Tom Barry

by Meda Ryan

  By August 1932 Barry was happy with Fianna Fáil and believed that the party’s views would concur with his own. He now wanted ‘a final effort’ to ‘reunite … all Republicans – all struggling for the same goal’.[23]Tom worked for the Cork Harbour Board by day, but in all his spare time he was devoting his energies towards IRA activities.[24]

  In a letter to An Phoblacht, Barry set out to correct a report that he ‘asked young men present’ at a commemoration in Dunmanway and ‘who were not volunteers to join the Irish Republican army’. Controversy arose between the reporter and others as to what Barry actually said.[25]Barry further clarified for Moss Twomey the comments he had made, wherein he had asked that people should get their TDs ‘to clearly understand that the people wanted the Republic restored now – not in ten or twenty years’. He wanted all ‘women and the heads of families’ to boycott British goods’. The IRA ‘could only help by organising, arming, training and disciplining themselves, because in the last analysis of any situation arising out of a struggle between Ireland and England, it was the armed men who counted.’[26]

  A period of unrest, the result of a combination of the bitterness left by the Civil War and the uncertainty of the political situation, prompted De Valera to get a clear mandate from the people by suddenly calling a general election for 24 January 1933. Barry again supported De Valera and held intensive drilling operations throughout Co. Cork. With IRA support De Valera’s strategy worked.

  Concern that the Free State Volunteer force being established, would ‘sweep unattached youths into its ranks’ had Barry proposing a motion at the March 1933 general army convention, that the IRA should notify all Fianna Fáil TDs of their objection to such a body. However, this motion was replaced by a decision to increase IRA recruitment efforts.[27]

  At this time (March 1933) Barry was concerned that banks were putting ‘pressure’ on farmers. Four farms ‘in the Upton district’ outside Bandon were to be seized and offered for sale. Two of the farmers were ‘ex-IRA’. The United Farmers Protection Association under the chairmanship of Tom Hales was helping them. But because of influences by others who were outside this association, Tom Barry felt the IRA should ‘take a hand in the matter’. Already he had ‘interviewed the solicitor to the bank at the request of and in the presence of the farmers concerned. I told him [solicitor] that neither sales nor seizures would be allowed and I also pointed out that he had already grabbed three farms himself, whilst acting as agent for the bank.’ At a meeting of the Farmers Protection Association to be held in Cork, Barry with IRA members Tadhg Lynch and Tom Kelleher wished to attend. He informed Moss Twomey, CS, that they should ‘take the lead … as we are the only organisation who can crystallise and develop opposition to evictions’, he wrote. The meeting could also be used to get ‘people to stand again behind the IRA’. Due to Tom Hales’ involvement in politics, he would prefer to get Tom Kelleher elected instead of Hales as chairman of the association.[28]

  Moss Twomey told Barry, ‘we need to be extremely careful in enquiring into every separate case of trouble with the bank’.[29]Barry and Kelleher with other volunteers attended the meeting to ‘urge popular resistance’.[30] At a further meeting in Bandon where Barry was not in attendance, he heard reports that Tom Hales, TD, ‘spoke disparagingly of the IRA’ and stated that the ‘present executive’ was ‘a harebrained lot’. Barry wasn’t sure if the events were correctly reported to him. But he wrote to Tom Hales spelling out the position – ‘if you cannot refer to the volunteers in a fair manner, omit all reference to the Irish Republican army’. Tom Hales did not attend the next meeting.[31]

  A few days later Barry wrote to Moss Twomey: ‘the banks are making offers of settlement in most cases at half the original debt. We have taken no further action … but we are watching how matters will develop.’ Barry was out most week-nights and all Saturdays in IRA ‘re-organisation’ in West Cork villages. He compiled a Programme for Training Camps. ‘One thing I am certain of is that we must now set out to show up the Fianna Fáil party for what they are’. He was organising ‘boycott’ meetings after Mass, holding parades on Sunday afternoons and arranging for ‘Easter Lily sales’. (Organisation in places such as Innishannon, Ballineen, Bantry, Castletownbere, Myross, Ardfield, Rathbarry with ‘speakers’ at each venue kept him working non-stop.)[32]

