THE PETER HART AFFAIR IN PERSPECTIVE: HISTORY, IDEOLOGY, AND THE IRISH REVOLUTION

摘要

For more than a decade now, accusations of academic fraud have been levelled at The IRA and its enemies: violence and community in Cork, 1916-1923 (1998), a brilliant, prize-winning monograph written by the Canadian scholar Peter Hart. The controversy turns on Hart’s depiction of Irish revolutionary violence, and in particular upon a chapter entitled ‘Taking it out on the Protestants’, which is in many respects the climax of the book. The Irish war of independence, as portrayed in Hart’s enviably vivid prose, was an essentially dirty war. Central to his account of the wider conflict is a patient reconstruction of a series of killings that took place in April 1922, previously neglected by scholars, but now widely known as the ‘Dunmanway’ or ‘Bandon Valley massacre’. The victims were ten Protestant men, killed in unauthorised IRA attacks; an eleventh man, the Rev. Ralph Harbord, was also wounded. Hart’s provocative conclusion that the massacre was driven by ‘sectarian antagonism … interwoven with political hysteria and local vendettas’ calls into question the moral superiority of republican insurgents as against the British crown forces, long taken for granted in nationalist Ireland and not least in West Cork itself.