And so it continues… Coolacrease… amateur historians and denial

Another weekend, another column by the indefatigable Eoghan Harris. And consequently another post by the frankly fairly fatiguable me…
This Sunday he is writing once more about Coolacrease and the Paul Quinn murder. He suggests that:

Last week I argued that the link between the killing of Paul Quinn of Cullyhanna in October 2007, and the killing of the two Pearson brothers at Coolacrease, Co Offaly in June 1921, was that both were carried out by people using the cloak of the IRA to cover what, in any normal society, would be seen as a cruel and criminal act.

I think that’s a telling admission. The term ‘normal society’ is replete with significations. Ireland in 1921 was not a ‘normal society’. The North in 2007 is moving towards ‘normality’, but still has a way to go. And it is this essentially – and I use the term advisedly – bourgeois sensibility that to me explains much much more of his political meanderings than any other factor. Because it is as one with the effectively vicarious and voyeuristic finger wagging of someone looking into a situation unable to contextualise that situation either in a socio-political or cultural milieu. I’ve spoken before of the condescending and patronising words about Protestants, thankfully missing in this piece.

Yet there are other patronising and condescending words for finally we are told what the response should be…

Likewise, decent local people were not wise in accepting the dubious assistance of the Aubane Historical Society in casting a cloud over the Pearsons. Instead of an ecumenical service of atonement — there was no clergyman at the Pearsons’s burial — we get increasingly incoherent attempts to explain away the murders. The latest lunacy on Indymedia is that the Pearsons were shot in the groin because IRA executioners were “inexperienced”!

‘An ecumenical service of atonement’. Well, there’s something to conjure with. A disputed historical event. Insufficient evidence to come to a clear determination as to guilt or otherwise and Ireland in 2007 is told that ‘atonement’ must be made. I disagree fundamentally. Incidentally it seems to me quite possible that an IRA unit might well be ‘inexperienced’ in such matters, it wasn’t quite a Maoist peasant uprising, but nor was it a well drilled standing army, and his point sits oddly with a later paragraph where he says:

Let me predict that the more decent locals let Aubane dictate how they handle this atrocity, the more the story will refuse to die. Because many Irish people simply do not believe that a pacifist Cooneyite family like the Pearsons would shoot and wound a member of the North Offaly IRA — who, by all accounts, were a maladroit bunch that most likely shot one of their own members in the dark.

Well come on now, we’re told they’re bloody executioners in one passage and that they’re a maladroit bunch in another. I can live with ambiguity and gray areas, but on all other issues the good Senator can’t.

But returning to atonement. This proposition seems to me to misunderstand the point of atonement and to enter into a process by which guilt is ascribed collectively. To my mind those who were guilty of murdering the Pearsons, those who know what happened definitively on that and the preceding days, were the ones who had to make atonement or come to terms with their acts. Not a community or polity, either local or general, some 90 odd years later. To do so would be to ascribe a certainty to the situation which we cannot determine. It would be an utter falsehood. A lie.

A lie shaped politically to cast a shadow across what was by any reckoning an already sufficiently bloody history which needs no further exaggeration or hyperbole.

And it would also be as gestural in its own way as the pointless and revanchist attacks on the PSNI policemen these last two weeks.

You’ll have gathered I loathe gestural politics from whatever direction.

Meanwhile, talking about Tom McGurk’s article in the Sunday Business Post last week he suggests:

Finally, I can see why naff Irish nationalists need to believe the fiction that no sectarian act was ever committed by the Old IRA in the Irish Republic. But I can’t see why Northern nationalists would want to deny that our Southern grandfathers could be as gruesomely sectarian as any of the gangs that roam South Armagh — a point brilliantly made in a polemic by Danny Morrison a few years ago.

So I was bit baffled when Tom McGurk, a Northerner who makes no secret of his nationalism, came out so strongly in last week’s Sunday Business Post against RTE’s Coolacrease programme. In doing so, he leaned far too heavily on a long article by Pat Muldowney published in Indymedia, home of hardline nationalists.

He then sallies forth with his boilerplate accusation about Muldowney.

More seriously, McGurk misleads us in the following two sentences. “University of Ulster academic Pat Muldowney — whose new book on the period will be published soon — is also said to be angry. As a historian, Muldowney is astonished that the programme ignored the only surviving documentary evidence of the incident — the officially recorded inquest into the killings.”

The close conjunction of these two sentences might lead the casual reader to form the impression that Muldowney is a University of Ulster academic historian. In fact Muldowney is a lecturer in mathematics at the university, and thus an amateur historian when it comes to weighing evidence. This causes him — and thus McGurk — to make elementary errors when evaluating evidence.

