A few points; (at the risk of repeating myself from earlier posts)
Whatever Aubane's motivation I can't take them too seriously as objective commentators - they're too obviously biased.
Re Hart, this is probably old hat at this stage, but the fact is that Hart's work, however much it might annoy people (including me at times), and despite serious flaws in some factual areas, is still streets ahead of most Irish historical writing on the revolutionary period. You won't learn anything from Meda Ryan or Brian Murphy about the social profile of the revolutionaries, the geographic distribution of violence, the nature of guerrilla warfare, but you will from Hart, and because of this, he remains useful to anyone who wants to understand, rather than have their opinion reinforced. I'm really sick and tired of reading on the internet that he is 'discredited' by people who have never read any of his books. Disagree with his conclusions, fine but don't dismiss it because you don't agree with it.
Equating Gerald Murphy and Peter Hart is a false analogy because Murphy is not a historian and has simply invented much of the book's content. His book began as novel and should have stayed that way.
Too much of this kind of debate has been about winning the media argument rather than history - ie poke enough holes in someone's research to claim that their argument is discredited without addressing the actual issue, whether it be sectarianism or the use of assassinations or whatever, in an evidence-based way. Where is the 'anti-revisionists' interpretation of the period? Too often it seems they are seeking to stifle debate rather than open it.
Re the central point the question of sectarianism, in Ireland in 1919 there were deep divisions, religious, social and political, between Catholics and Protestants, but these were not always the same as nationalist v unionist or Irish v British. In Dublin for instance, where about 20% of the population was Protestant, there had been fierce rivalry, including violence, between the Churches over conversions and care of orphans as recently as 1913, but this did not translate into nationalist conflict between Catholics and Protestants in 1916-23, although most Protestants were unionists. But it was also possible to be a Protestant and a militant republican there, eg George Gilmore. It was only where religious and political conflicts overlapped neatly that you saw straightforward sectarian violence - in Ulster and its borderlands, but especially in Belfast and Armagh. In Cork you see a mixture, only a minority of Protestants there were militant loyalists (most were moderate unionists and later Free Staters) but the loyalists element were certainly targetted for this by the IRA ie their houses were burnt and in April 1922, those suspected of being both protestant unionists and informers in West Cork were ruthlessly wiped out.
I think it's a complicated picture and we need debate, not polemics, to understand it.
By the by, this is an article on the Irish Story site about the latest arguments in the Dunmanway controversey, that addresses some of these issues.
http://www.theirishstory.com/2011/11/01 ... ntroversy/