crinnion’s position). After that, this second British agent was forgotten.
The third man was 31-year-old Englishman Alexander Forsey (reported as ‘Fursey’). Gardaí initially thought him ‘sympathetic to the IRA’. On 15 December 1972 he appeared in court, charged with possession of explosive safety fuse, 710 rounds of .22 and eight rounds of .303 ammunition. Under interrogation, Forsey told gardaí that he was in contact with a fellow Englishman, John Wyman.
To:
David Sterling. Executive Office, NIO, Belfast
Copy to:
James Brokenshire MP, Secretary of ... more To:
David Sterling. Executive Office, NIO, Belfast
Copy to:
James Brokenshire MP, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland
From:
Dr Niall Meehan, Faculty Head, Journalism & Media, Griffith College, Dublin.
16 November 2017 The HIAI and Dr Morris Fraser
Dear David Sterling,
On 17 May 1972 at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court London, a child psychiatrist employed by the NI Hospitals Authority, Dr Morris Fraser, pleaded guilty to abusing a 13-year-old Belfast boy in London in August 1971.
I attach two reports I authored on Dr Morris Fraser, in September and (just published) November 2017. They are entitled:
• ‘Stormont should correct HIAI report to reflect police paedophile delinquency’, Village magazine, November 2017;
• ‘Northern Ireland abuse inquiry (HIAI) failed to investigate paedophile doctor, Morris Fraser, who managed Lissue children’s psychiatric hospital’, Spinwatch, September 2017
Both reports detail a serious deficiency in the findings, and also errors of fact, in the Report of the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry (HIAI), as they concern Dr Fraser.
I wish to make two points on that subject, which are supported by evidence cited in the attached reports. I draw your attention in particular to copies of archival documents (cited here) in my September 2017 report on Dr Fraser.
The two points addressed are:
1. Morris Fraser’s work in Lissue Children’s Psychiatric Unit
2. Police failure to inform NI Hospitals Authority and RUC frustration of GMC investigation of Morris Fraser
Letter detail plus November 2017 Village magazine article is in the attached PDF. The second article referred to (containing supporting docs), 'Paedophile psychiatrist Morris Fraser and the Northern Ireland abuse inquiry - Morris Fraser report PART II', is at, https://www.academia.edu/34499583/
Spinwatch, 2017
The Northern Ireland abuse inquiry (HIAI) failed to investigate paedophile doctor, Morris Fraser,... more The Northern Ireland abuse inquiry (HIAI) failed to investigate paedophile doctor, Morris Fraser, who medically managed Lissue Hospital, children’s psychiatric ward.
- The Inquiry stated that Fraser did not work with institutionalised children and gave that as a reason why his behaviour was beyond its terms of reference;
- Dr William Nelson's oral testimony in April 2016 on Fraser's non-involvement in Lissue Hospital with institutionalised children, queried by Nelson's 1973 letter confirming it;
- HIAI failed also to report a second 1973 letter suggesting accused doctor could return to work in Lissue;
- Nelson letters sent September 2016 by General Medical Council to (and ignored by) Inquiry;
- 1973 Medical Council documents alleged that the RUC obstructed its attempts to investigate Fraser - also ignored by HIAI;
- HIAI January 2017 Report and website failed to report receipt of Medical Council documentation on Fraser;
- HIAI Report was also factually wrong on paedophile doctor's arrest and conviction.
PART I Morris Fraser Report: www.academia.edu/23870062/
In 1971, during the Northern Ireland Troubles, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) was made aware... more In 1971, during the Northern Ireland Troubles, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) was made aware that a well-known often-quoted Royal Hospital Belfast child-psychiatrist, Dr Roderick Morrison Fraser, had abused a 13-year-old Belfast boy in London.
Despite this, Fraser retained access to children in the Royal Hospital Belfast and in children’s homes. In May 1972 Fraser pleaded guilty to indecent assault at Bow Street Magistrates' Court but was not jailed. The media did not report Fraser's conviction.
On Spinwatch site at:
http://www.spinwatch.org/index.php/issues/northern-ireland/item/5850-morris-fraser-child-abuse-corruption-and-collusion-in-britain-and-northern-ireland
After his unreported May 1972 indecent assault conviction, police failed to inform the Hospital where he worked. Fraser’s professional standing, media celebrity, and access to children, remained unaffected. One year later, in May 1973, Fraser’s arrest in New York on new paedophile charges was publicised. He was suspended.
During this 1971-73 period Fraser’s observations on the Northern Ireland conflict and its effect on children reflected British policy interests.
The consequences of police, medical and media failures to hold Morris Fraser to account are addressed in this investigation, which publishes significant new information.
Field Day Review, 2014
The late Peter Hart, who died at a tragically young age in July 2010, asserted in his 1993 Trinit... more The late Peter Hart, who died at a tragically young age in July 2010, asserted in his 1993 Trinity College Dublin (TCD) PhD thesis, and in the 1998 Oxford University Press book based on the thesis, that republican forces fought a sectarian war against Protestants during the 1919–21 Irish War of Independence and afterwards. It culminated in a ‘massacre of Protestants’ in late April 1922, that is after Anglo-Irish hostilities ceased in July 1921, prior to the start of the Irish Civil War in June 1922. Equally controversially, Hart asserted that Irish Republican Army (IRA) Flying Column leader Tom Barry covered up an earlier ‘massacre’, of British Auxiliary prisoners after the 28 November 1920 Kilmichael Ambush. In his thesis and book Hart linked these events and portrayed them as emblematic of ethnically charged sectarian hatreds that drove ‘the nationalist revolution’.
In his professional role as historian, Peter Hart was perfectly entitled to explore and to present evidence leading to such conclusions. However, there are concerns that his evidence presentation breached ethical standards. In order to explore and to explain why I share this opinion, I will deal first with the November 1920 Kilmichael Ambush and then with the 1922 April killings. I will at that stage discuss the intellectual climate within which Hart’s research was accepted, largely uncritically.
A 'debate' with the Bishop of Cork, Paul Colton
I am grateful to Jeffrey Dudgeon for replying on the contentious subject of the killing of thirte... more I am grateful to Jeffrey Dudgeon for replying on the contentious subject of the killing of thirteen civilians and four British Army personnel in West Cork in late April 1922. I am grateful also to IPR for facilitating the discussion.
Dudgeon ignored my remarks (IPR November 2011) on Peter Hart’s errors and misrepresentations concerning the 28 November 1920 Kilmichael Ambush. I do not know if that means he now accepts my argument. Dudgeon concentrates instead on vindicating Hart’s view of the ‘April killings’ in West Cork in 1922, seen as ‘emblematic’ of IRA attacks on Protestants during the War of Independence period.
In the course of his reply, Dudgeon attempted to demonstrate that Irish Republicanism is anti-Protestant, even though republican ideology and action ‘claim[s] to be non-sectarian’.
During the late 18th Century some Irish Protestants founded The Society of United Irishmen and a significant number, mainly Presbyterian, broke from an assumed allegiance to the colonial system of Protestant supremacy. This tradition of Irish Republican separatism was led by Theobald Wolfe Tone. It was influenced by the American and French Revolutions, the first uprisings in human history to be influenced by secular as distinct from religious ideology. The subsequent 1798 United Irishmen inspired rebellion failed and was brutally suppressed.
These Protestant republicans were considered caste traitors. The best-known modern example is the last Protestant Editor of the Irish Times, Douglas Gageby, who considered himself a republican in the Wolfe Tone tradition. According to Major Thomas McDowell, the newspaper’s then Managing Editor and a fellow Belfast born Protestant, Gageby was (as reported in 1969 to the British Ambassador to Dublin), ‘a renegade or white nigger’.
According to Dudgeon, republicans practice ‘(fake) non-sectarian[ism]’. It is in essence devious, a kind of Roman Catholicism of the fundamentalist Protestant imagination. This view requires empirical proof. Depicting most of the late April 1922 West Cork killings as sectarian and as part of a pattern is therefore important to Dudgeon, who is an Ulster Unionist. Since the Ulster Unionist Party cannot easily shake off accusations of consistent sectarian practice in Northern Ireland (because it is a fact), events like the April killings are a basis for suggesting that the competing Irish ideologies cancel each other out, while confirming a need for ethnic separation. It is a rationale for partition on the basis of sectarian equivalence, a familiarity that breeds contempt.
I will look at this question of IRA sectarianism in two parts, first in terms of the April killings themselves, second with regard to whether they were ‘emblematic’ (Dudgeon’s term) of a consistent practice.
[The rest, including Jeff Dudgeon's piece, is in the attached PDF. Also included, an article from the same IPR edition on General Frank (FP) Crozier, first Commander of the Auxiliary Division, by Manus O'Riordan]
Irish Political Review, 2011
Jeffrey Dudgeon supports the late Peter Hart’s analysis of the West Cork IRA during and after the... more Jeffrey Dudgeon supports the late Peter Hart’s analysis of the West Cork IRA during and after the War of Independence. Dudgeon made three specific observations in two IPR editions (Oct 2010, Sept 2011) in response to Jack Lane and to Brendan Clifford.
In The IRA and its Enemies (1998) Hart alleged that sectarian motives accompanied the abduction and disappearance of three people in Ballygroman (north of Bandon near Ovens) and the shooting dead of ten more west of Bandon from 26 -29 April 1922. Dudgeon supports Hart’s reporting of these pre-Civil War killings and also Hart’s reconstruction of the 28 November 1920 Kilmichael Ambush. Hart called ambush commander, Tom Barry, a lying serial killer. Hart controversially concluded that the IRA fought a war of sectarian ethnic supremacy.
I respond to Dudgeon’s Kilmichael Ambush remarks before looking at those on April 1922. I also comment on Dudgeon’s defence of a book inspired by Hart’s research, Gerard Murphy’s, The Year of Disappearances (2010). [Reposted Aug 2022 due to previous version not downloading as a readable PDF.]
To read on.... download PDF
See also here:
‘Distorting Irish History [One], the stubborn facts of Kilmichael: Peter Hart and Irish Historiography’
and
‘Distorting Irish History Two, the Road from Dunmanway’, on the April 1922 killings.
Uploads
Videos by Niall Meehan
This important documentary revealed new evidence of British collusion with loyalist forces to cause the bombings and also involvement in other loyalist (in effect British) violence. It added to pressure on the Irish state to officially inquire into British collusion and into its own inaction in relation to the bombings. A Tribunal of Inquiry was set up in December 1999 under the late Justice Liam Hamilton. His successor Justice Henry Barron reported in December 2003 (link here, https://www.relativesforjustice.com/the-barron-report-into-the-dublin-monaghan-bombings/). Barron reported that his investigation was hampered by refusal of full cooperation from British authorities. The programme complements the Yorkshire Television First Tuesday documentary shown two years earlier, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Suwm8YGaqjM.
www.academia.edu/34075119/, www.academia.edu/51140266/, www.academia.edu/25202543/, www.academia.edu/35030894.
Latest addition by Niall Meehan
Rev (the late) WG (Billy) Neely founded the Church of Ireland Historical Society (COIHS). He acted as its secretary and convenor. He co-edited books on church history. Such was his prestige, when Neely died the society promoted a ‘WG Neely Prize’ in honour of its 'founder'.
Today, reference to WG Neely's role is invisible on the society's website. Pages on Neely and the prize were deleted or falsified. See also https://www.academia.edu/s/36345f7040
PDF pages show: before and after COIHS erasure examples; BBC & Sunday Life initial news reports; Sunday Independent (Dublin) letters 13, 27 August, 17 September, 2023; News Letter (Belfast) letters 18, 26 September 2023, Irish Examiner 7 October 2023, 5 July 2024; Phoenix 25 August 2023, 14 June, 12 July 2024; Times Higher Education (London) 12 October 2023; Sunday Life 22 October, 10 December 2023, 2 June, 16 June 2024; Belfast Telegraph 15 June, plus KRWLAW press statement 10 December 2023 on settlement Eddie Gorman case against Church of Ireland, Scouts Association.
See also web links below:
https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/sunday-life/news/ex-cops-case-against-church-of-ireland-over-paedo-minister-disrupts-stereotypical-narrative-around-historical-clerical-abuse/42087769.html;
https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/sunday-life/news/animal-minister-sexually-abused-me-and-other-boys-in-the-vestry-of-belfast-church-says-ex-ruc-man/42087765.html; PLUS
BBC NI News broadcast link (plus website BBC story):
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=575654724350125;
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-63066301.
Pamphlets by Niall Meehan
4 March 2023: new material inserted pp18-19, inadvertently omitted original publication. August 2023, fixed typo p9 ('did report' changed to 'did not report' - clear from context); on p18 'Morrison explained' to 'Morrison speculated' (more accurate term). 30 September 2024 deleted p14 second use of 'in 1937' in a sentence. October 2024, p19 Barry's 1974 'Deasy' critique out soon after Deasy died, not the day he died (corrected), fixed typos, clarified language, various pages.
Over nearly thirty years, historians mistakenly depicted the IRA's killing of Kate Carroll in April 1921 in Monaghan as sectarian. Carroll was one of three women the IRA executed between 1919-21 during the War of Independence, out of approximately 196 in total.
The essay discusses errors of fact and of interpretation, and also how treatment of Carroll's death represents a symptomatic failure by revisionist historians in Ireland. The essay reproduces for the first time an explanation of why Kate Carroll was killed. The information had been in the possession of one of the historians discussed in the essay, but was not detailed in his available research on the subject.
The essay also discusses the phenomenon of historians’ interest in alleged sectarian attacks on Protestants in southern Ireland, compared with relative disinterest in anti-Catholic pogroms in and around Belfast in the new territory of Northern Ireland, whose 100th anniversary falls in 2020-22.
Niall Meehan is the author of The Embers of Revisionism (https://www.academia.edu/34075119). 31 August 2023, typo corrected p2, some sentences re-written, pp2-3. Earlier, in noting historians who mistakenly concluded that no Protestants were elected to the senate, I wrote that six were. That should have been five (p3, see n17).
Essays critiquing creationist Irish history and Roy Foster on Ken Loachʼs The WIND that SHAKES the BARLEY
Niall Meehan & Brian P Murphy
Contents
THE EMBERS OF REVISIONISM Critiquing Creationist Irish History - Dr. Niall Meehan
Introduction – enter Conor Cruise O’Brien
PART I MAKING SPACE FOR REVISIONISM
PART II THE SOUTH
2.1 ‘Catholic Bourgeoisie’
2.2 Southern Economy
2.3 ‘Wonderful Catholics’, ‘Good Little Protestants’
PART III REVISIONISM AND THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE
3.1 Deceived Schoolboys
3.2 Journalists and History
3.3 Left, Right
3.4 Reporting History
3.5 Tales of the RIC
3.6 Academic Tales
3.7 Protestant Views
3.8 Adulterers and Homosexuals
3.9 Kilmichael Interviews
3.10 April Killings
3.11 Ethnic Cleansing Retreat
PART IV CONCLUSION
The WIND that SHAKES the BARLEY
Historical reflections on Roy Foster’s criticism of Ken Loach’s 2006 film
Dr. Brian P. Murphy osb
INTRODUCTION
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO THE FILM
THE CROWN FORCES
DEMOCRATIC MANDATE AND REFERENCE TO IRAQ
SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC ISSUES
SECTARIANISM
SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE WRITING OF IRISH HISTORY
Southern Star letters on the West Cork History Festival
Niall Meehan essay begins:
Introduction – enter Conor Cruise O'Brien
Historians who search for enhanced knowledge of past events never do so in a vacuum. Inevitably, societal pressures infiltrate the historian’s thought processes. When the subject matter of history comes closer to the present, politics intervenes. This is especially so in Ireland where the past is never past, but instead is considered the political present in retrospect.
Attempts to control the presentation of Irish history redoubled after 1970. This was due to official apprehension that nationalists and republicans in revolt against sectarian rule in Northern Ireland might influence southern popular consciousness. The consequent attempt to revise and to reverse a nationalist version of Irish history, so as to alienate southerners from northerners, was actively pursued by Conor Cruise O’Brien. He operated prominently in four areas of Irish life: government, politics, academic history and journalism. Their interaction was central to the relative success within academia of the revisionist project.
In revising Irish history O’Brien revised also his 1960s self. Before tacking to the right during the 1970s, he contributed three important articles to London’s New Left Review (NLR). They contained observations and sentiments he would later either ignore or disavow.
The first in 1965 challenged Cold War neo-colonialism, a subject of which O’Brien had direct personal experience. In 1961 he was forced out of his UN role in the province of Katanga in the newly independent, former Belgian, Congo. He had opposed the violent attempts of Western interests and white-ruled Rhodesia to partition off and turn Katanga into a client state. O’Brien wrote in the Observer on 10 December that year, ‘My resignation from the United Nations and from the Irish Foreign Service is a result of British Government policy’.
In exile from Ireland from 1962-68, O’Brien was associated with the ‘new left’. He opposed United States involvement in the Vietnam War, racism plus police violence in the US and Apartheid in South Africa. A 1967 NLR essay explained O’Brien’s role in exposing how the CIA funded and manipulated Encounter magazine (through the Congress of Cultural Freedom). O’Brien recounted also Encounter’s failed attempt to silence him. Another 1967 essay warned that ‘counter revolutionary subordination’ of intellectuals by the state in western society was a threat to ‘scholarly integrity’.
O’Brien was a committed supporter of resistance to US forces in Vietnam. Some years earlier he had supported the Algerian fight for independence from France. At a 1967 symposium on the Vietnam War O’Brien clashed with Hannah Arendt, who had remarked, ‘As to the Viet Cong terror, we cannot possibly agree with it’. O’Brien responded,
'I think there is a distinction between the use of terror by oppressed peoples against the oppressors and their servants, in comparison with the use of terror by their oppressors in the interests of further oppression. I think there is a qualitative distinction there which we have the right to make.'
In December 1967 O’Brien was front-page news in the Irish Times, that reported his arrest while demonstrating against the war, and being kicked by a policeman. In May 1968 O’Brien condemned police attacks on, and harassment of, the militant, armed, Black Panther Party.