  Barry observed that there was ‘great disillusionment taking place in the minds of the more sincere members of Fianna Fáil.’ The army council should ‘take advantage of it’.[33] Later in the year Moss Twomey told Joe McGarrity that the Fianna Fáil leadership suffocated the United Farmer’s Association proposal to organise a conference of republicans which led to Tom Hales resigning his Dáil seat.[34]

  All of Barry’s spare time was spent in IRA activity. With other Volunteers he was in Catletownbere, Bantry, Kealkil establishing training units which led to ‘40 officers and all the arms’ available, assembling for a training camp. In correspondence to ‘All Units’ in West Cork, Barry advised them that the training would commence on Saturday and Sunday 27 and 28 May, and he wanted arms cleaned, and assembled. ‘If any man is victimised owing to his being called up for training, notify me at once and the army will take up his case immediately’.[35]Moss Twomey told him he ‘should act very cautiously in this business’.[36]Other areas wanted instructions, including Sligo. Barry told Twomey that he was ‘sure’ Twomey would ‘agree that five minutes demonstration and verbal instruction is, as far as the usual batt. TO [training officer] is concerned, worth any one week’s reading of text books’.[37]He wrote:

  We should get twenty hours training at this camp on foot drill, extended order drill, rifle drill, machine-gun drill, revolver practice, rifle-practice (each man will fire one round at a target in our last hour of camp) lectures in organisation, duties of officers, discipline and control of men, movements of troops, etc. In particular each officer will have to take his turn at drilling and moving the remainder of the squads, so as to be qualified to drill and command his own company.

  He elucidated the ‘great drawback’ in ‘assembling all our arms and officers without sufficient effective ammunition’. While appealing to the chief-of-staff for arms and ammunition, he wanted to know by return if he had ‘any hopes of getting this stuff within a week’.[38]

  Barry, with sights on the bigger picture of a United Ireland, first had to uproot the ‘disturbing’ element to secure a strong army. Inequality in the north of Ireland led him to ‘believe there will be no real peace in Ireland until the crime of partition is ended, and until Ireland is again a united nation under one government of the Republic’, he wrote.[39]

  Meanwhile, the formation of the Blueshirts gave the militant wing of the IRA something to fight about. Barry believed that, as they represented fascism and had sprung out of Free State aspirations, they should be suppressed. Now, he had a cause and an opportunity to enlist young men into the IRA; within his forthcoming training camps he intended to cement the combination of youth with men who had practical experience. He intended changing methods to suit the time. This group soon became known as the ‘New’ IRA.[40]

  At the March 1933 army convention Tom Barry stated that he had a major problem with the Army Comrades Association (ACA) – The Blue Shirts – in West Cork. In outlining how they were molesting IRA, shooting, burning, creating ‘a menace’ by making daily life difficult, he could find ‘no way of handling these fellows but to dump them’. He wanted the convention to instruct the army council to act. While Andy Cooney sympathised with Barry’s predicament, he believed that the situation was not as bad in any area as it was in West Cork. Without doubt it was ‘very humiliating’ to Barry ‘to feel that his men are being kicked about,’ Cooney said. ‘If I were in charge of West Cork, I might be putting forward a proposition such as this.’ Cooney opposed a blanket army council declaration ‘to dump them’ as Barry had suggested but added that in doing so he was aware that ‘the prime schemers’ in Dublin were allowed ‘get off scot-free’.[41]
<
br />   Disquiet had surfaced in the IRA because of the Catholic bishops’ Lenten pastorals denunciation of the organisation. This was brought to the fore at the convention. Though condemnation by the Church was not new to Barry, he expressed disquiet that the Church suggested a link with the organisation and Communism, and argued that it could have an effect on IRA recruitment. Other delegates teased out the subject. But it was found that a socialist policy being pursued by some IRA members was unhelpful.[42]Later in the year in Bodenstown, Moss Twomey publicly denied IRA alliance with communism.

  A march to Government Buildings, as a first major effort of the Blueshirts National Guard, was arranged for Sunday, 13 August 1933. The army council of the IRA decided to attack O’Duffy’s marchers, so the Cork IRA men travelled to Dublin. On the eve of the march the government revived Cosgrave’s stringent measures of the military tribunal and banned the parade. O’Duffy called off the parade, but Barry and his men paraded. In the heightened atmosphere of tension, police baton charged the crowd who refused to disperse, and Barry was taken away by his comrades with a deep gash in his head and blood flowing down his face.

