Sir, – My normal method of dealing with reviews of my books is not to read them until after the hardback and the American or paperback editions have appeared. However, having been shown a copy of Eunan O'Halpin's October 15th "review" of my latest book, The Twelve Apostles, I am driven to lay aside my normal custom in order to set the record straight.
O'Halpin wrongly claims that I brush aside " most historical scholarship on the War of Independence", thus providing The Irish Times with the misleading headline over his comments, "Ireland's best-known historical writer brushes aside scholarship in an uncritical narrative of the War of Independence and Civil War".
From his review, it would appear that O’Halpin bases this judgment on the fact that I did not advert to some research of his which refers to the fact that a British undercover murder gang was suggested by a secret committee which “included the experienced magistrate Alan Bell, himself assassinated on Merrion Road”.
Bell, he writes, “incidentally was not only enquiring into Dáil Éireann finances as Coogan reports, but also investigating the attempted assassination of the viceroy, Lord French, in December 1919. This is clear from his notebook, which has been available for decades. Has Coogan consulted it or other intelligence material in British records?”
Had O’Halpin read my book with due diligence, he would have found the answer to this question on page 133.
Here I point out that in addition to tracking Collins’s loan-raising efforts, Bell served on an intelligence committee with Sir John French, and headed another grouping which was responsible for several raids. I point out that he also reported directly to Sir Basil Thompson the head of British intelligence, so that these raids sometimes had fatal outcomes.
As I point out, Bell’s security committee recommended that Sinn Féin “be infiltrated with spies and some selected leaders assassinated”.
O'Halpin also makes the assertion that I perpetuated a "canard" in stating that the late Peter Hart "claimed to have interviewed a man already dead about the Kilmichael ambush". The Hart comment was not "a canard". It is a factual statement based on the painstaking research of Meda Ryan, which was amply publicised in, among other places, the letters page of The Irish Times.
O’Halpin falsely gives the impression that I did not consult the pension records, now online, of the squad members and that I did not give due weight to the effects of post-traumatic stress on the squad.
He bolsters this assertion by stating that the pension records indicate that Mick McDonnell had very severe nervous breakdowns. “McDonnell’s medical travails, and his dispatch for treatment to the United States by Michael Collins, were publicly discussed in the Oireachtas as early as 1925, yet Coogan simply says that, after 1921, he prospered in California”.
The last section of my book deals in grim detail with the effects of post-traumatic stress on the Squad, both in their behaviour, both under the supposed control of Oriel House in Dublin, and in the appalling series of events in Kerry in the Civil War.
As to McDonnell, O’Halpin failed to note that on page 143 I describe in some detail how the shock of a comrade’s death, “combined with McDonnell’s marital problems, brought on a temporary nervous breakdown. Tom Keogh’s method of dealing with this potential security risk was to take his gun and, accompanied by Vinny Byrne, go to the Phoenix Park, a favourite spot for lovers, in an unsuccessful search for this ‘Jezebel’ whom he would certainly have shot had he have found her. Collins solved the problem by having McDonnell safely spirited to the United States.”
O’Halpin, along with the lacuna cited above, either missed or chose to ignore the fact that I described McDonnell’s subsequent career in the United States and his association with the McEnery family (page 300).
He talks about the need to bestow “critical analysis” on historical sources. Decoded, this means to leave consultation of archives to people like himself.
Irish history would suffer even more grievously than it has from revisionist historians if this were to be the case.
His viewpoint may fairly be judged by his references to two figures of the Squad era, Dan Breen and Vinny Byrne. Breen, O’Halpin avers, ended up “an embittered wreck” convinced that his services had not been properly recognised by the Irish State, and Byrne he dismisses as a “garrulous braggart”.
I interviewed both of these men, and I can only describe O’Halpin’s description as a gross slur on both men.
But how could it be otherwise, the intrinsic closed-shop caste of O’Halpin’s mind is perfectly illustrated in this statement of his: “Those aspiring to write authoritative history must produce and contextualise their evidence, and indicate where others can find and check all the material that they have cited. On the other hand, journalists are schooled generally not to reveal their sources, while balladeers and poets need no footnotes.”
Journalists in fact are schooled to check their sources. In the pages whose numbers I have cited above, readers, and even O’Halpin himself, should he deign to descend from his ivory tower, “can find and check all the material cited”. – Yours, etc,
TIM PAT COOGAN,
Dalkey,
Co Dublin.