Fitzpatrick Terror In Ireland

1916-1923
1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-1-84351-317-9
Verlag: The Lilliput Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 248 Seiten

The practice of terror in revolutionary Ireland remains a highly controversial topic, which seldom receives either balanced or dispassionate treatment. This collection of essays is designed to illuminate the varied origins, forms and consequences of terror, whether practised by republicans or forces of the Crown. It is the fifth production of the Trinity History Workshop, an informal group of academic historians, research students, and undergraduates associated with Trinity College, Dublin. The Workshop's reputation was established in 1986 by its first collection, Ireland and the First World War, subsequently reissued by The Lilliput Press. The current volume is dedicated to the memory of a distinguished former member, the late Peter Hart, whose studies of both revolutionary and counter-revolutionary terror continue to arouse lively and sometimes intemperate debate. Several chapters emerged from papers delivered at a one-day conference in Trinity College in November 2010, while others have been specially commissioned for this book. The contributors, including gifted postgraduate and undergraduate students as well as prominent historians, tackle many facets of terror, such as 'Bloody Sunday', the Kilmichael Ambush and the Sack of Balbriggan. Scholars, students, political activists and all those interested in the Irish Revolution will find both provocation and enlightenment in this book. Its purpose is not to assign blame to one party or another, but to offer varied perspectives on one of the most contentious periods of Irish history. The book is enhanced by illustrations, maps and charts.

DAVID FITZPATRICK is Professor of Modern History at Trinity College, Dublin. His most recent book is Solitary and Wild:Frederick MacNeice and the Salvation of Ireland, also published by The Lilliput Press in 2012.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fitzpatrick, David

Leseproben

2. Terror in Twentieth-Century Ireland

Brian Hanley

The use of the term ‘terror’ in relation to political violence, in Ireland and elsewhere, is problematic. Its derivative ‘terrorist’ is generally seen as pejorative and is rarely, if ever, accepted by those to whom it is applied. Many would reject D. J. Whittaker’s contention that what he calls ‘social “facilitation”’ leads to tolerance for ‘terrorism’:

This concept refers to social habits and historical traditions that sanction the use of violence against the government, making it morally and politically justifiable … Social myths, traditions, and habits permit the development of terrorism as an established political custom. An excellent example of such a tradition is the case of Ireland, where the tradition of physical force dates from the eighteenth century, and the legend of Michael Collins in 1919–21 still inspires and partially excuses the much less discriminate and less effective terrorism of the contemporary Provisional IRA.1

By contrast, Sinn Féin’s Gerry Kelly has suggested that ‘a Palestinian, a us Congressman, a British soldier or an Irishman will have different views on what a just war is. There is no one definition of a just war, or of terrorism.’ Gerry Adams has stated that, for him, terrorism involves the ‘deliberate targeting of civilians. In my view the IRA has never deliberately targeted civilians.’2 Many who honour the memory of Michael Collins or Edward Carson would likewise deny that ‘terror’ was part of the strategy behind the campaigns that brought the two Irish states into being. It is worth noting that historians are not immune to viewing this subject from their own political standpoints.

The Oxford English Dictionary offers a number of definitions of terror: ‘the state of being terrified or greatly frightened; intense fear, fright, or dread; … a state of things in which the general community live in dread of death or outrage; … a policy intended to strike with terror those against whom it is adopted; the employment of methods of intimidation; the fact of terrorizing or condition of being terrorized.’3 Any act of violence, even if directed at specific targets, can lead to feelings of terror, so defined. There are many examples of this in the Irish context. A recurrent aspect of twentieth-century violence in Ireland was forcing people from their homes or workplaces, threatening them with future violence or otherwise making their lives intolerable. Such violence often had an inter-communal or sectarian aspect, as with the expulsion of Belfast Catholics and dissident Protestants from their workplaces in 1912 and 1920, or the wider attacks on northern nationalists between 1920 and 1922. Further riots and disorder forcing major population movements occurred in Belfast in July 1935, August 1969 and August 1971.

As Richard English observes, a number of other definitions of terrorism have suggested that it is primarily violence directed against non-combatants. Thus Kydd and Walter, in The Strategies of Terrorism, define it as ‘the use of violence against civilians by non-state actors to attain political goals’. The us State Department describes terrorism as ‘premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience’. Conor Gearty maintains that ‘violence is unequivocally terrorist when it is politically motivated and carried out by sub-state groups; when its victims are chosen at random; and when the purpose behind the violence is to communicate the message to a wider audience’. 4 Under these definitions, neither the Kilmichael ambush of November 1920 nor the preceding assassinations of military and intelligence personnel on Bloody Sunday were terrorist acts. In both cases the targets of the IRA were military or state actors, not civilians or non-combatants.

