Sir, – A recent letter (February 12th) has drawn attention to the ongoing debate about the Bandon Valley murders of 13 Protestants in April 1922. Given the mention of my work on the subject, I wish to state my own findings, which differ from those of the other historians in the letter.
I believe that it is helpful to look at what people said in 1922 and also at what they did not say. These murders were condemned strongly by church and political leaders. At the same time, while claims have surfaced in recent years that some of the victims were targeted because they had assisted crown forces or had been informers, I have not come across anyone who said this in 1922.
No comments or speeches about these events, as recorded in the press, made such allegations. For some, these claims would have explained or even excused the murders. To the contrary, at a meeting of Bandon District Council, May 6th, Cllr Timothy Murphy stated how some of the victims had “sheltered men from the fury of the British forces”.
How then are these killings to be explained? Contemporary opinion understood them as reprisals. Reprisals were a nasty feature of the revolutionary period. Innocent members of a community were targeted because of the actions of other members of their perceived community. This was guilt by association.
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There were other gruesome sectarian reprisals during 1922. On March 24th, 1922, in Belfast six members of the Catholic McMahon family were murdered by police in disguise, in reprisal for the death of two Ulster Special Constabulary members. On June 17th, 1922, in reprisal for the death of two Catholics in South Armagh, six Presbyterian civilians were murdered at Altnaveigh near Newry by members of the fourth northern division of the IRA, based in Dundalk.
Events in the north impacted on the south at this time. The press carried many reports of northern violence, especially attacks on Catholics in Belfast. An Irish Independent article on April 26th was headed “Sad plight of Belfast Catholics – 350 homeless families”. Sectarian attacks in the north would lead to sectarian reprisals in West Cork. This background helps to explain the Dunmanway murders.
The initial spark for the violence was the shooting dead of IRA Commandant Michael O’Neill early in the morning of Tuesday, April 26th, when he tried to break into the Hornibrook family home at Ballygroman House, Ovens. This led to the death of the three Protestant members of the household by the IRA. Their bodies were buried secretly and their whereabouts are still unknown today.
Over the next four days there followed attacks by IRA members on nearly 30 victims in Dunmanway and district, leaving 10 dead, all Protestants. At the time these attacks and murders were widely viewed as sectarian reprisals for murders in the north.
On Sunday, April 30th, Daniel Cohalan, Catholic bishop of Cork, deplored “these awful murders” and asked: “Where would they find themselves if in the north Protestants continued murdering members of the Catholic community and in the south Catholics took reprisals on the Protestant community”.
That same day in Longford, Eamon de Valera condemned the murders and warned against the danger of “reprisals on the minority in the south for what was happening to Roman Catholics in Belfast”. He urged people: “Let them if necessary carry on a crusade in the north in defence of their brothers . . . but do not carry out reprisals on the Protestant community”.
Erskine Childers, in the May 1922 anti-Treaty Poblacht na hÉireann, denounced the “brutal murders of Protestants in County Cork”. He wrote: ‘We do not forget the provocation . . . massacres such as that of the McMahon family . . . But nothing . . . can justify this horrible episode”. Childers then declared: “Sectarian crime is the foulest crime, and is regarded as such in the tradition of our people, for it violates not only every Christian principle but the very basis of nationality as well”.
On May 12th, a Church of Ireland deputation met Michael Collins in Dublin in Dublin in order to seek assurance for their future, after the Cork murders and other violent incidents against the Protestant community. Collins gave them assurance and then stated that “it was obvious that the revolting murders in Belfast had an effect on the current situation: but the Belfast massacres could not be considered any justification for the outrages to which the deputation had alluded”.
From such statements, largely ignored in some recent coverage of these events, it is reasonable to argue that the attacks in West Cork in April 1922, sparked off by O’Neill’s death, were reprisals by elements of the IRA for attacks in the North. No-one was ever charged or convicted of these offences.
Childers explicitly condemned the Cork murders as sectarian.
The fact that all the Dunmanway dead were Protestants confirms this view. Through no fault of their own, innocent Dunmanway Protestants were targeted because of their perceived association with northern Protestants and events in the North.
At the time these murders were condemned strongly, without any qualification or excuse. We should remember this today. – Yours, etc,
Professor Emeritus
BRIAN M WALKER,
Belfast.