In an article ("The IRA's `cultural murder' at the Four Courts, 1922") published in The Irish Times on May 18th, Prof Tom Garvin makes the interesting observation that "historical misinformation is rather like a computer virus. Once a `story' becomes a `fact' it becomes well-nigh impossible to eradicate it from the historical record." He then proceeds to offer us several such "stories" and curious inferences as fact.
He states categorically that "the IRA, a group which was clearly neither republican nor an army, engineered the destruction of the Public Records Office in the Four Courts, and did so knowingly and with malicious intent in June 1922". Some lines further on, nevertheless, he defines the fact of Ernie O'Malley of the Four Courts garrison not specifically accepting responsibility for the explosion in the Records Office as "a perfect example of a republican lie of silence"!
It was in fact an element of the republican Army Executive which was in the Four Courts, not some amorphous IRA "neither republican nor an army".
Prof Garvin offers no proof for his statements that the Four Courts garrison "engineered the destruction of the Public Records Office with malicious intent", nor does he clarify the circumstances leading up to the attack on the Four Courts other than with an oblique reference that "partly because of British pressure following the assassination of Field Marshal Wilson on the orders of Collins, the Provisional, or nascent `Free State' government began shelling the Four Courts complex". That shelling introduced a war situation.
If I read his article correctly, Prof Garvin bases his thesis of "cultural murder" on the fact that Rory O'Connor was employed by Dublin Corporation and had, he maintains, been "apprised" by the Society of Antiquaries that the entire social history of the country for the previous two centuries was "in his care".
One must ask if the Provisional Government and its forces, particularly Commdts Ennis and Dalton who shelled the Four Courts, were also so "apprised" of their care before they began the shelling?
Prof Garvin makes the statement: "The enormous cultural loss to the Irish nation perpetrated by this extraordinary act of cultural destruction can never be reversed; effectively it constituted an attempt to murder the nation as a collective entity with a collective memory."
Of course the question is whether the responsibility lay with those fired on, or with those who did the shelling? Or was it, perhaps, something other?
Republican apologists, then and now, would no doubt argue that the "murder" - to use Prof Garvin's own word - by the pro-Treaty authorities of the Republic to which they had sworn allegiance was much more serious.
Prof Garvin also equates the contemporary Provisional IRA with the minority group of the Army Executive in the Four Courts in 1922 - a very generous leap of historical imagination. To further drive his point home, he equates them with the Nazis too - the Right, Left and Centre of historical computer bugging, perhaps?
A question not nowadays much asked is: why did the Provisional Government forces attack the Army Executive forces in the Four Courts and precipitate the Civil War?
Prof Garvin creates the impression that those opposed to the Treaty, political and military, recklessly plunged the country into civil war without rhyme or reason. In fact the Civil War began when, under threat from Britain that if they did not do it they'd come and do it themselves (orders were in fact issued for that purpose), the Provisional Government attacked the Four Courts, thus starting the war that lasted until April 1923.
It would be well if historians hitherto seen to be partisan and committed would, at this stage, re-examine those commitments and consider if, after all, the anti-Treatyites, no less than their opponents, may not have had legitimate reason and purpose.
Undoubtedly, in the unlikely event of the Executive forces having won the Civil War (or, more likely, the anti-Treaty element of Sinn Fein having won the vote in the Dail - or, indeed, had the Collins-de Valera Pact been given the chance it deserved), the boot might well have been on the other foot.
When my book, The Civil War, 1922-23, was first published in 1966, I wrote in the foreword: "Partisanship has been deliberately avoided . . . A certain romantic sympathy with the anti-Treaty party, very evident nowadays . . . had to be guarded against". Times change. So does "historical misinformation".
The facts of history should not be confused with, or distorted by, "historical computer viruses", new or old. They deserve better. If I may be allowed to refer again to The Civil War, in the introduction it says: "How men (and women), who had just spent four years as comrades in arms, fighting side by side against the British, came to turn their guns on each other, succeeding generations are entitled to ask and to be told." They do not want "historical misinformation" such as, I'm afraid, is all too readily available from what should be authoritative sources.
My recent book, Birth of a Republic, deals with these and other questions in an up-to-date and non-partisan way.
