Unpalatable truths can’t be waved away

The past is upon us again. On Monday, the second phase of centenary commemorations begins.

The first phase, those events commemorating 1916, went off without incident and was largely applauded for the manner in which it was handled.

The coming phase will be trickier. Glorious defeat in Easter week and stupidly brutal executions by the British is handy enough to commemorate. Events from 1919-23 present a few different challenges.

On Monday, the meeting of the first Dáil on January 21, 1919, will be marked.

Tomorrow, there will be an event commemorating what is considered the first shots of the War of Independence, shots that killed two Irishmen wearing RIC uniforms. This occurred at Soloheadbeg, Co Tipperary at around the same time the first Dáil was meeting in the Mansion House in Dublin.

A unit of Irish Volunteers intercepted the two RIC men who were escorting a consignment of gelignite.

The killings remain controversial.

Officially, the two Catholic RIC men, James O’Donnell and Patrick O’Connell, refused to surrender and were killed when they unslung their rifles. However, one of the Irish Volunteers involved, Dan Breen, subsequently claimed that the killings were premeditated.

Breen, who went on to achieve legendary status, mainly through his account of the time, My Fight For Irish Freedom, later said he and another member of the unit, Sean Treacy, had discussed the proposed engagement before it occurred.

“The only way of starting a war is to kill somebody so we intended to kill some of the policemen,” he said. “The only regret that we had following the ambush was that there were only two policemen killed instead of the six we expected.”

Neither Breen nor Treacy commanded the unit, but both were strong characters, as was to emerge over the following years of conflict. (Treacy was killed by British agents in October 1920).

The controversy surrounding Soloheadbeg might usefully inform some of the discussion that will inevitably ensue in the coming years.

The War of Independence led to the foundation of this State. As such it has always been viewed as a just and moral war. In that scenario, the methods used to prosecute the war, and the conduct of the winning combatants, is always considered through the rearview mirror to be above reproach.

This is standard in any war considered just or moral. Take the Second World War. The largely prevailing narrative is that the Nazis committed atrocities at the drop of a hat, while the Allies fought the good fight.

Later this year, Netflix is due to release a movie called

The Irishman, based on the life of Mafia gunman, Frank Sheeran.

Before his death, he claimed to have been the man who killed trade unionist Jimmy Hoffa, whose body has never been found.

Sheeran began his killing in the US army during the Second World War. In his account, the conduct of the Americans was in some ways every bit as savage as that of the Nazis. Prisoners, for instance, were routinely shot.

“If you had a load of prisoners you took them back, but with a handful of Germans or less you did what you had to do and what everybody else expected you to do,” he told author Charles Brandt.

The lieutenant gave me a lot of prisoners to handle and I did what I had to do.

One might well posit the notion that a career criminal doesn’t necessarily make for the most reliable historian. But it is also the case that Sheeran had nothing to hide at that stage of his life, and why would he invent that kind of thing in

explaining his role in what he also considered to be a just war.

His account sits uncomfortably with the official version of the boys defending democracy and defeating the thuggish Nazis. By contrast, America has found it much easier to come to terms with the terrible crimes committed by its soldiers in Vietnam, an unjust war which it lost.

How clean was the War of Independence? The Crown forces were certainly brutal. Many captured volunteers were murdered in custody under the guise of “shot while trying to escape”. The Black and Tans had scant regard for any standards or moral benchmarks.

But were there times when the Volunteers sunk as low?

An obvious example of how legend may have buried the facts concerns the boys of Kilmichael. On November 28, 1920, Tom Barry’s West Cork flying column wiped out an 18-strong patrol of Auxiliaries at Kilmichael, on the road between

Macroom and Dunmanway.

Barry’s account was always that the last of the Auxies were shot dead after they issued a false surrender, raising their weapons and reopened fire.

Kilmichael was important in the iconography of the War of Independence. It symbolised the imbalance of resources and power that faced the Volunteers.

The result demonstrated that it wasn’t the size of the dog in the fight that mattered, but the size of the fight in the dog.

It was the stuff of song and story with a perfect hero and communicator in Barry to propagate the legend.

Alternative research in recent decades suggests that there was no false surrender, that Barry gave the order to kill those still alive after they had surrendered. Both versions still prevail in competing narratives.

Tom Barry was one of the leading figures from that time, who went on to represent West Cork in Dáil Éireann and write his own book, Guerrilla Days In Ireland.

Is it possible that he managed to keep the real truth of his actions buried for decades because it would have been in conflict with the legend of the clean heroes seeing off the depraved foe?

Whether or not Barry committed what could be considered a war crime will continue to occupy some historians.

But surely it must be acknowledged that at least some who were subsequently considered heroes of the revolution succumbed, at some point, to depravity.

The murder of a number of Protestants in the Cork area during the period speaks for itself. Just as the Brits had their “shot while trying to escape”, so some in the

Volunteers liked to cite “informers” where scores could be settled, or sectarian murders justified.

Unlike its attitudes to the realities of the War of Independence, Official Ireland has long reconciled itself to the brutality of the Civil War. It had to because there was no depraved foe who was run out of the country. There was no enemy who could be dehumanised in the popular mind.

The Civil War was brother against brother, neighbour against neighbour, so there was no escaping the brutality inflicted on and by both sides.

The same candour has never really been applied to the realities of what occurred during the War of Independence for fear of upsetting the received legend.

Using the coming years of commemoration to properly acknowledge the truth from those times would be no bad thing.