Kevin Barry
by Sean Cronin
Republished by Irish Freedom Press, 2001

Reviewed by Michael Foy, The Irish Times, March 13, 1965

Few deaths in Ireland's chequered history caused such a hue and cry as did Kevin Barry's and none kept the flood of anti-British sentiment flowing so long.

His name taunted and embarrassed the British almost from the moment they pulled him out from beneath their ambushed truck in Dublin's Upper Church Street on September 20, 1920. Hanging him a few weeks later, they gave him the martyr cloak and lapped for themselves a fountain of hate which spread far beyond Irish shores. Songs have been written about Barry all around the world, the most famous in Glasgow - Paul Robeson recorded it.

It has been said that Barry's case drove Lloyd George to tears: had the Archbishop of Dublin flitting from one mansion to another seeking a reprieve; forced British soldiers and some of Barry's jailers to resign and won non-committed thousands to sympathy with the Republicans cause, England earned only an interest of ill-will.

The facts of course are that Barry was no mere 'lad of eighteen summers', no dreamer from a university lecture hall. For all his 18-and-a-half years he was a toughened soldier in the Republican forces: had taken part in a number of engagements and was a key attacker in the Upper Church street raid which left the British with three dead against no loss for the Republicans. Barry had taken part in the first engagement involving the loss of British troops since 1916 and he, as it happened, was the first Republican soldier taken in action since Easter Week.

For three years he had been a Republican soldier, as befitted someone from a staunch Republican home, proud of its former Fenian members. But even before that, as a Belvedere student, Barry was charting his course. He wrote and thought of Connolly and Larkin and the rights of Labour. When he was captured, the British had no sentiment crazed youth on their hands. He was silent before his questioners, sneered at his torturers, ignored his court-martial and was defiant to the last. He was typical of the young Republican rank and filers in that autumn of 1920, the revamped militants who rose from the ashes of Easter Week. Seán Cronin, in his study ponders on these points and there is nothing he writes which does not support them.

'Kevin Barry' is written by a Republican and deals with Republicans and their tactics at the time of Barry's capture. In such circumstances it could be forgiven for partisanship and sentiment. The partisanship is there, yet not to the point of spoiling, and the sentiment is given short shrift - though readers may pick all they wish to choose from references and extracts at the end of the book.

The account gives fair note of well-meaning people here and in Britain who tried to save Barry's life on humanitarian grounds, but it never fails to stress the Republican attitude: Barry was a soldier, he would be rescued by his comrades if possible - and indeed they laid many plans - but they would never resort to pleading. Mr Cronin too, sketches the temper of the nation in the autumn of 1920: Balbriggan sacked, police barracks blazing through the country, Black and Tans mowed down, reprisals commonplace.

An interesting feature is some extracts from the essays which Barry wrote in Belvedere. At the time these did not gain the scholarship winner high marks and earned the verdict 'piffle', but they showed Barry as a forward social thinker with a militant character. Mr Cronin, who last year wrote a study of Jimmy Hope, has written - as Tom Barry in a foreword says - 'without heroics or trimmings'. Yet while he keeps Republican Barry firmly placed in the Republican ranks, one cannot help but wonder which Barry did the most in the struggle for freedom: the volunteer under the truck in Upper Church street or that 'lad of eighteen summers' made immortal by Eddie Calvert and his silver trumpet.