by Meda Ryan
And Ireland long a Province be
A Nation once again.
The softness crept into those laughing eyes. Eyes that remembered experiences of gun-fire, Mills bombs and explosives, of sleet, snow and rain falling on him and his men; of sleeping rough while evading enemy capture; of long hours continuously marching through fields, bogs and rivers; of the blood of battle and the killing of enemies and spies.
Practically every adjective that could be applied to describe a human being had been used to portray the man beside me.
‘Yes. They said I was ruthless, daring, savage, bloodthirsty, even heartless.’ He laughed, thumped his chest. ‘That pounder gave me a smattering of trouble, but it has served me well. Yerra what matter! Some of our own men – the clergy called me and my comrades “murderers”.’
His father Thomas Barry, born into a small farm at Bohonagh, outside the town of Rosscarbery, went to the local National School and worked on the farm before joining the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) in 1893. Following his initial training and short assignments in a few Irish towns he was sent to Liscarrol (East Riding) in Co. Cork. While there he met and fell in love with Margaret O’Donovan, an attractive-looking girl and daughter of a respectable businessman.
From the outset her family was against this relationship, especially her father who believed his daughter could do better. However, the young pair were not be separated so when Thomas was transferred to a post in Killorglin, Co. Kerry, Margaret eloped with her young lover. She and Thomas were married, disowned by her family, and settled in their home at Chubs Corner in Killorglin. A year later their eldest son, Eddie, the first of fourteen children, was born.[1] On 1 July 1897 their second child was born. Baptised in the local Catholic church and christened Thomas Bernardine, he was affectionately known as Bernie, but was later known to the world as Commandant-General Tom Barry. He was a child who as an adult would in no small way be responsible for changing the course of Irish history and securing freedom for his people who were subject to British rule. He would one day destroy barracks like the one where his father worked and be responsible for the deaths of RIC men like his father.
On 29 December 1907, disillusioned with the RIC, Thomas resigned and returned to his native Rosscarbery where he operated a business, with his Aunt Hannah (Barry) Collins and Uncle Jerh Collins, known as The Arcade. This shop, with a bar at the back, sold groceries, meat and hardware and later, in an upstairs department, a line of ladies and gents suits and hats. The younger members of the family were sent to the convent school from where the boys transferred to Ardagh boys’ school. When young Tom (Bernie) attended the Boys’ National School, his master John McCarthy discovered that he was a bright pupil so he encouraged him by giving him books to read and inviting him to his house to give him further tuition in the evenings.
John McCarthy, a teacher who was known to turn the history book upside down on his desk and give his own version, instilled the spirit of nationalism into many a lad in that school. He encouraged the playing of Gaelic games after school hours and Tom, who was on the local football team, was a quick runner, agile and light on his feet. Many an evening was spent with the local lads who would competitively race each other in their bare feet around Jeff Wycherley’s field beside the church. He learned to swim in ‘Sweeney’s Hole’. His first introduction was ‘a push off the hill by older boys into a twelve foot drop – I had to sink or swim!’[2]
Schoolmaster McCarthy was also a great sportsman and had a sporting rifle. As he roamed the fields shooting rabbits, pigeons and woodcock, his companion was often the young Tom Barry.
