Sir, – Tim Pat Coogan (November 16th), author of influential "revisionist" biographies of de Valera and Michael Collins, is quite right to take me to task regarding my misstatement relating to his account of the assassinated magistrate Alan Bell in my review of The Twelve Apostles (October 15th).
Apart from that, I stand over my comments. Coogan says he did use the military service pension records. But how is a reader (or a reviewer) to know, as he no longer provides any footnotes, and he doesn’t list the pensions records in his brief “A Note on Sources”?
Coogan asserts that I believe that archives are only for academics. This is patent nonsense. I lobbied for the release of both the Bureau of Military History witness statements and the pensions records on the explicit basis that, as I wrote in 2012, they "constitute an astonishingly powerful and widely accessible means by which individuals, families, communities and localities can explore their particular histories within the wider context of the independence era"(Guide to the Military Service (1916-1923) Pensions Collection, page 151, accessible via www.militaryarchives.ie). – Yours, etc,
Prof EUNAN O’HALPIN,
Trinity College,
Dublin 2.