Sir, - In his review of the Leargas documentary on the Kilmichael ambush (Weekend, December 2nd) Eamon Delaney charges that Tom Barry derisively said of the dead Auxiliaries: "We threw them their money and their brandy hip flasks". Lest such an attributed quotation should now enter the history books and leave Barry damned for gratuitously abusing the corpses of his enemies, it is necessary to set the record straight.
Barry in fact took active measures to safeguard the corpses for subsequent identification and Christian burial. His actual words recorded in the documentary were: "We took their arms, took their ammunition, took their notes, notebooks. We left them their money and their brandy flasks and we pulled them away from the lorries - the dead bodies - and we set fire to their two lorries".
In the same issue, Kevin Myers objects to Padraig O Cuanachain's use of words in saying (An Irishman's Diary, November 28th) that the totally uninvolved civilian Seamus O Liathain was "murdered in cold blood" but that the Auxie storm-trooper Cecil Guthrie was "executed". Yet in what Mr Myers refers to as "Peter Hart's outstanding study" Guthrie is also described as "executed". What Hart nonetheless fails to mention is that in one of the reference works which he himself cites, Father Pat Twohig's Green Tears for Hecuba, Guthrie was identified as the actual Auxie who had murdered O Liathain in Ballymakeera.
Mr Myers proceeds to re-echo Hart's incorrect claim that O Liathain was "the only person killed by the Macroom Auxiliaries before Kilmichael". They were in fact in the process of establishing a reign of terror over what they regarded as the untermenschen of the West Cork Gaeltacht. Sunday after Sunday they systematically descended on Ballingeary at Mass time in order to corral and abuse the villagers as they emerged from worship. And in a "shoot-to-kill" mission on November 10th, 1920, they murdered the unarmed Volunteer Criostoir O Luasa in the neighbouring townland of Tuirin Dubh. Hart chose to make no reference whatsoever to this murder, nor to the subsequent encounter between the gloating Auxies and the local parish priest and Gaelic scholar an t-Athair Donncha O Donnchu, at whom they gleefully roared: "There's work for you back there!".
In contrast with the vendetta pursued against Barry's reputation, the Gaeltacht Volunteer leader Micheal O Suilleabhain was one about whom Hart could not find a bad word to say. He referred to O Suilleabhain's annoyance at having to cancel his own plans to attack Macroom Castle after Kilmichael. But he avoided quoting what O Suilleabhain actually wrote of Kilmichael in the latter's own memoirs, Where Mountainy Men Have Sown. For O Suilleabhain clearly set the ambush in the context of what proved to be unmentionable for Hart, the murder of Criostoir O Luasa: "He was not armed. It was a pity, for it was a remarkable fact that even a shot or two exchanged with these warriors disturbed their aim unduly. A few weeks later these marauding Auxiliaries were trapped at Kilmichael, a few miles to the south of our area. Seventeen of them were killed".
Indeed they were, and the course of the War of Independence was altered. - Yours, etc.,
Manus O'Riordan, Glasnevin, Dublin 11.