The Aubane Historical Society (AHS) is a historical society of amateur historians based in Millstreet, County Cork in Ireland, focusing on local history and the Irish revolutionary period. Brendan Clifford and Jack Lane, members of both the AHS and British and Irish Communist Organisation (BICO), grew up in the Aubane area of north Cork. The AHS has published numerous pamphlets on local history matters, often in relation to the Home Rule politician William O'Brien, the novelist Canon Patrick Sheehan, and the local poet Ned Buckley. According to Jack Lane, the AHS was originally intended to be a local history organisation, but later expanded into the role of opposing the "revisionist" movement in Irish history."BICO Is Dead—Long Live BICO!" by Jack Lane, A Review of What? Irish Political Review, Jan. 2009, pp. 36–37 . The Society has been highly critical of Peter Hart, whom it accuses of falsifying interview material,An Phoblacht "Hart Trouble Diagnosed" Review of the AHS' book Troubled History,which is critical of Hart with denunciations of Roy Foster, Brian Hanley, Paul Bew, and Henry Patterson. The AHS regularly attacks Hubert Butler (whom it accuses of being a quasi-racist defender of Protestant Ascendancy) and Elizabeth Bowen, whom it claims acted as a British spy in Ireland during the Second World War and hence lacking any Irish identity.For the AHS' criticism of Bowen, see "The Dubliner:The Life Times & Works of James Clarence Mangan", Clifford 1988, "A North Cork Anthology" by Jack Lane, 1993, and "Notes on Eire" by Clifford & Lane 2008. AHS has worked with some writers who might be seen as representing a more traditional republican perspective, including Desmond Fennell, Brian P. Murphy osb, Eoin Neeson and Meda Ryan.See, for instance, Myths From Easter 1916 by Eoin Neeson (AHS, 2007), and About Behaving Normally in Abnormal Circumstances by Desmond Fennell (Athol Books, 2007).
