Historians hail call for Ireland to remember anti-Protestant attacks

Historians and a victims' campaigner have given a mixed response to the Irish president's call to remember 'outrages' committed against Protestants during the Republic's struggle for independence from 1916-1921.
President Michael D HigginsPresident Michael D Higgins
President Michael D Higgins

Michael D Higgins’ comments were made on Sunday at an event honouring rebel figure Michael Collins.

Among the violence of the era were a series of attacks around the towns of Bandon, Clonakilty and Dunmanway in Co Cork in April 1922, when the IRA killed 13 Protestants.

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In his speech, Mr Higgins said it was important to face “the outrages perpetrated during both [southern] wars against Protestant people, some of whom were attacked regardless of their actual attitude towards the struggles under way”.

“It is also important to recognise that the cover of the civil war was used by some for the settling of vendettas, some local, some ancient, some based on land hunger and greed.”

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Belfast-born Dr Connal Parr – historian at Fordham University’s London Centre – welcomed Mr Higgins’s comments.

“These incidents touch on an important dimension for Irish Protestants immediately recognisable to present feelings in border areas in the north: the psychic cost of ethnic violence,” he said. “Such attacks led to the emigration of an already-dwindling Protestant population from the south of Ireland, with over a hundred Protestant families leaving West Cork.”

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To simply deny the cultural memory of such attacks is to feed in to the “crisis of belonging” felt by many Protestants on the island, he said.

“Only by confronting such episodes, as the Irish president has demonstrated, and continually reassuring unionists that such actions were heinous and did not represent the subsequent Irish state, can we continue down the path of some kind of meaningful understanding of a turbulent time.”

Historian Gordon Lucy said Prime Minister Lloyd George said in May 1922 that there had been 37 murders in the south in less than six months.

“The number of people who got up and left or fled is probably more significant than the numbers killed,” Mr Lucy added. The number of families in the Cork presbytery declined in the period by 45 per cent, in Munster by 44 per cent, 36 per cent in Connaught and 30 per cent in Athlone, he added.

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Mr Higgins spoke at length about how Collins’ experiences of actions by British forces deeply impacted him.

He also spoke of “the ability to hold together a forgiving consciousness of the past and an openness to the potentialities of the future – forging the alliance of pardon and promise”.

But Ken Funston of Innocent Victims United said there are many in Northern Ireland whose lives have been damaged by terrorism in a similar way as Michael Collins perceived British actions in the south around 1916.

The reconciliation Mr Higgins spoke about “does not exist whilst the agenda of blaming everything on the British, and Dublin absolving itself of any culpability, still leaves us floundering in the morass of the past,” he added.

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A Protestant former Letterkenny butcher has told how his business was destroyed by a sectarian IRA campaign in the 1970s.

“In 1960 our shop sales were stable but with the onset of troubles in the late 60s and early 70s in Londonderry our weekly sales soared by 300 per cent,” said Joe Patterson. That was until a union boycott called with the support of the IRA in Londonderry.

“In 1972 our sales plummeted due to an engineered strike of eight weeks, and the theft of goods including four tons of sirloin steak.”

He complained to the Garda and involved politicians and lawyers but all to no avail and his business folded.

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Two other Protestant businesses were also “forced out” in Letterkenny, with a total of 200 employees. One family business suffered theft of goods, cash and materials “but no action was ever taken”.

The owner now lives in Canada.