O’Brien linked his Irish and international perspect-ives in his second NLR contribution, ‘The Embers of Easter’, on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Rising against British rule. It was a robust anti-imperialist inter-pretation of Irish history. O’Brien had a connection there too. His uncle, the pacifist Francis Sheehy Skeffington, was executed during the Rising on the orders of a later found ‘guilty but insane’ Cork-born, Anglo-Irish British officer, Captain J.C. Bowen-Colthurst.
To great fanfare, in December 1968 O’Brien joined the small but then vibrantly and newly left-wing Irish Labour Party. Under a soon to be abandoned slogan, ‘The 70s will be socialist’, he was easily elected to the Dáil (Irish Parliament) at the June 1969 general election. O’Brien’s triumphant return to Ireland coincided with the emergence of civil rights demands that became a civil rights revolt in Northern Ireland. He was quickly in the thick of opposition to the North’s ‘Orange state’ .... [the rest in PDF]
Problems arising out of this identification are discussed, for example whether two IRA veterans of the the November 1920 Kilmichael ambush were alive when Hart claimed to have interviewed them anonymously. The cover of 'Troubled History' features the 18 November 1989 'Southern Star' coverage of the death of Ned Young, the last Kilmichael veteran to die. Hart's thesis and book claim an interview with an anonymous Kilmichael veteran one day later.
On the chapter, 'Taking it out on the Protestants', questions are posed with regard to information in the thesis that is withdrawn from the book. For instance a possible perpetrator of the 'April killings', April 26-29 1922 near Dunmanway West Cork, is named in the thesis, but excised from the book. Other significant changes are noted, also.
The essay is part of a projected larger study, examining the effect of the Troubles post 1968 in Northern Ireland intruding on the history of the War of Independence between 1919-21. In addition, the ramifications of censorship perfected by Conor Cruise O'Brien in the 1970s in southern Ireland will be examined in this wider context.
[See also, under 'papers':
Distorting Irish History [One], the stubborn facts of Kilmichael: Peter Hart and Irish Historiography, Nov 2010
Distorting Irish History Two, the road from Dunmanway: Peter Hart’s treatment of the 1922 ‘April killings’ in West Cork, May 2011]
[Download PDF below]"
Papers by Niall Meehan
I look here at a much relied upon, pioneering and, generally, highly astute account, J.H. Whyte’s Church & State in Modern Ireland, 1923-1970 (1971). Whyte interviewed ten clergymen including five bishops, all Roman Catholic, in a book devoted to that church’s role in independent Ireland. These geographical and denominational limitations produced avoidable interpretive weaknesses.
Take Article 44 of the 1937 Constitution, on religion. Article 44.1.2 recognised the ‘special position of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Roman Church as the guardian of the faith professed by the great majority of citizens’. It recognised also, in 44.1.3, the Church of Ireland, Presbyterian and Methodist churches, the Religious Society of Friends, Jewish congregations and ‘other religious denominations existing’ at that time.
The affirmation of a ‘special position’ represented, said Whyte, ‘One more instance of the movement … to enshrine Catholic principles in the law of the land’. It marked, ‘the culmination of [a] process’ in which ‘the Irish state appeared wholly committed to the maintenance of Catholic values’.
Whyte ignored published evidence from the Church of Ireland that should have qualified his observations. Due to unavailability of archival records, the extent of consultation with the Roman Catholic Church in framing Article 44 was unclear in 1971. Evidence of consultation with the Church of Ireland was available
My intervention in February 2017 led to the decision to delete the obituary. I did not ask for deletion. I asked the paper to add important information that was missing. Censorship was not a satisfactory response to the problem with the obituary. Correspondence with the newspaper, the suggested insert and the original obituary, is contained in the attached PDF (plus two related Guardian articles from the 1990s).
Published by Spinwatch, Public Interest Investigations: https://spinwatch.org/index.php/issues/more/item/5995-why-did-the-guardian-take-down-the-sociologist-brian-taylor-s-online-obituary
On 1 December 1972 at 7.58 and 8.15pm, as the Irish Times reported, ‘Two [car] bombs in Dublin city centre killed two [CIE workers], injured 127 other people, and dramatically changed the course of the Dáil crisis over the Offences Against the State (Amendment) Bill’. The legislation permitted a court to accept as proof of IRA membership the uncontested word of a garda chief superintendent.
The bombs were the second in a series of three in Dublin between November and January. They prevented a general election by collapsing Fine Gael opposition to the controversial measure. British involvement was suspected by then Taoiseach Jack Lynch. However, his government ensured that an MI6 agent John Wyman and Patrick Crinnion, Wyman’s mole in garda HQ, arrested nearly three weeks later, were freed prematurely.
A ‘third man’, whose role was hidden, led gardaí to Wyman. Gardaí told the Taoiseach about him. The Department of Justice, under then minister Desmond O’Malley, must also have known. Judge Henry Barron’s 2004 report on the 1972-73 bombings, that considered the Wyman-Crinnion scandal, ignored his existence. The Irish Press reported initially the arrest of two British agents, in addition to a garda member ‘employed in a clerical capacity at garda headquarters’ (Crinnion’s position). After that, this second British agent was forgotten.
The third man was 31-year-old Englishman Alexander Forsey (reported as ‘Fursey’). Gardaí initially thought him ‘sympathetic to the IRA’. On 15 December 1972 he appeared in court, charged with possession of explosive safety fuse, 710 rounds of .22 and eight rounds of .303 ammunition. Under interrogation, Forsey told gardaí that he was in contact with a fellow Englishman, John Wyman.
David Sterling. Executive Office, NIO, Belfast
Copy to:
James Brokenshire MP, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland
From:
Dr Niall Meehan, Faculty Head, Journalism & Media, Griffith College, Dublin.
16 November 2017 The HIAI and Dr Morris Fraser
Dear David Sterling,
On 17 May 1972 at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court London, a child psychiatrist employed by the NI Hospitals Authority, Dr Morris Fraser, pleaded guilty to abusing a 13-year-old Belfast boy in London in August 1971.
I attach two reports I authored on Dr Morris Fraser, in September and (just published) November 2017. They are entitled:
• ‘Stormont should correct HIAI report to reflect police paedophile delinquency’, Village magazine, November 2017;
• ‘Northern Ireland abuse inquiry (HIAI) failed to investigate paedophile doctor, Morris Fraser, who managed Lissue children’s psychiatric hospital’, Spinwatch, September 2017
Both reports detail a serious deficiency in the findings, and also errors of fact, in the Report of the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry (HIAI), as they concern Dr Fraser.
I wish to make two points on that subject, which are supported by evidence cited in the attached reports. I draw your attention in particular to copies of archival documents (cited here) in my September 2017 report on Dr Fraser.
The two points addressed are:
1. Morris Fraser’s work in Lissue Children’s Psychiatric Unit
2. Police failure to inform NI Hospitals Authority and RUC frustration of GMC investigation of Morris Fraser
Letter detail plus November 2017 Village magazine article is in the attached PDF. The second article referred to (containing supporting docs), 'Paedophile psychiatrist Morris Fraser and the Northern Ireland abuse inquiry - Morris Fraser report PART II', is at, https://www.academia.edu/34499583/
- The Inquiry stated that Fraser did not work with institutionalised children and gave that as a reason why his behaviour was beyond its terms of reference;
- Dr William Nelson's oral testimony in April 2016 on Fraser's non-involvement in Lissue Hospital with institutionalised children, queried by Nelson's 1973 letter confirming it;
- HIAI failed also to report a second 1973 letter suggesting accused doctor could return to work in Lissue;
- Nelson letters sent September 2016 by General Medical Council to (and ignored by) Inquiry;
- 1973 Medical Council documents alleged that the RUC obstructed its attempts to investigate Fraser - also ignored by HIAI;
- HIAI January 2017 Report and website failed to report receipt of Medical Council documentation on Fraser;
- HIAI Report was also factually wrong on paedophile doctor's arrest and conviction.
PART I Morris Fraser Report: www.academia.edu/23870062/
Despite this, Fraser retained access to children in the Royal Hospital Belfast and in children’s homes. In May 1972 Fraser pleaded guilty to indecent assault at Bow Street Magistrates' Court but was not jailed. The media did not report Fraser's conviction.
On Spinwatch site at:
http://www.spinwatch.org/index.php/issues/northern-ireland/item/5850-morris-fraser-child-abuse-corruption-and-collusion-in-britain-and-northern-ireland
After his unreported May 1972 indecent assault conviction, police failed to inform the Hospital where he worked. Fraser’s professional standing, media celebrity, and access to children, remained unaffected. One year later, in May 1973, Fraser’s arrest in New York on new paedophile charges was publicised. He was suspended.
During this 1971-73 period Fraser’s observations on the Northern Ireland conflict and its effect on children reflected British policy interests.
The consequences of police, medical and media failures to hold Morris Fraser to account are addressed in this investigation, which publishes significant new information.
In his professional role as historian, Peter Hart was perfectly entitled to explore and to present evidence leading to such conclusions. However, there are concerns that his evidence presentation breached ethical standards. In order to explore and to explain why I share this opinion, I will deal first with the November 1920 Kilmichael Ambush and then with the 1922 April killings. I will at that stage discuss the intellectual climate within which Hart’s research was accepted, largely uncritically.
Dudgeon ignored my remarks (IPR November 2011) on Peter Hart’s errors and misrepresentations concerning the 28 November 1920 Kilmichael Ambush. I do not know if that means he now accepts my argument. Dudgeon concentrates instead on vindicating Hart’s view of the ‘April killings’ in West Cork in 1922, seen as ‘emblematic’ of IRA attacks on Protestants during the War of Independence period.
In the course of his reply, Dudgeon attempted to demonstrate that Irish Republicanism is anti-Protestant, even though republican ideology and action ‘claim[s] to be non-sectarian’.
During the late 18th Century some Irish Protestants founded The Society of United Irishmen and a significant number, mainly Presbyterian, broke from an assumed allegiance to the colonial system of Protestant supremacy. This tradition of Irish Republican separatism was led by Theobald Wolfe Tone. It was influenced by the American and French Revolutions, the first uprisings in human history to be influenced by secular as distinct from religious ideology. The subsequent 1798 United Irishmen inspired rebellion failed and was brutally suppressed.
These Protestant republicans were considered caste traitors. The best-known modern example is the last Protestant Editor of the Irish Times, Douglas Gageby, who considered himself a republican in the Wolfe Tone tradition. According to Major Thomas McDowell, the newspaper’s then Managing Editor and a fellow Belfast born Protestant, Gageby was (as reported in 1969 to the British Ambassador to Dublin), ‘a renegade or white nigger’.
According to Dudgeon, republicans practice ‘(fake) non-sectarian[ism]’. It is in essence devious, a kind of Roman Catholicism of the fundamentalist Protestant imagination. This view requires empirical proof. Depicting most of the late April 1922 West Cork killings as sectarian and as part of a pattern is therefore important to Dudgeon, who is an Ulster Unionist. Since the Ulster Unionist Party cannot easily shake off accusations of consistent sectarian practice in Northern Ireland (because it is a fact), events like the April killings are a basis for suggesting that the competing Irish ideologies cancel each other out, while confirming a need for ethnic separation. It is a rationale for partition on the basis of sectarian equivalence, a familiarity that breeds contempt.
I will look at this question of IRA sectarianism in two parts, first in terms of the April killings themselves, second with regard to whether they were ‘emblematic’ (Dudgeon’s term) of a consistent practice.
[The rest, including Jeff Dudgeon's piece, is in the attached PDF. Also included, an article from the same IPR edition on General Frank (FP) Crozier, first Commander of the Auxiliary Division, by Manus O'Riordan]
In The IRA and its Enemies (1998) Hart alleged that sectarian motives accompanied the abduction and disappearance of three people in Ballygroman (north of Bandon near Ovens) and the shooting dead of ten more west of Bandon from 26 -29 April 1922. Dudgeon supports Hart’s reporting of these pre-Civil War killings and also Hart’s reconstruction of the 28 November 1920 Kilmichael Ambush. Hart called ambush commander, Tom Barry, a lying serial killer. Hart controversially concluded that the IRA fought a war of sectarian ethnic supremacy.
I respond to Dudgeon’s Kilmichael Ambush remarks before looking at those on April 1922. I also comment on Dudgeon’s defence of a book inspired by Hart’s research, Gerard Murphy’s, The Year of Disappearances (2010). [Reposted Aug 2022 due to previous version not downloading as a readable PDF.]
To read on.... download PDF
See also here:
‘Distorting Irish History [One], the stubborn facts of Kilmichael: Peter Hart and Irish Historiography’
and
‘Distorting Irish History Two, the Road from Dunmanway’, on the April 1922 killings.
This important documentary revealed new evidence of British collusion with loyalist forces to cause the bombings and also involvement in other loyalist (in effect British) violence. It added to pressure on the Irish state to officially inquire into British collusion and into its own inaction in relation to the bombings. A Tribunal of Inquiry was set up in December 1999 under the late Justice Liam Hamilton. His successor Justice Henry Barron reported in December 2003 (link here, https://www.relativesforjustice.com/the-barron-report-into-the-dublin-monaghan-bombings/). Barron reported that his investigation was hampered by refusal of full cooperation from British authorities. The programme complements the Yorkshire Television First Tuesday documentary shown two years earlier, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Suwm8YGaqjM.
www.academia.edu/34075119/, www.academia.edu/51140266/, www.academia.edu/25202543/, www.academia.edu/35030894.
Rev (the late) WG (Billy) Neely founded the Church of Ireland Historical Society (COIHS). He acted as its secretary and convenor. He co-edited books on church history. Such was his prestige, when Neely died the society promoted a ‘WG Neely Prize’ in honour of its 'founder'.
Today, reference to WG Neely's role is invisible on the society's website. Pages on Neely and the prize were deleted or falsified. See also https://www.academia.edu/s/36345f7040
PDF pages show: before and after COIHS erasure examples; BBC & Sunday Life initial news reports; Sunday Independent (Dublin) letters 13, 27 August, 17 September, 2023; News Letter (Belfast) letters 18, 26 September 2023, Irish Examiner 7 October 2023, 5 July 2024; Phoenix 25 August 2023, 14 June, 12 July 2024; Times Higher Education (London) 12 October 2023; Sunday Life 22 October, 10 December 2023, 2 June, 16 June 2024; Belfast Telegraph 15 June, plus KRWLAW press statement 10 December 2023 on settlement Eddie Gorman case against Church of Ireland, Scouts Association.
See also web links below:
https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/sunday-life/news/ex-cops-case-against-church-of-ireland-over-paedo-minister-disrupts-stereotypical-narrative-around-historical-clerical-abuse/42087769.html;
https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/sunday-life/news/animal-minister-sexually-abused-me-and-other-boys-in-the-vestry-of-belfast-church-says-ex-ruc-man/42087765.html; PLUS
BBC NI News broadcast link (plus website BBC story):
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=575654724350125;
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-63066301.
4 March 2023: new material inserted pp18-19, inadvertently omitted original publication. August 2023, fixed typo p9 ('did report' changed to 'did not report' - clear from context); on p18 'Morrison explained' to 'Morrison speculated' (more accurate term). 30 September 2024 deleted p14 second use of 'in 1937' in a sentence. October 2024, p19 Barry's 1974 'Deasy' critique out soon after Deasy died, not the day he died (corrected), fixed typos, clarified language, various pages.
Over nearly thirty years, historians mistakenly depicted the IRA's killing of Kate Carroll in April 1921 in Monaghan as sectarian. Carroll was one of three women the IRA executed between 1919-21 during the War of Independence, out of approximately 196 in total.
The essay discusses errors of fact and of interpretation, and also how treatment of Carroll's death represents a symptomatic failure by revisionist historians in Ireland. The essay reproduces for the first time an explanation of why Kate Carroll was killed. The information had been in the possession of one of the historians discussed in the essay, but was not detailed in his available research on the subject.
The essay also discusses the phenomenon of historians’ interest in alleged sectarian attacks on Protestants in southern Ireland, compared with relative disinterest in anti-Catholic pogroms in and around Belfast in the new territory of Northern Ireland, whose 100th anniversary falls in 2020-22.
Niall Meehan is the author of The Embers of Revisionism (https://www.academia.edu/34075119). 31 August 2023, typo corrected p2, some sentences re-written, pp2-3. Earlier, in noting historians who mistakenly concluded that no Protestants were elected to the senate, I wrote that six were. That should have been five (p3, see n17).
Essays critiquing creationist Irish history and Roy Foster on Ken Loachʼs The WIND that SHAKES the BARLEY
Niall Meehan & Brian P Murphy
Contents
THE EMBERS OF REVISIONISM Critiquing Creationist Irish History - Dr. Niall Meehan
Introduction – enter Conor Cruise O’Brien
PART I MAKING SPACE FOR REVISIONISM
PART II THE SOUTH
2.1 ‘Catholic Bourgeoisie’
2.2 Southern Economy
2.3 ‘Wonderful Catholics’, ‘Good Little Protestants’
PART III REVISIONISM AND THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE
3.1 Deceived Schoolboys
3.2 Journalists and History
3.3 Left, Right
3.4 Reporting History
3.5 Tales of the RIC
3.6 Academic Tales
3.7 Protestant Views
3.8 Adulterers and Homosexuals
3.9 Kilmichael Interviews
3.10 April Killings
3.11 Ethnic Cleansing Retreat
PART IV CONCLUSION
The WIND that SHAKES the BARLEY
Historical reflections on Roy Foster’s criticism of Ken Loach’s 2006 film
Dr. Brian P. Murphy osb
INTRODUCTION
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO THE FILM
THE CROWN FORCES
DEMOCRATIC MANDATE AND REFERENCE TO IRAQ
SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC ISSUES
SECTARIANISM
SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE WRITING OF IRISH HISTORY
Southern Star letters on the West Cork History Festival
Niall Meehan essay begins:
Introduction – enter Conor Cruise O'Brien
Historians who search for enhanced knowledge of past events never do so in a vacuum. Inevitably, societal pressures infiltrate the historian’s thought processes. When the subject matter of history comes closer to the present, politics intervenes. This is especially so in Ireland where the past is never past, but instead is considered the political present in retrospect.
Attempts to control the presentation of Irish history redoubled after 1970. This was due to official apprehension that nationalists and republicans in revolt against sectarian rule in Northern Ireland might influence southern popular consciousness. The consequent attempt to revise and to reverse a nationalist version of Irish history, so as to alienate southerners from northerners, was actively pursued by Conor Cruise O’Brien. He operated prominently in four areas of Irish life: government, politics, academic history and journalism. Their interaction was central to the relative success within academia of the revisionist project.
