Sir, - Meda Ryan (November 11th) repeats many of the arguments I have already answered. Thus, she returns to Tom Barry's first report and once again suggests that it "has all the hallmarks of a propaganda work". No historian I know has ever found a forged IRA document from this period, so I'm not sure how she would recognise one. If it was a forgery, why was it kept secret? Why wasn't it written to support the British version of events?
Ryan also points to the report's "barracks" terminology, but a wider reading of IRA documents would show that their authors often assumed as "official" a style as possible; British officers noticed the same thing. Barry, of course, had spent four years in the army and would presumably have known it well.
In any case, as I point out in The IRA and Its Enemies, Barry also failed to mention any "false surrender" in his first published account, in the Irish Press in 1932. In this version (very different from later ones), he declares that the three column casualties "had already fallen" when he advanced to the second lorry and that the Auxiliaries "like the IRA had fought to a finish." Was it forged as well? What reason would he have for concealing British treachery? Here is an account, indisputably by Barry, that agrees with the earlier report.
Ms Ryan again mentions my use of anonymous interviews, and contrasts it with her own. I have great respect for her research - as my footnotes show - but her biography of Barry does use the phrase "one Volunteer told me" about the killing of prisoners without saying who it was. Most of the interviews I used were not my own, but were conducted by others, as detailed in my book. In each case, the holders of the recordings asked me not to use names, as a matter of courtesy to the families involved. These sources can be checked, however.
Nor am I the first person to question Barry's later accounts. Liam Deasy's memoirs, Towards Ireland Free, quoting Paddy O'Brien, do not mention any "false surrender". When Barry attacked them in print, Deasy stood by his book and specifically denied Barry's "refutations", with the public support of most of the surviving officers and column men. Why believe Barry and not his former comrades?
There is an alternative, as my book suggests: legitimately different accounts exist of what happened at Kilmichael which can never be entirely reconciled. It was getting dark when the ambush started, some observers were far away, others saw only part of the action. Most of the participants were scared or enraged at the death of their comrades. And things happened very fast. So it is possible that one or more Auxiliaries surrendered while others kept firing. Or that a wounded policeman ignored the surrender and shot an IRA man when he approached. And it is certainly possible that some of the column did believe that they had been tricked.
However, what is clear is that there was no "false surrender" as Barry depicted it. There was no trick being played, and at most only one guerrilla died after the surrenders began. Most interviewees say that no one died in this way. Wounded and unwounded prisoners were beaten and killed in revenge for the grievous IRA losses around the second lorry - but this also happened at the first lorry where no column men were killed. One Auxiliary escaped only because he was believed to have been shot in the back as he ran away - only to be captured and executed a few hours later (although not by the column). Why were these men "finished off" if they were not guilty of treachery?
There were two forces at work at Kilmichael: the rage felt by the survivors at the death of their friends, and Tom Barry's determination that no Auxiliary would be left alive. Before the ambush began, he declared it was to be a fight to the finish, ordered bayonets be fixed, and posted men to prevent anyone escaping. Afterwards, he ordered the execution of wounded, helpless men. The result was a daring ambush which turned into a massacre: a combination of hot-blooded reprisal and cold-blooded murder, justified by the labelling of the victims as "terrorists". Sound familiar? The same recipe produced the same kind of violence in the British army and police - and later the Free State army. The real secret of Kilmichael is that the IRA inhabited the same culture of violence as their enemies, in which heroes and villains were indistinguishable. - Yours, etc., Peter Hart,
School of Modern History, Queen's University, Belfast.
This correspondence is now closed. - Ed, I.T.