Madam, – Gerard Murphy objected to your reviewer considering his The Year of Disappearances a “confusing muddle” (December 11th, January 6th). His book alleges that republican forces in Cork city in 1921 targeted uninvolved Protestants. It is in the loose tradition of the “Ulsterisation” of the Irish War of Independence, one in which republican forces are portrayed as sectarian. It emerged from TCD’s history department in the 1990s.
Many of Mr Murphy’s disappeared victims are unnamed. They have no known prior existence. No relatives searched for them and no one cried wolf. In Mr Murphy’s view this is because southern Protestants acted like sheep.
In fact, southern Protestants spoke out. Ulster unionist propaganda rationalised sectarian attacks on northern Catholics on the basis that southern Protestants got it in the neck too. Representative southern Protestants, including unionists, spoke plainly, publicly and often to reject these allegations. Evidence is required to counter this Protestant view. Phantoms will not do.
Mr Murphy speculates that Josephine O’Donoghue, wife of IRA head of intelligence in Cork, Florence O’Donoghue, and a spy in her own right, abducted (even drowned) Protestant teenagers in 1921. One such speculative instance is sourced by Mr Murphy in the Times of London (May 18th, 1921). A “mysterious individual in a motor car” reportedly abducted “somebody’s child” near Cork city “on a calm Spring evening”.
I checked the reference. It is not an eyewitness report of the alleged abduction, it is not by a regular Times reporter and the date of the event was, as I later discovered, some weeks before May 18th (therefore before Mr Murphy’s assumed time-line). The article contains little concrete information and nothing as to the religion of the unnamed child. It was within the second of a five-part Times series entitled, “An English Officer’s Impressions”. Interestingly, the anonymous officer later published the series as A Journey through Ireland (1922, republished in 2008). For what it is worth, that book expanded on the Times account. As Wilfrid Ewart (the author) passed an agitated group he overheard a description of Mr Murphy’s “mysterious individual” as “some bastard of an Englishman”.
Nothing links the event, as described by Mr Murphy, to Josephine O’Donoghue. Other sectarian activities attributed to her are based on similar or no evidence.
Your reviewer considered the strengths and weaknesses of The Year of Disappearances fairly. – Yours, etc,