Dunmanway Fields: saying something to break the silence about a great local hurt

• Author: Ellen McWilliams
• Published date: 15 April 2022
• Publication title: Irish Times: Web Edition Articles (Dublin, Ireland)

There is a place in west Cork where you find a Georgian rectory, a Famine road, and Béal na mBláth, all in one place. It is known for the vibrancy of its green fields and ditches and hedgerows, for wild garlic and bluebells in the spring, and the red, orange, and purple of fuchsia, montbretia, foxglove, and rhododendron in the summertime

It is where some of the most violent and deadly events of the Irish War of Independence and Civil War played out and we can count ourselves lucky to have writers such as Elizabeth Bowen, Seán Ó Faoláin, Julia O'Faolain, John McGahern and William Trevor to guide our way in coming to terms with this history and its aftershocks. There is a consolation to be found in the work of these writers that is not available in the abstractions of history.

The same square miles are also the home of a series of events that took place in April 1922, an atrocity historians refer to as the Dunmanway Massacre. It is one of the major historical controversies of the Irish Free State. The facts of the history are this: between April 26th and 28th, 1922, 13 Protestant men and boys were murdered or disappeared in the townlands around Bandon, Enniskeane, Dunmanway and Clonakilty.

Historians of this period have never been able to decide whether these Irish Republican Army killings in the feverish and fragile post-truce period can be attributed to sectarianism, political reprisal or an attempt to ward off any threat of British re-occupation. I have only just recently tried to read these carefully-reasoned arguments, but only ever end up thinking how little they must matter to the descendants of the victims of the massacre.

When I try to read and understand the history of the Dunmanway Massacre, and the tumultuous events of 1921 that led up to it, I can only push past the clinical historical analysis, turn away from the unbearable detail of how these men died, and search out the story of who they were in life.

The eldest of the men was in his 80s and the youngest was a boy of 16. They were part of a community that had historically enjoyed good relations with their Catholic neighbours. Many of them came from families that spoke Irish as well as English. They were drapers, chemists, solicitors and farmers. A few of them had Catholic servants. While many families fled after the events of April 1922, some later returned, and others stayed in west Cork.

I cannot speak for the descendants of the community that lost so many of its men to the Dunmanway Massacre, and to the events that led up to it in 1921, but I can speak of them because I grew up in those square miles in the 1980s and they were among the people who helped to raise me. They were the neighbours and friends who greeted any luck that came my way with the pleasure of an aunt or an uncle and are some of the first people I call to see when I go home.

And yet, somehow, it took me half a lifetime to encounter the full details of the events of April 1922 and, for all my supposed academic training and that I teach modern Irish literature at a British university, to see the history that was so close to home.

In trying to write about this, I have asked myself – who am I to speak? In examining these agonising histories, who speaks matters and I traded one south west for another more than 20 years ago and this is not my story. But the silence, between families and close-knit communities, in this case, although it might seem to serve the dignified and honourable purpose of self-preservation, can also be painful and inflict further pain and injury on people who have already suffered enough.

The value of silence is something Irish writers have always appreciated, from James Joyce's holy trinity of "silence, exile, and cunning" to Seamus Heaney's gentle commandment in one of his best-known poems: "whatever you say, say nothing". Looking back, I better understand the nature of such silence and the knowledge gained early on that to ask too many questions, to ask too much, was to risk causing hurt to the people you cared about and who cared about you.

But a child growing up in the 1980s – in this case, a Catholic child – had questions, nonetheless, about the mild-mannered separation of two communities on certain occasions. Though young children in that decade had only an uneasy, nervous sense of it, it was a time marked by the now familiar ideological warfare over Irish women's bodies, the slow surfacing of unspeakable histories of institutional violence against innocent people, and a constant...