There has been a version of history promoted which shows the IRA as a sectarian killer gang who vented their hatred by the killing of defenceless Protestants in the early days of partial Irish independence. This talk by John Regan provides an informed alternative picture…
Jude, this is excellent – but we really need to hear the Q & A in which his view would itself be challenged(as he himself indicated).
Well, let’s invite John Regan to feile an phobail 2018 for a Q&A.
Interesting stuff, but we should be aware that, according to Diarmaid Ferriter of UCD, John Regan’s work is ‘marred by questionable sources, repetition, pretension and invective’.
Ferriter said a lot more in that review, conceding many of the criticisms of Irish history Regan makes.
Partial and selective quotations to misrepresent don’t work anymore.
Interesting letter in the Irish Times
https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/letters/sectarianism-in-west-cork-after-the-truce-1.3183809?mode=amp
You got a dog in this fight Tam ?
The fact that Hart’s Protestant propaganda was not debunked for so long is testament to the Revisionist anti-Nationalist and anti-Republican attitudes in the History Departments of Irish Universities.
Historians happy to to take the States cash in return for crating a pseudo academic version of History to match the Sunday Independents anti Republican pseudo news.
The Republic’s Protestant population has reduced for a number of reasons, following Civil Service and army Jobs to remaining parts of the empire, unwillingness to live in a state heavily influenced by the other Church, birth rate, mixed marriages offspring guided towards the new establishment etc.
There were a handfull of Protestants killed in Cork, but they were mostly actively facilitating the Black and Tans and certainly nothing like the hundreds of Catholics killed in Belfast and the tens of thousands forced to flee South.
Thanks for that PaulG. Sums it up perfectly. The revisionists, so-called historians, who inhabit the universities and other establishments throughout the 32 counties are only too willing to come up with whatever story-line fits their paymasters’ agenda. The good thing of course is that very few are willing to listen, never mind believe, the rubbish they spout.
Wow. And I always associated paranoia and conspiracy theories with loyalism.
I concur PaulG: my own parents, who had six children. Shared their small, three-bedroom house in West Belfast, with a family of six who had been ethnically cleansed from their home in north Belfast in 1969.