Buried Lives
Page 27
One important indication of changed government attitudes is that in recent times we heard the first official expression of regret for the attacks on Protestant civilians in the period 1919–23. It came from the late Brian Lenihan, late Minister for Finance, in his speech at the annual Michael Collins commemoration at Beal na Blath in which he said, ‘… and many people with little or no connection to the struggle died or suffered by accident, or because of where they worked or where they worshipped.’ The murders in the Bandon Valley in 1922, are implied by Minister Lenihan, the subject of much heated recent debate characterised by attacks on Peter Hart’s findings, as discussed in chapter 2. Indeed, a few historians have been anxious to present this mini program as being non-sectarian. As previously stated, Michael Collins had no doubt the motive was sectarian, in retaliation for the massacres of Roman Catholics in Belfast.
Finally, once there is widespread acceptance that southern Protestants are as Irish as their Catholic neighbours, through a long tradition that embraces Swift, Grattan, Wellington, Parnell, Bulmer Hobson, Sean O’Casey and Oscar Wilde, the end of the road is in sight for an inclusive, pluralist, secular Ireland. Vincent Comerford has argued that the ‘national category in respect of Ireland … [has] no essential common character … Such a perspective is of little use for the purposes of chauvinist nationalism or intransigent unionism. But it is, arguably, a better key to understanding the fascination, wealth, the ever-changing complexity, the infinite variety and the endless contradictions of a long-lasting nationality such as Ireland’s.84 In such a broad form of interwoven nationality lies the deeply enriching southern Protestant legacy.
Appendix
THE VICTIMS AND THE SURVIVORS
The myth that the killings in the Brandon Valley in April 1922 were a carefully targeted campaign against a dozen or so people is still bandied about. Those targeted were well known as spies and informers, so the story goes. Therefore the killings were of a military nature that had nothing to do with religion; they were a pre-emptive strike against the agents of an invader just evicted but fully expected to return.
This would have been a catastrophic massacre, involving up to 30 victims if the IRA had been efficient and got their entire intended quarry.
Those Killed Outright
In Ballygroman, beginning in the early hours of Wednesday morning:
Michael O’Neill of Kilbrittain, an IRA man, was killed while trying to force entry, along with 3 others, into Ballygroman House, the home of Thomas Hornibrook.
Thomas Hornibrook, a 78-year-old widower and owner of Ballygroman House.
Samuel Wood Hornibrook aged about 45, Thomas’ unmarried son by his first marriage.
Herbert Woods, a nephew of Edward Woods, who was married to Matilda, daughter of Thomas Hornibrook by his second marriage.
In Dunmanway on the Wednesday night:
Francis Fitzmaurice, a 70-year-old solicitor and land agent, of Carbery House.
David Gray, aged 37, a chemist.
James Buttimer, aged 81, a retired draper.
In Ballineen/Enniskeane area on Thursday night:
Robert Howe, aged about 60, a farmer of Ballaghnure.
John Albert Chinnery, a 32-year-old farmer, of Castletown.
*Alexander McKinley, aged 17, of Ballineen.
John Buttimer, a 59-year-old farmer, of Caher.
James Greenfield, aged 45, a farm servant employed by John Buttimer.
In Clonakilty on Thursday night:
*Robert Nagle, aged 16, a night school student and post office assistant.
In Killowen area on Saturday night:
*John Bradfield, a 69-year-old farmer.
The Escapees and Survivors
In Dunmanway on Wednesday night:
William Fitzmaurice, brother of Francis Fitzmaurice.
James McCarthy, the publican whose pub was attacked.
William Jagoe, draper.
William Morrison, teacher.
George Applebee Bryan, shopkeeper.
Daniel Sullivan, a retired RIC man.
In Glandore on Thursday evening:
Arthur Stewart Travers.
In Skibbereen on Thursday night:
Jasper Travers Wolfe, aged 50, solicitor.
William Good Wood, aged 60, auctioneer.
In Ballineen/Enniskeane area on Thursday night:
Willie Daunt, aged 27, farmer and cattle dealer of Derrigra House, Ballineen.
Robert and Joseph Bennett of Ballineen, were not around when the killers called.
*Ralph Harbord, a 26-year-old curate of Murragh rectory, was seriously injured but survived.
William Buttimer, aged 22, farmer’s son, of Caher, west of Ballineen.
In Clonakilty area on Thursday night:
Thomas Nagle, aged 66, a bootmaker of Barrack Street, Clonakilty. When the gang could not find him, they shot his 16-year-old son instead.
