Gets into Hart about 23 mins in. Much of what he wrote was blatantly fraudulent. But it was wildly popular with the anti-Republican political class & media, and as such was praised to high heavens despite valid questions being raised from the start by local historians in Cork.
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It read well, and it was different, sure there’s thousands of books about the revolutionary period that are filled with bullshit anecdotes written from the viewpoint of the good guys, all the memoirs are shite
That’s old news now though
It was widely popular amongst a certain ilk alright in Eoghan Harris, Kevin Myers and Ruth Dudley Edwards all of whom have been hoisted by their own petard since and whose bona fides has been called into question on more than one occasion. Of course Hart is no longer with us so the false surrender account of Kilmichael and where it came from probably didn’t get much of a cross examination and so that theory more or less died with him.
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Kilmichael,
That false surrender story has gotten some mileage over the years
I wouldn’t believe any of them, if Barry was chocolate he’d have eaten himself
This fella was a bit of a renegade. Was executed a couple of fields away from where my mother was reared. However it happened we got talking about this at my grandmothers funeral a couple of weeks ago. He was supposed to be a decent enough man by big house standards who provided a lot of employment to the area and sponsored a local hurling team and provided decent pay and conditions. If anything he was anti establishment. Story goes he blamed a brother of Ernest Shackleton who was like royalty at the time for stealing some crown jewels. The British media even tried to blacken him with smear campaigns. The brits did a bit of black ops, as is their want, and told local IRA that this fella was a spy. Many people before and since believe that this was not the case and just a case of the British wanting the Irish to do their dirty work for them. Supposedly a big crew of IRA men landed on his doorstep in Kilmorna with a fair bit of drink on board and burned the place to the ground after executing him. Those bullets could have probably been better directed elsewhere at that time. There was a tokenistic reprisal by the brits later to be seen to be doing something.
Did you know him?
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Interestingly,…
I like to keep an open mind on things, I was in O’Mahony’s bookshop a while ago and noticed a new book on Kilmichael, an extension of a doctorate by a historian called Eve Morrison, I was intrigued after recent discussion here and read much of the introduction where she concludes that a lot of the anger at Hart is misplaced and a lot of the criticisms of his research are incorrect, I’d need to read the entire book to draw any conclusions obviously, perhaps you might be interested?
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Blindboys granda and his two brothers were involved in the ambush at Kilmichael
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They lost on the Treaty at the ballot box but wouldn’t accept it. That’s the long and short of the Irish Civil War.
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John is a big NaP man… No doubt he enjoyed penning that article and documenting the downfall of the @balbec
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I am afraid that book, largely, is a work of fiction. If memory serves, the first edition of it was withdrawn because of teeming errors.
The author is also bonkers.
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Griffith looks like a right hipster
Read this book a couple of months back. Then again, I had effectively already read a lot of it, via prior articles. Eve Morrison is basically brazen out and quite content to argue black is white and vice versa where Peter Hart is concerned. Her book is staggeringly childish in significant part.
An American who received a doctorate from TCD in 2012, she has been used as a stooge – willingly – to prop up Peter Hart’s reputation by interested parties such as RF Foster and Eunan O’Halpin. Given her modest abilities, this move can be counted a shrewd one.
For her troubles, EM was given a three year Research Fellowship at Oxford (2018-21). From what I can deduce online, she did not move from that plum post to a Lectureship, as would normally be the case, especially for someone who had just published a book. Certain inferences can be made – especially since her influential supporters have not been able to lodge her, ten years after her doctorate, in a permanent post.
Few people have any idea of how politicized Irish history, as an academic discipline, stands. Be as mediocre as you like but you will be promoted if you are sound on the revisionist question.
Lest I be accused of being solely critical, here is a book on the period by a youngish Irish historian I found excellent (and not in revisionist/counter revisionist loop):
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If only he had worn slip ons Irish history might have been so different.
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