"Ten men in a mini-bus Glimpse a red torchAnd are machine gunned to bits.Flesh rags and blood rags:The narrow mountain roadStrewn with corpsesSlaughtered fish on a slipway,Corpse upon corpse,Workman upon workman,Adorned with works instruments --Sandwich boxes and flasks,Decks of playing cards."-- The Minibus Massacre, Eve of the Epiphany
Paul Durcan's poem on the Kingsmill Massacre came fresh from the furnace of anger and shame felt in the Irish Republic on January 5, 1976, the eve of the Epiphany, on hearing the dreadful news that the South Armagh IRA had taken 10 Protestant workmen from their van, told the single Roman Catholic to run, made the men bunch more tightly together and then shot them down in a scene that seemed straight from hell.
RTE News showed us some of what TS Eliot called the "objective co-relatives", single images that summoned up the horror it spared us: the scattered safety helmets, the lunchboxes, a set of bloodied false teeth.
And it reported the most heart-rending incident of all in the story -- how the Protestant workers, believing the gang to be Loyalists, tried to hide the identity of the only Roman Catholic in the group.
Last week, RTE news seemed to lose that saving sense of balance. It rightly made much of the Loyalist riots in the Short Strand and the report on the Loyalist Loughlinisland murders.
But last Wednesday, neither Morning Ireland, Pat Kenny or the News at One made a single mention of the report of the Historical Enquiries team on the Kingsmill Massacre.
This is no time for tribal reporting. By reminding us that sectarianism is not confined to one tradition, RTE would have removed some propaganda ammunition from the arsenal of the the Recurring IRA.
Thankfully, that public service was performed by the Irish Times, which ran a stunning news feature with poignant black and white photographs of the murdered Protestants.
Let me pause to salute the departing editor, Geraldine Kennedy, and welcome the incoming editor, Kevin O'Sullivan. Both would have had a hand in the brave decision to give such a strong showing to the Kingsmill Massacre. It helped give a new generation a sense of anger and shame at the agendas of all the IRAs.
Some 20 years after the event, I felt the same anger and shame as I read Peter Hart's book The IRA and its Enemies. At its core was the IRA's killing of 10 Protestants in the Bandon Valley area in 1922,
the enforced exodus of hundreds of Protestant families from West Cork, followed by the shameful silence of 76 years that was finally broken by Hart's book in 1998.
Common to both atrocities was the attempted cover-up.
Just as IRA apologists, supported by some academics, created a moral fog around the Bandon Valley murders to protect the myth of a non--sectarian old IRA as a necessary force for Irish self-government, so the same forces conspire to protect the myth of the Provisional IRA as a reaction to sectarian Loyalism and as a necessary prelude to the peace process.
This is a deadly state of denial. By denial I mean all attempts by nationalist propagandists and academic micro-historians -- possibly motivated by academic jealousy given their neglect of the field until then -- to roll back the broad conclusions of Peter Hart's path-breaking work, and to blur, obfuscate, niggle and quibble in a way which objectively helps to hide the poor bodies of murdered Protestants stretched on the road of south Armagh or at the front doors of their farms and shops along the Bandon Valley.
But neither nationalists nor academic apologists will ever be able to get past the dead bodies dumped by the old IRA or Provo IRA. Their apologetics, however, are strikingly similar. In both Bandon and south Armagh, they claim the IRA unit was acting independently, or that the the murders did not have a traumatic effect on a much wider Protestant community, particularly in the South in 1922.
The apologists have something else in common, too: the lack of any sense of a larger historical hinterland.
Because just as the Kingsmill Massacre comes from a long history of sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland, so too the Bandon Valley murders come from a long history of Catholic nationalist sectarianism in the South, a prejudice against Protestants from which the IRA was not free.
That sectarian streak was formed by forces as diverse as the prophecies of Pastorini, the Tithe Wars, the agrarian terrorism of those who titled themselves Captain Rock, the vicious sectarian polemics of Tim Healy and DP Moran of the Leader, and, most pernicious of all, by the Ne Temere decree that set out to destroy marriage between Protestant and Catholic.
Tom Barry, for all his talk of republicanism, was tainted by that sectarian tradition and behaved in a brutally tribal fashion when he went looking for "spies".
In recent years, RTE programmes, as distinct from RTE News, have tried to tell the Protestant side of that tribal history, particularly in programmes about the Altnaveigh Massacre of June 1992, the killing of two young Cooneyites at Coolacrease in 1921, and above all the Bandon Valley murders of 1922, which were at the core of the RTE film Cork's Bloody Secret, which gave some closure to many Cork Protestants.
But not for long. Although these programmes were redemptive, they were almost immediately attacked by ultranationalists. Then there were the more careful apologetics of academic historians.
Having for almost 80 years shamefully neglected to do the work that was finally done by Hart, they now surfaced to announce they came to the same conclusions as his ultra-nationalist critics.
In recent days, I recorded a long interview with an elderly West Cork Protestant. What struck me forcibly -- as it never seems to strike academic historians -- was his account of the role played in the enforced exodus of Irish Protestants by what my friend Brendan Cafferty, a former garda, calls the "fear of crime", which could follow even a single murder.
But as my interviewee informed me, it could equally be caused by the billeting, with a Protestant farm family that included adolescent girls, of large parties of armed IRA men.
Recent suggestions by academics which appear to weaken Hart's work -- nothing is ever published that might support his conclusions -- prompt me to ask a rhetorical question in relation to the exodus of 107,000 Irish Protestants in the period 1911 to 1926, the largest movement of population in Europe before the Second World War.
Apart from Protestants who left because of natural migration, or because they were RIC men at risk, how can any academic who has not systematically spoken to Protestant survivors -- as Hart did -- fathom the psychological motivation of the tens of thousands of Irish Protestants who left Ireland after 1922?