I’ve said it before. What historical track record does Harris have that he considers himself in a position to throw brick bats at Muldowney? No more or no less than Muldowney, I would suggest. McGurk rather wryly noted that:

[the documentary makers were] Assisted by Senator Eoghan Harris, who apparently is an expert on the matter…

But it’s also worth pointing out that far from the pollyanish view of the WoI that Harris suggests Nationalists have McGurk also wrote:

Only the naive or those with a dinner party view of history could imagine that there were no sectarian incidents or acts of land grabbing as an empire was taken on.

The War of Independence was a vicious and largely localised war, with local IRA units – dominated by local families – enjoying little centralised organisation or direction. At the end, the winners wrote the story.

Local scores were settled – as the Republican courts, after they were set up, were to discover. But were militant Republican roots not embedded in the land war and its secret societies?

Equally, in the rural campaigns, wasn’t the land always going to be the perpetual subtext to everything else? After all, was this not a dispute engendered by an historic act of dispossession?

Note the phrase ‘dinner party view’…

Harris, though, continues to argue that all the evidence that Muldowney presents is suspect.

But Muldowney’s (and McGurk’s) interpretation is merely a terse summary by the Court of a one-page RIC Inspector’s report which simply summarises all the rumours rife in a local community which is clearly shocked by the Pearson shootings and anxious to find some acceptable motives for the atrocity. The RIC Inspector’s report on the rumours runs as follows

“Possible motives: 1. The acquisition of Pearsons land (para on this). 2. Revenge by Sinn Fein. It is said by the County Inspector Queen’s County that the two Pearson boys a few days previously had seen two men felling a tree on their land adjoining the road. Had told the men concerned to go away, and when they refused had fetched two guns and fired and wounded two Sinn Feiners, one of whom it is believed died. It is further rumoured when the farm house was burning, two guns fell out of the roof.”

Firstly, Muldowney is as entitled to ‘interpret’ this as Harris is. The historical record remains contested (note too that Harris entirely ignores the IRA’s own investigation).

And to anchor this in the present political context consider what Harris writes about a more contemporary resonance…

On reflection I realise that there is a further link. In both cases a shocked society took refuge in denials which protect associates or descendants of the perpetrators. Official Ireland sacrificed Paul Quinn to the peace process in order to protect Adams & Co. The Pearsons were sacrificed to national and local pieties — the claim that they were subjected to a “proper” IRA execution.

Again, a complete overestimation of what happened in Coolacrease. But worse an overestimation of what happened in South Armagh.

The Government and the Opposition were wrong to accept Sinn Fein assurances that the South Armagh IRA were not the perpetrators — a fiction that Lord Laird blew apart in his detailed description of how eight of the attackers wore surgical gowns and gloves, the grim garb of the IRA butchers of South Armagh.

Have the Goverment and the Opposition done any such thing? The IMC is fairly clear on the matter suggesting that associates or former or current members of the IRA may have been involved. I’m no apologist for the South Armagh IRA, quite the opposite, but I’m fairly certain that the murder of Paul Quinn reflected no larger political agenda (and having seen other paramilitaries fade away in inglorious circumstances why are we expected to believe that such events could not take place). And oddly enough so is Lord Laird who says that the IRA Army Council did not authorise any such happening. Which makes one wonder why there is this wish to play fast and loose with the facts, such as they are…

Harris argues that…

Denials do more damage than the original atrocity. When those in authority avoid naming names, decent people despair and fall dumb, the community closes in around the dirty secret, and civil society is clouded until the original offence against the moral order is brought out in the open and atoned for.

Actually, again I disagree. The original murders of the Pearsons, dispute or not, were the appalling acts, not a rather paltry dispute in the Irish media in 2007. That they happened in the context of a conflict provides scant exculpation. But that is the very point Harris time and again refuses to face up to. There was no clear ‘moral order’ in 1921. The British had seen to it that the democratic rights of the Irish were time and again stymied as they delayed any measure of Home Rule let alone independence. The response from this society to that delay, a delay set within an history that stretched centuries back and which included periods of ferocious repression, means that talk of ‘moral order’ seems willfully self-serving. Conflict is the absence, or near absence, of moral order and always will be. There are few enough ‘clean’ transitions from one national structure to another (perhaps the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc came close, but even there innocents were caught up in those events, and even today, as we have seen in Poland a long shadow has been cast). And to pretend that the shift from conflict to peace does not engender the most egregious and sometimes murderous contradictions, and that that is as true of 2007 as it was in 1921, is to be more than self-serving… that is also to be in denial.