Rumour, gossip and coincidence

HISTORY: The Year of Disappearances: Political Killings in Cork, 1921-1922By Gerard Murphy Gill Macmillan, 408pp. €24.99

EVENTS LEADING up to and during the life span of the “Cork Republic” of 1921-2 continue to provoke debate. Gerard Murphy’s study, concentrating on the activities of the Cork No 1 Brigade of the IRA, is the latest contribution to a growing body of work, most notably that of the late Peter Hart and John Borgonovo. Murphy’s book attempts to unravel a tightly-knotted ball of partial evidence, local rumour, gossip and coincidence surrounding the treatment of alleged spies and informers by the Cork No 1 Brigade and especially its No 2 Battalion, centred around Blackrock and Douglas, on Cork’s southside.

At the centre of Murphy’s thesis lie three well-known republicans: Seán O’Hegarty, commandant of Cork No 1 Brigade; Florence O’Donoghue, the brigade’s adjutant and intelligence officer; and Martin Corry, an IRA member from Glounthaune and later long-serving Fianna Fáil TD. All three are implicated in Murphy’s book charting the “disappeared” of Cork.

O’Hegarty sent prisoners to Corry’s area for execution; the prisoners were held in the sinisterly named Sing Sing, an underground vault in Knockrea Cemetery, before their execution and burial in the Rea, land in and around Corry’s farm. Corry himself claimed to have participated in the execution of up to 35 British military and policemen. Similarly, Murphy paints a picture of O’Donoghue, beset by paranoia and seeing Masonic treachery at every turn, ordering the abduction and execution of up to 12 unknown Protestant civilians after the truce of July 1921.

Identifying the disappeared of Cork from 1921-2 is Murphy’s core difficulty in the book, however, and one he never quite overcomes. A dizzying number of possibilities are presented, initially centred on the shadowy “Anti-Sinn Féin League”. But who comprised this league? A “murder gang” of renegade Auxiliaries – the most likely culprits, if the league truly existed – are seemingly passed over in favour of a spy ring operating out of either the YMCA branch or the Freemasons and possibly comprising prominent Protestant businessmen.

The treatment of the YMCA is particularly problematic: on the foot of the seizure of a YMCA motor car from Cork docks on the morning of the truce, Murphy asks what if abductions had occurred during one or other of these raids? This hypothesis is then treated as factual throughout the remainder of the book, and used to substantiate further allegations about IRA treatment of Protestant boys. A second example comes with the kidnapping of a half-dozen Cork pro-Treaty supporters on St Patrick’s Day 1922. Although there is no evidence about the religious identity of these victims, Murphy proceeds on the basis that they were Protestants and spies, and that they ended up as another batch of bodies buried in the Rea. None is ever identified. Solid evidence is cast aside in favour of a series of suppositions and possibilities, and these perhaps, what-ifs and maybes are the building blocks of Murphy’s argument.

Although clearly written, this is not an easy book to read. The main problem lies in its structure: Murphy takes the reader through a retracing of his own journey researching the book, keeping the narrative apace with the author’s unearthing of new evidence. The result is that events are treated in a piecemeal fashion: for example, the murder of 15-year-old Edward Parsons is returned to over and again, as new theories or possibilities emerge. Instead of a coherent, balanced narrative, what emerges is a confusing muddle.

These flaws notwithstanding, some of the less lurid aspects of Murphy’s work fit well with the overall picture of what those at the sharp end of the Irish revolution experienced. His brief survey of the large-scale transfer of mostly Protestant-owned property on Cork’s southside after 1923 hints at a larger narrative of southern Protestant migration in the post-revolution period. The suggestion that Cork IRA men violently targeted the life and property of southern loyalists in response to sectarian violence in Northern Ireland also coincides with emerging work on the treatment of Irish Protestants in Connaught and Munster. As Murphy has demonstrated, terrible things undoubtedly took place in the Rea and across Cork city and county. The grotesque horror of Sing Sing and the skeletons unearthed close to Corry’s farm speak to that.

Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid is Rutherford research fellow at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. Her study of the republican career of Seán MacBride will be published next year by Liverpool University Press