  Under the leadership of men like Eoin O’Duffy and Ned Cronin the Blueshirt movement began to gain momentum. The ensuing result was that Barry and the rank and file of the IRA, especially in Cork under his leadership, ‘threw itself enthusiastically into the struggle.’[43]

  Leading a precarious life, Barry with some of his comrades decided to take on a Blueshirt element in West Cork. He challenged a fringe group in Clonakilty one evening. He thought he had ‘shut them up’, and that when word would reach their leaders their activities would be stalled. Barry, Tom Kelleher and the boys then hopped into the car to set out for Bandon. Instantly men piled into another car, followed, and began to shoot. As Barry’s car tore past Ahiohill, and Ballinscarthy, through the winding roads of West Cork, Barry and Tom Kelleher with guns out the side-back windows, began to return fire. The driver kept his head. ‘It was like prairie driving’ as they knocked sparks off the bumpy road, the ditches and the black car behind. They swung around bends in the road, past Manch Bridge and in the straight. Suddenly their followers hit a ditch at Manch. Barry and his comrades shouted to nobody in particular and drove through Bandon without a policeman in sight.

  Jerh Cronin remembers Barry’s sense of humour in the midst of the tension of this Blueshirt activity. He was explaining why he had expelled somebody: ‘Just imagine,’ he said, ‘a soldier of the Irish Republican army came home half drunk and decided when he saw some old woman with a blue shirt that he’d attack her. And that wasn’t bad enough but didn’t the old woman beat him. A member of the Irish Republican army to be such a loser!’[44]

  Eoin O’Duffy was to address a meeting on the South Mall, Cork, on 1 October 1933 so Barry decided to have a counter-meeting. With several of the old IRA and those of a younger generation from throughout Cork city and county, he organised a gathering of hundreds, and assembled them to march towards O’Duffy’s group. Fearing trouble, the gardaí stood six deep.

  Jim Kearney was there. ‘Barry went up on the platform in the Grand Parade; loud and clear he spoke, “I have broken through cordons before and I’ll break through cordons again … battalion! Attention! Left turn!” And he faced us right for the guards. As we marched forward, they turned white. And just as we got to them – real close – he gave us the “Left turn!”’ Quick, sharp and decisive – Barry’s intention was to let the guards, O’Duffy and the government know that the IRA was still a redoubtable force.[45]

  Barry went ‘on the run’ again. Kathy Hayes recalls a night in Rosscarbery, during this period, when she hid him in a cupboard covered with clothes during a raid. He wore, she remembers, a bulletproof vest at that time.[46]

  Jack (Doheny) Lynch recalled being ‘on the run’ with Barry in 1933. ‘We were all members of headquarters staff, and were inside in this house in Morehampton Road. We had no money, nothing much, and Barry always loved to have a bet on a horse. He loved horse racing; if he had money even in later years he’d go to the Curragh. Anyway he said to us, “There are two horses going here today and I think they should win.” I don’t think I had two shillings. Eventually we made up ten shillings between us. He wrote the docket and gave it to me. I had to steal out.

  ‘The Echo came in. The two horses had won, and we got something like £30. That time you’d nearly buy a public house for £30. We hadn’t had a drink for months, and never thought of it. So Barry rubbed his hands and said, “We’ll go out tonight!”

  ‘We got ready, put our guns inside our pockets, put on our coats and went off. We were in this pub, a swanky pub. Barry never asked us what we’d have. He sat down and called for a drink – brandies all round. We got the brandies and the lad was all, “Yes, sir! No, sir!” Must have thought that anyone calling brandies was very well off! And as he was going away from the table, Barry called, “Give me a packet of Woodbines now please”.

  ‘“Jasus,” says I. “You made a right mess of it, brandy and Woodbines!” Well he got a fit of laughing.

  ‘Shortly before he died he reminded me of this incident, and the tears of laughter rolled down his cheeks, “Me and my tupenny packet of Woodbines. Jack, didn’t I always like my Woodbines!”’

