Dunmanway killings

Political context

The Irish War of Independence was brought to an end by negotiations in mid-1921. The truce between British Forces and the IRA came into effect on 11 July 1921, after talks between the British and

On 26 March 1922, part of the IRA repudiated the authority of the Provisional Government on the basis that it had accepted the Treaty and disestablished the Irish Republic declared in 1919. April saw the first armed clashes between pro and anti-Treaty IRA units, including the anti-Treaty occupation of the Four Courts in Dublin, the killing of a pro-Treaty IRA officer in Athlone and a gun attack on government buildings in Dublin.^[23][24] According to historian Michael Hopkinson, "the transitional [Free State] government lacked the resources and the necessary acceptance to supply effective government".^[25] In this situation, some IRA anti-Treaty units continued attacks on the remaining British forces. Between December 1921 and February 1922, there were 80 recorded attacks by IRA elements on the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), leaving 12 dead.^[26] Between January and June 1922, twenty-three RIC men, eight British soldiers and eighteen civilians were killed in West Cork, part of the area which would become the Irish Free State.^[27]

In County Cork

West Cork, where these killings took place, had been one of the most violent parts of Ireland during the

Paul McMahon wrote that the British Government had authorised £2,000 to re-establish intelligence in southern Ireland, especially in Cork, in early April 1922. On 26 April, the day after the raid on Hornibrook home, three British intelligence officers (Lts Hendy, Drove and Henderson) and a driver drove to Macroom with the intention of gathering intelligence in west Cork, where they entered an inn. There, the officers were drugged and taken prisoner by IRA men, taken out of the country to Kilgobnet and then shot and their bodies dumped.^{[citation needed]}

In Dunmanway

In Dunmanway itself, a company of the Auxiliary Division evacuated their barracks in the workhouse.^[39] The IRA found confidential documents and a diary they left behind: these included a list of names. The information – according to historian Meda Ryan – was so precise "only a very well informed spy system could account for some of the entries in the book". Flor Crowley, who analysed the diary, said "it was the work of a man who had many useful 'contacts' not merely in one part of the area but all over it." The list, however, did not contain any of the names of the Protestants killed.^[40]

The IRA's Third Cork Brigade had killed 15 informers between 1919 and 1921, according to

On 26 April 1922, a group of anti-Treaty IRA men, led by Michael O'Neill, arrived at the house of Thomas Hornibrook, a former magistrate, at Ballygroman, East Muskerry, Desertmore, Bandon (near Ballincollig on the outskirts of Cork City), seeking to seize his car. Hornibrook was in the house at the time along with his son, Samuel, and his nephew, Herbert Woods (a former Captain in the British Army and MC).^[43] O'Neill demanded a part of the engine mechanism (the magneto) that had been removed by Thomas Hornibrook to prevent such theft. Hornibrook refused to give them the part, and after further efforts, some of the IRA party entered through a window. Herbert Woods then shot O'Neill, wounding him fatally. O'Neill's companion, Charlie O'Donoghue, took him to a local priest who pronounced him dead. The next morning O'Donoghue left for Bandon to report the incident to his superiors, returning with "four military men", meeting with the Hornibrooks and Woods, who admitted to shooting O'Neill.^[44][45]

A local jury found Woods responsible and said O'Neill had been "brutally murdered in the execution of his duty". O'Donoghue and Stephen O'Neill, who were present on the night of the killing, both attended the inquest.

On 13 April, Michael Collins had complained about British newspaper reports on attacks against Protestants in Ireland to Desmond Fitzgerald. Collins said that while some of the coverage was "fair newspaper comment", the "strain of certain parts is very objectionable".^[48] Alice Hodder, a local Protestant from Crosshaven some 23 miles to the southeast, wrote to her mother shortly afterwards about Herbert Woods,

His aunt and uncle had been subject to a lot of persecution and feared an attack, so young Woods went to stay with them. At 2:30 am armed men ... broke in ... Woods fired on the leader and shot him ... They caught Woods, tried him by mock court martial and sentenced him to be hanged ... The brothers of the murdered man then gouged out his eyes while he was alive and then hanged him ... When will the British Government realise that they are really dealing with savages and not ordinary normal human beings?

The letter was forwarded to Lionel Curtis, Secretary of the Cabinet's Irish Committee, on which he appended the comment "this is rather obsolete".

