A historian who challenged the late Dr Peter Hart over his controversial thesis that the IRA engaged in sectarian killings in West Cork, will give the General Liam Lynch oration in Fermoy on Sunday.
Dr Brian P Murphy took strong issue with Dr Hart's contention that the killing of 13 Protestant men in Dunmanway and the Bandon Valley in April 1922, after the Truce, was sectarian.
In his book ‘The IRA and Its Enemies - Violence and Community in Cork 1916-1923’, Dr Hart concluded that the primary motivation behind the killings of the 13 men was sectarian.
“Behind the shootings lay a jumble of individual histories and possible motives. In the end however, the fact of the victim’s religion is inescapable. These men were shot because they were Protestant.”
“The sectarian antagonism which drove the massacre was interwoven with political hysteria and local vendettas, but it was sectarian nonetheless,” wrote Dr Hart who died in 2010.
But Dr Murphy disputed this, arguing that Dr Hart relied on a selective interpretation of a British army document which reported on loyalists providing intelligence to the British.
Dr Murphy pointed out 'The Record of the Rebellion in Ireland 1920-21', stated that generally loyalists had little information to give on IRA activities during the War of Independence.
But he added the document did note that there was an exception to this pattern “in the Bandon area, where there were many Protestant farmers who gave information” and Dr Hart ignored this.
The author of "The Origins and Organisation of British Propaganda in Ireland", Dr Murphy will deliver the annual General Liam Lynch oration at Kilcrumper Cemetery near Fermoy at 12.30pm on Sunday.