  Invariably, Barry talked with an air of confidence about his native county of Cork. ‘When we were up in Dublin and we’d hear about something which had happened, he’d give me a slap on the back; “Jasus, they wouldn’t do that down below with us, Jack!” He thought Cork was the greatest. He had this type of individual pride and collective pride, and I feel it was this coupled with honour that pushed him forward in such a way as not to let down his own county and in fact gain for them a certain prestige.’[47]

  When De Valera gave Col Eamonn Broy the task of recruiting men for an armed auxiliary force (Broy Harriers) to support the garda siochána, there was disquiet among republicans. Because many were former IRA men with ‘good records’, Barry declared them as ‘the greatest menace’. Conscious of a gradual acceptance of partition, Barry wanted action. ‘We should rely on what we can do, not what we can say’, he told a March 1934 IRA convention.[48]

  On 2 May Barry, now described as ‘one of the most famed and colourful guerrilla fighters of the Anglo-Irish war’ was arrested and sentenced to jail for a year for possession of arms. He refused to recognise the court and attacked Fianna Fáil for its attitude to the Republic and its betrayal of the IRA.

  He was released at Christmas. Deciding you couldn’t put a good man down he struck off for Tralee on 6 January 1935, full of fighting spirit. To an assembled audience he lacerated the government, advocating military action.

  In September 1934 Frank Edwards had been warned not to go to the Republican congress. Then in January Bishop Kinnane issued a rescript condemning him. He was sacked from his teaching post in Mount Sion, Waterford in January 1935. The IRA issued a statement saying that he wasn’t a member. Barry organised a protest group from Cork and with Moss Twomey and Pádraig MacLogan held a protest meeting. ‘Despite a statement read in all the churches forbidding attendance, over 5,000 attended.’ But as the Catholic clergy continued to denounce Barry from the altar, he continued in turn to ignore their utterances.[49]

  In March 1935 at a general army convention Seán MacBride introduced the issue of the formation of a political party, but it received no enthusiasm. Instead Tom Barry called on the members to support action within the six counties, within six months. Though consensus prevailed, the proposal was put on hold, when Moss Twomey alluded to the lack of resources.

  A tram strike in Dublin, which paralysed the city, presented an opportunity for action. When the government enlisted the army to fulfil the tram workers duties, the IRA stepped in to assist the workers. As tyres were sniped and police were fired upon, the police in a swoop on 26 March detained 43.

  That evening when Barry returned home to his wife Leslie in Dublin the gardaí came to the door and arrested him. He was charged for the �
��seditious utterances’ that he had made in January in Tralee.

  Prior to Leslie’s visit to ‘The Glasshouse’ on 24 April he wrote a note while he was ‘waiting waiting’. He hoped to slip the note to her ‘despite the military police’, because his trial was due next day and he wanted her to be there. He complimented her on her Limerick lecture – a report of which he read in the newspaper:

  It was very good and I felt proud of you. Still when I get out you will have something else to do and that will be to love me all the time.

  I have no idea how long our sentences will be. However long, please remember that I shall go through in flying colours and be back to you strong, fit and unchanged. Through all the time I will be in, I shall think always of you and love you all the time. Not love you more than I do now because that would be impossible ... Au revoir my sweetheart. I shall love you while I live and afterwards if it is possible for humans to do so. I shall be longing to get back to you and there we shall be so happy again. I send you all my kisses and all my love … My Leslie

  Your sweetheart,

  Tom.[50]

  Next day 25 April he was tried by a military tribunal at Collins’ Barracks on the charge of ‘sedition, unlawful association, refusal to answer questions and contempt’; he received an eighteen months jail sentence.[51]But he was out on parole by early June.[52]

  However, while still in ‘the Glasshouse’ Frank Aiken, minister for defence accompanied by Vivion de Valera, was at a ceilidh in Dundalk on 13 May. Because of government policy against the IRA, the audience was in a militant mood. When Aiken got on the stage, shouts of, ‘Remember the 77’ and, ‘Up Tom Barry’ burst forth. When he began to speak he was again interrupted with cries for Tom Barry. He said ‘he did not wish to refer to Tom Barry’. But as the cheers of interruption continued the minister said, ‘to those interrupters if they knew the part Tom Barry had taken in the Civil War they would not say very much about him.’ After further interruptions Mr Aiken said, ‘when the IRA were fighting and men were being executed, Tom Barry was running around the country trying to make peace.’ The shout from the gallery of ‘We must fight’ ended Mr Aiken’s appearance on stage.[53]