“They shared information about the local Irish  Republican Army activity with the British crown forces”:

Gerry Downing reviews Ellen McWilliams’ book Resting Places, on Wounds, War and the Irish Revolution

It is understandable that this 2023 book has got rave reviews from the British Empire apologists like Fergal Keane OBE (BBC foreign correspondent, nephew of John B Keane) in the current political climate. Today Sinn Fein apologises for the actions of the IRA during the ‘Troubles’, they shake hands with  royalty, including Prince Charles, who was appointed Colonel-in-Chief of the Parachute Regiment in 1977, just 5 years after they had murdered 14 people on Bloody Sunday in Derry on January 30, 1972.

Surely not accidentally on pages 66-7 McWilliams lists 17 terrible massacres in Irish history in chronical order from the Sack of Youghal in 1579 to the Omagh Bombing of 1998, but she goes from the Ballymurphy Massacre of 1971 to the Springhill Massacre of 1972 (Belfast’s Bloody Sunday) but misses out Bloody Sunday itself.

This was the most important single event in the Troubles from 1969 to the Good Friday Agreement on April 10, 1998. It profoundly changed the course of the struggle in the north; from that point it became total war by the British state on the nationalist population, not just on the IRA. The whole world witnessed the massacre on their TV screens, but just one of the murderers, Soldier F, Dave Cleary, is about to go on trial 52 years later for the murder of William McKinney and James Wray despite all the efforts of the British state to cover it up.

Eamonn McCann recalled;“When the shooting started that day the first reaction, after fear, was bewilderment. Why were they shooting? At Free Derry Corner where most people had gathered for the meeting, the crowd flung themselves to the ground as the crack-crack of the self-loading rifles came from the bottom of Rossville Street. Looking up one could see the last few stragglers coming running panic-stricken, bounding over the barricade outside the High Flats, three of them stiffening suddenly and crumpling to the ground. One ought to have realized at the time that what was happening was they were being killed.”

There never was a question of bringing to justice those who ordered and directed the Massacre, Prime Minister Edward Heath, General Robert Ford,  Sir Michael Jackson, etc. All three 1971-72 atrocities and many others were carried out by the Parachute Regiment on behalf of the British state. They were defeated and driven out of Aden, Britain’s only colony in the Middle East, in November 1967 and were determined not to let that happen again.

The book is basically a profound apology to the British Empire and all its supporters in Ireland for the terrible things the IRA did to them in the War of Independence from 1919 to 1921, but focussing on an event that took place after the Truce on July 11 and the Treaty on December 6, 1921. The book is:

“Dedicated to the families who lost so much to the Dunmanway Massacre, the atrocity that took place in Bandon, Enniskeane, Dunmanway and Clonakilty between 26 and 28 April in 1922, and to my mother’s family, who sacrificed so much for Irish Independence”.

Her mother’s family (pictured on the book cover) were profoundly mistaken, even if well-meaning and still honoured and loved despite that, we discover, as for the rest of them…. She can tell of some who were ‘out’ in the 1916 Rising; her great grandmother, Ellen Foley, was a Cumann na mBan activist in the Cork No. 3 Brigade.

She gives a ten-page selection of primary and secondary sources of prominent Irish and other political figures at the end of her book. Significantly missing are any reference to Padraig Pearse or James Connolly.

I have taken the title of my piece from a passage she wrote in page 45:

“The historians draw attention to the pogroms against Catholics in Belfast in the same period and the murders of members of the McMahon family by the Royal Irish Constabulary, on 24 March 1922, just weeks before the Dunmanway killings. They issue the necessary reminder that many more Catholic families suffered for their politics and because they shared information about the local Irish Republican Army activity with the British crown forces and their name too are recorded in the archive – and so they were made to pay for it in the chaos and pandemonium of guerrilla warfare. One agony does not cancel another (my emphasis).”

So, they only ‘shared information’ as a helpful neighbour would advise you, “get them cloths in off the line, I’ve just heard the forecast and it’s about to rain”. The ‘crown forces’ were almost entirely reliant on informers to assassinate IRA fighters; the vast majority of RIC Catholics resigned from the RIC so there was no one left to supply that vital information except the informers.

So that’s OK then; no single extract from the book speaks more clearly of the politics of the author, who everywhere champions the British Empire and the violence of the oppressor against the oppressed in her book.

Both Protestants and Catholics informed on the IRA to the ‘crown forces’, in this case the local Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries who immediately murdered them, of course.

There were three types of informers; those who did it for the generous blood money paid, British Army veterans still loyal to the empire and the local Protestant Ascendancy who feared socialist revolution if this war went too far.

The executions were carried by the local IRA after the Truce while their leader, General Tom Barry,  was in Dublin and the terms of the Treaty the previous December were being implemented. These local men understood the sell-out that was coming and took their revenge whilst they could. The wealthy and privileged Protestant Ascendency were to be protected, as the Free Staters did. This was, in a way, the first shots of the civil war.

    That book is “Dedicated to the families who lost so much to the Dunmanway Massacre, the atrocity which took place in Bandon, Enniskeane, Dunmanway and Clonakilty…”

    The difficulty here is that for over 300 years the Protestant Ascendency ruled nationalist Ireland which was over 80% Catholic. All Church of Ireland Protestants acknowledge the British monarch as the head of their Church. I, and local farmers  in my West Cork parish, were absolutely amazed to see a six-foot portrait of the Queen at a Protestant neighbour’s wake – “Did you see it, did you see it?” we whispered in amazement afterwards.

And many ‘British veterans’ of WWI fought with, and led, the IRA war of liberation against the terrorist mass murdering Black and Tans and the far worse Auxiliaries. One of those, the great Tom Barry, justified shooting informers thus:

“There can be no doubt as to why the death toll of the West Cork IRA dropped so amazingly. It was solely because British terror was met by a not less effective IRA counter-terror. We were now hard, cold and ruthless as our enemies had been since hostilities began. The British were met with their own weapons. They had gone down in the mire to destroy us and our nation, and down after them we had to go to stop them.”

Marxists are opposed to individual acts of terror as frequently counterproductive to the aims of the struggle, but we never equate the violence of the oppressed, Hamas or the IRA, with that of the oppressor, Israel, or the British Empire. ▲