Allegations of torture of citizens and prisoners by crown forces
Galway, 19 October 1920 - Allegations have arisen of brutal mistreatment of citizens and prisoners at the hands of police and military in Ireland.
Significantly, the allegations have not been confined to one location.
In the village of Cummer, Co. Galway, 20 men were stopped in the street on 17 October, and one by one were forced to strip before being flogged and then sent home without clothes.
The previous day, in nearby Corrofin, shopkeeper Mr J. Raftery was taken from his bed, naked, and brought a mile away from his house, where he was flogged. His attackers taunted him with jibes such as: ‘You will be alright when you have Arthur Griffith as president’. He was then thrown over a wall and fell ten feet into thistles and nettles, before being forced to crawl along the road while being flogged.
Also in Corrofin, four brothers by the name of Feeney were taken from their homes as they were saying the rosary. All four were stripped and flogged, while Thomas Feeney had a rope put around his neck which was used to drag him over a wall.
In Cork, an extraordinary story has emerged about the torture of two Sinn Féin prisoners, Thomas Hales and Patrick Harte of Knocknacurra, Bandon, who are both serving sentences of two years’ hard labour. Details of statements taken from Hales and smuggled out of the prison, have been published by the Daily News and the Irish Bulletin and it makes for grim reading. Hales states that he was taken to the yard of the military barracks in Bandon, where he and Harte were lined up to be shot. Instead, in an effort to extract information from them, they were beaten with canes, had pliers and pincers applied to their fingers, and were punched in the face. Four of Hales’s front teeth were broken.
As well as the physical damage, the torture is understood to have exacted a heavy mental toll on Harte who is now said to be ‘practically mentally incapacitated.’
[Editor's note: This is an article from Century Ireland, a fortnightly online newspaper, written from the perspective of a journalist 100 years ago, based on news reports of the time.]
