Of the fourteen dead and missing, thirteen were Protestants including one Methodist and one was Roman Catholic,[4][5] which has led to the killings being described as sectarian.
It is generally agreed that they were provoked by the fatal shooting of IRA man Michael O'Neill by a loyalist whose house was being raided on 26 April.
For its part, the IRA agreed that "attacks on Crown forces and civilians [were] to cease", and to "no interference with British Government or private property".
[22] On 26 March 1922, part of the IRA repudiated the authority of the Provisional Government on the basis that it had accepted the Treaty and disestablished the Irish Republic declared in 1919.
[26] Between January and June 1922, twenty-three RIC men, eight British soldiers and eighteen civilians were killed in West Cork, part of the area which would become the Irish Free State.
The discovery of documents in Dunmanway by republicans later supposedly confirmed the existence of counter-insurgency espionage in the area, which resulted in many purported informers getting safe passage to England.
Tom Hales and Sean Moylan were in Limerick, along with much of the Third and Fourth Cork IRA Brigades, trying to prevent the occupation of that city's military barracks by Pro-Treaty troops.
[40] The IRA's Third Cork Brigade had killed 15 informers between 1919 and 1921, according to Tom Barry, adding "for those who are bigots" that the religious breakdown was nine Catholics and six Protestants.
[citation needed] On 26 April 1922, a group of anti-Treaty IRA men, led by Michael O'Neill, arrived at the house of Thomas Hornibrook, a former magistrate, at Ballygroman, East Muskerry, Desertmore, Bandon (near Ballincollig on the outskirts of Cork City), seeking to seize his car.
The next morning O'Donoghue left for Bandon to report the incident to his superiors, returning with "four military men", meeting with the Hornibrooks and Woods, who admitted to shooting O'Neill.
When will the British Government realise that they are really dealing with savages and not ordinary normal human beings?The letter was forwarded to Lionel Curtis, Secretary of the Cabinet's Irish Committee, on which he appended the comment "this is rather obsolete".
[2] Matilda Woods later testified before the Grants Committee, while applying for £5,000 compensation in 1927, that her husband had been drawn and quartered before being killed and that the Hornibrooks were taken to a remote location, forced to dig their own graves and shot dead.
Nagle had been shot in place of his father Thomas, caretaker of the Masonic Hall in Clonakilty whose name was on an IRA list of enemy agents and who had gone into hiding, along with Alexander McKinley's uncle.
According to Niall Harrington – a Pro-Treaty IRA officer at the time – more than 100 Protestant families fled West Cork in the aftermath of the killings.
[36] 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.
"[55] Hodder reported 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 after it was informed.
[54] Tom Hales, Commandant of O'Neill's Brigade (3rd Cork), ordered that 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.
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.
"[59] Local Cork IRA commanders Tom Barry, Liam Deasy and Seán Moylan, returned to the county and ordered that armed guards be put at the homes of Protestants to prevent further violence.
[14] Barry, who had returned immediately from Dublin upon hearing of the killings, ensured that some of those who attempted to take advantage of the situation by stealing livestock owned by Protestants were firmly discouraged.
[60] Recent evidence confirms that the killings were carried out by the IRA even if it is not clear who precisely ordered their execution as no member ever claimed responsibility.
[9] Hart concludes that from two to five separate groups must have done the killing, and writes that they were likely "acting on their own initiative – but with the connivance or acquiescence of local units".
Meehan pointed out that these newspapers reported Buttimer as asserting, "Though there were a number of men there, she only saw one, whom she did not recognise", and that her Grants Committee statement was similar.
[69] Hart posits these were primarily revenge killings, perpetrated without a clear rationale by "angry and frightened young men acting on impulse".
[66] He suggests the targets were local Protestant men whose status as enemies in the eyes of the killers was codified in "political language of the day ... landlord, landgrabber, loyalist, imperialist, Orangeman, Freemason, Free Stater, spy, and informer" and continues, "these blanket categories made the victims' individual identities ...
"[66] Coogan concurred, writing, "the latent sectarianism of centuries of ballads and landlordism claimed ten Protestant lives" that week.
"[62][76] because:[T]he truth was that, as British intelligence officers recognised in the south, the Protestants and those who supported the [UK] Government rarely gave much information because, except by chance, they had not got it to give.
Although the Intelligence Officer of the area was exceptionally experienced and although the troops were most active it proved almost impossible to protect those brave men, many of whom were murdered while almost all the remainder suffered grave material loss.Historian John Regan, in his paper, The Bandon Valley Massacre Revisited, argued that the killings might be best understood in light of purported IRA fears that the British were planning a reoccupation of the south of Ireland and was a preemptive move against people believed to have been informers.
Regan argued that the selective use of evidence by Peter Hart in an attempt to emphasize a sectarian dimension to the killings highlights a wider problem in the politicization of Irish history.