All the spies in the IRA in the 1916-1921 period were most likely members of the IRA.” They were the spies, as they were in the Provos.
“How could Protestants be spies? What would they know? The only people who would know anything about the IRA were members of the IRA.
Mr Harris angrily rejected Mr O’Shea’s suggestion that Protestant farmers passed information to the British military or that it somehow justified their killing by the IRA, and he argued that any spies who betrayed the IRA in west Cork were most likely members of the IRA. The killing of Protestants was highlighted by the late Peter Hart in his 1998 book, The IRA and Its Enemies: Violence and Community in Cork 1916-1923, in which he alleged the IRA had engaged in a sectarian campaign with the shooting of 13 Protestants in the Bandon Valley in April 1922, after the Truce.īut Mr Hart's thesis and that of An Tost Fada was challenged by the Sinn Féin member and former Skibbereen town councillor Donnacha O'Shea, who said it ignored a British intelligence report that acknowledged Protestant farmers in the Bandon Valley passed information to the British. The documentary, first broadcast by RTÉ in 2012, was shown on July 29th as part of the inaugural West Cork History Festival, in Skibbereen, before an audience of about 100 people, followed by a debate involving Mr Harris and the film's producer and director, Gerry Gregg. As long as Irish Protestants in the Republic feel unable to talk about their past they are not truly free, the veteran journalist and polemicist Eoghan Harris told a packed gathering for the screening of his documentary about the treatment of Protestants in west Cork, An Tost Fada.Īn Tost Fada ( The Long Silence) tells the story of the Irish-speaking Church of Ireland clergyman Canon George Salter and how his father had to sell his Dunmanway farm in April 1922, amid IRA threats, and move to the UK before returning to live in Castletownshend, where Canon Salter was born in 1925.
0 kommentar(er)