In revising Irish history O’Brien revised also his 1960s self. Before tacking to the right during the 1970s, he contributed three important articles to London’s New Left Review (NLR). They contained observations and sentiments he would later either ignore or disavow.
The first in 1965 challenged Cold War neo-colonialism, a subject of which O’Brien had direct personal experience. In 1961 he was forced out of his UN role in the province of Katanga in the newly independent, former Belgian, Congo. He had opposed the violent attempts of Western interests and white-ruled Rhodesia to partition off and turn Katanga into a client state. O’Brien wrote in the Observer on 10 December that year, ‘My resignation from the United Nations and from the Irish Foreign Service is a result of British Government policy’.
In exile from Ireland from 1962-68, O’Brien was associated with the ‘new left’. He opposed United States involvement in the Vietnam War, racism plus police violence in the US and Apartheid in South Africa. A 1967 NLR essay explained O’Brien’s role in exposing how the CIA funded and manipulated Encounter magazine (through the Congress of Cultural Freedom). O’Brien recounted also Encounter’s failed attempt to silence him. Another 1967 essay warned that ‘counter revolutionary subordination’ of intellectuals by the state in western society was a threat to ‘scholarly integrity’.
O’Brien was a committed supporter of resistance to US forces in Vietnam. Some years earlier he had supported the Algerian fight for independence from France. At a 1967 symposium on the Vietnam War O’Brien clashed with Hannah Arendt, who had remarked, ‘As to the Viet Cong terror, we cannot possibly agree with it’. O’Brien responded,
'I think there is a distinction between the use of terror by oppressed peoples against the oppressors and their servants, in comparison with the use of terror by their oppressors in the interests of further oppression. I think there is a qualitative distinction there which we have the right to make.'
In December 1967 O’Brien was front-page news in the Irish Times, that reported his arrest while demonstrating against the war, and being kicked by a policeman. In May 1968 O’Brien condemned police attacks on, and harassment of, the militant, armed, Black Panther Party.
O’Brien linked his Irish and international perspect-ives in his second NLR contribution, ‘The Embers of Easter’, on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Rising against British rule. It was a robust anti-imperialist inter-pretation of Irish history. O’Brien had a connection there too. His uncle, the pacifist Francis Sheehy Skeffington, was executed during the Rising on the orders of a later found ‘guilty but insane’ Cork-born, Anglo-Irish British officer, Captain J.C. Bowen-Colthurst.
To great fanfare, in December 1968 O’Brien joined the small but then vibrantly and newly left-wing Irish Labour Party. Under a soon to be abandoned slogan, ‘The 70s will be socialist’, he was easily elected to the Dáil (Irish Parliament) at the June 1969 general election. O’Brien’s triumphant return to Ireland coincided with the emergence of civil rights demands that became a civil rights revolt in Northern Ireland. He was quickly in the thick of opposition to the North’s ‘Orange state’ .... [the rest in PDF]
Problems arising out of this identification are discussed, for example whether two IRA veterans of the the November 1920 Kilmichael ambush were alive when Hart claimed to have interviewed them anonymously. The cover of 'Troubled History' features the 18 November 1989 'Southern Star' coverage of the death of Ned Young, the last Kilmichael veteran to die. Hart's thesis and book claim an interview with an anonymous Kilmichael veteran one day later.
On the chapter, 'Taking it out on the Protestants', questions are posed with regard to information in the thesis that is withdrawn from the book. For instance a possible perpetrator of the 'April killings', April 26-29 1922 near Dunmanway West Cork, is named in the thesis, but excised from the book. Other significant changes are noted, also.
The essay is part of a projected larger study, examining the effect of the Troubles post 1968 in Northern Ireland intruding on the history of the War of Independence between 1919-21. In addition, the ramifications of censorship perfected by Conor Cruise O'Brien in the 1970s in southern Ireland will be examined in this wider context.
[See also, under 'papers':
Distorting Irish History [One], the stubborn facts of Kilmichael: Peter Hart and Irish Historiography, Nov 2010
Distorting Irish History Two, the road from Dunmanway: Peter Hart’s treatment of the 1922 ‘April killings’ in West Cork, May 2011]
[Download PDF below]"
I look here at a much relied upon, pioneering and, generally, highly astute account, J.H. Whyte’s Church & State in Modern Ireland, 1923-1970 (1971). Whyte interviewed ten clergymen including five bishops, all Roman Catholic, in a book devoted to that church’s role in independent Ireland. These geographical and denominational limitations produced avoidable interpretive weaknesses.
Take Article 44 of the 1937 Constitution, on religion. Article 44.1.2 recognised the ‘special position of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Roman Church as the guardian of the faith professed by the great majority of citizens’. It recognised also, in 44.1.3, the Church of Ireland, Presbyterian and Methodist churches, the Religious Society of Friends, Jewish congregations and ‘other religious denominations existing’ at that time.
The affirmation of a ‘special position’ represented, said Whyte, ‘One more instance of the movement … to enshrine Catholic principles in the law of the land’. It marked, ‘the culmination of [a] process’ in which ‘the Irish state appeared wholly committed to the maintenance of Catholic values’.
Whyte ignored published evidence from the Church of Ireland that should have qualified his observations. Due to unavailability of archival records, the extent of consultation with the Roman Catholic Church in framing Article 44 was unclear in 1971. Evidence of consultation with the Church of Ireland was available
My intervention in February 2017 led to the decision to delete the obituary. I did not ask for deletion. I asked the paper to add important information that was missing. Censorship was not a satisfactory response to the problem with the obituary. Correspondence with the newspaper, the suggested insert and the original obituary, is contained in the attached PDF (plus two related Guardian articles from the 1990s).
Published by Spinwatch, Public Interest Investigations: https://spinwatch.org/index.php/issues/more/item/5995-why-did-the-guardian-take-down-the-sociologist-brian-taylor-s-online-obituary
On 1 December 1972 at 7.58 and 8.15pm, as the Irish Times reported, ‘Two [car] bombs in Dublin city centre killed two [CIE workers], injured 127 other people, and dramatically changed the course of the Dáil crisis over the Offences Against the State (Amendment) Bill’. The legislation permitted a court to accept as proof of IRA membership the uncontested word of a garda chief superintendent.
The bombs were the second in a series of three in Dublin between November and January. They prevented a general election by collapsing Fine Gael opposition to the controversial measure. British involvement was suspected by then Taoiseach Jack Lynch. However, his government ensured that an MI6 agent John Wyman and Patrick Crinnion, Wyman’s mole in garda HQ, arrested nearly three weeks later, were freed prematurely.
A ‘third man’, whose role was hidden, led gardaí to Wyman. Gardaí told the Taoiseach about him. The Department of Justice, under then minister Desmond O’Malley, must also have known. Judge Henry Barron’s 2004 report on the 1972-73 bombings, that considered the Wyman-Crinnion scandal, ignored his existence. The Irish Press reported initially the arrest of two British agents, in addition to a garda member ‘employed in a clerical capacity at garda headquarters’ (Crinnion’s position). After that, this second British agent was forgotten.
The third man was 31-year-old Englishman Alexander Forsey (reported as ‘Fursey’). Gardaí initially thought him ‘sympathetic to the IRA’. On 15 December 1972 he appeared in court, charged with possession of explosive safety fuse, 710 rounds of .22 and eight rounds of .303 ammunition. Under interrogation, Forsey told gardaí that he was in contact with a fellow Englishman, John Wyman.
David Sterling. Executive Office, NIO, Belfast
Copy to:
James Brokenshire MP, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland
From:
Dr Niall Meehan, Faculty Head, Journalism & Media, Griffith College, Dublin.
16 November 2017 The HIAI and Dr Morris Fraser
Dear David Sterling,
On 17 May 1972 at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court London, a child psychiatrist employed by the NI Hospitals Authority, Dr Morris Fraser, pleaded guilty to abusing a 13-year-old Belfast boy in London in August 1971.
I attach two reports I authored on Dr Morris Fraser, in September and (just published) November 2017. They are entitled:
• ‘Stormont should correct HIAI report to reflect police paedophile delinquency’, Village magazine, November 2017;
• ‘Northern Ireland abuse inquiry (HIAI) failed to investigate paedophile doctor, Morris Fraser, who managed Lissue children’s psychiatric hospital’, Spinwatch, September 2017
Both reports detail a serious deficiency in the findings, and also errors of fact, in the Report of the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry (HIAI), as they concern Dr Fraser.
I wish to make two points on that subject, which are supported by evidence cited in the attached reports. I draw your attention in particular to copies of archival documents (cited here) in my September 2017 report on Dr Fraser.
The two points addressed are:
1. Morris Fraser’s work in Lissue Children’s Psychiatric Unit
2. Police failure to inform NI Hospitals Authority and RUC frustration of GMC investigation of Morris Fraser
Letter detail plus November 2017 Village magazine article is in the attached PDF. The second article referred to (containing supporting docs), 'Paedophile psychiatrist Morris Fraser and the Northern Ireland abuse inquiry - Morris Fraser report PART II', is at, https://www.academia.edu/34499583/
- The Inquiry stated that Fraser did not work with institutionalised children and gave that as a reason why his behaviour was beyond its terms of reference;
- Dr William Nelson's oral testimony in April 2016 on Fraser's non-involvement in Lissue Hospital with institutionalised children, queried by Nelson's 1973 letter confirming it;
- HIAI failed also to report a second 1973 letter suggesting accused doctor could return to work in Lissue;
- Nelson letters sent September 2016 by General Medical Council to (and ignored by) Inquiry;
- 1973 Medical Council documents alleged that the RUC obstructed its attempts to investigate Fraser - also ignored by HIAI;
- HIAI January 2017 Report and website failed to report receipt of Medical Council documentation on Fraser;
- HIAI Report was also factually wrong on paedophile doctor's arrest and conviction.
PART I Morris Fraser Report: www.academia.edu/23870062/
Despite this, Fraser retained access to children in the Royal Hospital Belfast and in children’s homes. In May 1972 Fraser pleaded guilty to indecent assault at Bow Street Magistrates' Court but was not jailed. The media did not report Fraser's conviction.
On Spinwatch site at:
http://www.spinwatch.org/index.php/issues/northern-ireland/item/5850-morris-fraser-child-abuse-corruption-and-collusion-in-britain-and-northern-ireland
After his unreported May 1972 indecent assault conviction, police failed to inform the Hospital where he worked. Fraser’s professional standing, media celebrity, and access to children, remained unaffected. One year later, in May 1973, Fraser’s arrest in New York on new paedophile charges was publicised. He was suspended.
During this 1971-73 period Fraser’s observations on the Northern Ireland conflict and its effect on children reflected British policy interests.
The consequences of police, medical and media failures to hold Morris Fraser to account are addressed in this investigation, which publishes significant new information.
In his professional role as historian, Peter Hart was perfectly entitled to explore and to present evidence leading to such conclusions. However, there are concerns that his evidence presentation breached ethical standards. In order to explore and to explain why I share this opinion, I will deal first with the November 1920 Kilmichael Ambush and then with the 1922 April killings. I will at that stage discuss the intellectual climate within which Hart’s research was accepted, largely uncritically.
Dudgeon ignored my remarks (IPR November 2011) on Peter Hart’s errors and misrepresentations concerning the 28 November 1920 Kilmichael Ambush. I do not know if that means he now accepts my argument. Dudgeon concentrates instead on vindicating Hart’s view of the ‘April killings’ in West Cork in 1922, seen as ‘emblematic’ of IRA attacks on Protestants during the War of Independence period.
In the course of his reply, Dudgeon attempted to demonstrate that Irish Republicanism is anti-Protestant, even though republican ideology and action ‘claim[s] to be non-sectarian’.
During the late 18th Century some Irish Protestants founded The Society of United Irishmen and a significant number, mainly Presbyterian, broke from an assumed allegiance to the colonial system of Protestant supremacy. This tradition of Irish Republican separatism was led by Theobald Wolfe Tone. It was influenced by the American and French Revolutions, the first uprisings in human history to be influenced by secular as distinct from religious ideology. The subsequent 1798 United Irishmen inspired rebellion failed and was brutally suppressed.
These Protestant republicans were considered caste traitors. The best-known modern example is the last Protestant Editor of the Irish Times, Douglas Gageby, who considered himself a republican in the Wolfe Tone tradition. According to Major Thomas McDowell, the newspaper’s then Managing Editor and a fellow Belfast born Protestant, Gageby was (as reported in 1969 to the British Ambassador to Dublin), ‘a renegade or white nigger’.
According to Dudgeon, republicans practice ‘(fake) non-sectarian[ism]’. It is in essence devious, a kind of Roman Catholicism of the fundamentalist Protestant imagination. This view requires empirical proof. Depicting most of the late April 1922 West Cork killings as sectarian and as part of a pattern is therefore important to Dudgeon, who is an Ulster Unionist. Since the Ulster Unionist Party cannot easily shake off accusations of consistent sectarian practice in Northern Ireland (because it is a fact), events like the April killings are a basis for suggesting that the competing Irish ideologies cancel each other out, while confirming a need for ethnic separation. It is a rationale for partition on the basis of sectarian equivalence, a familiarity that breeds contempt.
I will look at this question of IRA sectarianism in two parts, first in terms of the April killings themselves, second with regard to whether they were ‘emblematic’ (Dudgeon’s term) of a consistent practice.
[The rest, including Jeff Dudgeon's piece, is in the attached PDF. Also included, an article from the same IPR edition on General Frank (FP) Crozier, first Commander of the Auxiliary Division, by Manus O'Riordan]
In The IRA and its Enemies (1998) Hart alleged that sectarian motives accompanied the abduction and disappearance of three people in Ballygroman (north of Bandon near Ovens) and the shooting dead of ten more west of Bandon from 26 -29 April 1922. Dudgeon supports Hart’s reporting of these pre-Civil War killings and also Hart’s reconstruction of the 28 November 1920 Kilmichael Ambush. Hart called ambush commander, Tom Barry, a lying serial killer. Hart controversially concluded that the IRA fought a war of sectarian ethnic supremacy.
I respond to Dudgeon’s Kilmichael Ambush remarks before looking at those on April 1922. I also comment on Dudgeon’s defence of a book inspired by Hart’s research, Gerard Murphy’s, The Year of Disappearances (2010). [Reposted Aug 2022 due to previous version not downloading as a readable PDF.]
To read on.... download PDF
See also here:
‘Distorting Irish History [One], the stubborn facts of Kilmichael: Peter Hart and Irish Historiography’
and
‘Distorting Irish History Two, the Road from Dunmanway’, on the April 1922 killings.
In one or both parts of divided Ireland, a combination of censorship, repression, mass migration, and the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 maintained ‘acceptable levels’ of violence and dissent. At the same time, however, the British and Irish political establishments also relied on academics and journalists. Their task was to ‘revise’ and destabilize ‘traditional’ Irish and Irish-American understandings of the history and contemporary implications of British imperialism and Irish resistance—on the grounds that popular perceptions of past events, such as the Great Famine and Partition, generated ideological, emotional, or even practical support for militant Irish Republicanism.
In an essay published in 1983, Dr. Raymond James Raymond (latterly, Ray Raymond), a young Irish historian teaching in the United States, succinctly described what, he contended, should be modern Irish history’s principal functions. It should refute, he avowed, one or more of three Irish nationalist beliefs, all of which he characterized as ‘romanticized and un-historic’. These beliefs were: first, ‘[that] the history of Ireland is a history of British oppression’; second, ‘[that] the British presence in Ireland has been disastrous for the Irish people’; and third, ‘[that] Irish freedom had to be achieved through violence’.
Such scholarly opinions naturally seemed authoritative, and, indeed, in the early 1980s no young historian of Ireland appeared to have a brighter future and greater potential influence, especially in the United States.....
To discover what happened next.... read on.
Field Day Review, 7, 2011, Editors: Seamus Deane & Ciarán Deane, Paperback: 270 pages, ISBN 978-0-946755-51-6
The Year of Disappearances, Political Killing in Cork, 1920-23 by Gerard Murphy, published in November 2010 by Gill & Macmillan, excited considerable media and academic interest. It attempted to document in extensive detail a previous historian’s assertion that the IRA ramped up a campaign of anti-Protestant violence beginning in the summer of 1920. Despite an impressive initial flurry of favourable commentary from Eoghan Harris in the Irish Examiner, Kevin Myers in the Irish Independent and from Oxford University based historian John Paul McCarthy in the Sunday Independent (on 5,7,12 November, respectively), the book fared less well subsequently. A problem for Murphy was that, aside from documented errors, most of his disappeared Protestant victims were unnamed. They had no known prior existence. No archive reveals them, no relatives searched for them and no one cried wolf. At the time of writing, Professor David Fitzpatrick’s commentary in the Dublin Review of Books (DRB) is the sixth consecutive considered response to argue that it cannot be seriously taken as historical research. Mine was the first to make this point.
However, I expressed a similar conclusion about aspects of pioneering work by the late Professor Peter Hart, Fitzpatrick’s much-celebrated former student, and also the historian whose book, The IRA and its Enemies, Violence and Community in Cork, 1916-1923 (1998), inspired Murphy.
Perhaps for this reason, Fitzpatrick’s review went some lengths to separate what he termed Gerard Murphy’s ‘disorganised dossier’ from the ‘intellectual power and academic skill’ displayed by Peter Hart. Even some of Peter Hart’s harshest detractors concede the attributes Fitzpatrick rightly awarded him. Hart was capable of combining gifted and imaginative scholarship with exceptional powers of exposition. At its best, his work demonstrated a masterful integration of archival detail that drove forward a clearly structured and an elegantly composed narrative. However, while Hart’s academic skill and narrative presentation was superior to Murphy’s, problems associated with Murphy’s book have also been identified in Hart’s scholarship. This is most evident in the selection and presentation of sources appearing to imply that ethnic and sectarian hatreds drove the quest for Irish independence during the period, 1919-23.
In that sense, Murphy’s book represents a kind of continuity with Hart’s work, rather than the binary Fitzpatrick suggested. For those who question Hart’s historical scholarship, Murphy’s book represents a logical, and a significant, decline in Irish historical standards. This is a subject I would like to further develop here.
