Distorting Irish History Two, the road from Dunmanway PDF Print E-mail
Niall Meehan, 24 May 2011

Niall Meehan analyses some aspects of the late Professor Peter Hart’s treatment of the 1922 ‘April killings’ in West Cork, confusion created by Hart and by his PhD supervisor on the question of 'ethnic cleansing', and errors of elision, omission and distortion that gravitated from Hart's PhD thesis into his book on the subject. 
The Year of Disappearances, Political Killing in Cork, 1920-23 by Gerard Murphy, published in November 2010 by Gill & Macmillan, excited considerable media and academic interest. It attempted to document in extensive detail a previous historian’s assertion that the IRA ramped up a campaign of anti-Protestant violence beginning in the summer of 1920. Despite an impressive initial flurry of favourable commentary from Eoghan Harris in the Irish Examiner, Kevin Myers in the Irish Independent and from Oxford University based historian John Paul McCarthy in the Sunday Independent (on 5,7,12 November, respectively), the book fared less well subsequently. A problem for Murphy was that, aside from documented errors1, most of his disappeared Protestant victims were unnamed. They had no known prior existence. No archive reveals them, no relatives searched for them and no one cried wolf. At the time of writing, Professor David Fitzpatrick’s commentary in the Dublin Review of Books (DRB) is the sixth consecutive considered response to argue that it cannot be seriously taken as historical research.2 Mine was the first to make this point.3
However, I expressed a similar conclusion about aspects of pioneering work by the late Professor Peter Hart, Fitzpatrick’s much-celebrated former student, and also the historian whose book, The IRA and its Enemies, Violence and Community in Cork, 1916-1923 (1998), inspired Murphy. Perhaps for this reason, Fitzpatrick’s review went some lengths to separate what he termed Gerard Murphy’s ‘disorganised dossier’ from the ‘intellectual power and academic skill’ displayed by Peter Hart. Even some of Peter Hart’s harshest detractors concede the attributes Fitzpatrick rightly awarded him. Hart was capable of combining gifted and imaginative scholarship with exceptional powers of exposition. At its best, his work demonstrated a masterful integration of archival detail that drove forward a clearly structured and an elegantly composed narrative. However, while Hart’s academic skill and narrative presentation was superior to Murphy’s, problems associated with Murphy’s book have also been identified in Hart’s scholarship. This is most evident in the selection and presentation of sources appearing to imply that ethnic and sectarian hatreds drove the quest for Irish independence during the period, 1919-23.

In that sense, Murphy’s book represents a kind of continuity with Hart’s work, rather than the binary Fitzpatrick suggested. For those who question Hart’s historical scholarship, Murphy’s book represents a logical, and a significant, decline in Irish historical standards. This is a subject I would like to further develop here.4

Download pdf for the full article here
1 See for example, John Downes, ‘Author owns up to errors in IRA Cork deaths book’, Sunday Tribune, 16 January 2011. These errors were uncovered by Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc (2011).
2 ‘History in a hurry’, DRB, Issue 17, http://www.drb.ie/more_details/11-03-17/History In_A_Hurry.aspx Reviews (to date) of The Year of Disappearances are linked alongside Eugenio Biagini’s review, at the Institute of Historical Research website (see references section).
3 An ‘amazing coincidence’ that ‘could mean anything’: Gerard Murphy’s The Year of Disappearances, Spinwatch, 17 November, 2010, at http://gcd.academia.edu/NiallMeehan/Papers/
4 See also, ‘Distorting Irish History, the stubborn facts of Kilmichael: Peter Hart and Irish Historiography’, Spinwatch, 17 November 2010, at http://gcd.academia.edu/NiallMeehan/Papers/
 
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