‘The old master told me,’ Jerh Fehily recalls, ‘that he was in a way responsible for the victories of West Cork. “Because,” he said, ‘not alone did I give Tom Barry his formal education, but I took him one day when he was quite young and showed him how to hold, carry, load and fire the gun”.’[3]
Young Tom was up to all the pranks of high-spirited boys of his age. To cut the cost of milk for their large family the Barry’s rented a field at the other end of the town where they kept a cow. Tom’s task each evening was to bring home the cow. One evening his pal bet him a penny that he wouldn’t ride the cow through the town. ‘No sooner said than done,’ said Kathy Hayes. ‘He jumped on the cow’s back and headed for the town. The dogs went mad, barking, jumping and pulling the cow’s tail. Naturally people came to the doors to see what was causing the racket. Through the town, round the corner, hell for leather! Bernie clung on. At the stall door he threw himself on a heap of manure just in time to save his head.’[4] Afterwards he wondered which was the most serious crime, the disgrace of the family in front of the neighbours or that the cow was in calf, as he got ‘a tongue lashing’ when he arrived home.[5] Wild, adventurous and a leader, ‘he was always into tricks,’ Kathy Hayes recalls. ‘People from the surrounding countryside would travel to Mass in a pony and trap. They’d tie the horses in a yard at the top of the town.’ With other lads he’d untie the horses. They would race them up and down the hill and around the fields. ‘When the owners would come out from Mass the horses would be in a lather of sweat. He was a terror!’[6]
Tom’s aunts, his mother’s sisters, kept in touch with her and were aware that Tom was extremely intelligent. The Barrys couldn’t afford to send him for further education, so the aunts decided to pay for his education at Mungret College, near Limerick.[7] In boarding-school his studies progressed and during holidays he also kept up his game-shooting with his former schoolmaster. As the years went by young Tom Barry would move away from Rosscarbery, but his love for this town, situated on a hill overlooking an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean and set in the rugged countryside of West Cork, and for its people would never diminish. He wanted to be forever known as a West Cork man.
Business for the Barry family at The Arcade was not great and with such a large family their money dwindled, so they decided to sell their property and move to a house in Upper Convent Hill, Bandon. His father then worked in various shops in Bandon.
Bandon was a Loyalist town. In the early part of the fifteenth century when the town was founded, hundreds of families were moved from England to Bandon. Following the plantation of the fertile lands around the area the town drew up its charter in 1613. One of its first acts was to pass a by-law, ‘That no Roman Catholic be permitted to reside in the town’. A notice outside one of the nine-foot-thick walls read:
A Turk, A Jew or an Atheist,
May live in this town, but no Papist.
Somebody came at night and wrote under it:
He that wrote these lines did write them well,
As the same is written on the gates of hell.[8]
The Bandon Militia was formed and ‘became part of the English forces of occupation in Ireland, ready at all times to march against their Irish neighbours and to help in crushing any effort to get rid of English rule.’[9] By the early part of the twentieth century the walls had become only a historical memory and catholic families were living in the town, but it was a garrison town where the sentiments of many of its inhabitants were pro-British. The elder Thomas Barry was a Redmondite believing in Home Rule. He expressed such sentiments at home, though his wife Margaret believed in a more nationalist tradition.
In 1914, Tom, at 17, got a job as a clerk in Emerson’s, protestant merchants in MacSwiney’s Quay, Bandon. The firm dealt in machinery, coal, manure, oil, timber and general provisions. Here this bright young lad had his first taste of employment and remained for nine months. During this time he would cycle the twenty odd miles to Rosscarbery on Sunday’s to meet his girl friend Kathy Hayes as well as his other friends.
But young Tom was anxious for adventure. In 1915 Britain, at war with Germany, was looking for army recruits in Ireland. So on 30 June, Tom, with a friend Frank McMurrough enlisted in the RFA at Cork and became a soldier in the British army. He is described as: ‘Height, 5’ 10”. Brown hair. Clean-shaven. Smart appearance. Large mole on left thigh’.[10]
‘I w
ent to war for no other reason than that I wanted to see what war was like, to get a gun, to see new countries and to feel a grown man. That was my primary motive at the time’.[11] So he bade goodbye to Kathy, to rugged Rosscarbery’s hills, bog lands and surrounding sea which he loved, the dear friends of his youth in that district, his acquaintances in Bandon and most of all, his parents, brothers and sisters and set out for his initial training in the British army.[12] First he went to Athlone and then to Woolwich. When the army was about to embark for France, news of their requirement in Mesopotamia (now Iraq) meant they had to head in that direction. He was offered a commission in the Munsters, but refused it.’[13] So in January 1916 Tom set foot in Basra. Here he was gassed and was taken back to Bologna and then to the Royal Hospital in Woolwich. Soon he returned to his regiment.[14]
Tom was content with the lot of a soldier and enjoyed the excitement, though with hindsight, he became immensely critical of the handling of the campaign in Mesopotamia.[15] After futile attempts, costing many lives, in trying to break the Turkish-German ring, the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force under General Townsend withdrew from Kut el Amara to rest. The 30,000 beleaguered troops camped twelve miles away – a safe distance from view and from fire range. Tom, with some more of the boys, was strolling towards the orderly tent where war communiqués were generally displayed. ‘We usually scanned these things,’ he said, ‘and paid little heed to war news, but this particular evening a heading caught my eye. It was under the heading of: SPECIAL – REBELLION IN DUBLIN. I read it and re-read it three or four times. It concerned Dublin and my people, the Irish.’ He maintained that this was the turning point in his life. ‘It put me thinking. What the hell am I doing with the British army? It’s with the Irish I should be!’[16] The notice told of the 1916 Rising in Dublin where a group of ‘rebels’ who took over the GPO, Liberty Hall and other places, were shelled and overcome by the crown forces and many of the ‘rebels’ killed. The communiqué covered several weeks and told of arrests, the execution of the leaders and the jailing of hundreds of ‘rebels’.