Failing an adequate answer, I am satisfied that IRA terror played the major part, and that Paul Durcan's judgement still stands:
"Never were men more obscene than they,
The terrorist leaders of the IRA."
Paul Durcan will read his poetry at the Skibbereen Arts Festival, in Skibbereen, Co Cork, July 16-23.
Paul Durcan's poem on the Kingsmill Massacre came fresh from the furnace of anger and shame felt in the Irish Republic on January 5, 1976, the eve of the Epiphany, on hearing the dreadful news that the South Armagh IRA had taken 10 Protestant workmen from their van, told the single Roman Catholic to run, made the men bunch more tightly together and then shot them down in a scene that seemed straight from hell.
RTE News showed us some of what TS Eliot called the "objective co-relatives", single images that summoned up the horror it spared us: the scattered safety helmets, the lunchboxes, a set of bloodied false teeth.
And it reported the most heart-rending incident of all in the story -- how the Protestant workers, believing the gang to be Loyalists, tried to hide the identity of the only Roman Catholic in the group.
Last week, RTE news seemed to lose that saving sense of balance. It rightly made much of the Loyalist riots in the Short Strand and the report on the Loyalist Loughlinisland murders.
But last Wednesday, neither Morning Ireland, Pat Kenny or the News at One made a single mention of the report of the Historical Enquiries team on the Kingsmill Massacre.
This is no time for tribal reporting. By reminding us that sectarianism is not confined to one tradition, RTE would have removed some propaganda ammunition from the arsenal of the the Recurring IRA.
Thankfully, that public service was performed by the Irish Times, which ran a stunning news feature with poignant black and white photographs of the murdered Protestants.
Let me pause to salute the departing editor, Geraldine Kennedy, and welcome the incoming editor, Kevin O'Sullivan. Both would have had a hand in the brave decision to give such a strong showing to the Kingsmill Massacre. It helped give a new generation a sense of anger and shame at the agendas of all the IRAs.
Some 20 years after the event, I felt the same anger and shame as I read Peter Hart's book The IRA and its Enemies. At its core was the IRA's killing of 10 Protestants in the Bandon Valley area in 1922,
the enforced exodus of hundreds of Protestant families from West Cork, followed by the shameful silence of 76 years that was finally broken by Hart's book in 1998.
Common to both atrocities was the attempted cover-up.
Just as IRA apologists, supported by some academics, created a moral fog around the Bandon Valley murders to protect the myth of a non--sectarian old IRA as a necessary force for Irish self-government, so the same forces conspire to protect the myth of the Provisional IRA as a reaction to sectarian Loyalism and as a necessary prelude to the peace process.
This is a deadly state of denial. By denial I mean all attempts by nationalist propagandists and academic micro-historians -- possibly motivated by academic jealousy given their neglect of the field until then -- to roll back the broad conclusions of Peter Hart's path-breaking work, and to blur, obfuscate, niggle and quibble in a way which objectively helps to hide the poor bodies of murdered Protestants stretched on the road of south Armagh or at the front doors of their farms and shops along the Bandon Valley.
But neither nationalists nor academic apologists will ever be able to get past the dead bodies dumped by the old IRA or Provo IRA. Their apologetics, however, are strikingly similar. In both Bandon and south Armagh, they claim the IRA unit was acting independently, or that the the murders did not have a traumatic effect on a much wider Protestant community, particularly in the South in 1922.
The apologists have something else in common, too: the lack of any sense of a larger historical hinterland.
Because just as the Kingsmill Massacre comes from a long history of sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland, so too the Bandon Valley murders come from a long history of Catholic nationalist sectarianism in the South, a prejudice against Protestants from which the IRA was not free.
Tom Barry, for all his talk of republicanism, was tainted by that sectarian tradition and behaved in a brutally tribal fashion when he went looking for "spies".
In recent years, RTE programmes, as distinct from RTE News, have tried to tell the Protestant side of that tribal history, particularly in programmes about the Altnaveigh Massacre of June 1992, the killing of two young Cooneyites at Coolacrease in 1921, and above all the Bandon Valley murders of 1922, which were at the core of the RTE film Cork's Bloody Secret, which gave some closure to many Cork Protestants.
But not for long. Although these programmes were redemptive, they were almost immediately attacked by ultranationalists. Then there were the more careful apologetics of academic historians.
Having for almost 80 years shamefully neglected to do the work that was finally done by Hart, they now surfaced to announce they came to the same conclusions as his ultra-nationalist critics.
In recent days, I recorded a long interview with an elderly West Cork Protestant. What struck me forcibly -- as it never seems to strike academic historians -- was his account of the role played in the enforced exodus of Irish Protestants by what my friend Brendan Cafferty, a former garda, calls the "fear of crime", which could follow even a single murder.
But as my interviewee informed me, it could equally be caused by the billeting, with a Protestant farm family that included adolescent girls, of large parties of armed IRA men.
Recent suggestions by academics which appear to weaken Hart's work -- nothing is ever published that might support his conclusions -- prompt me to ask a rhetorical question in relation to the exodus of 107,000 Irish Protestants in the period 1911 to 1926, the largest movement of population in Europe before the Second World War.
Apart from Protestants who left because of natural migration, or because they were RIC men at risk, how can any academic who has not systematically spoken to Protestant survivors -- as Hart did -- fathom the psychological motivation of the tens of thousands of Irish Protestants who left Ireland after 1922?
Failing an adequate answer, I am satisfied that IRA terror played the major part, and that Paul Durcan's judgement still stands:
"Never were men more obscene than they,
The terrorist leaders of the IRA."
Paul Durcan will read his poetry at the Skibbereen Arts Festival, in Skibbereen, Co Cork, July 16-23.
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