Most studies of the Irish War of Independence and Civil War have dealt with the extremes of violence, and the ex-servicemen were but a tangential part of broader research. Their geographical focus has generally been Munster and particularly County Cork, the area of greatest violence. Jane Leonard, however, focussed specifically on the experiences of Irish ex-servicemen returning from the Great War. She writes that they ‘often experienced hostility and rejection’, and were subject to ‘extremes of intimidation including beating, mutilation, punishment shooting, prolonged kidnapping, expulsion from Ireland and murder’. She estimates that ‘during the period from 1919 to 1924, upwards of 120 ex-servicemen were killed either by the IRA or by the anti-Treaty republican side during the Civil War’, and that, although some of these veterans were acting as intelligence agents for the RIC and military forces, ‘the vast majority appear to have been killed simply as a retrospective punishment for their service in the Great War’. Leonard concludes that British ex-servicemen ‘formed a marginalised and unwelcome group in Irish society’. Commenting on the motives of the IRA in targeting ex-servicemen she writes, ‘within the nationalist community ex-soldiers weakened the revolution's effectiveness by refusing to join Sinn Féin, subscribe to its funds, or obey the rulings of its courts; and also by maintaining economic and social contacts with the British administration and its security forces’. Leonard was one of the first academics to conduct research in this area. Her influential article ‘Facing the Finger of Scorn’, first published in 1997 and much quoted by later researchers, was ‘largely based on (28) interviews conducted with Irish ex-servicemen during the 1980s and 1990s’. Although the oral interviews were an important historical contribution, as they represented one of the last opportunities to record the comments of some of the ex-servicemen, there is a risk in generalising from such a limited sample.