Large areas of the country were denuded of Protestants and those remaining only hung on by a thread

IT is difficult to fathom what Dr Martin Mansergh TD really is saying on hidden history and the fate of Protestants in or around the 1920s (Letters, January 7).

He gives a sort of grudging approval to Niamh Sammon’s excellent TV programme on the Coolacrease killings, but then says “the charge that the programme was insufficiently nuanced may well be true”.

Also he stated that the justification of military necessity is doubtful in the case of Coolacrease and, most astonishingly, that it can be questioned whether the treatment meted out to the Pearsons met the standard of avoiding “wanton cruelties”.

I wonder what he would call cruelty, in fact, if leaving the two boys for hours to die in agony is an issue when even some of the supporters of this slaughter said that those who carried out the shooting should have been courtmartialled for not delivering the coup de grâce.

Dr Mansergh, perhaps unwittingly, gets to the core issue when he says the minority (who were basically Protestant and British in outlook) who got in the way could expect to get hurt.

Tom Barry said much the same: “We never killed a man because of his religion, but we had to face up to facts. The most salient fact was that nearly all Protestants were unionist”.

So political views counted.

Dr Mansergh also is on shaky ground when he says the killing of Catholic RIC men was evidence of non-sectarianism.

Indeed the first RIC man killed was in Co Tipperary. He was a Constable McDonnell from Co Mayo, whose descendants I know and they still feel the hurt. He was a widower with seven children and was known to his slayer Dan Breen, a ruthless killer who later became a TD for South Tipperary.

Those men were killed because they wore the police uniform, albeit with the harp and crown.

The modern IRA blood brothers, in the recent, dirty 30 years of killing in the North, also killed Catholic RUC men, but the overall effect was most felt by the Protestant population in those ethnic cleansing years.

What we are talking about is the disappearance of the Protestant population at the time. It is estimated that well in excess of 40,000 left or were intimidated out — that is apart altogether from those who left because they were directly connected with the British, army, police, big houses, etc. Many were ordinary small farmers and artisans. Many examples exist around the country, but I will quote some from Dr Mansergh’s own county.

On August 5, 1921, Dr Miller, Bishop of Cashel, said that “five of our members have been foully murdered without the slightest justification”.

In November 1922, the same bishop appealed to Protestants in the area not to emigrate in the face of intimidation.

Rev Sterling Berry wrote to the Minister for Home Affairs on June 10, 1922 that in the area of Templederry, Silvermines and Ballinclough there was “scarcely a Protestant family which had escaped molestation. Houses have been burned; Protestant families have been forced to leave neighbourhoods; altogether a state of terrorism exists”.

There are many such examples in other places. Even after the Treaty, such things occurred.

To see the evidence one only has to look around. The minority population never recovered from this cataclysm.

Large areas of the country were denuded of Protestants and those remaining only hung on by a thread.

While other things like mixed marriages counted, only a Holocaust-denier would say the events at issue here and surrounding the 1920s did not matter.

Brendan Cafferty

Creggs Road

Ballina

Co Mayo