Kilmurry Volunteers  1915-21 

As L.A. Clarkson has observed, Irish history has suffered from premature generalisation, premature in the sense that sweeping general statements have too often been based on superficial impressions or even on casual assumptions regarding what must have been rather than what actually was, and not on the detailed investigation of actual situations. In every age and every aspect of Irish history, there has been and still is a crying need for local studies which throw light on the actual families and actual individuals of whom communities and political social movements were made up. Such local enquiries are the building blocks of which general national histories are composed.  

'Michael Galvin, in his study of the personnel of the pre-Treaty I.R.A. in one county Cork parish should therefore throw new light on that movement which, emerging as a radical and revolutionary force in the Ireland of its day, succeeded in a compartively short struggle in breaking the British connection for the greater part of this island'.

Kenneth Nicholls History Lecturer U.C.C.