For more, download the PDF
[See also in 'Papers':
Distorting Irish History [One], the stubborn facts of Kilmichael: Peter Hart and Irish Historiography, November 2010
A response on use (and non-use) of sources to Professor David Fitzpatrick (TCD), HIstory Ireland, July August 2009]
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.
(See Also:
Troubled History - a tenth anniversary Critique of Peter Hart's 'The IRA and its Enemies', http://www.academia.edu/166387/;
and
'Distorting Irish History Two' on the 'Bandon Valley Massacre', http://www.academia.edu/612672/)
[To read on, download PDF below]"""
After Easter each year the Orange Order initiates public celebration of what the supremacist organisation regards as its British way of life, based on support for biblical Protestantism and the “being Protestant” British monarchy. It habitually wears out shoe leather until leaves fall in the autumn, in celebration of “civil and religious liberty”. Approximately 2,500 marches, parades, feeder parades, band practices and bonfires occupy the highways and byways of the North. Many Britons, on encountering these displays, find them alien to British identity.
They are always accompanied by physical attacks on Catholics and by other provocations, some of which are detailed here. The Order's insistence on marching in some mainly nationalist areas of Northern Ireland caused a crisis in the Church's relationship with the Order during the 1990s. Sectarian violence that accompanied the Order's attempts to defy bans on marching in those areas appalled many Church members. The ban on marching through the mainly nationalist Garvaghy Road in Portadown in particular, one week prior to the annual 12th July protest, provoked violent opposition:
“In 1995, after two days of violence, mediation between local nationalists and the Order took place and a limited parade was allowed. In 1996, the parade was banned. While police and soldiers held the Orangemen back behind steel barricades, Billy Wright - who by this time had a terrifying reputation throughout mid-Ulster - sent his gang to murder a Catholic [Michael McGoldrick, a taxi driver]. The chief constable changed his ruling. The parade would be allowed, he said, because otherwise too many lives might be lost.” (Susan McKay, Guardian, 17 Nov 2001)
The epicentre for mobilisation against police and then statutory Parades Commission marching bans was the Drumcree Parish Church. It was used for an Orange Order church service each year, before a futile post-1996 attempt was made to walk the Garvaghy Road. Facilities offered by the church, in the form of meeting rooms, plus toilet and cooking facilities, helped to maintain the protest for weeks on end, year after year.
[....] Download PDF for rest of article"
In early January 1960 in the Irish Times she advertised that ‘Protestant shorthand typists’ were ‘urgently wanted’. Later that month, ‘a Protestant shorthand typist (senior)’ was ‘available’, though in early February, they were again required, either full or part-time. However, in July a Protestant with ‘excellent testimonials’ was offered to firms operating religious segregation at quite junior levels. And so it continued throughout the heady 1960s. Miss Synnott, who provided ‘a better selection’ (Dec ’69), and the Irish Times alternately enticed or proffered ‘educated’, ‘experienced’, or ‘inexperienced’ Protestant office staff. In July 1970 Synnott’s still sought Protestants, long after the missile gap had vanished and during a period when the Irish Times was reporting civil rights movements in the US and in Ireland.
Miss Synnott was one small part of the advertising diet. Protestants and firms seeking them advertised openly and provided some interesting contrasts.
In late January 1960 a ‘Protestant young lady shorthand typist’ sought a post alongside, ‘Doctor recommends companion valet, Protestant’ (an actual valet rather than advice on a stress-free lifestyle). In February 1953 a ‘non-union’ Protestant Automobile electrician-Welder sought work. However, ‘Barmen, Protestants’ were offered ‘full union wages and conditions’ in Bangor, Northern Ireland. Most jobs were southern and most ads did not state a religious preference, though northern ones did invariably. A ‘Belfast Catholic family’ in search of ‘a young country girl’ thought it prudent to add, ‘safe area’. What was more important, identify or expertise? In September 1963, Miss Synnott sought a ‘Protestant Hotel receptionist’ in the Irish Independent. That day a ‘C. of I. business lady, well educated’ desired ‘any type of work’, while a ‘highly educated young lady, 23, Protestant’ wanted an ‘interesting position’. Some were quite precise. Firms thinking of spicing up their social life in July 1964 were offered the services of a Presbyterian ‘entertainments manager’. The same day also in the Irish Times a ‘gardener (C.I.)’ sought work, together with a ‘quiet respectable’ Protestant ‘country girl’. Also, that day, ‘a lady’ of unknown persuasion with 20 years experience ‘required a ‘position with kindly cheerful Protestants’. Was there another kind? In November 1945 a ‘Gentlewoman (RC)’ offered ‘services, no salary’ adding, ‘Protestant not objected to’. For some her religion might have been the price of any objection.
...... [Rest of text: PDF link below]
Newspapers sometimes reflect the times better than they report them and offer insights for the social historian in overlooked places. In November 1972 Denis Coughlan in the Irish Times dismissed those depicting former Northern Premier Terence O’Neill as ‘the darling of the Catholics’. He noted a Protestant-only small add. It stated, 'Protestant girl required for housework. Apply to the Hon. Mrs Terence O’Neill, Glebe House, Ahoghill'. Had O’Neill advertised anonymously in Coughlan’s newspaper, as most did, this particular faux pas might have gone unnoticed, as apparently unnoticed as the fact that such ads existed in the first place.
See also 'Bad Form for Bill to DIscuss Badminton for Protestants': http://www.academia.edu/1841115
Second letter, after response from John Borgonovo and Gabriel Doherty (UCC). Previous Fitzpatrick letter and original article by Borgonovo, Doherty, in previous two issues of History Ireland.
Download PDF to read.
See also, 'Distorting Irish History Two, the road from Dunmanway: Peter Hart’s treatment of the 1922 ‘April killings’ in West Cork':
http://gcd.academia.edu/NiallMeehan/Papers/618347
21 years earlier in 1973 O’Brien, then Minister for Posts & Telegraphs, asked RTE to sack Eoghan Harris. A year later, he almost succeeded.
Harris is currently in the news because a new book by Brian Hanley and Scott Millar, 'The Lost Revolution', on the Workers Party and the Official IRA, devotes 40 pages to the controversial commentator.
Under O'Brien’s 1973-77 tenure as Minister for Posts and Telegraphs RTÉ was brought into line on the North. Unlike previous ministers O’Brien made direct demands of broadcasters. In late 1975 well known reporter Derek Davis was alarmed to hear that O’Brien had telephoned and demanded that Davis be sacked. Davis had reported discussion of a possible sentencing concession to kidnappers of Limerick based Dutch industrialist, Tiede Herrema, in the home of then Justice Minister, Patrick Cooney.
In 1973 O’Brien approached RTÉ Director General Tom Hardiman and asked him to dismiss the high-profile TV producer. Harris opposed Ireland’s 1973 entry into the European Economic Community (EEC). He related it to Britain’s role in Northern Ireland. Entry did not represent a ‘divorce from Britain’ but was ‘abduction consequent upon rape’. It ‘revealed not the new horizons of Europe, but the old frontiers of Britain’. He observed, ‘the colonial symptoms of our relationship with Britain’ included, ‘the protection of the ruling class of six of our counties, who used a local and especially vicious form of social control called religious bigotry’. He added that pro EEC socialists had ‘an honoured place in the pantheon of late Trotskyites’.
Harris criticised RTÉ colleagues perceived as EEC supporters. Bizarrely, he protested with others against Ireland’s and RTÉ’s hosting of the 1971 Eurovision Song Contest, a year after Ireland won it for the first time with Dana. Referring to the ‘Eurovision common market idea’, Harris complained that RTE had not consulted him on broadcasting the popular event.
The often suspended Harris was RTÉ’s best known republican dissident. A March 1972 Irish Independent profile was headlined, 'The rise and fall of Eoghan Harris'.
In the 1980s Harris was to rise again, but he had first to fall further in RTE.
Hardiman told O’Brien it would be more appropriate to express his views through the RTE Authority. O’Brien decided, instead of going through the Authority, to go public, when the time was right.
At the October 1974 Labour Party Conference O’Brien asserted that opposition to internment without trial in Northern Ireland was in effect IRA propaganda. The Monday following O’Brien arrived with public fanfare at RTÉ and instructed that a broadcast programme on internment be shown in the presence of senior management. He declared afterwards that if the IRA was not in a physical occupation of RTÉ it exercised a ‘spiritual occupation’. Broadcasters responsible were disciplined internally, the producer, Eoghan Harris, most severely. He was exiled from current affairs programming, stating later that he was ‘marginalised and put into ridiculous, rubbishy programmes’.
Harris returned to public view in the mid 80s as a firm supporter of Conor Cruise O’Brien and of the broadcasting censorship that O’Brien championed. Harris denounced young broadcasters he depicted as soft on republicanism. He wanted done to them what O’Brien had done to him.
'No history of Ireland in the second half of the twentieth century is possible without considering the contribution of Conor Cruise O'Brien'. He was a historian, politician and journalist 'who was a product of, maker of and product of history. Like his country and because of it, his was a case of arrested development'.
"
He had a long career: in the Irish Civil Service in the 1940s; in the 1950s in the UN; in the Congo, the University of Ghana and New York University in the 1960s, He was elected an Irish opposition Labour TD in 1969 under the slogan ‘The Seventies will be Socialist’. He became Minister for Posts and Telegraphs in 1973 and lost his seat in 1977. He became Editor in Chief of The Observer until 1981. He has been a writer and commentator ever since. He wrote numerous books on politics, history and literature.
Half way through he became a reactionary. The rock on which he fell was the Irish National Question.
In 1965, O’Brien said,
‘[A] liberal, incurably, was what I was[,]… profoundly attached to liberal concepts of freedom - freedom of speech and of the press, academic freedom, independent judgement and independent judges.’
In 1976, O’Brien told Bernard Nossiter of the Washington Post he wanted to imprison the Editor of the Irish Press for printing pro-Irish republican letters.
In 1993 O’Brien supported censoring a radio advertisement for a book of short stories by Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams. Favorable reviews in The Times, Sunday Times and Times Literary supplement were by IRA sympathizers, he suggested. Why not ban them then? Radio advertisements were more dangerous, said O’Brien, as the audience included,
‘people who are poor and who are not so well educated. That is... less educated people who on the whole are more likely to be impressed than more educated people’.
In 1998 he revealed that he had supported police brutality in 1974, by a group that went on to beat confessions out of, and obtain convictions against, innocent people.
He shifted rightwards under cover of the left. He had the credentials...... "
Introduction:
I sent three letters to the Irish Times between 13 and 21 January on the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation report, published on 12 January.
I researched in 2010, for the first time, 219 deaths of children from the Protestant ethos Bethany Home, in unmarked graves in Dublin’s Mount Jerome Cemetery. The discovery was publicised in the media then.
In 2014 Catherine Corless reported up to 800 dead infants in a burial ground in Tuam, from a local authority institution controlled by Roman Catholic Bons Secours nuns. A 9 January Irish Times profile of Corless reported, “In April 2014, she saw an article by Alison O’Reilly in the Mail on Sunday about an unmarked plot in Dublin’s Mount Jerome Cemetery where children who had died at the city’s Bethany home were buried.” Corless contacted O’Reilly. Reaction to Corless’s discovery forced the government to set up of the Mother and Baby Home Commission of Investigation, that reported on 12 January.
In the course of my research I have explained problems with Irish Times coverage of abuse in Protestant settings (see https://www.academia.edu/31332320/). Some of that is noted below. I did not expect to be contacted by the paper for comment, though the Commission report covered Bethany Home and another institutions under the direct control of the Church of Ireland, Denny House.
I did expect that a letter would be published; dealing with information not covered in Irish Times reports. That was not to be, despite three attempts. In January 2020 my last letter was published in the paper, two months after submission, after the Press Ombudsman intervened (as explained in the note on the second letter below).
On 26 May 2010 surviving former residents of the evangelical Protestant Bethany Home for unmarried mothers and their children assembled in Dublin’s Mount Jerome Cemetery. On a patch of bare earth they marked the deaths of 40 children who did not make it, 33 at that spot in unmarked common graves. The children died between March 1935 and December 1936.
Subsequent research has revealed a total of 219 dead children for the period 1922-49. 54 died from convulsions, 41 from heart failure and 26 from marasmus, a form of malnutrition (see Tables 1 & 3). In addition, the original 1935-36 figure of 40 deaths has increased to 48. Another 38 died Between 1937-39. Therefore, 86, or well over one third of Bethany’s 219 child deaths in the 28 years between 1922-1949, occurred in one five-year period, during 1935-39 (see Table 1). In addition, nearly two thirds, 132, died in the ten-year period, 1935-44.
1936 witnessed the highest mortality with 29 deaths, of whom six were buried the day they died. Therein lies an anomaly. That is eight more than reported internally to Bethany’s Managing Committee (see Table 2).
There are more graves elsewhere. For example, Bethany’s Managing Committee minutes for December 1949 mention two deaths, but just one is recorded in Mount Jerome’s burial register that year. The list of 219 excludes also, to take a different example, the unknown final resting place of an 18-month nursed-out infant scalded to death in July 1934 in Newbliss, Co. Monaghan (see report, page 2). Perhaps some died in hospital (though Table 3 indicates that seriously ill children died in Bethany).
Bethany’s Managing Committee did not address the fact that 1935 and 1936 witnessed the highest infant mortality in the Home’s history. Instead, at a September 1936 committee meeting at which a first highly critical Maternity Act inspection report was noted, the Committee discussed ‘spiritual blessings among the girls during the last three months... Miss Walker gave some details. It was decided to record thanks to God for this encouragement in the work of the Home’.
Surviving former residents feel they are the forgotten few in the largely media driven story of southern Ireland’s marginalisation of unwed mothers and their children. Given its dominance in the South, the story tends to be more about the Catholic Church than about victims who were not all Catholic. This emphasis, understandable to a degree, feeds an information deficit addressed here.
In Justine McCarthy's article about Joyce McSharry, who was separated from her mother in the Bethany Home in 1951, the solicitor David Phelan of Hayes & Sons disclaimed knowledge of an irregular 'Adoption Agreement' written by the firm (Quest for lost mother ends at graveside, News, last week).
In the 'Agreement' Ralph Walker of Hayes & Sons, nephew of Bethany Home residential secretary Hettie Walker, was named as the 'attorney' of Joyce's mother, Emily Sheppey.
This was so as to arrange a future legal adoption without consulting Emily.
Derek Leinster and I wrote to Hayes & Sons between 2010-11.
The firm also wrote the 'Adoption Agreement' which saw Derek handed to a dysfunctional family in 1945.
In 2011 a representative volunteered without explanation that he approached a retired partner to see if he could shed light on the mystery. The person concerned is a son of the Bethany Matron. She witnessed the 1951 'Agreement' and remained as matron until the home closed in 1972.
He too was “not aware of the existence of any records relating to Bethany Home”.
I wrote again on July 3 with regard to the Emily Sheppey 'Agreement', indicating that this indicated ongoing engagement between the home and the firm.
I am informed that such documentation should not be destroyed and also that, if destroyed, a record would normally be kept.
Mr Phelan wrote to me at 8.39pm on Friday July 4th that unsuccessful "searches have been carried out", and that therefore "there is nothing more we can do".
I suggested to Mr Phelan that "If the documents have been removed from your firm you are unlikely to find them in it".
I also asked Mr Phelan to consider calling in the authorities if he concludes that important documentation was removed in a possibly unauthorized manner.
Whatever he decides, Children separated from their parents in the Bethany Home would appreciate if Mr Phelan could provide them with more information.
Niall Meehan, Faculty Head, Journalism & Media, Griffith College Dublin.
Irish Independent 10 June 2014
AT the Bon Secours home for mothers and children, 796 children were buried in a mass grave over 37 years (1925-61). At the Bethany Home in Dublin, 221 children were buried in unmarked graves over 28 years (1922-49).
The Bethany Survivors Campaign supports Catherine Corless's commendable research on the Tuam deaths and her efforts with Teresa Killeen Kelly to place an appropriate memorial stone at the Tuam site. The Tuam Graveyard Committee attended the April 2 unveiling of the monument to Bethany children in Mount Jerome cemetery.
Mainly young, unwed mothers were banished from their community to Bethany as a punishment. Some 'unwanted' 'illegitimate' children who survived the Bethany regime were exported to Britain and the USA. Some were dispatched to unsuitable families. Many suffered lifelong illness, physical and psychological.
Since the discovery of the Bethany graves in 2010, survivors were keen to ensure that Protestant denominations, whose clerical representatives sat on the Bethany Managing Committee, accepted their share of responsibility. Only the Church of Ireland stepped up to the plate. However, the Presbyterian and Methodist churches did send representatives to the recent memorial unveiling; that was a moving and positive event for all who participated. Plymouth Brethren assemblies, whose religious ideology guided the 'Mission' (Bethany's name in its minute book), ignored survivors' requests for discussion.
However, the Bethany survivors' focus has been on the state, which was supposed to regulate the health and wellbeing of residents under the 1934 Registration of Maternity Homes Act. Analysis shows that Bethany became a more dangerous place for children after its passing. In a home with, on average, 20 mothers and about the same amount of children in a given month, 52 children died in the 10 years before enactment, 132 during the 10 years afterwards. In October 1939, the deputy chief medical adviser of the Department of Local Government and Public Health stated, after visiting Bethany, that it was "well recognised that illegitimate children are delicate and marasmic (starving) from their birth".
This tosh was in response to public disquiet at death and illness in the home, exacerbated by sectarian competition for possession of children's souls (whether living or departed). The medical adviser sought a solution to unwelcome publicity throughout 1939 by finally directing Bethany in October to cease admitting Roman Catholics. He thus revealed the sectarian intent of state regulation.
His 'solution' worked. Public attention went away and children, all of whom survived between April 14, 1939 and April 21, 1940, started dying again. Once the spotlight was turned off, lives were again quenched.
In reacting to the disgraceful revelations in Tuam, and more that are sure to emerge in other parts of the island, we should not lose focus.
These institutions were state services by proxy that were officially regulated.
Deaths in church-run or religiously based institutions required official complicity or perhaps (more likely) indifference toward the plight of officially marginalised 'illegitimate' human beings.
