Dunmanway Killings - Aftermath

Aftermath

According to Niall Harrington – a Pro-Treaty IRA officer at the time – over 100 Protestant families fled West Cork in the aftermath of the killings, in fear of further attacks. Alice Hodder in the same letter cited above wrote

For two weeks there wasn't standing room on any of the boats or mail trains leaving Cork for England. All loyalist refugees who were either fleeing in terror or had been ordered out of the country...none of the people who did these things, though they were reported as the rebel IRA faction, were ever brought to book by the Provisional Government.

One Cork correspondent of The Irish Times who saw the refugees go through the city noted that, "so hurried was their flight that many had neither a handbag nor an overcoat." Hodder also alleged that Protestants in the area were being forcibly evicted from their farms by republicans on behalf of the Irish Transport Union, on the basis that they were bringing down wages, although she conceded that the local Pro-Treaty IRA reinstated them when it was informed Tom Hales, Commandant of O'Neill's Brigade (3rd Cork), ordered all arms be brought under control while issuing a statement promising that "all citizens in this area, irrespective of creed or class, every protection within my power." Arthur Griffith echoed Hales' sentiments though Hales was actively engaged in armed defiance of Griffith's government at this time. Speaking on 28 April in the Dáil Griffith, President of the Pro-Treaty Irish Provisional Government, stated:

Events, such as the terrible murders at Dunmanway ..., require the exercise of the utmost strength and authority of Dáil Éireann. Dáil Éireann, so far as its powers extend, will uphold, to the fullest extent, the protection of life and property of all classes and sections of the community. It does not know and cannot know, as a National Government, any distinction of class or creed. In its name, I express the horror of the Irish nation at the Dunmanway murders.

Speaking immediately afterward, Seán T. O'Kelly said he wished to associate the "anti-treaty side" in the Dáil with Griffith's sentiments. Speaking in Mullingar on 30 April, the Anti-Treaty leader Éamon de Valera also condemned the killings. A general convention of Irish Protestant churches in Dublin released a statement saying that:

Apart from this incident, hostility to Protestants by reason of their religion, has been almost, if not wholly unknown, in the 26 counties in which they are a minority.

The incident provoked long-held fears on the part of Loyalists in southern Ireland. A deputation of Irish Loyalists which met Winston Churchill in May 1922 told him that there was, "nothing to prevent the peasants expropriating every last Protestant loyalist" and that they feared a repeat of the massacres that Protestants had suffered in the Irish Rebellion of 1641 and the 1798 Rebellion. Churchill himself remarked that the events were "little short of a massacre."

Local IRA commanders Tom Barry, Liam Deasy and Seán Moylan, returned to the county and ordered that armed guards be put on the homes of Protestants to prevent further violence. Tom Barry, who had returned immediately from Dublin on hearing of the killings, ensured that some who attempted to take advantage of the situation by stealing livestock owned by Protestants were firmly discouraged.