How important was Tom Barry in the IWOI?

Neutronale wrote: »

Absolutely damning and excellent review here:http://www.academia.edu/485160/History_Ireland_Book_Review_Gerard_Murphy_The_Year_of_Disappearances

If Murphy is not a convinced revisionist and Harrisite I am at a loss as to why he would set out to take this approach, why would he want to prove the IRA was sectarian?

If he has twisted the evidence in the way in which the above review states he is in danger of not being taken seriously as a historian...

I was a little disappointed with John Borgonovo’s review of my book The Year of Disappearances that appeared in the January/February edition of HI. I would have expected more in the line of constructive criticism rather than the dismissal that the book received. My book, he asserts ‘cannot be presented as serious scholarship; it is a work in which ‘speculation replaces sound historic methodology’. Borgonovo’s method of criticism was to quickly run through the various elements of the book while asserting that I produce no evidence to support any of them. In each instance he ignored the evidence that I did provide. It is not possible to go through all his assertions in a letter of this length, so a few examples will have to suffice.

He states that Martin Corry is an unreliable witness who frequently exaggerated his War of Independence experiences and that I don’t question his credibility. Yet the first eight chapters of my book are spent in doing precisely that. Corry’s claims that a large number of people were shot out of the brigade prison at Knockraha are substantiated by other members of the 1st Cork Brigade, including his own commanding officer, Michael Leahy. As for the actual number killed, Corry himself in his IRA pension application form claimed that his group executed 27 prisoners during the War of Independence. It is well known that IRA pension applications were vetted by having their claims authenticated by senior veterans of the conflict. It is fair to assume that if Corry claimed to have executed 27 people that this number was agreed by his superiors in the Old IRA. 35 might have been an exaggeration, 27 is not.

Another example of Mr. Borgonovo’s method is his statement that the only evidence I produce on the abduction of half a dozen Cork city merchants on St Patrick’s Day 1922 are three newspaper reports. In fact, this story was carried by no less than six newspapers and was even picked up by the Press Association and ran, off and on, in these newspapers for the next week – though the men are not named. It is also supported by the accounts of IRA veterans who predated it to make it look as if it occurred a year earlier. John Borgonovo knows this as well as I do. After all, he wrote a whole book trying to prove that these men were killed in the spring of 1921, something he failed to prove. Based on Liam de Roiste’s diary entry of 23 March 1922, he then states that the men abducted on 17 March 1922 were in fact two local IRA officers arrested for joining the Gardai. It is true that two IRA men called Hallinan and Kelleher were arrested around that date after making a visit to Dublin to join the Civic Guard but these were not the six ‘prominent citizens’ taken on St Patrick’s Day. (Kidnappings were almost a daily occurrence during those weeks.) Mrs Parsons, inquiring about the fate of her son (a fifteen-year old) who disappeared the same week was told at IRA HQ in Union Quay barracks to hold out no hope as 'a lot' had been shot around that time.

Mr. Borgonovo stated that I could not uncover ‘blatant anti-Masonic and anti-Protestant sentiments amid thousands of pages of O’Donoghue material’. I think the reasons for that are fairly obvious. Maybe he should spread his wings a little and have another look at the correspondence emanating from the 1st Southern Division in the Mulcahy and indeed the Lankford papers. There’s plenty anti-Masonic stuff in there. Besides, what was O’Donoghue doing ‘updating’ his lists of Freemasons as late as 1930 when he was no longer a member of the IRA? Mr. Borgonovo’s review is full of such examples of partial reporting of the evidence presented in my book. To rebut them all would require me writing the book all over again.

As I have said previously, my book is a book of evidence, not a book of conclusions. I work from the standpoint of scientific methodology. What evidence I have, I put out there on the basis that it is falsifiable. (In other words that it can be proven wrong, if it is wrong - for those who don't understand what the word 'falsifiable' means.) My hope is to provide stimulus to others to further investigate the subject as new information becomes available. I was surprised at the tenor of John Borgonovo’s review, considering that my work augments his own and explains a lot of the puzzling ambiguities that his data, based largely on the accounts of Old IRA veterans, throws up. Suggesting that this is not a work of serious scholarship, when I use considerably more sources than he does, is not just being disingenuous, it is also plain wrong.

Gerard Murphy
Updated 23 October 2011
http://year-of-disappearances.blogspot.ie/2011/10/reply-to-john-borgonovo.html

GRMA wrote: »

Yeah, making stuff up is generally a no go area for historians.

tdv123 wrote: »

Just watched the late late Gay set up Adams on. He really is a twat.

An Coilean wrote: »

I would not agree with that assessment, it has been said of Barry that he had the clearest idea of how to beat the British of any IRA officer in Ireland, he freely admited that at the time of the truce the IRA had come no where near even striking distance of a military defeat of British forces, however that is not to say that a military victory was not possible.

British forces in Ireland were severly streched by mid 1921 and several of the Highest ranking officers in the British general staff were voicing concerns that if the IRA was not beaten in the summer of 1921, then they would not be beaten at all. It was getting increasingly difficult to maintain the numbers of troops in Ireland while also managing commitments in the rest of the Empire.
The arms situation was poor on the IRA side, however in terms of manpower the preceding years of war had left the IRA with a pool of experienced officers and men that could quickly be turned into an effective army of some potential should they have been able to pull of the arms landings that were being prepared at the time of the truce.

I don't think that the war would have continued to a point where we would ever have seen a surrender of the British army in the field, but we could have seen the IRA continue to build in strenght and extend the war through divisional flying colums that could have opporated in what had previously been quiet areas to further increase pressure on the British forces through the winter of 1921/22 that would have made an end to the war on much more favorable terms to the Irish a near inevitability.

The limited resources of the post Great war British Army and its commitments throughout the Empire coupled with mounting public oposition at home simply would not have allowed the British government to continue with the war in my opinion.

An Coilean wrote: »

That is quite a Dublin centric view of the War, while the customs house was a blow to the dublin brigade, to say it was finished is well wide of the mark, as for the leaders in Dublin, the IRA was a difuse organisation, the capture of the entire GHQ, an achievement the British never even came close to realising would still have had only a minor effect on the units fighting outside of Dublin.
GHQ did not organise attacks or provide arms, the local units in all areas did that for themselves.

The capture of key officers in GHQ may have been a setback in Dublin, and a coup for the British, but in terms of the actual fighting on the ground in the country, it would have made little difference.