Sir,—In reply to Jeffery Dudgeon (HI 20.2, March/April 2010, Letters), the debate about whether the late Peter Hart is guilty of calling the Dunmanway massacre ‘ethnic cleansing’ has gone on far too long. In his article ‘Class, community, and the Irish Republican Army in Cork’, in Cork: history and society (1993), he stated (p. 980) … Read more
Sir,—I followed with interest the debate on Peter Hart’s interpretation of the 1922 Dunmanway massacre (John M. Regan, HI 20.1, Jan./Feb. 2012, Platform; Jeffrey Dudgeon, HI 20.2, March/April 2012, Letters). Hart’s reputation is unlikely to be damaged by Regan’s analysis, however. To somebody who knows the area, Regan’s handling of data is so slipshod and … Read more
Sir,—Jeffrey Dudgeon’s reply to John M. Regan (HI 20.2, Jan./Feb. 2012, Letters) raises the possibility that Frank Busteed was an IRA officer partly responsible for killing ten loyalist Protestants from 26 to 29 April 1922. While evidence is tenuous, Peter Hart’s withholding of this and other (more crucial) evidence indicating a non-sectarian explanation in The … Read more
Sir,—Do most academic historians of revolutionary and post-revolutionary Ireland conform to a ‘constitutional narrative’, driven by a moral imperative to subvert republican interpretations of Irish history? Has their shared political agenda led to widespread and deliberate distortion, suppression, ‘elision’ and even falsification of the evidential record? Have they repeatedly abused their academic positions by indulging … Read more