Over the next two days, ten Protestant men were shot dead in the Dunmanway, Ballineen and Murragh area. In Dunmanway on 27 April, Francis Fitzmaurice (a solicitor and land agent) was shot dead. That same night, David Gray (a chemist) and James Buttimer (a retired draper) were shot in the doorways of their homes in Dunmanway. The next evening, 28 April, in the parish of Kinneigh, Robert Howe and John Chinnery were both shot dead. In the nearby village of Ballineen, sixteen-year-old Alexander McKinley was shot dead in his home.[50]

In Murragh, Reverend Ralph Harbord was shot in the leg but survived; he was the son of Rev. Richard C.M. Harbord, also from the Murragh area, who was the target for his connections to the supposed Loyalist Action Group or Protestant Action Group.^[3] Later, west of Ballineen, John Buttimer and his farm employee, Jim Greenfield, were both shot dead.^[51] The same night, sixteen-year-old Robert Nagle was shot dead in his home on MacCurtain Hill in Clonakilty, ten miles south. Nagle had been shot in place of his father Thomas, caretaker of the Masonic Hall in Clonakilty whose name was on an IRA list of enemy agents and who had gone into hiding, along with Alexander McKinley's uncle.^[42][52] John Bradfield was shot in place of his brother Henry.^[53] Henry Bradfield had been "wanted" by the IRA as they believed he had been providing information leading to IRA "arrests, torture and deaths".^[42]

Aftermath

According to Niall Harrington – a Pro-Treaty IRA officer at the time – more than 100 Protestant families fled West Cork in the aftermath of the killings.^[36] Alice Hodder in the same letter cited above wrote:

For two weeks there wasn't standing room on any of the boats or mail trains leaving Cork for England. All loyalist refugees who were either fleeing in terror or had been ordered out of the country ... none of the people who did these things, though they were reported as the rebel IRA faction, were ever brought to book by the Provisional Government.^[54]

One Cork correspondent for The Irish Times who saw those who had left go through the city noted that, "so hurried was their flight that many had neither a handbag nor an overcoat."^[55] Hodder reported that Protestants in the area were being forcibly evicted from their farms by republicans on behalf of the Irish Transport Union, on the basis that they were bringing down wages, although she conceded that the local Pro-Treaty IRA reinstated them after it was informed.^[54] Tom Hales, Commandant of O'Neill's Brigade (3rd Cork), ordered that all arms be brought under control while issuing a statement promising that "all citizens in this area, irrespective of creed or class, every protection within my power."^[2][14]

Speaking immediately afterwards, anti-treaty TD

The Belfast News-Letter on 28 April under the headline "Protestants Slain" spoke of "ghastly crimes of the night" and the existence of an appalling state of affairs in the south and west Cork area "where a general massacre of Protestants appears to be in progress". The Northern Whig on 1 May wrote that "it is a matter of notoriety that the murders, far from being unprecedented, are only the last in a long series which began as far back as 1641."[59] Local Cork IRA commanders Tom Barry, Liam Deasy and Seán Moylan, returned to the county and ordered that armed guards be put at the homes of Protestants to prevent further violence.^[14] Barry, who had returned immediately from Dublin upon hearing of the killings, ensured that some of those who attempted to take advantage of the situation by stealing livestock owned by Protestants were firmly discouraged.^[60]

Responsibility

Recent evidence confirms that the killings were carried out by the IRA even if it is not clear who precisely ordered their execution as no member ever claimed responsibility.^[61] Historian Peter Hart has written that the killers were identified by several eyewitness sources as local IRA men.^[9] Hart concludes that from two to five separate groups must have done the killing, and writes that they were likely "acting on their own initiative – but with the connivance or acquiescence of local units".^[9] Hart's analysis of the identity of the killers has been challenged by other historians, including Rev. Brian Murphy (OSB), Niall Meehan and John Borgonovo.^[62][63]

Hart reported that Clarina Buttimer, a relative of one of those killed (James Buttimer), based on newspaper reports and her 1927 Irish Grants Committee statement, "seem[ed] to have recognised at least one of her husband's attackers". Meehan pointed out that these newspapers reported Buttimer as asserting, "Though there were a number of men there, she only saw one, whom she did not recognise", and that her Grants Committee statement was similar. Meehan wrote that Frank Busteed, the person identified and later omitted without explanation, would have undermined Hart's sectarianism thesis as Busteed, although raised by his Catholic nationalist mother, had a Protestant father.^[62]

