So maybe these troubles are, bar a few more stupid, purposeless killings, finally over. Yet already I can sense the events of the past 30 years being rewritten and a thick layer of historical cosmetic paste being smeared over the butcheries, the torture, the ethnic cleansings and the disappeared.
We have seen much similar vileness dressed over before, and transformed into congenial and heroic myth. It has taken nearly 80 years for a written account, free of legendising and propaganda, to give details of the IRA's most celebrated theatre in the "Anglo-Irish" war, Cork.
The historian responsible is Peter Hart, whose work, The IRA and its enemies - Violence and Community in Cork, 1916- 23 (Oxford) must be the most masterly study of what became a truly legendary IRA campaign. It is the product of many years' work - Peter began his investigations just as the last of the veterans of the time were coming to the end of their lives. He spoke to all he could, and most of those he met, he liked, as decent men, with a fine sense of humour and a deep sense of commitment to the cause for which they were fighting.
The fevers of war
Of course, the personal merits of the individuals concerned are barely relevant. Once men are seized by the fevers of war, they generally abandon their own personal principles, because normally they are not fighting for any personal gain. Is it surprising so few IRA veterans seem ever to have expressed remorse at what they had done? Did the availability of the Catholic confessional relieve men of their guilt? Or did the hagiographical culture which settled on this period allow old men forget the reality of their deeds? Of course they were terrible times, far more terrible than history or popular folklore generally record. It was a time of personalised murder.
Peter's close analysis of the time indicates that less than half of the Crown casualties of the time, and only a third of shootings by IRA men, occurred in combat, with Crown force shootings following a similar pattern. The rest of the killings were of the helpless, the unarmed, as underlined by another statistic which Peter reveals: only one in ten of Crown losses, and less than one in five of the IRA's losses occurred in engagements in which the other side suffered casualties.
In other words, the famed fights at Crossbarry and Kilmichael were atypical, not least because the flying-column format responsible for them was extremely vulnerable to counter-attack by the British. Kilmichael is, alas, celebrated in song and folklore, though Peter's minute examinations reveal that, in 1920, Tom Barry systematically slaughtered disarmed RIC Auxiliaries after they had surrendered. Barry's story that they had resumed firing under a false flag of surrender is a fiction concocted by Barry himself.
Unnecessary death
There is a large memorial at Kilmichael, ostensibly to the three volunteers who were killed in the engagement; but in reality it honours the extermination of a column of Auxiliaries, who Barry later was to say had been terrorising the innocent people of the area. In fact, that Auxiliary unit had killed one local civilian, an event "which depressed us," wrote one Auxiliary at the time, "especially as it was a stupid and unnecessary death and it had, so to speak, opened war, which we had not wanted."
The revenge for that was soon coming. Two Auxiliaries travelling from Macroom vanished. They had been kidnapped, "interrogated" (whatever that means) and murdered, their bodies buried secretly. The ambush of 18 Auxiliaries at Kilmichael occurred shortly afterwards, and ended in the butchery, with bayonet, revolver and shotgun, of those who had surrendered. "Barry made us," recollected one volunteer. "He shot one, then we shot one." Some volunteers refused, and several were hysterical.
Two Auxiliaries survived. One, Cadet H. Forde, clubbed and shot in the head and left for dead, was paralysed and brain-damaged for the rest of his life. Another, Cecil Guthrie, was shot and wounded but escaped. Hours later he accidentally stumbled into two unarmed volunteers, was kept for two days, and was then murdered and buried secretly in Annahala Bog - a truly shaming business which Barry, of course, glossed over in Geurilla Days in Ireland. And finally, the commanding officer of the Auxiliaries, ex-Colonel Buxton Smith, who was not on the patrol, never recovered from the annihilation of his men, and shortly afterwards killed himself.
No public mention
Yes indeed, there is a memorial at Kilmichael: but it doesn't mention any of that, just as in the decades which followed, no public mention was made of the pogrom of Protestants in West Cork, in which one veteran of Kilmichael was probably involved, nor of IRA "conscription" of unwilling youths, nor of the campaign of murder of ex-servicemen, nor of the numerous "disappeared" - Peter alone has evidence of 12 secret killings which since, unproven, remain outside his statistical analysis of events of the time.
And yes of course, Crown atrocities at the time were numerous; but they have been repeatedly testified to, then and ever since. Let us hope that the selective amnesia which settled over this period does not again descend on more recent events in the North. Not merely do the dead deserve better, more important still, so do the living. To understand how mythology has concealed the truth in Irish history, it is obligatory to read Peter Hart's The IRA and its Enemies. It is a masterpiece.