While going through the Bethany Home Minute book I noted monthly figures on how many children died. A thought occurred, 'Where are they buried?'. That led me in 2010 to unmarked ground at the nearest graveyard, Mount Jerome, and subsequent extraction of children's names from the burial register. It is inconceivable that the state was not aware of this fact. Could state officials similarly have been unaware of the mass grave in Tuam and of the living conditions that led to it? That seems highly unlikely.
The religious orders and churches whose representatives administered 'mother and baby' homes have their burden of responsibility. So, too, does the state. It was not blind to what went on and should not be allowed to deflect from its responsibility today, by placing all blame on churches. Bethany survivors and those from similar homes were unfairly excluded from the state's redress scheme in 2005 by then Education Minister Mary Hanafin. Subsequent ministers turned down requests to reverse the decision. Perhaps it can be reversed now. How much more unearthing of forgotten children will it take?
Niall Meehan is Head of the Journalism & Media Faculty in Griffith College Dublin
The comment was delivered in the blokey style O’Herlihy adopts in quizzing Johnny Giles and Eamon Dunphy on RTÉ’s soccer panel. It seemed out of place in O’Herlihy’s discussion with a female Irish badminton representative, on Chloe Magee’s first round win over her Egyptian opponent. O’Herlihy looked as if he had run out of questions on a sport about which he appeared to know little, apart from the type of person he thought once played it.
Surprisingly, O’Herlihy’s recollection was historically accurate. O’Herlihy committed a gaffe by blurting out sentiments hoped best forgotten. The immediately negative reaction was an illustration of current Irish social psychology. Citizens of the Irish Republic are uncomfortable addressing largely superseded differences between Roman Catholic and Protestant communities and because of that; do not know a lot about them. Besides a fear of reviving vaguely remembered and ill-considered slights and animosities, some view the discussion as itself sectarian. It is a charge difficult to apply to a sports commentator who, though from a Roman Catholic background, is married to a Protestant. The assertion is largely a social-psychological defence mechanism.
It is a pity that it is like this. There is an absence of a language within which social, economic and cultural differences, leavened by the vicissitudes of Irish history and politics, may be comfortably explored.
[To read on, click on link or download PDF here...]
Links to further Reading:
Begley, Colm; Herdman, Sydney; Leinster, Derek; McCarthy-Fitzpatrick, Helen, ‘Inquiry into ‘exploitation’ of orphans’, Irish Times, 17 May 2012, http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/letters/2012/0517/1224316238093.html.
Maguire, Martin, ‘Our People’ the Church of Ireland and the culture of community in Dublin since Disestablishment. In Gillespie, Raymond & Neely, W. G., eds, The Laity and the Church of Ireland, 1000-2000. Four Courts, 2002, http://eprints.dkit.ie/75/1/Our_People_Laity_of_the_C_of_I.doc.
Meehan, Niall, “Protestants … were left as Orphans”, Church & State, 4th Quarter, 2010, http://gcd.academia.edu/NiallMeehan/Papers/315286.
Meehan, Niall, Church & State and the Bethany Home, History Ireland, v.18, n.5, Sep-Oct 2010, http://gcd.academia.edu/NiallMeehan/Papers/277737.
Meehan, Niall, Shorthand for Protestants, Sectarian Advertising in the Irish Times, History Ireland, v.17, n.5, Sep-Oct 2009, http://gcd.academia.edu/NiallMeehan/Papers/112400.""
IN 2001 Irish Times reporter Carol Coulter wrote a short article outlining allegations of abuse affecting Smyly’s Church of Ireland Children’s Home. The report referred to preparation of a report by the health board. What the report said and indeed whether it was written were never reported. The paper did not investigate further.
On 16 January 2003 Coulter commented on:
“…the stereotypical treatment of our longest-standing minority, the Protestant community, which has been presented as a homogenous group whose minority status somehow puts it beyond any criticism or analytical discussion”.
Coulter, who was from a Protestant small-farming background in the west of Ireland, is now Director of the Child Care Law Reporting Project and Adjunct Professor in the School of Law, NUI Galway.
She further observed:
“In college I was puzzled, and sometimes irritated, by the distorted and extraordinarily benign view my Catholic friends had of the Protestant community in Ireland... [It did] not accommodate differences in historical origin, geography or class. It glosse[d] over the undeniably unpleasant aspects of this history, like the disproportionately powerful grip a section of the Protestant community held, up into the 1960s, on swathes of the Irish economy, and the religious bigotry which surfaced from time to time. Nor d[id] it accommodate the reality of the economically underprivileged in the community”.
Coulter noted of a neighbour’s child sent to a Dublin orphanage, due to her mother being unable to manage financially on a small farm after her husband’s death:
“… this girl was now the beneficiary of Protestant ‘charity’, and would be trapped in this exclusive environment at the lowest level of its rigid hierarchy, destined to work at the bottom of the service industry, often run by prosperous members of the same religion”.
In the course of researching the untold story of marginalised southern Protestants, I met ‘John’, another victim of this process. He was the institutionalised son of a Protestant unmarried mother. After birth in 1946 in the Church of Ireland Magdalen Home, its associated Nursery Rescue Society farmed him out, literally. John became a free agricultural labourer from the age of five, offered to families masquerading as foster parents, who treated him appallingly. For example, Christmas Day typically consisted of eating scraps separately from his ‘family’, and receipt of a colouring book and crayons as a ‘present’. Approximately six other similar children he knew during the 1950s and 1960s descended into a life of poverty, depression, alcohol and drug misuse. Deeply affected and profoundly depressed by physical and emotional knocks that kept on coming (discovering at age 58 a separated twin sister, adopted in Northern Ireland), only he survived to tell the tale. John’s is one of many such stories, largely hidden.
As Coulter noted also in her 2003 piece:
“While the backgrounds and situations of the [Roman Catholic] children in […] industrial schools received widespread public discussion, no one thought to inquire about the children in Protestant orphanages.
Where did these children come from? Why were they there? If these children did have living family members, why were they in institutions? None of these questions were asked, as if they fell outside the known boundaries of public discourse about Catholic and non-Catholic, rich and poor, privileged and marginalised, into which the other discussion of the children’s institutions fell”. END intro
The article investigates the extent to which the Irish Times has failed to heed Coulter's advice.
Higgins said that some abused people she was employed to assist would never be satisfied, while some others had engaged in fraud. That was 'Liveline' sorted. Higgins' uncomfortable presence on the RTE radio programme provided a target for survivors. 'Liveline' phones hopped for days afterwards.
The encounter also provided a promotional tagline, broadcast on other RTE programmes for a week. Repeatedly, Duffy was heard insisting that Higgins should state: "The amount of money we have been given by the religious orders is not enough".
Caranua has since 2014 administered a Residential Institutions Statutory Fund, designed to provide ongoing non-cash support to abuse victims. lt is limited to €110m, the sum promised by 18 Roman Catholic religious congregations in a 2002 deal, in return for indemnity against prosecution.
Since 2002 the separate Residential lnstitutions Redress Board has spent €1.5bn compensating over 16,000 former residents of Industrial Schools, Children's Homes and other institutions. For effect, the state has set an unrealisable goal of retrieving 50% of the cost from
the 18.
All of the confusion surrounding responsibility for abuse and attempts to assuage society's guilt, by assigning blame, is reflected in this story.
Winslow Sterling Berry, Deputy Chief Medical Adviser, Department of Local Government and Public Health, Ireland, after visiting Bethany Home, Orwell Road, Rathgar, Dublin, 25 January, 6 October 1939 (see p. 8).
‘A beautiful institution…, seemed to be well-run and spotlessly clean… I closed the place down and sacked the matron, a nun, and also got rid of the medical officer. The deaths had been going on for years. They had done nothing about it.’
JamesDeeny, Chief Medical Adviser, Department of Health, Ireland, after visiting Bessborough Mother and Babies Home, Cork, in the mid to late 1940s (see p.11).
-----------------------
See also,
Church & State and the Bethany Home
http://gcd.academia.edu/NiallMeehan/Papers/277737/
Hence, there is a large gap in official knowledge as a result of implementing a sectarian welfare and detention system, albeit one in which the dominant confessional community was regulated more so than its smaller Christian counterpart. This practice had no statutory basis but statute law was used to enforce it, often against the stated intent of the law. Research into Bethany Home indicates that this is one reason for neglect and death in the Bethany Home.
Official records explain why officials decided not to interfere when confronted with evidence of unusually high child mortality and medical neglect in the Bethany Home. We mainly summarise them here.
Direct State involvement
Bethany was a place of detention for women convicted of crimes from the trivial to the most serious. There appears to be no statutory basis for the directing of offending Protestant females into the Bethany home until 1945, but then only in the case of female Protestant children and teenagers. Incarceration of women generally in the Bethany Home was, however, an official practice.
------------------
See also,
Church & State and the Bethany Home
http://gcd.academia.edu/NiallMeehan/Papers/277737/
OPINION: The evidence does not support claims of sectarianism against Protestants in the South in the 1920s, writes NIALL MEEHAN
THERE ARE many misconceptions in David Adams’s commentary on the deaths of 14 people in west Cork in late April 1922 (Opinion and Analysis, October 8th). He wrote, “I don’t know west Cork”, but exercised his right to address southern sectarianism on the basis of “knowing people”. Some of the historical issues he addresses, with which I take issue, are covered in the autumn 2009 issue of the Dublin Review of Books: http://www.drb.ie/more_details/09-09-20/Frank_Gallagher_and_land_agitation.aspx
Adams assumes a uniformity in Protestant attitudes towards sectarianism in politics during and after the War of Independence, roughly 1919-22. There were in fact deep divisions. It was not merely a nationalist-unionist division, there was also a division between North and South. Anti-Catholic pogroms centred on Belfast shipyards were initiated in July 1920 by unionist leader Edward Carson and retrospectively endorsed by his deputy, James Craig, Northern Ireland’s first prime minister. Over 10,000 were said to have been driven from their work within two weeks, including “rotten Protestants” (ie socialists) who objected and 1,500 Catholic ex-British army servicemen.
Vociferous objections came from southern Protestants, including unionists. They were provoked by Carson’s suggestion that sectarianism in reverse happened in the south. Daily newspapers, especially The Irish Times, published protestations that such had never been the case and was not the case in the middle of the violent Anglo-Irish conflict.
A statement from the Rev Bertram C Wells, St Thomas’s Church, Dugart, Achill Island, Co Mayo, was typical. On May 4th, 1922, he thanked “our Catholic neighbours and friends for their kindness and help” in making the “dance in aid of the Dugart National School a success”.
He continued: “To the officers and members of the IRA and volunteers who were present and came to my assistance in more senses than one on that night, I desire thus publicly to express my warmest thanks. In these days when there is so much foolish talk going on, I feel it my duty, as well as privilege, to state that nothing but the greatest kindness and courtesy has always been shown us by our Catholic neighbours.”
In order to declare separation from northern unionist sectarianism, an Irish Protestant Convention was held on May 11th, 1922. A published preparatory motion stated that southern Protestants had not suffered “hostility”.
Then 14 were shot in west Cork from April 26-29th, including 13 Protestants. The motion was amended to state “apart from this incident, hostility to Protestants by reason of their religion, has been almost, if not wholly, unknown, in the 26 counties in which [Protestants] are a minority”.
It is not conceivable that a representative group would utter such a pronouncement in such circumstances unless it accurately represented their views. The characterisation of the west Cork shootings as an exception was echoed emphatically by the then pro-unionist and pro-British Irish Times.
In my DRB article I suggest that a minority of loyalists identified strongly with the British war effort and with northern unionism and took arms or other action on that basis. This should not be seen as surprising, but has not been factored sufficiently into the discussion. Evidence suggests that this was a basis for the shootings in Coolacrease, Co Offaly, in June 1921 and of the irregular killings in west Cork in April 1922.
I have to conclude, in disagreement with David Adams, though in agreement with most southern Protestants in 1922, that virulent sectarianism is particularly a northern unionist problem. I would like to finish though on a point of agreement with regard to support for funding Protestant schools. Could I enlist his support for funding schools for widely dispersed urban and rural atheists? It might help us to get on with our otherwise blameless existence.
Niall Meehan, of Griffith College Dublin, is researching attempts to describe the War of Independence as a pre-enactment of the conflict in Northern Ireland, post-1968
R.F. Foster, How the Catholics became Protestants, in Luck and the Irish, Penguin Books, 2007, p.37.
"The problems of the unmarried mothers had been explained comprehensively by Mr. Michel Viney in the Irish Times, although the articles had dealt primarily with the Roman Catholic population."
Mrs Katherine F Glover, SRN, Matron, 42nd annual meeting of the Bethany Home, Irish Times, 29 April 1965
Introduction
During Anglo-Irish treaty negotiations in 1921 Britain threatened ‘terrible war’ if acceptance of partition between north and south and an oath of allegiance to the British monarch was not forthcoming from the Irish side. The southern Irish Free State’s political elite was born of such compromise and victory in a subsequent civil war. A pulverised industrial infrastructure, endemic poverty, mass emigration, lack of economic development, combined with a perceived failure to complete the national revolution, ensured that a sense of fragility endured.
Conservative and right wing social forces were consolidated in the attempt to ensure survival. The Roman Catholic Church, which had become institutionally robust during the final phase of British rule, was the strongest conservative force in the new state. Having failed to rule successfully through Protestantism, the British government attempted to cultivate institutional Catholicism in the mid to late 19th Century. While this too was a political failure, it facilitated Catholic organisation, which, combined with a Protestantism in retreat, ensured a century of triumphant growth. From a position of outlawed non-Britishness to that of incorporation under imperial rule, Independence proved a further stepping stone for a Roman Catholicism that became identified as ‘Irish’. It offered Catholic solutions to social problems affecting Catholics, the vast majority.
Autonomous religious bodies exercised control over health, education, welfare provision and youth detention. Religion invested society with a sense of meaning, one generally supportive of and that helped to mould the status quo. In the absence of a destabilising republican stamp of approval, a Catholic ethos emerged and substituted.
Was the state that emerged from this process conservative because of Catholicism, or was the latter merely the most significant influence? The emergent dominance of the Roman Catholic Church and its more recent erosion were considered central to the suppression and then advent of a more secular and pluralist polity. In Luck and the Irish (2007), Roy Foster linked southern Irish authoritarianism to a nexus of Catholicism and nationalism and its demise to the emergence or a return to an implicitly liberal protestant sensibility. In Foster’s ‘widest sense’, Protestantism was considered to be part of a subterranean strain of liberalism. If that is so, examining what Protestant organisations did should supply evidence of a submerged liberal ethic, repressed by this alleged alliance between nationalist ideology and the Catholic Church.
[To read on ... download PDF below]
Ardent Empire loyalists considered Britain ceding control to 26 of Ireland’s 32 counties in 1922 a catastrophe. As with German First World War defeat, humiliation gave way to finger pointing at the traitors and charlatans who capitulated to the inferior Irish. Britain was simultaneously squeezed by the Russian Revolution on one side and US emergence on the other. Fascist ideologies emerged to blame Jewish communists and finance capitalists, plus Irish republicans, aliens all, as co-conspirators in the effort to undermine white British civilisation.
James Loughlin’s fascinating analysis focuses on ‘Ulster’ as a site of opportunity for British fascists. Here were confirmed loyalists in a new outpost of Empire, fighting enemies inside the gate. Another reason for a loyalist emphasis is because, as Loughlin explains, Irish nationalists “had never been attracted by the British extreme right”. The British Fascists (BF) party hailed Edward Carson and the UVF during the 1912-14 Home Rule crisis, as “the first of all the fascists”. Early member William Joyce, a precocious Back & Tan agent in Galway, later Oswald Mosley’s lieutenant, finally ‘Lord Haw Haw’ in Nazi Germany, agreed. Escaping Ireland, he escaped an IRA assassination attempt. So too did another stalwart, Brigadier General Sir Ormonde Winter, who oversaw British Intelligence efforts against the IRA after Bloody Sunday.
The BF lasted until eclipsed in the 1930s by Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF). Loughlin explains in his lively and stimulating survey, spanning the 1920s up to 2018, that occasionally promising fascist forays into Northern Ireland ended usually in disappointment.
Lord Craigavon, paraphrased by Loughlin, possibly explained it best. Noting “attempts to introduce fascism into Ulster”, the Northern premier reportedly replied “we have all we want here”, adding “We have the Orange Order, the Black Brethren, and the “B” Specials, and they constitute all the fascism that Ulster wants”. The book outlines the context, Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail alliance with Mosley in 1934. A friend of Craigavon, Rothermere asked Mosely to leave Northern Ireland be. Stormont was promoted as a model of what fascist government should look like. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
More prosaically, British fascists did not prosper for the same reason Labour and Tories also fail. Northern Ireland is not fully participant in the party politics of the British state.
Mosley had difficulty with anti-Catholicism as did some others in the BUF (apart from Joyce), mainly its English Romanists. Alternately, unionists were un-convinced by anti-Semitism. Loughlin promotes the idea of loyalist pro-Semites though that seems a stretch. Jews, including a former Unionist Lord Mayor of Belfast, were forced out of the North during World War One, because (ironically) Jews were considered German. Evangelical Protestant and South Belfast Unionist MP Reverend Robert Bradford thought Ulster Protestants a lost tribe of Israel. A former member said Bradford’s election agent in 1974 was in the National Front. Certainly, at the time they supported each other. More recent loyalist affection for Israel is partly based on its treatment of Palestinians, a model of how effectively to deal with enemies think many unionists.
A solid base of loyalist anti-Catholicism hosts occasionally other forms of prejudice, including opposition to Muslims after 9-11, to Chinese and to Poles, plus other ethnic minorities. They experience racism in loyalist parts of Belfast, where over-crowded West Belfast Catholics fear to live. Emphasis on loyalist reaction does not preclude a nationalist variant, though, like sectarianism, it has less political purchase in that community. One aspirant West Belfast fascist gained notoriety in 1983, when he shot dead three fellow Irish Army soldiers in the Lebanon. As a 1970s schoolboy he opposed “red” teachers, one in the form of Fergus O’Hare, elected a Peoples Democracy Belfast City Councillor in 1981.