The emphasis in these definitions on ‘sub-state groups’ is clearly problematic, as states can, and do, engage in similar forms of terrorism. ‘The Terror’ was a term originally applied to ‘Government by intimidation’ in Robespierre’s France (1793–4). Likewise, the British state in Ireland, and both Irish states after 1921, were prepared to utilize terror tactics. In 1920–2, Crown forces were involved in forcing people from their homes, destroying property and intimidating and killing citizens. Well-known examples include the reprisals in Banbridge, Dromore and Lisburn and the burning of Cork City centre in 1920.5

Describing such actions of the British state in the revolutionary era as ‘terrorist’ is not problematic for Irish nationalists. More controversial has been the suggestion that the IRA in that era carried out actions that might be defined as sectarian terror, an argument that inspired much of the debate on Peter Hart’s The I.R.A. and Its Enemies. Hart examined the impact on West Cork’s Protestant population of a number of shootings in April 1922, documenting the fear that these killings produced and the flight that they helped provoke. Along with his allegations about the conduct of the IRA during the Kilmichael ambush, Hart’s interpretation touched a raw nerve. His work was enthusiastically endorsed by polemicists and self-publicists, eager to utilize his research for their own purposes. This further muddied the waters, as battle lines were drawn not just on the basis of what was said, but what was presumed to have been said.6 Though an early republican reviewer had stated that Hart’s work (along with that of Joost Augusteijn and David Fitzpatrick) ‘would add to anybody’s understanding of the reasons behind many of the military strategies implemented during the revolutionary period’, the debate degenerated into a tussle between those who felt duty-bound to defend the honour of the IRA, and those who wished to denounce them.7 Hart’s use of the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ to describe the events in West Cork certainly did not clarify the issue.8 As he himself later admitted, there was ‘no ethnic cleansing in the Irish revolution (though the attacks on Catholics in Belfast came close) but there was ethnically targeted violence’. Hart also conceded that ‘Unionist organizations embraced or acquiesced in sectarianism in a way nationalist ones – to their credit – did not’.9

The killings in West Cork had already been documented by republican activist Jim Lane, almost forty years ago:

In April 1922, at the time of the Truce, a pogrom every bit as vicious as any one in Belfast, took place in West Cork. Following the shooting dead of an IRA officer by a Protestant, armed men visited Protestant homes in the districts surrounding Bandon, and on one day alone nine Protestants were shot dead. A young boy of 18 years was shot in his home in Clonakilty, a married man with a young family was shot in Dunmanway, as well as two old men in their 70s and 80s. Elsewhere, in Ballineen, Enniskeane, and Castletown–Kenneigh the story was similar, a knock at the door at dead of night and the men of the house were taken out and shot before their families. By the weekend Protestants poured out of West Cork, taking the Rosslare boat to Britain. The week was finished off with the shooting of an old Protestant, aged over 70 years and crippled with arthritis.

Lane made clear that what differentiated that Cork case from killings of Catholics in Belfast was that, unlike the unionist government, Sinn Féin immediately condemned the killings and republicans moved to prevent any more.10 In the south, at least, these killings were exceptional, though the IRA’s retaliation at Altnaveigh, for B-Special violence in the South Armagh area during 1922, was also designed to instil terror.11

Many were genuinely shocked and upset by the idea that the ‘old’ IRA might have engaged in a sectarian slaughter that played a part in forcing people from their homes and indeed from Ireland. In some cases this reflected a long-standing desire among supporters of constitutional nationalism to draw a sharp distinction between the ‘old’ IRA and the modern version. As a nephew of the ‘Big Fella’ argued passionately in 1996, Michael Collins had ‘kept the fight to the fighting areas, whereas the IRA has committed countless acts on violence on civilians in the past 25 years. That sort of violence did not happen in Collins’s time.’ This was a view endorsed by many enthused by Neil Jordan’s movie of the same year, with one young cinema-goer claiming that ‘everybody knows the modern IRA are some of the most highly-trained terrorists in the world. The film shows that in 1920 they were only boys, most of them.’12 That such views were sincerely held was not surprising, given that they were endorsed by some historians. Speaking at Béal na mBláth in August 1982, John A. Murphy had argued that the ‘urban terrorist violence of the last 12 years … had no counterpart in the events of 60 years ago, at least not on the Irish side’. Then, he argued, the republicans had possessed ‘a popular vote, a popular mandate, the popular will – this is what...