Book gathered details of violence against Catholics between 1920 and 1922 before publishing plans were scrapped

By Paul AinsworthDecember 01, 2024 at 11:44am GMT

A book chronicling a wave of sectarian attacks on Catholics by loyalists in Belfast that was once deemed “too dangerous to publish” is to be examined in a new documentary.

Pogrom Bhéal Feirste (Belfast Pogrom) will be screened on TG4 next Wednesday December 4, and tells the story of a controversial book penned by Belfast priest Fr John Hassan in 1922, two years after sectarian violence against Catholics and nationalists erupted in the city.

The troubles of the early 1920s occurred against a backdrop of civil strife across Ireland that included the ongoing War of Independence.

Sectarian tensions that began in Derry in 1920 spread to Belfast that year, and led to loyalist attacks on non-unionists and expulsions of Catholics from places of industry including the city’s shipyard and linen mills, fuelled by the incendiary rhetoric of unionist leader and UVF founder Edward Carson.

An estimated 455 people were killed in Belfast during this two-year period, 267 of whom were Catholics, while 151 were Protestants and 37 were members of the security forces.

At St Mary’s Church in Belfast city centre’s Chapel Lane, Fr John Hassan began to collect witness accounts of the attacks and killings happening around him.

The Irish language documentary explains how the government in the south planned to publish the accounts in a book titled Facts and Figures of the Belfast Pogrom 1920-1922, with Fr Hassan disguised with a pen name, G.B Kenna.

However, the publishing plans were thrown into chaos with the Civil War breaking out in 1922, and following the establishment of the Irish Free State, its fledgling government adopted a peace policy with the Northern Ireland government.

As a result, plans to publish the book were scrapped, despite many copies already having been printed.

Most were pulped, with only 18 copies surviving.

A description of the new documentary, which is produced by Belfast-based Clean Slate Television states the book “was almost lost forever until one of the surviving copies was found in the 1990s”.

“This programme explores the violence in Belfast at the time of partition, the political backdrop in which these events occurred, and how the lines of segregation established in the 1920s remained for many decades,” the description adds.

https://www.irishnews.com/news/northern-ireland/documentary-examines-priests-controversial-pulped-book-on-belfast-pogrom-N3A2IQL6SRHY5J4FDZTD4UW7HI/