War of Independence ‘disappeared’ recalled
IN the War of Independence, people were abducted, executed and secretly buried, not by the British, but by the Irish Republican Army. A new TV3 series, In The Name Of The Republic, investigates the ‘disappeared’ of 1919 to 1921, as Eunan O’Halpin, professor of contemporary Irish history at Trinity College, attempts to identify them and tells their shocking stories. Of these civilians killed by the IRA, O’Halpin asks “were they spies, were they informers? Some were, some were not.” Buried in unmarked graves or weighed down and dumped into lakes and rivers, they are the forgotten victims of Ireland’s struggle for independence. In his decade of research, Professor O’Halpin discovered executions carried out upon the slightest of evidence. “These deaths cast a dark shadow over the struggle for independence,” he says. With the centenaries of major moments in Irish history looming — 1916, partition, independence and the Civil War — it is timely this darker passage is being revealed.
In the first instalment of the TV series, O’Halpin travelled to Laois to investigate the rumour that the bodies of executed men were dumped on a farm during the War of Independence. Using modern technology and the expertise of an archaeological firm to find evidence of human burials, he tries to establish the identities of the alleged victims.
