Massacre in West Cork (11 page)

In February 1921 Alfred Cotter was shot in his mother’s house in Ballineen.
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The IRA targeted the Cotter family because it believed that the family were watching Tim Warren and Jack Hennessy. Both had been severely beaten by members of the Essex Regiment in July 1920 after they had placed posters in Ballineen calling for a boycott of Cotter’s Bakery. Hennessy had had a revolver pushed into his mouth and the hammer clicked while being questioned, and had been certain he was to be shot in the back when he was ordered to walk away from the military after his beating. He escaped by diving into the River Bandon. Hennessy later recalled:

Early in my statement I referred to the case of Alfred Cotter of Ballineen who was supplying the R.I.C. with bread. The case of Cotter had been continually before the battalion and there appeared to be evidence to connect him with spying. After the O/C, Tim Warren, and I went on the run Cotter continued his contacts with the R.I.C. The case was dealt with by the Brigade when they were cleaning up the British spy ring in West Cork in the early days of 1921. Alfred Cotter was executed on brigade orders on the 27th February, 1921.
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Tim Warren had no doubt that the Cotters were spying on him:

They appeared to have been kept well informed of my movements as they had associated me with the fight at Manch. I got away to the back of the post office and escaped in the darkness. Cotter’s, the bakers, were keeping the British informed of our movements.
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However, another reason for the shooting seems to have been because the Cotters refused to stop supplying bread to the army in Bandon. This might seem appalling to the modern observer, yet there was a vicious logic to it: if the supply of food to the occupying power can be cut off, then that power cannot function and has to leave. The same reasoning applied to railwaymen’s refusal to move army supplies around the country. A boycott had failed to stop the Cotters, so more drastic action was taken.

In a claim for damages for the death of a horse, the Cotter family give a very different picture about the start of their troubles.
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According to Mrs Cotter, the youngest brother, Herbert, was studying in Trinity College, Dublin, and on a visit home had been keeping company with the military. Mrs Cotter and two of her sons, Patrick and Pierce (a veteran of the Great War), ran the business. Alfred worked for his brothers in the bakery. They were at pains to point out that they had nothing to do with Herbert and therefore the boycott of their business was unjust. However, they continued to supply the British military during the entire period in direct opposition to IRA policy.

The case of Lieutenant Colonel Warren Peacocke is different to the others, in that if anyone was going to be an active loyalist it should have been him. He came from a military family and his father had been a major in the British Army before him. The family came originally from Limerick, having bought land there after the Cromwellian confiscations, and lived at Skevanish House, Inishannon. There seemed to be little doubt within the IRA that he was a spy. He was shot on 1 June 1921.

His death was discussed in the House of Commons on 2 June, and Sir Hamar Greenwood suggested, ‘The only motive that I know is that this gallant officer was a loyalist and an ex-officer of His Majesty’s Army.’ Lieutenant Colonel Willoughby asked if ‘this officer was known to have ever given any information to the Government as to any action of the Sinn Féin party?’ Greenwood replied evasively, ‘He had no connection whatever with the Government or any public office or with any political movement in the county in which he lived.’
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The IRA claimed that Peacocke was working with the Essex Regiment in the area, and he had become secretary of the Cork Branch of the hardline Irish Unionist Alliance in 1920.
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Tom Barry does not name him in
Guerilla Days in Ireland
, but gives enough details to leave no doubt that the informer he labels ‘C’ is Peacocke.
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According to Barry, four Black and Tans were guarding the house on the night of the killing but, although they opened fire on the two members of the IRA, the killers were not pursued.
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On 12 December 1921 his mother, Ethel Peacocke, wrote from Coombe House, Bruton, Somerset, England, and protested at the Treaty. She outlined a litany of suffering and concluded, ‘Is there no statesman left to say a word for the despised and persecuted loyalists?’
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Richard Russell, one of the Inishannon IRA, provided exceptional detail as to why Peacocke was targeted and how he was killed:

I think it was on June 1st 1921 that Lieut-Colonel Peacocke, a ‘retired’ British army officer who resided at Innishannon [sic], was shot. He had been operating in the area as an intelligence agent and had guided raiding parties of military in the area. His identity had been established some time prior to Xmas 1920, when during the course of a raid the mask which he always wore on such occasions slipped. From the date of this incident, Peacocke lived in Bandon military barracks and only visited his home in Innishannon on odd occasions. Information was received on May 31st (I think) that he had been seen at his home. Tom Kelleher and Jim Ryan – two members of the Column were sent to Innishannon to shoot Peacocke. They were scouted by Jack Murphy, Ml. McCarthy and Tom O’Sullivan of the local company (Innishannon). The men detailed to carry out the shooting (Tom Kelleher and Jim Ryan) hid in the laurels outside the house, and when Peacocke came to the hall door he was approached by them. He attempted to draw his gun but was shot by our men, who were fired on by Peacocke’s guard of Black and Tans. Our men, including scouts, withdrew without casualties and returned to their H.Q. in Crosspound area.
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According to the British, Warren Peacocke was a Great War hero, but to the IRA he was the primary eyes and ears of the Essex Regiment in its raids around the Bandon area. Neither side mentioned his religion. He was a combatant in a covert war and his bravery deserves to be acknowledged as such. The men who shot him did so because they believed he was their enemy and this was the only way to get him to stop his activities.
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On the surface it appears that the West Cork IRA was generally careful to gather evidence against suspected informers before making a decision. The BMH witness statements make it clear that people who were suspected of being informers, but against whom there was no evidence, were initially warned. If they persisted in ‘anti-national’ activities, then they were shot.
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To cast all IRA victims as defenceless, innocent civilians is a greater insult to their memory than to acknowledge that they believed in their cause. The Delaney brothers were shot in their beds as a reprisal for the Dillon’s Cross ambush in Cork city in December 1920. Nobody would dream of suggesting that they were not in the IRA, that the Auxiliaries who shot them got the wrong men or that their sacrifice for their cause was of any less value than that of Pearse and Connolly. Why should the same not apply to the other side?

