Times Higher Education suggested in 2008 that Hart's work "offers a revisionist version of events that proved highly controversial".
[8] In his review of The IRA at War, 1916–1923, John M. Regan wrote in 2004:"Hart is neither a statist nor a southern nationalist, though the influence of both ideologies can be traced through his work.
His exploration of the plight of Protestants in the Free State illuminates the sectarian underbelly of the revolution that nationalist historiography prefers to ignore.
In escalating violence in Cork, Tipperary, or Dublin could Michael Collins, Harry Boland, or Ernie O'Malley be held accountable for raising sectarian tensions in Antrim, Down or Belfast?
However, Hart dated an additional interview with his second anonymous Kilmichael veteran on 19 November 1989, six days after Ned Young died.
[16][17] Niall Meehan, Head of the Journalism and Media Faculty in Griffith College, Dublin, questioned Hart's claims with regard to the "Chisholm tapes", in a review of David Fitzpatrick (ed.
The other recorded interviewee, Jack O'Sullivan, spoke words which were misattributed by Hart to the ambush scout he claimed he interviewed on 19 November 1989.
[18][19] The discussion resumed in 2022 with a book on the Kilmichael Ambush, defending Hart, by Eve Morrison, to which Niall Meehan responded.
The second controversy surrounds the Dunmanway killings, in which thirteen Protestant men and boys were shot dead between 27–29 April 1922 during the truce between the IRA and the British forces.
In his review of The IRA and its Enemies (The Month, September–October 1998) Brian Murphy noted Hart's citation of a British intelligence assessment in the Record of the Rebellion in Ireland that "in the south the Protestants and those who supported the Government rarely gave much information because, except by chance, they had not got it to give."
Murphy pointed out that Hart had omitted the following sentence: An exception to this rule was in the Bandon area where there were many Protestant farmers who gave information.
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.
[22]As the April killings took place in "the Bandon area", Brian Murphy queried apparent suppression of evidence contradicting Hart's conclusion.
Discovery of a hitherto hidden violent sectarian culture culminating in mass expulsions created a plausible context for the Dunmanway killings.
Not quoting the sentence in the British Army's Record of the Rebellion in Ireland identifying that in Southern Ireland loyalist espionage around Bandon was exceptional, Hart attributed the killing of local Protestant's to the violent sectarian culture he misidentified rather than to the bitter intelligence war waged between the British forces and the IRA.
Omitting the one sentence identifying Bandon's exceptionalism ensured the superficial plausibility of Hart's ethnic conflict thesis.
This concept of self-determination was important to the definition of "revolution" Hart employed, which was defined by the transfer of sovereignty from the pre- to the post-revolutionary regime.