The Irish Times - Monday, March 21, 2011
An Irishwoman's Diary
'It can't all have been terror, can it? Surely people were leaving for other reasonsfollowwhere employment led? The trouble with that suggestion is that Blackrock andDouglas weralready attractive and still relatively rural.' Above, Blackrock Castle, Co
MARY LELAND
AS CHRISTMAS PARTIES go, it was one of the better gatherings of neighbours, with the seasonal addition of offspring drawn home from what some call the diaspora; but we¹re inclined to think of them as world citizens  confident creatures earning their living in other lands and happy, at least for now.

Some of these youngsters had even younger editions asleep in the buggies in the hall. We can¹t believe our eyes, we said: could that personnel manager from Madrid be the teenager we remembered rushing down the road in her school uniform  late? Is that really the lad photographed as a toddler in our garden, flying back tomorrow to his clinic in Cologne? Change is happening all the time, even here in Blackrock, Cork; the future is right before our eyes.

But in this corner of the warm, mulled-wine-flavoured drawing room, the talk was of our village in 1922; the cheerful adult children hearkened to a remembrance of the phantom neighbours who had lived in our houses and of whom we had never heard until their names splintered the air of this party, names broken into the paragraphs of The Year of Disappearances . Someone had stirred Gerard Murphy¹s account of political killings in Cork from 1921 to 1922 into the conversation. Incomers such as myself  I had lived here only since 1966  grouped around this narrative of the Knockrea townland, taking in the Blackrock Road, Douglas Road, Ballinlough, Ballintemple. Knockrea. My grandmother lived at Whitethorn on the Douglas Road, in a British Legion house, but as a child I didn¹t know that. The peonies and trellised porch and small-paned windows of her terrace home and its unfailing welcome were all I knew, except that there was another elite, the people living in the Eden of Knockrea Park just across the road.

Here in Blackrock, I believed that my own house had originally been a large single dwelling, damaged in a fire and rebuilt as a pair of smaller houses. In the Christmas drawingroom I learn that the fire had been set by Republican incendiaries because the daughter of the house was considered too friendly with a member of the Black and Tans. What were we learning here, with our mulled wine, in the cheerful blaze of logs from the garden¹s felled branches? Who is our neighbour  who went before us and where did they go?

Some 90 families left the Knockrea townland in 1922 alone. ³Cork city had around 9,059 non-Roman Catholics in 1911², writes Murphy. ³That had dropped to 4,400 by 1926². He adds that analysis of the change in house occupancy on a street by street basis suggests that most of this decline occurred in 1922 ³and was most severe in the south-east corner of the city, between the Blackrock Road and the Douglas Road². Murphy names the names, not all of them confined by any means to this particular district, for his scope is comprehensive and covers reprisals and assassinations in both city and county.

Yet the shock of seeing one¹s own address leap from the pages leads the eye inevitably to events closest to home, as when Murphy writes, ³Of the 52 Protestant-occupied homes along the Blackrock Road at the start of 1922, 28 had left by 1926.²

It can¹t all have been terror, can it? Surely people were leaving for other reasons, to follow where employment led? Or because they died from natural causes? Or to move to a more attractive, perhaps rural, environment? The trouble with that suggestion is that Blackrock and Ballinlough and Douglas were already attractive and still relatively rural. There must be other arguments, and indeed we air them in astonished tones until we are reminded of a linking truth. What united these deaths, this other diaspora, is that the victims were definably, if not exclusively, Protestant.

Religion was politics in those days: faith implied affiliation, and so did employment. The disappearances, executions, graves and departures over two to three years are listed by Murphy in compelling statistics. Over there in Lakelands, where the dog and I watched Traveller children gallop their coloured ponies, lay the body of George Horgan, listed as missing in 1920.

Murphy says that Denis McGrath, manager of the Cork Examiner, was shot at the junction of the Victoria Road and Blackrock Road. He survived and years later my father succeeded him at the Examiner. His house at the corner of Crab Lane was well known to us from the windows of the bus into town. Arson claimed the Blackrock residence of Maurice Healy, barrister, brother of Tim Healy, first governor of the Free State. A renowned bon viveur who settled in London, Maurice is remembered not so much for the embers of his old home but for his books, from The Old Munster Circuit (1940) to Stay Me with Flagons (1943).

We remembered Maurice as he would have liked, with a good wine. It was Christmas. But there was a feeling as our little group dispersed to mingle more dutifully that this is true: the past never dies. Recovering from the silence of shock, no one mentioned the unspeakable IRA activist and later long-serving TD Martin Corry. No point in spoiling a really good party. 

 MARY LELAND IRISH TIMES 21.3.2011