In his post-war lectures to Staff College, Major Percival states that his main sources of information were loyalist farmers and that he kept a six-inch map which identified the individual houses of those known to him on his office wall. This seems bizarre behaviour, given the probability that the wrong eyes would see it.
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The British
Record of Rebellion
shows the consequences for the loyalists who provided information where it says:

… in the Bandon area where there were many Protestant farmers who gave information. Although the Intelligence Officer of the area was exceptionally experienced and although the troops were most active it proved almost impossible to protect those brave men, many of whom were murdered while almost all the remainder suffered grave material loss.
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This quotation is often cited when these murders are discussed, but the actual quotation is rarely considered on its own merits. Its provenance is beyond question, and it clearly says that even though the intelligence officer (Major Percival or Captain Kelly) was highly experienced, many of the Protestant farmers who gave information were killed and almost all suffered material loss.
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They were killed for providing Major Percival of the Essex Regiment in Bandon with information and, therefore, the IRA’s targeting of these farmers was strategically correct.
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As I have said, in many cases the person was ordered to leave, while in other cases a warning as to future conduct was deemed sufficient. Tim Herlihy of the Ovens Company gives direct testimony of what happened in his area:

Thompson and the Herons, senior and junior, must have been the first prisoners to have been expelled from Ireland by a Republican Court. They were strongly suspected of being spies for the British but there was not sufficient evidence to convict them, so, instead, they were expelled from the country. They had been passed on from the III [3rd] Brigade for safe keeping while awaiting trial. Another prisoner, MacGibbon, against whom suspicion was not so strong, was given the benefit of the doubt and was released.
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This first killing of spies, such as Thomas Bradfield in February 1921, annoyed the British, and in Dunmanway and Bandon K Company of the Auxiliaries posted a notice, which included the following:

In order to prevent outrages by strangers taking place in Dunmanway and district, it has been decided that six male inhabitants shall be held responsible for each week for informing the O.C. Auxiliary Police at the Workhouse, Dunmanway, of any suspicious stranger arriving in the Town, or of any occurrence or circumstance which points to contemplated outrage. This plan is further intended to protect other inhabitants from intimidation and to render it possible for any LOYALIST to give information without the rebels being able to trace its source.
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Given that Flor Crowley was telling the IRA everything that was happening in the Auxiliary barracks, it is likely the IRA knew about this statement before the ink was dry.

However, there was an inherent risk in the structure of the IRA, or any military force for that matter, in the making of decisions on who was a spy/informant. Once the brigade commandant was convinced of a person’s guilt, then, quite often, nobody higher up the chain of command reviewed this decision until after punishment had been carried out.
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This seems to have happened in the case of Thomas J. and Thomas Bradfield, both of whom were shot on orders from Tom Barry.
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Writing in 1924, P. S. O’Hegarty stated in his book,
The Victory of Sinn Féin
, that this had the potential to lead to miscarriages of justice. O’Hegarty was a member of the IRB and a brother of Seán O’Hegarty (the IRA commander in Cork city after Terence MacSwiney).
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He took the pro-Treaty side in the Civil War, and while this coloured his view of the leaders of the anti-Treaty side, his description of IRA controls agrees with that of Tom Barry. In a chapter titled ‘The Moral Collapse’, O’Hegarty says, ‘The eventual result of that was a complete moral collapse here … it was open to any volunteer commandant to order the shooting of any citizen, and cover himself with the word “spy”.’
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He blames this moral collapse for the events of the Civil War and states that by the end of the War of Independence, and especially during the Truce period, the local commander became supreme.
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Effectively, ‘the man with the gun had become a law unto
himself.’
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Virtually the same language is used by Michael O’Donoghue in describing what happened to his brother, who had been demobbed from the RIC at the end of March 1922. O’Donoghue recalled, ‘The local I.R.A. police had promptly arrested him and ordered him to leave Cappoquin within 24 hours under threat of death. He had gone back straight to Gormanston R.I.C. H.Q.’ O’Donoghue was angry at the treatment of his brother, but he recognised that at this stage he was powerless to intervene:

It certainly was galling for me, an I.R.A. fighter in North and South, to dash home to see my parents and family and to find that my brother, a demobbed R.I.C. man, returned home, had been driven away as a dangerous criminal at the point of the gun by the local Republican Police in Cappoquin. It was just one of the many acts of bullying and brutal tyranny indulged in at that time by petty local Republican ‘warriors’ to show their arrogant authority and self-importance. These acts resulted in the name of the I.R.A. police becoming obnoxious in many districts. In many places, the local Battalion Commandant claimed supreme authority in his area and ruled like a feudal baron.
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