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“Something of the Nature of a Massacre”: The Bandon Valley Killings Revisited

Between 26 and 29 April 1922 a series of killings in West Cork shocked Ireland. Over three consecutive days unidentified gunmen shot dead thirteen civilians, all of whom were Protestants. Ninety-two years after what has become known as the “Bandon Valley massacre,” historians still do not know precisely who carried out these killings or why. The identities of the perpetrators and their possible motivations remain hotly contested. The late Peter Hart’s pioneering work, The IRA and Its Enemies: Violence and Community in Cork, 1916–1923, advanced a sectarian explanation of the April 1922 violence. He concluded: “Behind the killings lay a jumble of individual histories and possible motives. In the end, however, the fact of the victims’ religion is inescapable. These men were shot because they were Protestants.” But he also noted, “Many of these men had been marked out as enemies [of the IRA] long before April 1922.” This latter feature drives a republican counternarrative best articulated by Meda Ryan in her biography of West Cork IRA leader Tom Barry. She argues that the April victims were killed because they had provided information to British forces,