William Perrott, a farmer near Clonakilty. A visit was paid to his property on Thursday night, but he had made himself scarce.
Richard Helen was kidnapped from O’Donovan’s Hotel, Clonakilty, on Thursday night, but escaped from his captors as they led him away.
In Killowen area on Saturday night:
William Bradfield, aged 53, was asked for but absent. The gang shot his crippled brother instead.
Henry Bradfield, aged 81, a cousin and neighbour, was also visited but was absent.
Thomas Bradfield, brother of the murdered John Bradfield, fled when his brother was killed. He returned a fortnight or so later, but received a death threat the same day and left for good that night.
Although there is no evidence of him being directly attacked, he could be considered potential victim number 30. With one brother killed and another targeted, there is a reasonable probability that Thomas too might have been on the list.
Notes
PREFACE
1 Patrick Buckland, Irish Unionism, Vol. 1, (Dublin, 1972), p.285.
2 Roy Foster, ‘Something to Hate’ in Irish Review, xxx (2003), p.5.
3 Marianne Elliott, When God Took Sides (Oxford, 2009), p.20.
4 Ibid., pp. 215–216.
5 R.B. McDowell, Crisis and Decline (Dublin, 1997), preface.
6 Richard Tillinghast, Finding Ireland (Indiana, 2008), p.23.
7 Charles Townshend, The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence, 1918–1923 (London, 2013), p.452.
8 McDowell, Crisis and Decline, p.136.
9 BBC Four, 16 December 2013.
CHAPTER 1
1 Census of Ireland 1926, Vol. III, table 1b, p.1.
2 Ibid., table 1a.
3 Patrick Buckland, Irish Unionism 1: The Anglo-Irish and the New Ireland 1885–1922 (Dublin, 1972), pp. 285–6.
4 Ibid., p.284.
5 Ibid., p.285.
6 Ibid.
7 Peter Hart, The IRA at War 1916–1923 (Oxford, 2003), p.223.
8 Ibid., p.240.
9 R.B. McDowell, Crisis and Decline, p.132.
10 Kent Fedorowich, ‘Reconstruction and Resettlement: The Politicization of Irish Migration to Australia and Canada, 1919–29’ in English Historical Review, November 1999.
11 Enda Delaney, Demography, State and Society: Irish Migration to Britain, 1921–1971 (Liverpool, 2000), p.72.
12 Hart, The IRA at War, p.226.
13 Delany, Demography, State and Society, p.72.
14 General Report of the 1926 Census, Vol. 10, p.47.
15 Kurt Bowen, Protestants in a Catholic State, p.35.
16 General Report of the 1926 Census, p.47.
17 Preliminary Report of the 1926 Census, p.7. However, it is not explained how this figure of 37 dependents per 100 men is arrived at for Dublin city.
18 Hart, The IRA at War, p.227, footnote 14.
19 Kevin Myers, Ireland’s Great War (Dublin, 2014), p.5.
20 J.J. Sexton and R. O’Leary, ‘Factors Affecting Population Decline in Minority Religious Communities in the Republic of Ireland’ in Building Trust in Ir
eland: Studies commissioned by the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation (Belfast, 1996), p.314.
21 Ibid.
22 For Ireland overall, the modern consensus lies between 27,000 and 40,000. K. Jeffery, Ireland and the Great War (Cambridge, 2000), pp.33, 35; J. Horne, ‘Our war, our history’, in J. Horne (ed.), Our War: Ireland and the Great War – the 2008 Thomas Davis Lecture Series (Dublin, 2008), pp.5, 6, estimates the number to lie between 27,000 and 35,000.
23 Ian d’Alton, paper given at the Parnell Summer School, 13 August 2014 entitled Sentiment, Duty, Money, Identity? Motivations for the Southern Protestant Involvement in Two World Wars.
24 Census of Ireland, Vol. X, Chapter 4, p.46. However, the figure of 12 per cent is high as it is arrived at by subtracting ALL people born outside Ireland to get a figure for native Protestants. There were Catholic British soldiers born outside Ireland, Scots in the 26 counties who were Catholics, and American-born Catholics.
25 Census of Ireland, Vol. III, table 1b, p.1.
26 Email from Ida Milne to the author on 21 January 2013.
27 Ida Milnes’ PhD thesis and subsequent email correspondence give a figure of 14,256 victims of flu in the 26 counties, so perhaps 10 per cent (this being the proportion of Protestants in the 26 counties in the 1911 census) died of flu.
