Kilmichael: a 1920 battle that is still being fought

British forces in Ireland suffered their greatest defeat during the War of Independence when men from the West Cork Brigade of the IRA killed 18 Auxiliaries at Kilmichael on November 28th, 1920. Three IRA volunteers, Pat Deasy, Michael McCarthy and Jim Sullivan, were also killed. The basic facts are not in dispute, but Kilmichael has been on the front line of the war of memory for the last 102 years as Eve Morrison’s new book discovers.

Why write a book about the Kilmichael ambush and its aftermath?

When I started my PhD in history in 1999, Peter Hart’s book The IRA and its Enemies had just come out. Everybody in the Irish history community was talking about it.

There were questions about the interviews he had done for the book: it was claimed that one of the veterans involved (Ned Young) was dead by the time Peter claimed to have met him. This turned out not to be the case.

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The subject of my PhD was the Bureau of Military History collection (first made public in 2003). I was just about the first person to read all 1,773 witness statements, consult the administrative files etc.

Tom Barry’s narrative in Guerilla Days in Ireland (published in 1949) said there had been a false surrender and that’s why all the Auxiliaries were killed. This explained why he took no prisoners and why the ambush was so brutal.

The witness statements relating to Kilmichael didn’t fit with this version of events, so I decided to discuss this in my PhD. At that time, the atmosphere around the debate was very intimidating. I wrote an initial draft of a chapter and realized what I had written would save me from getting attacked but didn’t reflect what in my view the evidence actually suggested. This made me uncomfortable. I felt like a coward. In the end, I decided to take a different approach. To speak my mind.

I also met Peter and he seemed like a nice, honest, decent guy.

Then I started talking to people in Cork, and realised that attitudes were much more diverse than the public debate would lead you to believe. Almost the first thing you find out when talking to people on the ground is that there’s always been two stories about what happened at Kilmichael. Some of the veterans who were there, particularly ones who went on record, disagreed with what Tom Barry wrote about Kilmichael in 1949. Father John Chisholm, who allowed me to listen to the interviews he conducted in 1969, also introduced me to the late Liam Deasy, a nephew of the Liam Deasy who commanded the Cork III Brigade after Charlie Hurley was killed in March 1921. Deasy clashed with Barry over Kilmichael in the 1970s.

After I finished my PhD, I was contracted to write a book about the Bureau of Military History. When I started to work on that book, Kilmichael was taking up too much space and focus, so I decided to deal with it separately.

I thought I was going to write a local history that would take me about six months. It morphed into a much more ambitious book and took far longer than I ever thought it would.

You mentioned Peter Hart. Who was Peter Hart?

Peter Hart was a doctoral student of David Fitzpatrick (a history professor in Trinity College Dublin TCD). He started in 1987. He was from St John’s in Newfoundland. He wasn’t Irish and that’s important, I think.

Hart did a local study of the Cork IRA and was an exceptionally thorough researcher. He was one of the first people to access several collections in the military archives as well as other primary sources like the Florrie O’Donoghue papers.

Hart also talked to Father Chisholm and listened to his interviews, and conducted other interviews himself.

Chisholm recorded the memories of many of the survivors of the West Cork Brigade, including those of Jack O’Sullivan, Ned Young and Paddy O’Brien (although most of O’Brien’s interview was taped over). Hart also interviewed Young twice.

Hart’s PhD was passed, I think, without corrections, which almost never happens. The examiners and Oxford University Press’s reviewers thought it was brilliant. The IRA and its Enemies was published in 1998. Then everything just blew up.

Hart argued that violence, political violence had a corrosive impact across the board.

He used examples of the killings and torture of IRA men and civilians by Crown Forces as well as Kilmichael and the Bandon Valley massacres of April 1922 (in which 13 Protestants were killed in a series of attacks that Hart believed were partially motivated by sectarianism) to explore this. He was a pacifist who refused to distinguish (morally) between the violence of the IRA and that of Crown Forces. That annoyed a lot of people.

Hart has recently been described to me by someone who knew him well as a Canadian nationalist. The argument that he was some sort of neo-unionist is ridiculous.

One of the things I took from your books is that it is as much about how Kilmichael has been remembered as about the ambush itself.

That is true. For the first two or three decades after the ambush several different stories were circulating. Some said a sort of bogus surrender by Crown Forces had occurred after which Barry decided to take no prisoners. Sometimes it was said that Volunteers were killed or wounded because of such a trick, but not always.

An extended account of the ambush by a local historian from west Cork named Flor Crowley came out in 1947, before Barry’s book. It gave quite a different version of events. Crowley said that the three IRA men who died in the ambush were fatally wounded or killed before Barry even got to where their section was fighting. He wasn’t critical of Barry at all, in fact he gave quite an idealised account of what happened, but the implication was still that Barry had just rounded the corner and wiped them (the Auxiliaries) out. No quarter was given nor did the enemy expect any quarter.