John Borgonovo in Spies, informers and the 'Anti-Sinn Féin Society', the Intelligence War in Cork City, 1920–21, comments that Hart could "not offer any evidence of the IRA's motivations" for the killings of suspected informers in Cork other than their occupation.^[63] Meehan notes Borgonovo's detailed analysis of the IRA in Cork, and that Borgonovo disagreed profoundly with Hart's discounting the IRA's intelligence-gathering capability.^[62] Borgonovo described it as "irresponsible" of Hart to discount IRA claims of the Dunmanway victims' guilt in the killing of suspected or known informers without offering an analysis of IRA intelligence-gathering operations.^[62][63] Commenting on Hart's work on the IRA in Cork, he wrote that "While Dr. Hart's conclusions can be suspected, I do not believe they can be sufficiently documented."^[62][63]

At the time the press, including the

The motive(s) for the targeting of the victims also remains a point of contention. Niall Meehan and Rev. Brian P. Murphy (OSB) have each written that the victims were killed because they were informers on behalf of Crown forces, citing an intelligence diary left by Auxiliaries as they evacuated Dunmanway, however the diary contains none of the names of the thirteen murdered men.[68] In 2013, that list was located in the Florence Begley collection in the Bureau of Military History.^[69]

Hart posits these were primarily revenge killings, perpetrated without a clear rationale by "angry and frightened young men acting on impulse".^[66] He suggests the targets were local Protestant men whose status as enemies in the eyes of the killers was codified in "political language of the day ... landlord, landgrabber, loyalist, imperialist, Orangeman, Freemason, Free Stater, spy, and informer" and continues, "these blanket categories made the victims' individual identities ... irrelevant."^[66] Coogan concurred, writing, "the latent sectarianism of centuries of ballads and landlordism claimed ten Protestant lives" that week.^[70]

Ryan claims, by way of justification, that all of those killed were described as "committed loyalists" and "extremely anti-Republican". She says that they had been in contact with the Essex Regiment based in Bandon during the conflict, supplying information on the local IRA and that it was "firmly established" later that Fitzmaurice and Gray had been informers, and that their information had done a great deal of damage to the IRA.^[42] In Gray's case—as a woman ^[who?] who had been a ten-year-old girl during the Troubles told Ryan—he had allegedly sought out "information from children in their innocence", hence children were warned against talking to him.^[71] According to Ryan, Fitzmaurice, Gray, Buttimer, and Harbord were associated with the above-mentioned Loyalist Action Group, based in Murragh and known locally as the Protestant Action Group, and that all four were involved in espionage.^[72] Ryan claimed to have seen, during a 1981 interview with a surviving Cork IRA flying column volunteer named Dan Cahalane, all thirteen names of the Dunmanway victims listed as "helpful citizens" in Auxiliaries' documents found by republicans after the departure of the British forces from southern Ireland.^[42][73]

Hart writes that the term informer was used as a form of "generic abuse" and found "no evidence whatsoever" that they had been active in opposing the IRA.^[74] Meehan writes that the killings were not "motivated by either land agitation or by sectarian considerations".^[68] Rev. Murphy agrees, citing a British document, A Record of the Rebellion in Ireland in 1920–1921.^[62][75] Meehan and Rev. Murphy conclude "the IRA killings in the Bandon area were motivated by political and not sectarian considerations. Possibly, military considerations, rather than political, would have been a more fitting way to describe the reason for the IRA response to those who informed."^[62][76] because:

[T]he truth was that, as British intelligence officers recognised in the south, the Protestants and those who supported the [UK] Government rarely gave much information because, except by chance, they had not got it to give. An exception to this was in the Bandon area where many Protestant farmers gave information. Although the Intelligence Officer of the area was exceptionally experienced and although the troops were most active it proved almost impossible to protect those brave men, many of whom were murdered while almost all the remainder suffered grave material loss.

Most recently, historian John Regan, in his paper, The Bandon Valley Massacre Revisited, argued that the killings might be best understood in light of purported IRA fears that the British were planning a reoccupation of the south of Ireland and was a preemptive move against people believed to have been informers. Regan argued that the selective use of evidence by Peter Hart in an attempt to emphasize a sectarian dimension to the killings highlights a wider problem in the politicization of Irish history.^[77][78]

TV programme on RTÉ

Cork's Bloody Secret, shown on RTÉ on 5 October 2009, dealt with the Dunmanway killings. The programme was produced by Sean O Mealoid, and included interviews with two descendants of two of the Protestants executed.^[79] It included a dialogue between two local historians, Donald Woods and Colum Cronin, and featured Prof. John A. Murphy and Eoghan Harris (who later debated the issue in the Irish Times), alongside UCC historian Andy Bielenberg.^[80]

Notes