Eoghan Harris

MY GRANDFATHER, Pat Harris, spoke proudly of marching to Macroom on Easter Monday, 1916, and of being arrested with Terence MacSwiney on August 12, 1920, at a meeting of the officers of Cork No 1 Brigade in Cork’s City Hall. But he never spoke about what the First Cork Brigade did in the two years that followed.

Gearóid Murphy’s The Year of Disappearances, Political Killings in Cork 1921-22, explains my grandfather’s grim silence. According to Murphy, these two years saw a “descent into savagery” by the Cork No 1 Brigade. Led first by Sean Hegarty and later, and more murderously, by Florrie O’Donoghue, it carried out a frenzied campaign of civilian killings that Richard Mulcahy and Michael Collins tried vainly to restrain.

Murphy’s book will cause shock and anger in Cork republican circles. But the author cannot be dismissed as a West Brit revisionist. He is racy of the republican soil, an Irish-speaker from Carrignavar, and has no agendas. He modestly calls his massive chronicle a “best-fit” account, and accepts that future historians may amend his findings. But it will be hard to argue away his core conclusion.