A brutal crime just before the end of the War of Independence hints at the darker side of the conflict, writes Niamh Sammon
No doubt June 30th, 1921, began like any other for the Pearson family of Coolacrease, Co Offaly. Life on that day would have revolved around the usual farm chores, but today, there was an extra task at hand. With the sun in the sky, two sons of the family, Richard (24) and Abraham (19), and a friend of theirs, William Stanley, were saving the hay, determined to make the most of the good weather.
Late in the afternoon, Stanley looked up from his work to see a gang of armed IRA men converging on the hayfield from all sides. He knew something terrible was coming, and yelled to Richard and Abraham to run for their lives. He then ran himself, a stumbling desperate bid for survival, but looking back over his shoulder, he saw the Pearson boys rooted to the spot.
Within the hour, the Pearson women were driven from their home, which in turn was burned to the ground. As the house blazed, they saw Richard and Abraham lined up and shot - their father William and another brother Sidney, would have met with the same fate, had they not been away that day. Mrs Pearson and her daughters nursed Richard and Abraham for many hours as they slowly bled to death.
All of this happened just seven days before the truce ended all hostilities in the War of Independence. The fighting stopped, but a question remained: what had this family done to deserve such a dreadful retribution? The Pearsons were members of a peaceable, non-political, dissenting Protestant sect known as the Cooneyites, and their attackers were drawn from the local Catholic community. These were their friends and neighbours; people they must have greeted on the roads around Cadamstown, lads who'd sat with them at school. What forces had changed these friends into the enemies who came to their home, burned it to the ground, and shot them in a brutal manner as their helpless mother and sisters looked on?
These are the questions that leaped out at me just over a year ago when a friend gave me a book by Alan Stanley, the son of William Stanley who'd escaped with his life that day. Alan had written a powerful account of the single most defining event in his family's history. He told how, after the killings at Coolacrease House, the Pearsons fled to Australia, and of his own search to trace their descendants. In this slim volume, Stanley published his correspondence with the Australian Pearsons, who were desperate to try and understand how the country of their forebears had turned so violently against them.
The story he had unravelled was the starting point of the journey toward making a television documentary about the truly hidden history of what happened at Coolacrease. It seemed that this was the kind of history you don't learn about in school and, notwithstanding Ken Loach's film dramatisation of the period in The Wind that Shakes the Barley, here was proof of a much darker side to the republican fight for independence. They say that the victor writes the history, but was that as true in Ireland as elsewhere?
COOLACREASE IS THE townland, in the foothills of the Slieve Bloom mountains, where the Pearsons had lived and farmed the land. Even today, it's a place apart. Travel through the Slieve Bloom mountains and you won't meet a soul.
It's just outside the commuter belt, and despite its pastoral beauty, definitely off the tourist trail. Nothing remains now of the Pearson's presence apart from the ivy-choked ruin of their former home. Yet for the older generation in Cadamstown, ruined walls are unnecessary to remind them of the events of June 1921. It's a story they would have heard in childhood; it would have been whispered by adults when they thought no children were listening.
When we went knocking on doors in the area, however, nobody wanted to talk. This event took place 86 years ago, before telephones and 24-7 perma-communication, yet, even now in our confessional era of blogs and memoirs, a veil of silence continues to shroud that summer's day long ago. It was hard to understand. Older members of my own family, though, could venture a compelling explanation. People didn't want to talk about Coolacrease because for them this story was not about folk memory or history or sectarianism; it was about protecting the reputations of their fathers and uncles. The memory of the dead generation was at stake. That old adage "Blood will out" had more than one meaning in Cadamstown.
Eventually, some people agreed to talk, but only on the understanding that their identities would not be revealed. More than one person said that they wouldn't be able to live in the area if it was known they had co-operated with the documentary. During a previous life as a TV news producer, I'd heard such words plenty of times, in Belfast, in Derry - it was amazing to hear those same caveats aired in the south of Ireland in 2007. And it was more surprising still when an old man made it his business to let our camera crew know "You could get shot for asking those kind of questions."
But in the end, some people did talk on camera. What emerged quite strongly was the stark division within the community of Cadamstown over the events of that day in June 1921. Some believe the Pearsons were innocent victims targeted purely for their land. The two boys had been killed at a time of great land hunger and that hunger was keenly felt in Offaly, where good farmland was hard to come by. The attack on the family was, some argue, merely a land grab, perpetrated by men desperate to get their strike in before the war came to an end. Others dispute this, claiming the Pearsons were "spies and informers" who collaborated with the Black and Tans, and who ultimately got what they deserved.
Just two months after the events of June 1921, an advertisement for the auction of Coolacrease appeared in The Irish Times. It described a farm "of excellent quality, sound and healthy for all kinds of stock, and well known in the locality for its dairy and fattening qualities".
Tellingly, and because Coolacrease House was now no more than a scorched ruin, the ad delicately states that "the site for the residence is situated on a well timbered lawn, and is approached by an avenue". Like the Pearsons, many Protestant families at this time were torn from their roots and forced out.
Many scattered to the new world to escape the old, and their stories have silently mouldered among hundreds of files at the British National Archives in Kew. But the files are there - preserved, indelible - and they reveal some uncomfortable truths long forgotten in the victor's version of the past.
The Killings at Coolacrease will be broadcast next Tuesday at 10.15pm on RTÉ1