Having arrived at fascism after membership of the Conservative and then Labour Parties, after World War Two Mosley was a busted flush. Opposition in his previous life to British repression in Ireland made him ill-suited to supporting loyalist sectarianism. Alternate attempts to win over Irish immigrants and oppose partition went nowhere. His post-war ‘Europe a Nation’ project proposed that white Europeans unite and maintain dominance in Africa. It was unattractive to little Englanders particularly when European empires fell apart. After Mosley’s retirement reaction to colonial collapse, much like to Irish Independence, created space for the neo-Nazi National Front. Opposing ‘coloured’ immigration and then ‘Europe’ replaced anti-Semitism as the dominant prejudice.
Similarly, unionist fear of being cast aside like Rhodesia, white South African expulsion from the Commonwealth, plus retreat from Empire, hardened opposition to civil rights demands. The resultant post-1969 crisis saw National Front, Combat 18, White National Party, British National Party, efforts to link up with loyalism and promotion of anti-IRA sentiment. Tentative NF opposition to sectarianism, in favour of fascist solidarity, gave way to supporting sectarian killers and killing. Mosley occasionally made suggestions, for instance that Catholics, like ‘coloured’ immigrants, could ‘repatriate’.
This saga is expertly detailed by Loughlin, whose focus on Enoch Powell indicated one route to far-right success in the North: become a unionist.
Niall Meehan is Faculty Head in the Journalism & Media Faculty in Griffith College. He is the author of The Embers of Revisionism (2017)
This survey of 20th Century southern Protestant experience notes that it began badly for Protestant landlords. Their huge estates were sub-divided for purchase by unappreciative mainly Romanist tenants.
Then things went further downhill.
Bury’s narrative asserts that IRA attacks on individual Protestants during the 1919-23 War of Independence and Civil War were sectarian. Southern Protestant testimony rejecting this perception is ignored, alongside other contrary evidence...... (the rest in PDF)
Robert J Savage, Manchester University Press, 2015 £70, ISBN 9780719087332.
History Ireland Nov-Dec 2015 Vol 23, No 6, Reviewed by Niall Meehan.
Robert Savage has written a richly detailed history of the BBC’s ‘Irish Troubles’, a story of how a sometimes-calculated self-censorship functioned before the British government made it official in 1988.
Savage explains how during the 1960s, BBC Northern Ireland news was encouraged to ignore sectarianism. Inquisitive broadcasters from over the water were usually sent packing from the ‘Province’. At that time, however, the minority population received inspiration from network television pictures of African-American civil rights demonstrators and from the collapse of what remained of the British Empire. Their self-sustained revolt post-1968 against fifty years of discrimination was partly in response to indifference from Broadcasting House as well from Westminster.
[.... more in PDF]
http://www.drb.ie/essays/frank-gallagher-and-land-agitation
A response to Tom Wall's 'Getting Them Out, Southern Loyalists in the War of Independence' (Dublin Review of Books, Issue 9, Spring 2009).
Tom Wall reviewed, ‘Coolacrease: the true story of the Pearson executions – an incident in the Irish War of Independence’, by Paddy Heaney Pat Muldowney, Phillip O'Conor, Brian P Murphy and others (Aubane 2008), for Dublin Review of Books (Issue 9, Spring 2009). The book critiqued a 2007 RTE television ‘Hidden History’ documentary purporting to demonstrate that the IRA execution of two brothers named Pearson in June 1921 was motivated by sectarianism and a desire to obtain Pearson land.
My response questions Wall's use of Frank Gallagher's book, 'The Four Glorious Years', in support of the view that sectarian land grabbing was a feature of IRA actions, and Wall’s general understanding of the position and stance of southern Protestants during the War of Independence.
Tom Wall suggested that Aubane Historical Society publications, 'Coolacrease', and 'Troubled History, a 10th Anniversary Critique of Peter Hart’s The IRA and its Enemies', were for the purpose of “defend[ing] the received history of the national struggle against revisionism.” That would imply an exercise in comparing revisionist histories with a canonical and unalterable version of historical events.
In many ways, the problem is actually the other way around. Coolacrease critics of the RTE documentary made better use of historical method, principally by producing and evaluating evidence that was misreported and/or ignored by the television programme. Professional historians, who supported the assertion of republican sectarianism, were shown not to have consulted original documentation. They were the ones who made assumptions.
.....
For more, download attached PDF or go to:
http://www.drb.ie/essays/frank-gallagher-and-land-agitation
Fergus Campbell’s new book builds on and extends his 2005 study Land and Revolution. In the latter, agrarian conflict leading to land reform is seen as a movement from below, in which mainly landless tenant farmers wrenched control, slowly, frustratingly, achingly, often violently, over many years, from extremely wealthy landlords. By 1918, almost two-thirds of previously tenanted land had been purchased (the remaining third took another fifty years to obtain and disperse). Land Acts between 1870 and 1909 compelled landlords to sell and “undermined the economic power of the Irish landlord class”. This from a starting point in 1881 in which two hundred and ninety-one people owned 7,213,310 acres, or about a third of Irish land. More, but not too many more, owned most of the rest. These “were among the wealthiest individuals in the United Kingdom”, and also owned land in Britain itself.
The removal of this significant political deadweight may have contributed as much to the modernisation of Britain as it did to the development of Irish society. Campbell shows, however, not as much as we might like to think or may have been led to believe. He examines the people who ruled Ireland in the years prior to the achievement of partial independence and how they ruled it. He supplies reasoned socio-economic investigation of what led to the 1916 Rising, a significant advance over the out-of-the-blue-cathartic-shock explanation beloved of supporters and detractors alike. The book contains seven chapters, entitled simply, Land, Administration, Policing, Politics, Business, Religion and Conclusion. In each, he applies himself directly to describing “what it says on the tin”. In some ways the book’s deceptively simple and direct prose style and extraction of facts from figures is reminiscent of the standard British sociological text Who Rules Britain (1994), by John Scott. Whether this book becomes the standard Irish historical text on the subject depends on factors peculiar to historical inquiry in or about Ireland.
[..... read on by downloading attached PDF or going to:
http://www.drb.ie/essays/top-people]
INTRODUCTION
Before tackling the book, it is necessary to give a brief historical introduction for those unfamiliar with this period in Irish history and/or with the context within which a debate on sectarianism in Irish history is taking place.
The British government refused to accept the verdict of a large majority of Irish people who opted for independence from Britain at the 1918 General Election. Sinn Féin won 73 of 105 Irish seats and set up a breakaway Dáil (parliament) in January 1919. As a consequence of British suppression of Irish demands and institutions, an increasingly ruthless and bitter military, clandestine, intelligence, propaganda and political struggle broke out between British and Irish forces during 1919-21. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) fought British counterinsurgency forces. Support for the republican project deepened in the face of British measures that, while effectively brutal, were otherwise ineffective. Protestant and Roman Catholic civil society south of what became the border of the state of Northern Ireland either supported or was effectively neutral toward republican forces, mostly the former. British policy aimed at managing the conflict by encouraging and deepening sectarian division failed, essentially because their republican opponents, while mainly Roman Catholic in religious outlook, were politically anti-sectarian
However, small but significant counter republican forces based ideologically on Protestant loyalism and support for the British Empire may have been successfully activated. Such groups and individuals faced severe IRA sanction, including execution and deportation. As Third West Cork Flying Column leader Tom Barry put it, ‘The British were met with their own weapons - they had gone down into the mire to destroy us and our nation, and down after them we had to go.’ The question is, how far was that?
(The rest is in the PDF.... )
In addition, the subsequent letter below expands on an aspect of the review analysis:
The Irish Times - Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Political killings in Cork
Madam, – Gerard Murphy objected to your reviewer considering his The Year of Disappearances a “confusing muddle” (December 11th, January 6th). His book alleges that republican forces in Cork city in 1921 targeted uninvolved Protestants. It is in the loose tradition of the “Ulsterisation” of the Irish War of Independence, one in which republican forces are portrayed as sectarian. It emerged from TCD’s history department in the 1990s.
Many of Mr Murphy’s disappeared victims are unnamed. They have no known prior existence. No relatives searched for them and no one cried wolf. In Mr Murphy’s view this is because southern Protestants acted like sheep.
In fact, southern Protestants spoke out. Ulster unionist propaganda rationalised sectarian attacks on northern Catholics on the basis that southern Protestants got it in the neck too. Representative southern Protestants, including unionists, spoke plainly, publicly and often to reject these allegations. Evidence is required to counter this Protestant view. Phantoms will not do.
Mr Murphy speculates that Josephine O’Donoghue, wife of IRA head of intelligence in Cork, Florence O’Donoghue, and a spy in her own right, abducted (even drowned) Protestant teenagers in 1921. One such speculative instance is sourced by Mr Murphy in the Times of London (May 18th, 1921). A “mysterious individual in a motor car” reportedly abducted “somebody’s child” near Cork city “on a calm Spring evening”.
I checked the reference. It is not an eyewitness report of the alleged abduction, it is not by a regular Times reporter and the date of the event was, as I later discovered, some weeks before May 18th (therefore before Mr Murphy’s assumed time-line). The article contains little concrete information and nothing as to the religion of the unnamed child. It was within the second of a five-part Times series entitled, “An English Officer’s Impressions”. Interestingly, the anonymous officer later published the series as A Journey through Ireland (1922, republished in 2008). For what it is worth, that book expanded on the Times account. As Wilfrid Ewart (the author) passed an agitated group he overheard a description of Mr Murphy’s “mysterious individual” as “some bastard of an Englishman”.
Nothing links the event, as described by Mr Murphy, to Josephine O’Donoghue. Other sectarian activities attributed to her are based on similar or no evidence.
Your reviewer considered the strengths and weaknesses of The Year of Disappearances fairly. – Yours, etc,
NIALL MEEHAN,
The Society for Irish Church Missions to the Roman Catholics, 1849-1950, by Miriam Moffitt, Manchester University Press, 320 pp, £60, ISBN: 978-0719078798
Ideology matters to everyone, though they may not call it by that name. Systems of thought give meaning to life and to death and what happens in between. Belief systems may encourage people to change their conditions of life and become autonomous social actors. They may also induce fear of the consequences of confronting agents and agencies of power. Ideologies are experienced, constructed and contested though interaction with powerful competing social forces.
Religion is a form of ideology, the belief in a power that governs the forces and laws of nature and therefore the destiny of humanity. In the European transition from feudalism to capitalism, Christianity moved from a position where it was the status quo to one of adjunct to the secular power of capitalism, its belief in progress based on economic growth and subordination to the rhythms of industrial life and work. The great split in Christianity, between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, reflected this revolutionary change in outlook in which the latter was both an adaptation to changing power relations and a reflection of the emergence of the nation state. Passivity in the face of an all-powerful nature was superseded by acceptance of the laws of the market as the arbiter of human social relations. The fate of the emergence into history and society of the isolated individual was, it was argued, in his or her own hands. People compensated for all-powerful and impersonal economic relationships by engaging in a personal one with God, mediated only by contemplation of His word in the Book. To be educated, to read, was to be in a position to directly experience the God of the Bible.
Protestantism seemed advanced, in the spirit of the age, in comparison to the pre-capitalist and idolatrous traditions of Roman Catholicism. It also claimed authenticity through direct unmediated insistence on literal biblical truth. The project faltered however once scientific inquiry, that other by-product of the Age of Enlightenment, demonstrated that the Book of Genesis account of creation was simply an imaginative fable. One tradition, which we know today as evangelical or sometimes fundamentalist Protestantism, and which believes in the literal truth of the Bible, was unfazed since the truth cannot be contradicted. In 1916 the theologian and evangelical activist Revd TC Hammond, denied that “Protestantism substituted an infallible book for an infallible Church”. Literal pedantry such as this had, as we shall see, a political usefulness that Hammond pursued in Ireland and Australia during the twentieth century.
This system of thought and action worked well enough in industrialising societies that were becoming richer, but not so well where the laws of the market resulted in disastrous stagnation and which justified the consequences. That was the fate of outlying possessions of major industrialising powers and became the fate of the oldest surviving colony, Ireland.
For more, download the PDF .....
My review highlighted several key failures of the edited collection. The Editor Professor David Fitzpatrick and Dr Eve Morrison responded to my review. I think it would be of value to continue the discussion, not least since debate may clarify the wider issues surrounding approaches to and controversies in modern Irish history. Reviews in History does not permit continued discussion beyond review and response. Hence its publication on Spinwatch.
I also include here a section omitted from the original review, concerning Brian Hanley's discussion of a 1985 Sinn Fen pamphlet called The Good Old IRA, and also further discussion this point on CedarLounge.wordpress.com.
See also:
Why Spinwatch is Publishing John Young’s Statement:
http://www.spinwatch.org/-articles-by-category-mainmenu-8/52-northern-ireland/5516-why-spinwatch-is-publishing-john-youngs-statement
Review of Terror in Ireland, 1916-1923 and responses (16 Aug 2012):
http://gcd.academia.edu/NiallMeehan/Papers/1877653"
and (also reproduced here)
The 1985 Sinn Fein Good Old IRA pamphlet and historical revisionism – a response to comments:
http://cedarlounge.wordpress.com/2012/10/16/the-1985-sinn-fein-good-old-ira-pamphlet-and-historical-revisionism-a-response-to-comments/
Which links to (main text in PDF): http://cedarlounge.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/1985-sf-pamphlet-b-cedar-lounge-discussion.pdf""
The book examines British and Irish violence (mainly the latter) from the 1916 Easter Rising through the Civil War. The terms ‘terror’ and ‘terrorist’ are loosely, often selectively, applied. According to Fitzpatrick, ‘Terrorists are those who perpetuate any form of terror; Terrorism implies a sustained and systematic attempt to generate terror’ (p. 5). This conceptualisation is not so much taut as tautological. It is difficult to envisage military or quasi-military activity that does not induce terror among combatants and an affected civilian population. Brian Hanley’s compelling first chapter exposes the problems in Fitzpatrick’s construct. Hanley notes that even under current US State Department categorisations, IRA attacks on Bloody Sunday (21 November 1920) and at Kilmichael (28 November 1920) cannot be defined as terrorist (p. 11). Nevertheless, two chapters are devoted to Bloody Sunday and one to Kilmichael.
Throughout the collection republican forces are often ‘Irish terrorists’ or simply ‘the terrorists’. Their British opponents are not similarly identified, suggesting that the words have a pejorative rather than descriptive function. Drawing upon the work of the late Peter Hart (who died in 2010 at the age of 46), whose analysis ‘called into question the morality and sincerity of the republican movement’, the editor asserts that republicans set out ‘to threaten and marginalize “deviants” within the community that the terrorists claim to represent’ (p. 6). Their suspicions were ‘based on categorical assumptions’ (p. 4). As the volume is dedicated to Hart’s memory, Fitzpatrick is intent on defending his reputation from ‘outraged readers’ for whom ‘the integrity of the revolutionaries from 1916–21 was an article of faith’ (pp. 4, 6). The ‘article of faith’ formulation is carefully chosen.
...... For more.... click on title, go online, or download attached PDF
Review includes separate responses from Editor, David Fitzpatrick (p.19), and Eve Morrison (pp.20-26, author of chapter on Peter Hart's treatment of the Kilmichael Ambush of 28 November 1920.)
See also:
Reply to Professor David Fitzpatrick and to Dr Eve Morrison’s response to criticism of Terror in Ireland 1916-1923 (plus consideration of Dr Brian Hanley on 'The Good Old IRA'), http://www.academia.edu/1994527/
"I have encountered the cases of many people who were abducted and executed by the IRA. Put to death for suspected collusion, often on the flimsiest of evidence. In some case we don’t even know the names of victims, let alone their whereabouts... In 1920 and 1921 at least 200 people were abducted, executed and their bodies secretly disposed of by the IRA. These included over 180 civilians, as well as policemen and soldiers…."
- Eunan O’Halpin, Bank of Ireland Professor of Contemporary History, Trinity College Dublin, presenter 'In the Name of the Republic'
With these words Eunan O’Halpin described a ‘dark shadow’ over Ireland’s fight for independence against the British Empire. On this basis he searched for bodies ‘disappeared’ by the IRA. However, no evidence was presented that the majority of this group existed. Without resolution of this fundamental research issue, it is difficult to understand how the programme emerged from the drawing board. Television programmes are expensive and this one received €198,000 from the Broadcasting Fund of Ireland. Possibly, it looked good on paper.
The two-part series floated on a proposition that seemed an article of faith. The origin of the bodies was presented in a vague and deeply unsatisfactory manner. The programme proceeded on the basis of a central perceptual flaw, namely that an absence of evidence established reasonable suspicion that something untoward had occurred. It was as though darkness was itself evidence of light. O’Halpin’s reference to family IRA connections, including to Kevin Barry the original "Martyr for old Ireland", was, like a lot of the programme, of little evidential assistance. [full review in PDF]
The makers, Tile Films, described their work thus: Executive Producer – Stephen Rooke; Producer – Dave Farrell; Director – Michael Dwan; Writers – David Ryan & Ruán Magan; Presenter – Eunan O’Halpin; Director of Photography – John Fay
RELEASE DATE: March 2013 GENRES: Docudrama / Irish History
"For some the Anglo-Irish War is viewed through rose tinted glasses, a heroic struggle against an Imperialist monster and the Civil War a brave and honourable attempt to disentangle the country from an ill judged Treaty that did not deliver on the nation’s aspirations. But there is a much darker story to be told of the often innocent men shot as spies and made to disappear. In The Name of the Republic is a two part documentary series following eminent Historian, Professor Eunan O’Halpin as he explores this dark side of Irish republicanism. At the spine of the story is a dig at one of the burial sites which Tile Films have exclusive access to."
https://feile-an-phobail-2021.heysummit.com/talks/ethnic-cleansing-the-irish-wars-of-independence-1919-23-and-academic-interpretations-and-responses/
Panel Discussion - 3pm Friday 6 August
“ETHNIC CLEANSING”, THE IRISH WARS OF INDEPENDENCE (1919-23), AND ACADEMIC INTERPRETATIONS AND RESPONSES
After 1980, the nationalist struggle for independence in the 1920s was reinterpreted as a sectarian conflict. Presented by academic historians, new evidence confirmed that unremembered, sectarian conflict had raged across southern Ireland leading to the “ethnic cleansing” of Protestants.
This panel discusses how and why this new narrative emerged without verifiable evidence. All of the panelists are experts in the field and in their different ways critical of the prevailing historical consensus sometimes known as ‘revisionism’, but perhaps more accurately identified as a counter-insurgency historiography directed against republicanism.