28 Fitzpatrick, ‘Protestant depopulation and the Irish Revolution’ in Irish Historical Studies, November 2013, p.659.
29 Ibid.
30 Thanks to Donald Wood for drawing my attention to this in his email of 22 November 2016 when he referred to the Registrar General’s report, 1926.
31 The Irish Times, 7 February 2015.
32 Ibid.
33 R.B. McDowell wrote, ‘It is fair to say … that the pressure exercised on unionists … partly accounts for the striking fall in the Protestant population of the 26 counties between 1919 and 1923.’ Crisis and Decline, p.136. Fitzpatrick quotes McDowell instead as writing that the new government’s ‘direct discriminatory action against Protestants’ led to ‘voluntary’ emigration rather than involuntary emigration; this would have been after 1923. McDowell cites cases from the Irish Grants files in The National Archives at Kew of Protestants forced out by intimidation.
34 I am indebted to the independent researcher Don Wood for his analysis and questioning of David Fitzpatrick’s article, as well as the paragraphs above, which he emailed to me. He is currently writing about the Protestant decline in numbers.
35 Bowen, Protestants in a Catholic State, pp.30–31.
36 Miriam Moffitt, The Church of Ireland Community, p.54.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid.
39 Andrew Bielenberg, ‘Exodus: The Emigration of Southern Protestants During the Irish War of Independence’, Past and Present, 218, p.218.
40 Ibid., p.219.
41 Sexton and O’Leary, Building Trust in Ireland, p.301.
42 Enda Delaney, Demography, State and Society, p.72.
43 Ibid., p.73.
44 Prof. Walker delivered a paper on this subject in Trinity College, Dublin on 27 November 2013 and plans to publish his findings.
45 Bielenberg estimated the number of ‘involuntary Protestant emigrants was 2,000 to 16,000’, see ‘Exodus: The Emigration of Southern Irish Protestants During the Irish War of Independence and the Civil War’ in Oxford Journals Past and Present, 218:1 (February 2013), pp. 199–233.
46 Email from Don Wood to author, 10 November 2015.
47 Census of Ireland 1926, Vol. III, pp.8–9.
48 The Irish Times, 6 July 1923. This letter is one of a number in the letters pages of The Irish Times concerning the departure of Protestants. The debate was continued in The Cedar House Lounge Revolution website at http://cedarlounge.wordpress.com/2009/10/29/corks-bloody-secret-a-small-dispute/
49 W.E. Vaughan and A.J. Fitzpatrick (eds), Irish historical statistics: Population 1821–1971 (Dublin, 1978), pp. 67–71.
50 Ibid.
51 Bielenberg, Exodus, p.207.
52 Ibid., p.227.
53 Ibid.
54 David Fitzpatrick, Politics and Irish life 1913–1921 (Cork, 1998), p.40.
55 R.B. McDowell, Crisis and Decline (Dublin, 1997), p. 10.
56 The Irish Times, 15 February 1929.
57 Fergus Campbell, The Irish Establishment 1879–1914 (Oxford, 2009), p.299.
58 Ibid.
59 Hart, The IRA at War, p.3.
60 Lloyd George to Law, 12 Jan 1918, B.L., 82/8/4. House of Lords Record Office (Parliamentary Archives).
61 Peter Hart, The IRA and its Enemies (Oxford, 1998), pp.273–292.
62 Ibid., p.290.
63 Sexton and O’Leary, ‘Factors Affecting Population Decline in Minority Religious Communities in the Republic of Ireland’, p.263.
64 Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland (New York, 2005), p.229.
65 Church of Ireland Gazette, 7 September 1921.
66 J.B. Leslie (ed.), The Irish Church Directory and Year-Book for 1920 (Dublin, 1920); J.B. Leslie (ed.), The Irish Church Directory and Year-Book for 1930 (Dublin, 1930)
