Madam, – I wish to make a few observations on your review of my book, The Year of Disappearances, Political Killings in Cork 1921-1922 (Weekend Review, December 11th). It seems that your reviewer, Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid, believes I put too much detail in the book. However, when I went public with this material I knew it would be very controversial. Therefore, I felt it imperative that I lay it all out and let the reader make up his or her own mind on the various strands of the story.
If that leads to a “dizzying number of possibilities”, as your reviewer noted, then so be it. At least all the evidence that I could find is now out there. Far from being a “confusing muddle”, the findings of the book are only all too clear.
There are a few details that need to be addressed: She asks who comprised the “Anti-Sinn Féin League”, if it truly existed, and suggests I “passed over” this issue in the book. The “Anti-Sinn Féin League” certainly did exist and it consisted of undercover British officers and ex-officers, a “murder gang of renegade Auxiliaries”, if you like, who carried out unofficial killings in Cork and elsewhere. I devote six chapters to this very topic – some of these gentlemen are named and their careers described. I don’t think it’s fair to say I passed over the subject. Most of this material is new but I get no credit for it. The important point is that when Cork city IRA men say they shot members of this “League” they invariably refer to Cork Protestants, rather than military men. The implication is clear enough: an “Anti-Sinn Féin Society” consisting of renegade British officers carried out assassinations in Cork during 1920/21. But IRA men then used this as a blanket term to cover their own shootings of Protestants in the post-Truce period.
A more important point is the faint praise she gives me for identifying the migration of Protestants from the south eastern suburbs of Cork city “after 1923” with the suggestion that it fits into the “larger narrative of southern Protestant migration” from other parts of Ireland. However, as my book clearly points out, the exodus from Cork city took place in 1922 and Cork city Protestants were largely safe after 1923, if they made it that far. This is a subtle but important distinction.
Implying that this was mere “migration” is to duck the issue of the terror that forced these people to flee in the spring and summer of 1922. And it is no coincidence that they fled the areas where the most prominent IRA leaders were living – the killings and abductions along the Blackrock Road are evidence enough of that. Other areas of the city were largely untouched. The fact that people were putting their 10-year-old sons on the mail boat for England because it was too dangerous for them to remain in Cork says it all.
Since its publication, The Year of Disappearances has been subject to a concerted campaign of vilification via the internet in an effort to discredit it. One of the main planks of this campaign is that the book is a work of fiction. If it were a work of fiction, or if it were poorly researched and badly written, as Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid implies, then there would be no need for such a campaign.– Yours, etc,