Madam, - In his article on Ken Loach's The Wind that Shakes the Barley (June 17th), Luke Gibbons correctly asserts that there is no evidence of "ethnic cleansing" of Protestants in West Cork during the War of Independence.
He is also correct to draw attention to the fact that racism was a prevalent British attitude. The British army regarded the entire population as their enemy.
Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, then Brigade Major Bernard Montgomery, typically remarked: "It never bothered me a bit how many houses we burned. . . I regarded all civilians as 'shinners', and I never had any dealings with them."
Such sentiments were also to be found in the minds and actions of those who set up and ran variants of the shadowy "Anti-Sinn Féin Society".
Such "loyalists" gathered intelligence and went on RIC and Auxiliary raids to "spot", assassinate or torture their quarry.
They were not representative of the whole Protestant community, many of whom were sympathetic to the republican cause. Protestants generally held little regard for the Black and Tans who, without distinction of creed, burned both Protestant and Catholic-owned property.
British forces openly encouraged the loyalists and this has led some to conclude mistakenly that they were British forces in mufti. The revisionist historian Peter Hart holds this view. He spoke on it in a recent Rebel County documentary on the Ken Loach film on RTÉ 1.
Hart concluded that Protestants shot for informing were innocent of such activities.
Hart's view is a favourite among Orange Order members, as Drew Nelson, grand secretary of the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland, explained to Gerry Moriarty (June 17th). Nelson believes, on the basis of Hart's research, in a "massacre of Protestants that took place. . . on the main street of Dunmanway, in April 1922". There is no evidence that Protestants were shot because of their religion.
There is evidence that informers, whose names were left behind by departing Auxiliaries, were shot from April 26th to 28th, 1922 near Bandon, contrary to express IRA orders. The shootings were condemned by all shades of then pre-Civil War republican opinion.
Two historians in particular, Brian Murphy and Meda Ryan, should have been interviewed. Murphy researched the topic in his recent work on The Origins and Organisation of British Propaganda and Meda Ryan dealt with it in her recent Tom Barry biography.
Murphy first drew attention to the racist British attitudes cited in Luke Gibbons's piece. Possibly the documentary makers were also not aware that Irish Academic Press will soon publish John Borgonovo's Spies, Informers and the Anti-Sinn Féin Society. It undermines the contention that the IRA was sectarian in countering the activities of loyalist spies.
This is a subject that, I am sure, will excite further interest in the debate that The Wind that Shakes the Barley has opened up. - Yours, etc,
NIALL MEEHAN, Offaly Road, Cabra, Dublin 7.
Madam, - Luke Gibbons in his piece on Ken Loach's The Wind That Shook The Barley, states that the only Protestants killed by republicans in Cork during the War of Independence and Civil War were spies and informers.
What are we to make, then, of this passage from Peter Hart's The IRA and Its Enemies? (Hart is most likely one of the "revisionists" referred to by Mr Gibbons.) He describes a killing rampage carried out by the Cork anti-Treaty IRA over two nights in April 1922. At the end of the bloodbath "ten men had been shot dead. All were Protestants. Hundreds [of their fellow Protestants] subsequently went into hiding or fled their homes in a wave of panic".
Denis Lourdan, a local IRA guerrilla member, put it candidly: "our fellas took it out on the Protestants".
Is Mr Gibbons saying that all these people killed or terrorised were informers and deserved their treatment? - Yours, etc,
AG MATHEWS, Cedar Court, Terenure, Dublin 6W.