The Great War dragged on; he was Bombardier Barry of the British army. In 1917 he was among those who returned from the borders of Asiatic Russia, where he had been wounded. However, his injury wasn’t serious and he was back in action in a short time. December of that year found him in Egypt with the field regiment in which he was serving, supporting General Allenby’s army in his advance on Jaffa and Jerusalem. Like all the other soldiers he took the hardships in his stride. From there he served in Italy, then France and back to England in 1919.
Ireland was only across the water, so after demobilisation he returned to Cork in February 1919, and made his way back to his parents’ home in Bandon.
Notes
[1]Eddie (Edward), Tom (Bernie – Bernadine), Margery (Margaret), Eileen (Ellen), Kitty (Catherine Mary), Mick (Michael), Maria Mary, Elizabeth Mary Gertrude, Jack (John), Eva, Gerald, Joanna, Maureen, Ann. Details from Sheila Barry Irlam (Tom Barry’s niece) and from Gerald Barry (Tom’s cousin) who is assembling ‘a family tree’. I am indebted to Con O’Callaghan for putting me in touch with Sheila and Gerald. The Barry’s homestead in Killorglin was at Chubs Corner. It was demolished for road-widening, by Kerry County Council, in the 1990s. The Barry home was beside Timothy Chub O’Connor’s timber yard – hence the name Chubs Corner, Frank McGillycuddy to author, 26/2/2003, courtesy of Maurice O’Keeffe.
[2] Family details from Gerald Barry; Tom Barry, author interview. Interviews with Tom Barry stretch over a period – 4/9/1974, 18/9/1974, 25/10/1974, 2/12/1974, 29/12/1974, 18/1/ 1975, 25/1/1975, 17/4/1976, 28/4/1977 – due to overlapping of topics, herein after known as, ‘author interview’, special interview on Northern Ireland 18/4/1979; also Jerh Fehily, interview 7/9/1978.
[3] Jerh Fehily, author interview 7/9/1978.
[4] Kathy Hayes, author interview 14/9/1979.
[5] Tom Barry, author interview.
[6] Kathy Hayes, author interview 14/9/1979; Tom Barry, author interview.
[7]Mungret Annual – He started in Mungret in 1911, Mike McGuire, Limerick City Library details.
[8] George Bennett, History of Bandon, 345. Bennett believed that ‘some Jacobite wag’ wrote the latter two lines.
[9] Denis J. O’Donoghue, History of Bandon, p. 22.
[10] WO35/206, Sir Peter Strickland Papers, Imperial War Museum (IWM).
[11] Barry, Guerilla Days In Ireland, p. 2.
[12] Tom Barry, author interview. He said that members of the family were ‘all allowed’ make their own decisions. His father had a great belief in the army and military matters. Tom spoke with pride of his parents who reared a large family. I could find no evidence for Peter Hart’s suggestion that he ‘did not get along’ with his father and that this was partially ‘the reason he ran away to join the army’. Peter Hart, The IRA & Its Enemies, p. 32, footnote, 48. Contemporaries in Bandon, where I grew up, neither saw nor heard anything to confirm conflict between Tom and his father. Later communication shows a good relationship.
[13]Cork Examiner, 10/11/1915.
[14]Cork County Eagle, 22/1/1916.
