Killings of 13 Protestants in west Cork in 1922 were sectarian acts, say descendents of victims

The Government has been urged to publicly declare that the killings of 13 Protestants and the attempted murder of 20 more between the War of Independence and the Civil War were sectarian acts committed by elements of the west Cork IRA.

The call was made by a delegation from the Dunmanway Discussion Group (DDG), which met Department of Foreign Affairs officials in Iveagh House in Dublin.

The killings in April 1922 came after a local IRA leader, Michael O’Neill, was shot dead by Herbert Woods after O’Neill and his men had attacked the home of Samuel and Thomas Hornibrook near Killumney, Cork, searching, it is said, for weapons.

Controversy has surrounded the killings for decades, with some of the families of the dead arguing that that the victims were singled out solely because they were Protestants, a view supported in the 1990s by Canadian historian the late Peter Hart.

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Others, however, have argued that the killings were not sectarian, but that they could be explained because a number of those who were killed had allegedly passed on information to the British forces during the War of Independence, even after it had ended in July 1921.

Following Tuesday’s meeting, the DDG said the Government should issue a “belated” statement “recognising unequivocally” that the Bandon Valley killings were “sectarian acts perpetrated by elements of the IRA”.

Such a statement would “end decades of ill-informed speculation, misrepresentation and disinformation about the motives of the perpetrators of the massacre and about their victims’ political affiliations”.

“Silence and obfuscation have only served to prolong hurt among the descendants of victims, and to obscure the true nature of the crimes,” the group declared in a statement.

Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin told the West Cork History Festival last year that “we keep missing opportunities to engage and to work together to benefit all of the communities on this island”, the group said.

The DDG was established in April 2022 by descendants of the victims, and their supporters, after the killings were not included in the Decade of Centenaries commemorations.

Last year, historian Brian Walker said the killings had been removed from history for decades, including from the Church of Ireland’s own history until the “silence was broken” by Peter Hart.

In recent decades, it has been argued that the Protestants were attacked because they had passed on information to the British authorities of the time, or that they had been involved in an “anti-Sinn Féin/IRA society”. However, those charges were not made at the time by anyone, Prof Walker said.

The Bandon Valley killings have attracted “a surge of interest” since the anniversary passed, and “no serious historian” has disputed Prof Walker’s conclusions, which are supported by Ellen McWilliams’s book Resting Places: On Wounds, War and the Irish Revolution, the group claimed.

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