Kevin Barry: An Irish Rebel in Life and Death by Eunan O'Halpin (review)

Abstract

Eunan O’Halpin, Kevin Barry:An Irish Rebel in Life and Death (Newbridge: Merrion Press, 2020), xii+250 pages. Kevin Barry is one of the most famous of the dead in Ireland’s War of Independence. It is not because of any fame during his life. It was the circumstances of his death that bequeathed him fame. Just eighteen years old when he was sentenced to death by court martial for his involvement in an IRA operation that led to the death of three British soldiers, Barry was executed by hanging at Mountjoy Jail on All Saints’ Day 1920, at a time when social disorder in Ireland was reaching a climax. In a new book, part biography, part analytical history and part family memoir, the Emeritus Professor of Contemporary Irish History at Trinity College Dublin, Eunan O’Halpin, asks why Kevin Barry’s solitary image remains the dominant icon of youthful patriotic sacrifice for the War of Independence. Barry was one of approximately 550 IRA volunteers, 750 civilians and over 700 Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and British Army personnel to lose their lives during that war. Nine other IRA men were sentenced to death and executed for similar actions in 1921, one of them – Frank Flood – a good friend (and fellow medical student) of Kevin Barry’s. In some ways Barry was unremarkable. Why then has his name continued to resonate in Irish republican, as well as popular, culture? With an ease facilitated by the author’s in-depth knowledge of the events and personalities of this period in Irish history and knowledge of archival material on Kevin Barry himself, Eunan O’Halpin, a grandnephew of Barry, addresses this question, as well as setting his life in the context of the politics and society of Ireland in the 1910s and 1920s. His subject’s story is intertwined with that of the divisions within society on Ireland’s political future and the gradual shift in public opinion towards a more separatist vision of Ireland, this shift largely caused by the social disorder brought about by political and military conflict. O’Halpin draws on family and school records to present a likeable, balanced boy with academic and sporting abilities (in rugby and hurling) and many friends, who was politically minded and increasingly more radical than mainstream opinion in 1917. More than anything O’Halpin presents a very human and real picture of an ordinary boy who progressed to become a ‘Jesuit-educated medical student’, leading a full life in addition to his role Studies • volume 110 • number 437 124 Spring 2021: Book Reviews in the IRA (which he had joined at the age of fifteen in 1917), both in Dublin and Carlow. He and his large family, to whom he was very close and by whom he was much influenced, especially in the case of his eldest sister Kitby [sic], had grown sympathetic to advanced nationalism even before the Rising, as a result of influences in both home places. He was inspired at thirteen years of age by a speech by Bulmer Hobson (a senior figure of the IRB), at an event which he attended with his eldest sister. The tickets for this had been given to him by schoolmates at St Mary’s College, Rathmines, which he attended before transferring to Belvedere College in 1916. Later, he was a medical student at UCD, in the last stage of his short but relatively well-connected life. The Barry family appear to have been part of a slightly privileged and interesting political class developing in Ireland in the 1920s. His sister Kitby herself later played a key role in ensuring communication between Éamon de Valera and Liam Lynch during the civil war and married Jim Maloney, son of P J Maloney, a TD in the first Dáil. Kitby’s daughter married the poet Patrick Kavanagh; Eglin, Kevin’s sister, married the eldest son of prominent Volunteer The O’Rahilly; and Mary, Kevin’s other sister, married Jim O’Donovan – the IRA’s leading expert on explosives. There is a fascinating insight into Kevin Barry, the schoolboy, which draws on homework – mostly essays – and on scrawls and doodles which appear on the margins...