Sir, - In reply to Padraig O Cuanachain (July 7th), members of the British army and the Irish police committed murder on a massive scale in Ireland in 1920 and 1921 - and typically got away with it. My book, The IRA and Its Enemies, discusses many such instances, their causes and consequences. These men should have been tried and convicted - but under British laws, not international ones.
Nor were members of the IRA protected by the Hague Convention, the basis for the law of war on land. The British government and its forces were not at war in this sense. To be recognised as belligerent soldiers, the guerillas would have had to be fighting for a responsible established state, wear a recognisable uniform or emblem, carry their arms openly, and not disguise themselves as civilians. None of these conditions applied. It is of course true that international law favours established states, but if any group can claim belligerent status when using political violence, then so can the INLA or the LVF. The Oklahoma bombers would also conceivably have a right to POW status.
The analogy Mr O Cuanachain makes with occupied France in the second world war is an interesting one, but - at least under the Nuremberg principles - German criminals were convicted for war crimes because they violated the Hague rules by plundering, killing prisoners of war and hostages, etc. They were an illegally occupying power, and the Free French forces were fighting for a recognised government (in Allied eyes), despite not having a 1918style mandate. Of course, resistance fighters did many of the things the IRA had done, and thus violated the laws of war, but they did for the most part qualify as combatants.
To return to the specifics of the Kilmichael ambush, I can answer Mr O Cuanachain's queries as to Tom Barry's first report of the action. It is reprinted in a classified divisional history written in 1922, now to be found in the Imperial War Museum in London. I have quoted almost all of it in The IRA and Its Enemies. Is it genuine? Clearly so, on a number of grounds.
First, IRA units habitually wrote weekly, monthly, and after-action reports, and many of these were captured. Many survive in Irish archives, but others are sprinkled through internal British documents and files, or were released to newspapers. Any historian of the period will know this to be true. Incidentally, there are no known cases of forged IRA documents.
Second, the report contains details of the column and the ambush which only a participant could have known.
Third, the report does not support the official British version of the ambush, which wrongly accused the IRA of mutilating the Auxiliaries with axes, among other things. Why forge a document if it won't do you any good or make your opponent look bad?
Fourth, why forge a document and then only reprint it secretly in an internal, unpublished, history after the conflict is over? It simply makes no sense.
Finally, my account of what happened depends largely on the memories of other IRA men who were there. Were not they also "Irish patriots fighting for independence"? Should we "revise" their words out of the story to keep Barry's lies intact?
As I write from Belfast, the terrible cost of hypocrisy and double standards is clear. Surely murder was murder in 1920, no matter who committed it, and surely it is time we can say so, and be governed simply by what the facts - and simple morality - tell us. - Yours, etc., Peter Hart,
School of Politics, Queen's University, Belfast BT7 1PA.