Fearghal Mac Bhloscaidh lectures in history at St Mary’s University College, Belfast. Niall Meehan is the Head of Journalism at Griffith College, Barry Keane is a respected teacher of history and published independent scholar and John Regan teaches history at the University of Dundee.
This event will be live streamed from Glór na Mona, Gael-Ionad Mhic Ghoill via www.facebook.com/glor.mona and a small number of invited guests will be in attendance
Talk by Niall Meehan for Independent Left, 9pm, 28 November 2020
Here is the historical Nine O'Clock News. I am going to talk about and event that took place this day one hundred years ago, about five hours earlier.
The Kilmichael Ambush on 28 November 1920 occurred two years after Sinn Fein’s November 1918 General Election victory, taking 73 of 105 Irish seats with approximately 70% support, and refusal to sit in the British House of Commons. It was over a year since Britain outlawed the separatist parliament, the Dáil, set up in January 1919. Many of the newly elected members were in British jails. The IRA emerged as a force that defended Dáil institutions and defied British jurisdiction, in a situation of contested dual power. The armed struggle was part of a campaign of resistance that involved strikes against British militarism, refusal by Irish workers to transport British forces and materiel (inspired by British workers who refused to transport munitions for use attempting to overthrow the new Soviet Union), trenching of roads, setting up alternative courts and local administration, as well as demonstrations and vigils. The hotbed of defiance and resistance was in Ireland’s largest and southernmost county, Cork.
One group that has contributed much to an academic and general understanding is the History Department and also the Politics Department of Queens University Belfast. There are many distinguished authors of historical works to be found there. Names such as, Paul, now Lord, Bew, Richard English, Peter Hart, David Harkness, ATQ Stewart, Graham Walker, Fearghal McGarry, Marie Coleman, Keith Jeffrey, and many others come to mind. All of them have contributed to our understanding, not always without contention, but that is often a positive rather than a negative trait. The work is generally stimulating. There is much of value there, including in some work by Peter Hart.
However, in the list above there is a peculiarity. Not one of the names of Queens academics I mentioned is from within Northern Ireland’s Roman Catholic community. Strangely, if you scan the online staff profiles of department members you will have difficulty finding an academic recruited from that population group. Due to the sectarian geography of the state of Northern Ireland, it might it be said, logically, that persons from a northern nationalist background are difficult to pinpoint. Their perspectives do not, perhaps, contribute in any meaningful sense to intellectual ferment within the staff group.
See also: www.academia.edu/6764527
Queens University Belfast and the Fair Employment Crisis by Cathal Smyth
AN INFANCY IN A DUBLIN ORPHANAGE IN WORLD WAR TWO
Thursday 26 September 2013 Trinity College Dublin
Swift Theatre (Arts Building): 7.30 p.m.
Derek Leinster is the author of the highly successful autobiographical works Hannah’s Shame (2005) and Destiny Unknown(2008). These books, which will be relaunched on the evening, relate Derek’s childhood in a Church of Ireland associated Children’s Home and his early adulthood, his boxing career and his search to find out more about his identity and to get justice.
‘Derek’s first book Hannah’s Shame was a story of survival whereas Destiny Unknown is one of hope. Derek’s story is one that needs to be told and he does so in a wonderfully honest way with no feelings of regret or hatred’
Sarah Hackett, Book Reviewer for The Harp
The talk will be introduced by:
Daniel McConnell, Political Correspondent of the Sunday Independent
Niall Meehan, Academic from Griffith College, will also be talking
Bethany Home co-existed with the first half century of the Irish State and took in unmarried mothers and so-called illegitimate children. It has been in the news of late due to a Prime Time documentary and pressure on the government to admit its former residents to a scheme of redress.
I do not know if Mrs Duckett knew of the Bethany Home but probably she would have approved of its aims and objects. She certainly approved of the Irish Church Missions, or to give it its full name, the Irish Church Missions to the Roman Catholics. It was one of the, as she put it, ‘strictly protestant and evangelical societies’ intended to benefit from her £100,000 estate in her final 1934 will. The Church Missions, or ICM for short, approved in turn of the Bethany Home. Its most famous 20th Century leader, Rev’d Thomas Chatterton (or TC) Hammond, from Cork, helped to open and then sat on the Bethany Home Managing Committee until his departure for Australia in 1935.
Mrs Duckett’s daughter, Mrs Olive Georgina O’Grady, was upset at being cut out of her mother’s 1934 will and contested it. [Slide 1: A,B] Mrs Duckett had been declared mentally incompetent in 1935 and died in 1937. Mrs O’Grady wanted her mother declared intestate because unfit mentally to construct a will for the previous 30 years. There were a number of wills with attendant executors vying for the attention of the court.
Clearly, at the end of her life Mrs Duckett was incapable. However, were her previous views and actions evidence of that condition, as her daughter argued?
2012 History Ireland discussion with historians, relatives of Kilmichael Ambush participants and of IRA veterans.
Maureen Deasy (daughter of IRA veteran Liam Deasy (brother of Kilmichael Ambush casualty Pat Deasy); Sean Kelleher (son of IRA veteran Tom Kelleher); Maura O’Donovan (daughter of Kilmichael Ambush veteran Pat O’Donovan); Marion O’Driscoll (wife of solicitor Jim O’Driscoll; John Young (son of Kilmichael Ambush veteran Ned Young); plus historians Niall Meehan, Eve Morrison, Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc. Also two appendices: statement by John Young (son of Ned young) and Sunday Times report of statement
Fearghal Mac Bhloscaidh discussed revisionist distortions of Irish history (HI 28.6, July/Aug . 2020, Platform) that base themselves on the alleged neutrality of the British state and a correspondingly mistaken view that 'Irish republicanism is inherently violent , irrational and sectarian'. I agree that that is generally the case. However, established historians reject the suggestion of a common, never mind a revisionist, approach. In Fatal path the late Ronan Fanning showed how imperial British state violence made Irish resistance inevitable . He also famously admitted that revisionist history-writing about the 1910-22 period sought to undermine the post-1968 IRA. ....
See PDF for the rest, including Mac Bhloscaidh article; plus Andreas Boldt letter; John Regan on Peter Hart and the Kilmichael Ambush...
Southern Star 14 November 2020
The just published Dead of the Irish Revolution (DIR), a 1916-21 fatalities database, continues fighting the 28 November 1920 Kilmichael Ambush. Eunan O’Halpin devotes three pages to a mini-defence of controversial historian the late Peter Hart.
36 IRA fighters defeated an 18-man British Auxiliary patrol, 16 of whom were killed. One escaped but was later captured and executed. Another Auxiliary, severely wounded, was left for dead.
In 1998 Hart reported that ambush commander Tom Barry was a vainglorious lying ‘serial killer’ and that the War of Independence was an ethno-sectarian squabble. Other revisionist historians predicted difficulties for those defending the Cork IRA. Quite the reverse has happened.
Controversy centres on Hart attempting to undermine Barry reporting an Auxiliary false surrender, resulting in IRA casualties, followed by a fight to the finish with no acceptance of further surrender attempts. O’Halpin's defence begins with a simple mistake, asserting that Barry claimed all three IRA casualties as false surrender victims, Pat Deasy, Jim O’Sullivan and Michael McCarthy. Barry indisputably stated two, Deasy and O’Sullivan.
O’Halpin defends Peter Hart’s anonymous late-1980s ‘interviews’ with two elderly ambush participants. One occurred six days after Ned Young, the last surviving participant, died. O’Halpin resolves the problem with historian Eve Morrison’s claim that a Willie Chambers is the missing man. But, in the Southern Star in 2017, Morrison reported Chambers during the ambush guarding a bridge 15km away. In August, Morrison reported that Ned Young, the other alleged Hart interviewee, did not discuss the ambush (or Tom Barry) at all. That should not surprise us. His son John pointed out in 2008 that his then 96-year father suffered a debilitating stroke two years earlier.
Hart therefore interviewed an ambush veteran who did not speak about it and someone not there, who did.
O’Halpin, like Hart, ignores participant descriptions of a false surrender. Ned Young, who reported being away from the ambush proper pursuing an escaping Auxiliary, spoke of a false surrender relayed to him immediately afterwards. His comrades also said John Lordan killed an Auxiliary he accused of falsely surrendering. Stephen O’Neill, the first ambush fighter to publish on the subject, in 1937, is similarly ignored. Since Tom Barry’s Guerilla Days in Ireland is dismissed, it is hardly surprising that its contribution is misreported.
A different approach is evident in DIR commentary on the April 1921 killing of Kate Carroll in Monaghan. She featured in revisionist accounts of the IRA’s supposed war on Protestants and ‘social deviants’. Here, DIR readers are spared knowledge that after 29 years historians discovered Carroll was Catholic. The saga is explained in my essay, ‘She is a Protestant as well’[https://www.academia.edu/43753997/].
The book is an objective database to the extent that, like Hart’s Kilmichael research, its omissions and errors are identified.
Niall Meehan
(author of ‘Examining Peter Hart’, https://www.academia.edu/8348624/)
The letters may be considered an addendum to southern Star correspondence over three months in 2017, collected in West Cork’s War of Independence (at, https://www.academia.edu/34399025/).
Eve Morrison's 8th August festival talk is at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buVryG55kqs. Her book on Kilmichael, aimed originally at marking the ambush’s 100th anniversary on 28 November 2020, is (according to the publishers) delayed until April 2021.
My, related, talk and essay (published the same day as Morrison spoke), 'She is a Protestant as well', looks at historical reconstructions of an April 1921 IRA execution in Monaghan, available here:
https://www.academia.edu/43753997;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdrpAi-Z3bk.
The advertising blurb for the First West Cork History festival this year told us that it,
"… will span a diverse set of places, historical subjects and periods, from the local to the international, ranging from the Knights Templar to the events of the Irish revolutionary period in West Cork. Leading historians will be joined by journalists and senior diplomats, and while much of their focus will be on Irish themes, the perspective will be international. The festival will be informal, participatory and with a menu for the intellectually omnivorous."
This was all very welcome but it is a pity that the Festival did not invite any local historians to address it on the history of West Cork and in particular on the controversial issues that have bedevilled that history since publication of the late Professor Peter Hart’s work. He created the current interest in West Cork’s history some twenty years ago. Everybody knows this. This Festival was indebted to him for this interest.
However, the serious discussion on his work occurred outside the Festival in the pages of the Southern Star and elsewhere. This is a collection of the correspondence from that paper and other items that deal in detail with the ‘legacy issues’ arising from
Professor Hart’s work. The first letter, from Tom Cooper, generated 22 more items of correspondence and a news report, between 27 May and 26 August 2017 on three topics:
1. Three letters, from Cooper and Simon Kingston, on the festival;
2. Four letters, from Cooper and from Gerry Gregg on his and Eoghan Harris’s documentary, An Tost Fada (‘The Long Silence’), plus one newspaper report;
3. Five letters each from Eve Morrison and Niall Meehan, three from Barry Keane, and one each from Donald Woods and John Regan, on Peter Hart, Tom Barry and the 28 November 1922 Kilmichael Ambush.
In addition, due to Barry Roche in the Irish Times reporting RTÉ’s re-editing of An Tost Fada, Tom Cooper had a letter published on his role in that decision. It occasioned three replies, to which the Irish Times denied Cooper a response, which we publish here. We also publish an important 2014 letter from Meda Ryan to History Ireland, in response to a commentary on Ryan by Eve Morison (in a review of Pádraig O Ruairc’s book, Truce).
This is by far the most useful outcome of the Festival despite not being part of it. Another event that played both on and offstage was the Sunday Times (‘Éire’ edition) dismissal of Peter Hart’s original supporter and a festival contributor, Kevin Myers.
In his column on the morning of the last festival day, Myers combined misogyny and anti-Semitism, attacking women generally and Jewish women in particular. He had made his reputation, alongside Hart, criticising IRA commander Tom Barry and other
republicans. Myers spent his festival afternoon beside a female Jewish rabbi, under a portrait of Tom Barry. That part, you couldn’t make up.
We hope that the organisers of next year’s Festival will arrange for a continuation of such forensic discussion of West Cork’s history. They can do so by ensuring that the local and national participants in the Southern Star discussion are invited to the
Festival. It is surely sensible that such contributions are made at the Festival as well as outside it. It would be useful also to ascertain how to apply to join the secretive Festival Committee.
Jack Lane, Aubane Historical Society.
Níall Meehan Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc
History Ireland, v19 n6, Nov-Dec 2011
NM review of first edition:
http://www.academia.edu/372431/
POR review of first edition:
http://www.theirishstory.com/2011/03/09/book-review-the-year-of-disappearances-political-killings-in-cork-1921-1922/#.TrZ-vCPdUvA
Gill & Macmillan has published a ‘second edition’ of Gerard Murphy’s The Year of Disappearances ten months after publication of the first. It alleged systematic IRA sectarianism toward Protestants in Cork during and after the War of Independence. Initial positive commentary from Independent Newspapers columnists was replaced by heavy criticism in seven consecutive academic reviews. Murphy took exception, including to John Borgonovo’s HI review and to local historian Jim Fitzgerald’s objections (See HI, Jan-Feb, Mar-Apr, May-Jun, Jul-Aug 2011).
Murphy’s preface to the second edition concedes, however, that the first contained ‘errors’. With one partial exception and despite acknowledging the ‘collaborative’ nature of historical research, he does not indicate what errors were made, where corrections and amendments have resulted, or who pointed out his mistakes.
Unfortunately, attempted rectification has deepened first edition incoherence, in which mistakes are compounded. Two examples suffice to illustrate the point.
In the first edition Murphy claimed that IRA veteran Connie Neenan referred to the deaths of three Protestant teenagers in an interview recorded in the Ernie O’Malley Notebooks (UCD Archives, P17b / 112 p.126). Murphy cited Neenan as stating, “Three were friends, they confessed to their trackings, and they were killed.” This was so central to Murphy’s thesis relating to alleged IRA targeting and killing of Protestants, he referred to it at least 15 times. However, Murphy’s transcription was inaccurate. The O’Malley notebook sentence reads, “Both kids confessed their trackings, and they were killed.”
When the reliability of his transcription was questioned, Murphy told Sunday Tribune journalist John Downes, “I stand over everything in the book and completely reject the suggestion that it is based on a questionable interpretation of documents …my transcription of this [sentence] is the correct one”. Furthermore, he asserted, “a blind man” could see this.
Gill & Macmillan were subsequently presented with a copy of the document and an accurate transcription. In his second edition, Murphy silently corrected himself.
However, Murphy continues to insist that Neenan referred to the killing of “three Protestant boys” in his O'Malley interview (second edn, pp 173, 303, 304). Murphy claims this trio were executed together after the Truce of 11th July 1921 and that “this may have set in motion a whole witch hunt fuelled by suspicion and paranoia which led to dozens of deaths.”
Aside from Murphy’s continuing failure to name these and other allegedly dead Protestants, nowhere in the interview did Neenan refer to three Protestants being executed together by the IRA Instead, Neenan (whose use of language reflected having lived in the USA) referred to the killing of two unnamed ‘kids’ of unspecified religion, which he linked to an alleged British spy ring connected with the YMCA. One of these was a fifteen year old who, according to Neenan, was killed “15 months after the murder of Tomás Mac Curtain” - i.e. June 1921, not after the Truce. The identity of the second ‘kid’ and the date he was killed is unknown.
Neenan later referred to two ‘kids’ who were suspected of spying and killed by the IRA in separate incidents. One was John Begley a Catholic ex-soldier killed in July 1921 whom Neenan described as “a young kid, a nondescript type”. Neenan stated definitively that the other unnamed ‘kid’ was a Catholic, who was exposed by IRA Intelligence Officer Sean Culhane. Therefore, there is no possibility whatsoever that Neenan referred to the killing of three Protestant teenagers anywhere in his interview with O'Malley.
Lamentably, Murphy continues to attribute to Neenan’s O'Malley notebooks interview, statements Neenan did not make.
In a second example, an Irish Times letter (18 January 2011*) informed Murphy that he had misinterpreted an article in the Times (London). Murphy suggested it was “an eyewitness account of the abduction of a teenager, the only one we have”, that occurred soon before publication on 18 May 1921. (Both editions, p. 110) The article merely stated, “somebody’s child, it appeared, had been kidnapped by a mysterious individual in a motor car”. From this Murphy speculatively but typically (on no evidence) suggested the culprit was IRA spy Josephine O’Donoghue, wife of the IRA’s head of intelligence.
Significantly, Murphy was unaware that the Times article, one of five giving ‘An English Officer’s Impressions’, was published as A Journey in Ireland 1921 by Wilfrid Ewart (in 1922**). Ewart reported being in Cork City from 23-25 April (pp 25, 54) and commented on an ‘abduction’ at that time, which he did not ‘eyewitness’ as he arrived afterwards. Yet, in the second edition Murphy asserts that it took place on 12 May (p. 306). Furthermore, a new note implies disingenuously that Murphy reveals Ewart's name and book (that does not appear in the Bibliography, p. 389, n. 3).
One nearby alleged victim disappeared from Murphy’s 2nd edition narrative. In the first edition Edward Kenny reportedly vanished on 22 April and “was executed” by the IRA (Murphy's emphasis, p. 155). Murphy’s indexed first edition discussion of Kenny on seven pages is replaced by a single un-indexed endnote, admitting confusion (p. 370, n. 20).
As evidence, Murphy’s speculations are valueless. These examples, two of many, raise serious questions about Murphy’s ability to accurately transcribe and interpret historical material. It also poses the question of whether either edition of Murphy’s book should be treated seriously as a work of history. It calls into question the judgement of Gill & Macmillan’s academic referee who recommended publication.
On a more general level, Gerard Murphy’s book illustrates the collapse in standards attendant upon support within the academy for the IRA sectarianism thesis. Its proponents have reduced the War of Independence period to an exercise in propaganda.
NIALL MEEHAN, Griffith College Dublin
PÁDRAIG ÓG Ó RUAIRC, University of Limerick
*LETTER to Irish Times - 18 January 2011
Political killings in Cork
Madam, – Gerard Murphy objected to your reviewer considering his The Year of Disappearances a “confusing muddle” (December 11th, January 6th). His book alleges that republican forces in Cork city in 1921 targeted uninvolved Protestants. It is in the loose tradition of the “Ulsterisation” of the Irish War of Independence, one in which republican forces are portrayed as sectarian. It emerged from TCD’s history department in the 1990s.
