Irish History; Palestine Mandate History

This incident is minor when we compare it to what occured in the Palestine Mandate during 1936-1939:

It begins on the night of April 25th, 1922, four months after the Treaty, when an IRA group broke into the home of Thomas Hornibrook, his son Samuel and son-in-law, Captain Herbert Woods. Faced by armed intruders at dead of night, Captain Woods fired at them and shot dead the IRA group's leader, Michael O'Neill.

The three Protestants surrendered. The IRA group took them away to the hills and killed them in dire circumstances. Their bodies have never been found. In Blood-Dark Track, Joseph O'Neill gives them the only epitaph they have ever received: "These three dead Protestants were multiply entombed. Their violent deaths were not reported in the Irish newspapers; their bodies were buried in secret somewhere in West Cork; and their remains, unlike those of Northern Catholics, shot dead as informers, were never officially missed."

But it did not stop there. Over the following nights, the IRA shot 10 ordinary Protestant shopkeepers, farmers and clergymen. Hundreds of terrified Cork Protestants packed the trains and sought refuge in England and Northern Ireland. Similar scenes were taking place all over Ireland. At least 40,000 southern Protestants left.

Donald Woods directly confronts his self-imposed silence on the subject when speaking to another local historian, Colm Cronin: "We have been writing together on historical matter for four or five years now and I wonder why we never discussed these events of 1922?" Colm replies that many Catholics did not know the facts, and the hurt was so deep "they brought down a wall of silence around it".

Hazel Baylor speaks fluent Irish. She stands in the farmyard of the traditional farmhouse and points out where her uncle, Bertie Chinnery was shot dead. She says her mother had no hatred for his killers, and neither does she. You will have to see the film to feel her healing power.

Charles Duff comes from London, where he lectures on Shakespeare. He stands at the grave of his grandfather, David Gray, a chemist, who was shot dead in the doorway of his shop in Dunmanway.

After the murder the Gray family fled to England. It is Charles Duff's first time seeing his grandfather's grave and he has this to say: "I suppose I've thought a lot about how that family was once very happy and very united and it was a family, how on the grave it says 'worthy of everlasting remembrance' and how there hasn't been everlasting remembrance.