Crowley’s account was closer to an earlier version of Kilmichael by Barry that appeared in the Irish Press in 1932. So Barry did change his story. Some also felt that his false surrender narrative made the Volunteers who stood up to take the surrender look naïve. They took exception to that although it wasn’t said publicly.

Tom Barry does not come out of your book very well. The words narcissist and self-obsessed come to mind.

I don’t think there’s many people who would deny that he was a difficult man. He was very changeable and quite mercurial. He provoked strong reactions. People tended to either love him and worship him or didn’t like him at all.

We do need to bear in mind that he served in the first World War and the War of Independence. That surely would have had an impact.

Barry was suffering from ‘soldier’s heart’, a kind of a post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Since the release of first World War pension records the folk story of him collapsing with a ‘heart attack’ after Kilmichael makes more sense. He actually talks about his bouts of illness in his Military Service Pensions Collection (MSPC) application.

The 1970s saw the rise of revisionist history. How was Kilmichael perceived then?

Brian Hanley’s book The Impact of the Troubles on the Republic of Ireland, 1968-79: Boiling Volcano? is the first thoroughgoing historical study of the impact of revisionism in the 1970s. What he says is very interesting. People like Conor Cruise O’Brien were arguing that the atavistic memory of the independence struggle was fuelling the violence in the North.

What Brian shows very well is that, in fact, the Troubles triggered a kind of reckoning in the South. All sorts of people were questioning and thinking and arguing about the War of Independence and the role of violence.

It was also a period when the modern republican movement was focusing and asserting ownership of commemorations in the South. They became involved in Kilmichael and Bodenstown and that gave them a platform at a time when censorship meant you didn’t have republican voices on television or the radio.

Republicans didn’t care if there was a false surrender at Kilmichael then. Their argument was – this is war. What do you think it is like?

They argued that the old IRA was just as brutal, if you like, as the new one. In other words, if they had had Semtex during the War of Independence they would have used it.

That changed once the Troubles ended. They didn’t need those sorts of arguments as much anymore.

You write in your book:”Researching Kilmichael has been a bizarre experience. I met several exceptional people in Cork and elsewhere, and made some fast friends. I was also, on one occasion, threatened (verbally), actively misled more than once, shouted at in the street by strangers, and shadowed when visiting the ambush site. One individual I spoke to asked if I was ‘wearing a wire’.” Who threatened you?

Somebody who had an interview I wanted to listen to. I asked if I could and they said maybe, but that they’d have to speak to a few people. The next morning my phone started going at about 9am and it was this person. They were really nervous, took everything they said the previous day back, and informed me that if I told anybody about our conversation, I would be dealt with by any means necessary.

I was refused access to Tom Barry’s papers as well. The person who has them just said no. Apparently they are in very bad condition. They should be given to an archive so that professional archivists can preserve them, digitise them and take care of them.

Why does this whole episode generate such a level of enmity and controversy 102 years later?

It comes in waves. Kilmichael was always controversial. Up to the 1970s it was mainly an argument between the veterans over what happened. When Peter Hart’s book came out it morphed into something else. It became a debate about Irish history and the legitimacy of the Irish independence struggle. Some argued that Irish people needed an idealized version of their history, or at least one that acknowledged the tragedy of it all. It was argued that Irish academic historians were taking that away from them, and were using critical accounts of the period as a kind of a covert way to undermine nationalism and the modern republican movement with it.

That goes to the heart of the problem with Hart. He was perceived to be denigrating the IRA’s role in the War of Independence. He did exaggerate the extent to which sectarianism informed the IRA’s actions, but his arguments were caricatured and oversimplified by both sides in the revisionist debate.

What we really need is a wide-ranging academic study of the role of religion and the impact of sectarianism in both Ireland and Great Britain, because religion informed attitudes on both islands during the revolutionary period.

The centenary of Kilmichael was marked by a very ugly debate by Brian Stanley making a connection between Warrenpoint (18 British soldiers killed in August 1979) and Kilmichael. What did you make of that debate at the time?

If you are going to make a comparison in terms of the political impact and the military success of the two it is probably not the worst comparison you could make. But I think it was a very silly and juvenile thing to say and I don’t approve of making those sorts of comments in a political arena. Even if they (the British soldiers killed at Warrenpoint) were legitimate targets, there is something unsavoury about jokes and quips at the expense of the dead.

Kilmichael: The Life and Afterlife of an Ambush is published by Irish Academic Press priced €19.95