I’ve just finished watching a history-documentary (and I use that term advisedly) on Ireland’s British-owned private television channel, TV3, called “In The Name of the Republic”. Presented by Eunan O’Halpin it set out to investigate the alleged “disappearance” of some 200 Irish people during the Irish Revolution, supposedly executed by the Irish Republican Army as part of its struggle against the British Occupation Forces from 1918-1923. Beginning with an archaeological dig searching for the corpses of three men found shot dead in 1921/22 by a local “eccentric” farmer the program goes on in drama-documentary style to present a case for the mass and indiscriminate murder by the IRA during Ireland’s War of Independence of countless innocent civilians (who may or may not have been British spies or informers, officers of the feared British paramilitary police, the Royal Irish Constabulary or RIC, or soldiers of the British Army).

Of course the archaeological dig failed to uncover any evidence of any murdered men (spies or otherwise), despite the fact that the program makers offered us some identities for two of the three supposed victims, complete with dramatic reconstructions of their capture and deaths. However (and quite bizarrely) at the end of the program we were told that the two suggested victims actually survived the conflict completely unharmed.

Not only do we not have the bodies of the “murdered” we don’t even have any suggestions for who was “murdered”. In fact we don’t have any evidence that any “murders” happened in the first place! What we do have is a supposed drama-documentary from the Peter Hart school of Irish history, with a hefty dollop of Gerard Murphy (of which more here).

By the by, if any historians are looking for murder victims from the Irish Revolution with, you know, real actual identities and, hey, actually physical remains, here they are. The photographs above and below are of Patrick and Harry Loughnane, aged 29 and 22, both Volunteers of the Irish Republican Army, detained, tortured and murdered by members of the RIC’s Auxiliary Division in November 1920. From Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc’s article that featured on The Irish Story in 2012:

“The Loughnane brothers were arrested in daylight at their family home at Shanaglish, Co. Galway on the 26th November 1920. Their partially burned and mutilated bodies were discovered in a pond near Ardrahan on 5th December that year. The two brothers had been tied to the back of an R.I.C. lorry and forced to run behind it until they collapsed from exhaustion and were dragged along the road. Both of Pat’s wrists, legs and arms were broken. His skull was fractured and there were diamond shaped wounds, resembling the cap badge worn by the RIC Auxiliaries, carved into his torso. Harry’s body was missing two fingers; his right arm was broken and nearly severed from his body. Nothing was left of Harry’s face except for his chin and lips. A doctor who examined the Loughnane’s bodies stated that the cause of death was “laceration of the skull and the brain.” The attached photographs of the brothers’ bodies at the time of their discovery show some of the horrific injuries they suffered. The same month that the Loughnane brothers were killed, members of the RIC in Galway also killed a pregnant woman and a Catholic priest.”

If I might also add, all that archive film shown in the “documentary” of supposed victims of violence by the Irish Republican Army during the War of Independence, including men, women and children made homeless sitting in ditches at the side of the road? They were actually from a contemporary newsreel showing Irish civilians hiding in the fields of north County Dublin following the Sack of Balbriggan. That is the burning of the small Irish coastal village of Balbriggan by the British Occupation Forces in 1920.

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