Many of Mr Murphy’s disappeared victims are unnamed. They have no known prior existence. No relatives searched for them and no one cried wolf. In Mr Murphy’s view this is because southern Protestants acted like sheep.
In fact, southern Protestants spoke out. Ulster unionist propaganda rationalised sectarian attacks on northern Catholics on the basis that southern Protestants got it in the neck too. Representative southern Protestants, including unionists, spoke plainly, publicly and often to reject these allegations. Evidence is required to counter this Protestant view. Phantoms will not do.
Mr Murphy speculates that Josephine O’Donoghue, wife of IRA head of intelligence in Cork, Florence O’Donoghue, and a spy in her own right, abducted (even drowned) Protestant teenagers in 1921. One such speculative instance is sourced by Mr Murphy in the Times of London (May 18th, 1921). A “mysterious individual in a motor car” reportedly abducted “somebody’s child” near Cork city “on a calm Spring evening”.
I checked the reference. It is not an eyewitness report of the alleged abduction, it is not by a regular Times reporter and the date of the event was, as I later discovered, some weeks before May 18th (therefore before Mr Murphy’s assumed time-line). The article contains little concrete information and nothing as to the religion of the unnamed child. It was within the second of a five-part Times series entitled, “An English Officer’s Impressions”. Interestingly, the anonymous officer later published the series as A Journey through Ireland (1922, republished in 2008). For what it is worth, that book expanded on the Times account. As Wilfrid Ewart (the author) passed an agitated group he overheard a description of Mr Murphy’s “mysterious individual” as “some bastard of an Englishman”.
Nothing links the event, as described by Mr Murphy, to Josephine O’Donoghue. Other sectarian activities attributed to her are based on similar or no evidence.
Your reviewer considered the strengths and weaknesses of The Year of Disappearances fairly. – Yours, etc,
NIALL MEEHAN
** Republished in UCD Press's 'Classics in Irish History' series in 2009 and featured in Bookworm, HI Sep./Oct. 2009 - Ed.)."
Brian Walker's theory that between 26-29 April 1922 10 Protestant men in West Cork were killed in retaliation for sectarian attacks on Catholics in Northern Ireland is plausible ('Darkest nights: mystery of the Dunmanway massacre', Irish Independent 31 May).
Some 229 people were killed there between February and May 1922. The violence began with the expulsion of 6,000 from Belfast shipyards in July 1920. Protestant trade unionists were also victims. One, James Baird, later observed that every Roman Catholic was excluded, “whether ex-service man who had proved his loyalty to England during the Great War, or Sinn Féiner.” By November “almost 10,000” were affected. Thousands of Catholics were also driven from their homes. An April 1922 agreement between Michael Collins and James Craig, to give restitution to expelled workers, collapsed near month's end. Northern Protestant church leaders’ support for the shipyard expulsions was also reported that month.
However, there is a problem with Walker's notion of North-South sectarian reciprocity. Southern Protestant congregations were, at the time, denying sectarian tensions, while denouncing attacks on Catholics in the north.
The day it reported the west Cork killings, the Southern Star reported Protestants in Schull condemning "acts of violence committed against our Roman Catholic fellow countrymen. [Living as a small minority … we wish to place on record the fact that we … have never been subjected to any oppression or injustice." 12 days later the representative Protestant Convention agreed and called the 26-29 April killings an exception.] The British Empire journal Round Table noted in June 1922, "Southern Ireland boasts with justice that it has been remarkably free from the purely sectarian hatreds that have come to characterise Belfast".
Why then did the killings take place? Some research indicates an IRA perception that the victims had collaborated with British forces. Walker dismisses one possible contributing factor, the simultaneous killing in nearby Macroom of three British Intelligence officers [who were acting to reinstate civilian intelligence links]. The British denied their officers’ intelligence function and the IRA denied arresting and killing them. It is possible that this led to acquiescence in a purely sectarian narrative for the simultaneous civilian killings.
This is speculative, but makes more sense than Walker’s theory of retaliatory sectarian attacks. [Possibly I am mistaken, but probably Walker is]. My view is explained in more detail in 'Field Day Review' 2014.
"
"David Fitzpatrick's review (HI Sep-Oct 2013, v21n5) of John Borgonovo’s Dynamics of War and Revolution: Cork City, 1916-18, devoted a paragraph to defending Peter Hart. The section contained a factual error: Hart's The IRA and its Enemies (1998) did not assert that IRA commander Tom Barry engaged in 'sectarianism'. It contained also a curiosity: Fitzpatrick cited the albeit 'less rigorous' Gerard Murphy on 'evidence of brutal sectarian murders and sinister abductions.'
The latter observation substantially revises Fitzpatrick’s drb.ie review of Murphy’s The Year of Disappearances (2010), that described a 'disorganised dossier' by 'an amateur enthusiast who intended to write a novel'. Fitzpatrick noted other reviewers (I was one, academia.edu) who, 'pointed out various errors of citation or misreading of documents'. He detailed examples of 'loose argument and factual error,' including Murphy's ludicrous suggestion that IRA spy Josephine O'Donoghue drowned Protestant boys. Fitzpatrick lamented 'a major historical opportunity… squandered.'
The paragraph [in the HI review] concluded on critics of the approach adopted by Hart and Murphy: 'apologists for contemporary republicanism have set out to discredit, sometimes by foul means as well as fair, the integrity of those [historians] denigrating [IRA] revolutionaries.'
This view that Hart and Murphy are within a group engaged in denigration is interesting. Does this include Professor Fitzpatrick? Consider his performance at the 2013 Magdalene College Cambridge Parnell Lecture entitled, 'The Spectre of Ethnic Cleansing in Revolutionary Ireland'.
According to the Irish Sunday Times (Justine McCarthy report 17 Feb 2013, letters 24 Feb), Professor Fitzpatrick commenced by singing a ballad, A New Revenge for Skibbereen to the tune of The Galtee Mountain Boy. Line two ran, 'We took it out on the Protestants, we could only catch a few,' and continued in similar ethnic cleansing vein. It depicted sectarian celebration of the killing of two Protestant men, Tom Bradfield, who was killed early in 1921 and 'Old [Francis] Buttimer' in April 1922.
The ballad was perceived as the genuine republican article, as reflected in contributions following the lecture. However, Professor Fitzpatrick then observed that he did not wish to be accused, as Hart had been, of having 'falsified historical evidence'. He admitted to composition, 'yesterday morning'.
The sadly ignored spoken part of the proceedings, on Methodist attitudes to the unfolding conflict, revealed no evidence of republican ethnic cleansing. The song, an example of denigration, was unsupported by historical research. Surely then, allegedly foul and fair methods employed by unnamed republican apologists are offset by those Professor Fitzpatrick employed at a Lecture series commemorating a Protestant leader of Irish nationalism.
Niall Meehan, Griffith College""
(As it becomes available, I will add material to this archive of the long-running discussion.)
The 26 November 1932 article by ambush commander Tom Barry is accompanied by a section of a letter to the Irish Press editor, protesting the omission of a false surrender account in Barry’s submitted copy.
In her 2022 research on the ambush, Eve Morrison suggested that Barry’s letter may be from the 1940s. She therefore assumed that Barry omitted mention of the false surrender in 1932 because he had not yet (in her view) concocted this episode. This is a clear mistake on Morrison’s part since, as illustrated, after Barry protested omission of a false surrender narrative, he continued, 'You should print the full article, and give an explanation regarding that one on 26th'. Morrison’s reference to the 1940s makes no evidential sense. She did not point to any Barry Irish Press article then, omitting a false surrender account. Irish Press serialisation of Barry’s 1948 book , Guerrilla Days in Ireland, prominently displayed a false surrender narrative. I show this in detail in Rehabilitating Peter Hart (2022, cover above), at https://www.academia.edu/89528489/.
Also, Morrison does not refer in her research to Piaras Beaslaí false surrender references in national newspapers in 1926. She dismisses participant Stephen O'Neill’s 1937 Kerryman article, that includes a false surrender account, solely on the basis that it was (Morrison asserts) written with Tom Barry's imprimatur.
Topics in my essay, linked above, also include Morrison’s, in my view equally mistaken, attempt to compare criticism of revisionist historian Peter Hart, whose approach to Kilmichael and Tom Barry Morrison attempted to reinforce, with treatment of Teddy Katz (pictured bottom left, above). Haifa University Israel stripped Katz of his MA, that researched a 1948 massacre by Israeli troops at Tantura, Palestine. I observe,
"Hart’s work was, as his Dictionary of Irish Biography entry asserts, ‘lavishly praised’. Unlike Katz, he obtained grants enabling him to continue his research. Hart obtained full-time academic employment in Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) in 1998, followed by a prestigious 2002 appointment as Canada Research Chair in Irish Studies at Memorial University, Newfoundland, before his untimely death in 2010 aged 44.
"After 1998, Hart faced criticism from individuals. There was no institutional threat to his PhD award. Hart suffered no discernible career ill-effects. If anything, as Joost Augusteijn recently noted, Hart’s QUB employment was ‘partly politically inspired’. Katz was denied the right to pursue research in a university, never mind become employed in one."
Morrison’s commentary generally sidesteps criticism of Hart’s flawed research. Katz’s research is afforded faint praise, by appearing to endorse tendentious criticism of his courageous recounting of one of a number of large-scale massacres of Palestinians.
OPPONENTS of the Northern Ireland government accuse it of operating a police state. The Ulster Unionists, who have held control for nearly half a century, make automatic denial each time this charge is urged.
Undocumented allegations and blanket disclaimers do not help towards fair assessment. For seven months we have examined what happened during a Civil Rights march from Belfast to Derry. We have also looked to the aftermath of this demonstration, its consequences, and action taken by the authorities.
We are not primarily interested in reciting what happened to students and other young people who set out on the road, hoping to break through barriers of religious bigotry by directing attention to social and economic issues. We have tried to produce a study of Northern Ireland government in action. During their march the walkers learned much of police behaviour and political attitudes through a series of sharp object lessons. We have tried to establish facts, identify participants, and assess the parts they played.
The Northern Ireland unit was created in 1920 to appease the fears of a substantial Protestant majority faced with the prospect of inclusion in a Catholic-dominated, all-Ireland state. The Belfast Parliament was given control of matters of local importance, though the British Parliament retained wide powers to intervene. These have not been exercised.
From the outset, political attitudes in the new unit were wedded to religious persuasion. Critics argue that this has been disastrous for most of the people. It benefits only the ruling caste within the Ulster Unionist Party. This body is assured of continued power by the adherence of the majority of all classes of Protestants. As this power relies upon the enduring nature of old fanaticisms, official antipathy, previously reserved for those who were opposed to the existence of the Northern Ireland state, now extends to those who campaign against the religious divide.
We offer no exhaustive assessment of how the Unionist Party has governed during 50 years of near-absolute power, but seek to tell what we have discovered about the rule of law in Northern Ireland. The incidents described raise important questions about police and governmental partiality, and about the use of mobs to implement official policy. Our description should allow each reader to decide whether the appellation police state" should be applied to this area, and will permit him to assess how well the government has adhered to the principles underlying one of the most potent and cherished Unionist catch-cries: "For civil and religious liberty".
Bowes Egan & Vincent McCormack, London, August 1969.
In 1964, BOWES EGAN, with a group of others from Queen's University, Belfast. established a committee to investigate abuse of power by central and local government authorities in Northern Ireland. Since then he has been closely concerned with the Civi l Rights movement. He is a lecturer in law at the City of London College, author of a number of books, and has been contributor to The Times, the Sunday Times, and other national newspapers and specialist journals.
VINCENT McCORMACK is a writer and trainee psychologist at the Department of Psychology of Queen's University. During the last few months he has carried out an exhaustive investigation into the Burntollet incidents.
In 1979 Mary Holland's freelance contract with the Observer newspaper was terminated. An award-winning journalist and broadcaster, she had written for the newspaper since 1964. Holland pioneered coverage of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
As editor in chief, Conor Cruise O'Brien objected to her coverage of Northern Ireland, in particular to an article on ten years of the Troubles. O'Brien wrote to Holland after he had altered the article (causing an entire edition of the Observer magazine to be pulped). He noted, 'It is a serious weakness in your coverage of Irish affairs that you are a very poor judge of Irish Catholics. That gifted and talkative community includes some of the most expert conmen and conwomen in the world and in this case I believe you have been conned'. It letter is included here in full.
O'Brien also wrote in relation to the subject of Mary Holland's piece, Derry woman Mary Nellis, 'Since Irish republicanism - especially the killing strain of it - has a very high propensity to run in families, and since the mother is most often the carrier, I incline to the view that a mother [Mary Nellis] whose [H Block prisoner] sons behave in this way has had something to do with what they believe and how they behave.'
O'Brien would not allow Holland to contribute similar material in future. Her contract was terminated in 1979. When O'Brien vacated his post in 1981, Holland returned to write for the paper.
Irish Press, Irish Times and Guardian coverage is also attached (pp3-6). Pages 1-2 contains cover of Embers of Revisionism pamphlet, and a leaflet handed out at TCD's Centenary Conor Cruise O'Brien Symposium.
In 'Laurence [Larry] O'Toole versus RTÉ', O'Toole argued successfully that RTÉ was wrong to censor him as spokesperson for striking bakery workers, solely because he was a Sinn Féin member. RTÉ had in effect extended the censorship provision by banning all Sinn Féin members, whether speaking for trade unions, as in O'Toole's case, other organisations, or in a private capacity.
O'Toole established his argument in letters back and forth to RTÉ Director of News Joe Mulholland in 1990 and 1991. He stated that as a worker in the Gateaux factory in Finglas (where the strike took place) and as an executive member of the bakery workers trade union, he was not representing or speaking on behalf of Sinn Féin. RTÉ rejected his argument and stated that O'Toole was banned because he was a Sinn Féin member (two of the letters are attached).
When the High Court verdict was announced, RTÉ was in effect ordered to liberalise its censorship regime. Many expected that the station would be relieved to permit more freedom of speech. The NUJ Broadcasting Branch in RTÉ welcomed the ruling and it was thought management would follow suit. Surprisingly, RTE management did not and justified its stance to staff in an internal bulletin. The Repeal Section 31 Campaign replied with its own RTÉ staff bulletin. The two bulletins are available here, alongside campaign leaflets produced before and after the High Court judgement.
Professor Hugh T Lyon's review generated a considerable impact, in the form of an immediate demand for Proctor's The Famine Revisited that bookshops could not supply. The review is reproduced here with an explanation of the book's unavailability, by Dr Maurice Coakley. Professor James S Donnelly's discussion of the review in his The Great Irish Potato Famine is included also, with Professor Donnelly's kind permission
Contributions from John Arden, Conrad Atkinson, 'Cormac' (Cartoons, Brian Moore), Liz Curtis, David Brazil, Andrew Brown, Margareta d'Arcy, Jonathan Dimbleby, Chris Dunkley, Philip Elliott, David Elstein, Fred Friendly, Phillip Jones Griffiths, Jonathan Hammond, Seamus Heaney, Mary Holland, Roland Joffe, Peter Kennard, Paul McCartney (lyrics 'Give Ireland back to the Irish'), Paul Madden, John McGuffin, Danny Morrison, Raymond Murray, Conor Cruise O'Brien, John O'Callaghan, Jeremy Paxman, Anna Raeburn, Philip Schlesinger, Anthony Smith, Peter Taylor, Colin Thomas.
Information on Ireland pamphlet, Russell Press, 1979
(Better scan than previously.)
From the back cover:
Protestant bigotry, a Masonic conspiracy, the treachery of individuals, or mere "procedural irregularities" - what is the truth of the Queen's University of Belfast's Fair Employment Crisis?
This thought-provoking study suggests that the answer is to be found at a much deeper level, within the structures, personnel and culture of the University. The reader is invited to question widely-held assumptions regarding both the position of Queen's as a liberal institution and its relationships with wider Northern Irish society. Ultimately this book is a call for full and open debate on the core issues of equality of opportunity at Queen's.
Cathal Smyth had been a student at Queen's since 1987, studying in a number of faculties and holding posts in the Student's Union including that of President in 1991/92. This book is based on his under-graduate dissertation in the Department of Politics. Cathal graduated in 1994 with a first class honours degree.
Jane Addams,
L. Hollingsworth Wood,
Frederic C. Howe, Vice-Chairman,
James H. Maurer,
Oliver P. Newman,
Senator George W. Norris,
Rev. Norman Thomas,
Senator David I. Walsh
CONTENTS
Map
Personnel of the Commission
Personnel of the Committee ii
List of Witnesses Before the Commission v
Hearings of the Commission vi
I. History, Purpose, and Method of the Commission 1
Origin of the Commission, 1 ; Purposes of the Commission, 1
Method of Gathering the Evidence, 2; Witnesses Invited, 2;
British Prevent Investigation in Ireland, 4.
II. Review of the Situation and Statement of Findings 7
Events Leading to the Present Crisis, 7 ; How Great Britain
Met the Insurrection, 8; Irish Resistance, 10; British Responsibility, 11; Conclusion, 13.
III, Imperial British Forces in Ireland 15
IV. The British Campaign in Ireland 19; Ley de Fuga, 24; Reprisals, 27; "Sinn Fein Extremist," 37; Where the Responsibility Lies, 44; Destruction of Property, 45; Burning of Towns, 47; Official Sanctions for Destruction of Property, 47; Industrial Destruction, 48; The British Terror in Ireland, 52; Religious Services, 57; Deaths and Wakes, 57; Funerals, 59.
V. Physical Consequences to the Imperial British Forces in
Ireland 60; Causes of Casualties Suffered by Imperial British Forces, 62; Policy of Assassination, 73.
VI. Moral Consequences to the Imperial British Forces, 79; Imperial British Officers, 86 ; Imperial British High Command in Ireland, 92; Imperial British Government in Ireland, 96.
VII. Political Aspect of the Imperial British Policy in Ireland, 101; The Irish Republic, 103; Failure of the Imperial British Policy in Ireland, 105.
Supplemental Report: The Religious Issue in Ireland 111
Appendices 119
Index 137