[15] Ewan Butler, Barry’s Flying Column, p. 21.
[16] Tom Barry author interview; Tom Barry to Kenneth Griffith and Timothy O’Grady, Curious Journey, pp. 86, 87; also RTÉ Sound Archives, AA2782/, n.d.
2 - Caught up in the Movement
The people of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland went to the polls in a general election in December 1918. Tom Barry was outside Le Harve. The Great War had ended – a war in which approximately 50,000 men of Irish birth and many more of Irish blood had given their lives.
Two men whose lives entwined with Tom Barry’s life were Eamon de Valera and Michael Collins. American born De Valera defended Boland’s Mills during the 1916 Easter Rising. After capture he escaped death but was sentenced to a term of penal servitude. In the summer of 1917 he was released, but was again imprisoned in May 1918. During his release in November 1917 he was elected president of Sinn Féin and of the Irish Volunteers, the military wing of the Sinn Féin movement which later became known as the Irish Republican army (IRA).
In November 1913 at the foundation meeting of the Irish Volunteers Eoin MacNeill stated that ‘British politics are controlled by British interests, and complicated by problems of great importance to the people of Great Britain.’ The Volunteers, he said, ‘will form a prominent element in the national life under a national government.’1 On election day 1918, De Valera and other candidates were in jail; nevertheless Sinn Féin fought every seat in Ireland except two and won 73 out of the 103 seats they contested. On Tuesday, 21 January 1919, those elected Sinn Féin Members not in jail met in Dublin to form the First Dáil Éireann, thereby setting up the government of the Irish Republic. Of the 73 Sinn Féin MPs elected to Westminster 36 were in prison and the rest refused to take their seats in Westminster when the new parliament assembled on 4 February 1919.
A neighbour of Tom Barry’s, Michael Collins, a 1916 Rising participant, became minister of finance and minister of home affairs in the First Dáil, later, president of the supreme council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), and director of intelligence. The IRB wanted total separation from Britain and complete autonomy for Ireland, but was prepared in the interim to co-operate with Home Rulers. However, in 1913 events superseded compromise – the formation in January of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) to resist Home Rule implementation, and in November the formation of the Irish Volunteers to meet nationalist demands. The Home Rule Bill (Third) for Ireland was signed on 18 September 1914, but by agreement with the Ulster Unionists and the Irish Parliamentary Party it was suspended for the duration of the First World War and the question of a legislative parliament for Ireland, in British government discussions since 1866, remained unresolved.
Meanwhile in West Cork local Volunteers were secretly meeting, drilling and recruiting new m
embers.2Tom Barry, the ex-British soldier, was back in Bandon. Immediately he began to study more Irish history to discover why the Irish nation had to rise up against England in 1916. When he had read the communiqué about the execution of the 1916 leaders while in Mesopotamia he found it ‘a rude awakening, guns being fired at the people of my own race by soldiers of the same army with which I was serving.’3 Yet back in Ireland since February 1919, he was constantly seen in the company of the British army personnel stationed at Bandon and fraternised with ex-British soldiers in an Oliver Plunkett Street premises. Actions such as this were held against him when he tried to join the IRA and indeed his critics condemned him for such deeds, but he maintained that he went with the spirit of those who had fought with him. (He was not officially discharged from the British army until 31 March 1920.)4
As the months (1919)passed Tom moved cautiously into a different circle of friends in Bandon, though throughout this period members of the British forces kept in close contact with him and invited him to meetings in the Young Men’s Hall, a type of club for the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and ex-soldiers.5 Soon afterwards Tom enrolled in Skerry’s College, Cork, where he studied Law, English and Business Affairs. During the first months at Skerry’s College, this smart young man was often seen in the early morning, the collar of his coat turned up, as he rushed down Convent Hill making his way to the station for the train to Cork. In the evenings he would often meet his girlfriend Annie O’Leary. The pair would sometimes be seen dancing in the town hall. His relationship with Kathy Hayes had faded, though he remained ‘a good friend’ throughout his life. During the War of Independence she became involved with him in the movement, and later in life whenever he was in the area, he visited her public house where she lived with her husband and family in Rosscarbery.6
