Historian’s ambush account comes under fire

THE controversial revisionist historian Dr Peter Hart is to speak on political violence at the Irish Historical Society in UCC on Tuesday next. One of the events in Irish history on which Dr Hart made his reputation is the Kilmichael ambush of November 1920.

He accused the IRA and ambush leader Gen Tom Barry of engaging in “lies and evasions” by stating that British Auxiliaries engaged in a false surrender during the ambush. He alleged that Barry simply killed unarmed British combatants without cause.

In the accepted version, after the false surrender and in the lull that followed, Auxiliaries killed IRA soldiers standing in plain sight to take the surrender. This caused Barry to issue an order to recommence firing until all the Auxiliaries were killed.

Two British and two Irish sources from the 1920s and 1930s support Barry’s account of the false surrender. It was not regarded as contentious until Dr Hart came along 70 years later.

He is emphatic in using his view of events at Kilmichael to state that the War of Independence was a sectarian war in west Cork.

That is why the debate goes beyond arguments over what exactly happened at Kilmichael and Dr Hart’s controversial contention that Tom Barry was “little more than a serial killer”.

He claims support for his view that Barry lied as a result of anonymous interviews in the late 1980s with those he claimed were IRA veterans who had participated in the ambush.

This leads to an issue touched on by Dr John Regan of Dundee University in a recent review of Meda Ryan’s ‘Tom Barry — IRA Freedom Fighter’ (Mercier 2003): “Hart was indeed fortunate in finding survivors of the ambush alive and lucid nearly 70 years after the event… one of whom, he notes, visited the site with him”.

Dr Hart dates one of his interviews with an ambush scout as having taken place on November 19, 1989. The last surviving ambush participant, Ned Young, died six days earlier, while the last Kilmichael ambush scout died in 1967.

Meda Ryan has dated the time of death of ambush survivors in the 2005 paperback edition of her Tom Barry biography.

Her dating is in agreement with others on this point. Dr Hart’s persistence in keeping his interview accounts anonymous makes unravelling the issue difficult.

We are dealing with an event that took place over 80 years ago in which all of the participants are deceased.

Governments operate a 30-year rule in relation to secret files, source material that historians generally crave. Dr Hart appears to be operating a ‘perpetuity rule’ in relation to his own secrets.

There are other problems with Dr Hart’s approach, outlined recently over four issues of History Ireland (March-April to Sept-Oct 2005) and centre on accusations of omitting relevant information in original source material.

For instance, a ‘captured’ typed document, now generally accepted as a British forgery, purported to be Barry’s account of the Kilmichael ambush. Its true provenance as a forgery designed for a particular purpose would have been clearer earlier had Dr Hart published it in full, instead of quoting from it in a selective manner.

Similarly, Dr Hart made an accusation of sectarianism in relation to Protestants shot near Bandon after the Truce in 1922, an act condemned by both sides of the then pre-civil war Treaty divide. Dr Hart used a British source to promote his view that these shootings, and others carried out previously by the IRA, were simply sectarian and aimed at randomly selected Protestant victims.

However, the source cited by Dr Hart contained a following sentence contradicting his sectarianism point — but Dr Hart omitted it.

Research by Meda Ryan and by Brian Murphy (published by Aubane), using original source material they comprehensively report, has further undermined Dr Hart on this point.

Recently-published and forthcoming work by John Borgonovo (published by Irish Academic Press) clarifies the position further with regard to sectarian loyalist activity in Cork during the War of Independence period.

In the interests of historical accuracy, perhaps some of these points could be addressed by Dr Hart, or by other participants to him, at the UCC conference.

I am sure all can agree that the questions requiring answers are clear and important.

Jack Lane

Aubane Historical Society

Aubane

Millstreet

Co Cork