67 McDowell, Crisis and Decline, p.135.
68 Marcus Tanner, Ireland’s Holy Wars (London, 2003), p.312.
69 Richard English, Irish Freedom (London, 2006), p.296.
70 Dooley, The Decline of the Big House in Ireland (Dublin 2001), p.106.
71 Ibid., p.111.
72 Ibid., p.106.
73 Elliott, When God Took Sides, p.217.
74 The Irish Times, 10 May 1922.
75 McDowell, Crisis and Decline, p.132.
76 Morning Post, 26 January 1924.
77 R.B. McDowell, Crisis and Decline, p.139.
78 Dooley, The Decline of the Big House in Ireland, p.201.
79 Ibid., p.142.
80 Ibid., p.202.
81 Ibid., p.202.
82 R. Dudley to Lord Dunalley, 27 May 1923 (NLI, Dunalley papers, 29,810 (19).
83 McDowell, Crisis and Decline, p.148.
84 Dooley, The Decline of the Big House, p.205.
85 McDowell, Crisis and Decline, p.140.
86 Ibid., p.140.
87 Freeman’s Journal, 17 July 1924.
88 Letter from Wood-Renton to Cosgrave, 27 February 1926. F 19/2/26, NA Dublin.
89 F 19/2/26, NA Dublin.
90 Ibid.
91 Ibid.
92 Morning Post, 18 June 1925.
93 Ibid., pp.91–92.
94 Mr David Griffin of the Irish Architectural Archives (IAA) in Dublin advised me that he has been in touch with TNA in London, which believes that it may have copies of the Shaw-Renton Commission reports. The Shaw Scrapbook in the IAA contains some details of awards published in various editions of Iris Oifigiul. Fuller details are available in the National Library of Ireland.
95 David Fitzpatrick, Terror in Ireland 1916–1923 (Dublin, 2012). See No.6 - David Fitzpatrick, The Price of Balbriggan.
96 N. Brennan, ‘Southern Loyalists and the Irish Grants Committee, 1921–31’ in Irish Historical Studies, xxx, No. 119 (May 1997), p.407.
97 Ibid., p.150.
98 Ibid., p.151.
99 Brennan, A Political Minefield, p.414.
100 McDowell, Crisis and Decline, p.160.
101 Brennan, A Political Minefield, p.415.
102 McDowell, Crisis and Decline, p.160.
103 Brennan, A Political Minefield, p.417.
CHAPTER 2
1 Augustjein, Joost (ed.), The Irish Revolution 1913–23 (Palgrave, 2002), Historiography p.11.
2 Peter Hart, The IRA and its Enemies, p.308.
3 Tom Wall, ‘Getting Them Out, Southern Loyalists in the War of Independence’ (drb, Issue 9, Spring 2009) www.drb.ie/essays/getting-them-out - See more at: www.drb.ie/essays/a-house-built-on-sand#sthash.G53VpqEj.dpuf
4 Buckland, Irish Unionism, p.204.
5 TNA CO 762, 37, de Burgh.
6 Letter sent to me by Susan de Burgh in Vancouver.
7 CO 762, 37, de Burgh.
8
Email from Susan de Burgh, 9 October, 2007.
9 CO 762, 37, de Burgh.
10 Email from Susan de Burgh, 9 October, 2007.
11 Buckland, Irish Unionism, p.202. Buckland gives many other examples of outrages committed against Protestants in pp.202–203.
12 Ibid., p.202.
13 Ibid., p.203.
14 Ibid., p.204.
15 PRONI 989A/8/23
16 Buckland, Irish Unionism, p.206.
17 Delaney, Demography,State and Society, p.73.
18 Hart, The IRA and its Enemies, p.304.
19 Ibid., pp. 313–314. Hart lists 15 cases in the reports of the IGC TNA CO 762. I found further cases of Protestants who had nervous breakdowns in IGC reports from Co.Tipperary claimants. The majority were women.
20 James S. Donnelly Jr, Big House Burnings in County Cork during the Irish Revolution, 1920–21. In Éire–Ireland 47: 3&4 Fall/Win 12.
21 Cork Examiner, 2 June 2001.
22 Donnelly, Big House Burnings, p.178.
23 Tom Barry, Guerrilla Days, p.14.
24 Ibid., p.214.
25 David Leeson, The Black and Tans: British Police and Auxiliaries in the Irish War of Independence, 1920–1921 (Oxford University Press, 2011).
26 Buckland, Irish Unionism, p.214.
27 James Donnelly, Big House Burnings in Éire-Ireland 47: 3&4 Fall/Win 12 p.182.
28 James S. Donnelly Jr, The House Burnings in County Cork during the Irish Revolution, 1920–21 Éire-Ireland 47:3 & 4 Fall/Win 12 p. 182.
29 TNA CO 904/196
30 Hart, Unionism in Modern Ireland, p.92.
31 Lionel Fleming, Head or Harp (London, 1965).
32 Ibid., pp.67–68.
33 TNA CO 762 32, Good.
34 Ibid.
35 Hart, The IRA and its Enemies, pp.273–292.