I love the little anomalies in Irish history. Leonard Cohen sang that “there is a crack in everything” and “that’s where the light gets in”. Well, there are big cracks in the standard myths that sustain communal ideologies here.
hen I was 15, I was taken by the enthusiasm around the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising and learned some rebel songs, the most famous being the Ballad of Kevin Barry.
I hadn’t heard it for years — decades probably — until it came on Lyric FM one Sunday evening. The singer was Paul Robeson.
“All around the little bakery, sure we fought them hand in hand”. Oh, aye. For sure.
I looked up the entry for Kevin Barry in The Dead of the Irish Revolution by Eunan O’Halpin and Daithí Ó Corráin, an invaluable record of all the dead of the Irish War for Independence.
Barry, I learned, had been part of a group of IRA men who held up a British Army supply truck which had gone to a bakery to collect bread.
The IRA’s objective was to capture weapons. Soldiers on the truck put down their guns when ordered to do so, but someone fired a shot and everybody panicked and started shooting.
Three soldiers were killed. The IRA men escaped, except for Barry, who was found under a vehicle trying to fix a jammed gun.
One of the most interesting parts of the story was Kevin Barry’s generous comments about the Black and Tans who held him before his execution, who he said had been “most kind”.
Now, of course, the Black and Tans were vicious thugs deploying a British strategy of reprisals against republicans and their families. That’s not in dispute.
But we have it on the authority of Kevin Barry that they weren’t all bad and we have to live with that.
There was another battle at a bakery that became a legend. This was in the Markets area of Belfast in August 1971, a few days after the first internment raids.
It gave us the famous photograph by Ciaran Donnelly of Official IRA man Joe McCann, silhouetted by flames, holding an M1 carbine.
You have to wonder how heavy the fighting was if a photographer could wander onto the battlefield and get a gunman to pose for him. Go to the records of the dead on the night of that battle of the bakery and you find that only one person died in that area.
This was William McKavanagh, shot in the back by soldiers. He had no part in the supposed battle, but had run when they sought to detain him.
The Official IRA claimed that it had inflicted “several fatalities” on the Army. It frequently made exaggerated claims of its military successes. The British Army did the same.
In a security assessment in November 1971, which you can find in the Public Record Office, or through the wonderful Cain website, the Army assesses that it had to date killed “three dozen” IRA gunmen.
There are two ways in which you can reach that figure. One is by counting every single person — man, woman and child — killed by soldiers in the Troubles up to that point and the figure you will reach is 36.
That would include all of the innocents killed in internment week in Ballymurphy and Ardoyne and other areas.
The other way you can reach that figure is by accepting Army claims that the bodies of IRA dead were spirited away and buried in secret.
The Army did, apparently, believe that and sent one soldier I spoke to on patrol to search for freshly opened graves in Milltown Cemetery.
What is appalling about the first interpretation is that every single killing, whether of a housewife, priest, or child, was counted to the credit of the Army in an internal document — not a propaganda sheet.
So, killing innocents was good, because those deaths could be reported up as actual military successes and versions to the contrary could be dismissed as lies.
A further implication of this wilful self-delusion in the Army was that it over-estimated its successes and under-estimated the task before it. It got too cocky.
If the IRA had, indeed, lost 36 snipers in 1971 — if it even had had 36 snipers to lose — then its resources would have been seriously depleted.
The Army and the government to which it reported would have had grounds for optimism on the eve of the very worst year it would ever face here.
The same report includes a serious under-estimation of the emerging strength of the loyalist paramilitaries, with no sense that a campaign of sectarian murder is about to begin. It analyses the prospects for the Official IRA quite well, however.
The intelligence services seem to have had a much clearer idea of developments and thinking within that group than within any other. The media also had much easier access to the Officials than to the Provisionals at that time.
But who wants the truth about our past, or even simple factual accounts?
Yet, those who have pushed lies at us are vulnerable to closer inspection and some really important myths cherished by those who would defend murder are sometimes very easily undermined.
** Malachi O’Doherty’s new book, The Year of Chaos: Northern Ireland on the Brink of Civil War 1971/72, is published next month by Atlantic Books
