The Killings at Coolacrease

The “Hidden History” documentary, inspired in part by Eoghan Harris, is a distortion of what actually happened at Coolacrease, when two young Protestants were murdered. By Pat Muldowney

 

There is a great big hole in the middle of the RTÉ Hidden History programme aired on 23 October 2007 about the 1921 IRA execution of the two Pearson brothers in Co Offaly. There was an even bigger one in the Tubridy Show (RTÉ Radio One) coverage of the issue on 21 October.

The Hidden History programme originated in the 2005 book I met murder on the way by Alan Stanley and in Eoghan Harris' Sunday Independent article (9 Oct 2005). The latter provided the tone and political content of the programme; “To attack a family like that calls to high heaven for atonement”. It also provided the programme's working title – Atonement – during production.

So it is not surprising that the programme challenged the validity of the Irish Court Martial ruling, held in June 1921, which found the Pearsons guilty of staging an armed attack on an IRA unit engaged in road block activity in resistance to the Black and Tan terror aimed at suppressing the democratically elected Irish government; for which the Court passed the death sentence.

But this was not the only Court that met to adjudicate on the fate of the Pearsons. This Hidden History programme supposedly set out to examine forensically what happened on 30 June 1921, the day of the executions. So how did it happen that the programme never mentioned – not once – the other Court, which met on 2 July 1921 to do exactly the same thing?

It is not that Hidden History did not know about the British Military Court of Enquiry, which met on that day in Crinkle Military Barracks, Birr.

The problem for the Hidden History/Eoghan Harris line was that the British Military Court of Enquiry, operating completely independently, found exactly the same as the Irish Court Martial. The Chief Inspector of the Queen's County RIC testified to the Court that “the two Pearson boys a few days previously had seen two men felling a tree on their land adjoining the road, had told the men concerned to go away, and when they refused, had fetched two guns and fired and wounded two Sinn Feiners, one of whom it is believed died”.

In numerous recitals of the propaganda, and in the dramatized re-construction shown by Hidden History, the women of the Pearson family are placed in the yard where the executions took place and forced to watch the two men being shot. At the Court of Enquiry, the women themselves testified that they were taken, not to the yard, but to a grove of trees a safe distance from the house. In the grove it was physically impossible to see inside the enclosed yard where the two men were taken.

Eoghan Harris salaciously described the gunshot wounds that the two men received: He said they were shot “very deliberately, in the genitals, in their sexual parts, in their sexual organs”. Other versions, again inspired by Hidden History/Eoghan Harris, are practically pornographic and I will not repeat them here. But what the medical evidence given to the Court describes is a range of injuries from the legs to the shoulders, all of them superficial, and none to the genitals. According to the evidence, none of the wounds were fatal, and the men died from shock and blood loss. If they had received timely and adequate medical attention it seems their lives could have been saved.

There is much more that can be gleaned from the Court of Enquiry. Along with the Irish Court Martial Report, this is where a real investigation of the Pearson case should have started.

Which brings us to the historians used by Hidden History. To their credit, historians Paddy Heaney and Philip McConway detected that there was something amiss with the programme and distanced themselves from it, as reported in the Offaly Independent newspaper of 6 October. Philip McConway's findings on the subject are expected to be available on the website of the Offaly Historical & Archaeological Society http://www.offalyhistory.com and in print. Much of the relevant information is already available at http://www.indymedia.ie/article/84547.

Like thousands of others caught up in the war caused by imperial aggression against the democratically elected government, the Pearsons suffered a terrible tragedy, which everyone must feel. But as the Courts found, they worked for the terror forces that sought to destroy Irish democracy by brutal methods. In his statement to the British Government's Grants Committee, William Pearson formally declared that he was a collaborator (“I assisted the Crown Forces on every occasion”).

By endlessly posing the question of whether the Pearsons were spies and informers, and whether documented evidence can now be found for this, Hidden History uses misdirection to divert attention away from the real and more serious reason for the executions, as determined by both the Irish and British Courts.

 

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