The late great-hearted Manus O’Riordan had many things in common with Fintan O’Toole, the main target of the article.
Both their fathers were CIE Bus Conductors.
They were both raised in Dublin, south of the Liffey.
Both went to Christian Brothers schools, both took degrees from UCD.
Both became familiar with the United States
.Manus took a degree there.
Fintan lectures at Princeton.
Manus was brought up a Communist but abandoned that Creed without acrimony He was proud of having been a Communist.
Fintan was brought up a Catholic. Instead of lapsing like many a decent man, he became a rancorous opponent of the Church,
a critic, bent under the weight of chips on his shoulders, which, on examination prove to be products of his imagination.
Manus placed the Article below on FACEBOOK on 1st November 2020 and emailed it to me,-Donal Kennedy.
‘THE IRISH TIMES’ AND
THE REBURIAL OF KEVIN BARRY
by Manus O’Riordan, ‘Irish Political Review’, December 2016
LEST WE FORGET!
On November 1 last, I posted a memorial notice on Facebook to mark the anniversary of the 1920 execution of Kevin Barry. Prompted by the degree of reflection present inthe few youthful writings from which I had quoted, I wondered if that aspect of Barry’s strength of character had been remarked upon on the occasion of the exhumation of his remains from Mountjoy Jail and their reinterment in Glasnevin Cemetery in 2001. Certainly not by the ‘Irish Times’. Quite the contrary. Two of its resident columnists, Kevin Myers and Fintan O’Toole, fulminated against the exhumation, reburial and state funerals being accorded to Kevin Barry and his comrades. Kevin Myers is, of course, a notorious right-wing ranter, regularly achieving hard-to-match heights of hysteria, who has plied his trade between the ‘Irish Times’, the ‘Irish Independent’ and the Irish edition of the ‘Sunday Times’.
But to return to how the reburial of Kevin Barry and his comrades was “respected” in the ‘Irish Times’ of 2001: The tone of its columnists’condemnations ranged from “restrained” disapproval to mendacious ranting and raving. The more “restrained” condemnations read:
October 3: “What is the Taoiseach up to? He has, with generosity and courage, done so much to acknowledge the Irish dead of two world wars, and to recognise the plurality and complexity of the various strands of Irish history. So why, with the peace process apparently breathing its last, should he give State funerals to 10 IRA men of more than 80 years ago, so powerfully reviving the myth of single-sided victimhood? It is 12 years since Donal O’Donovan wrote ‘No More Lonely Scaffolds’, an account of the life of Kevin Barry. The author is a nephew of the republican martyr, and one could be forgiven for expecting a hagiography. It is nothing of the kind, but a fair and careful account of a tragic episode in which four young men were killed in the middle of a terrible war. If anything might have undone the cult of Barryism, this book should have done so. The proposed State funerals for Kevin Barry and nine other executed IRA men indicates that it has failed.”
“Kevin Barry was involved in an ambush in which three British soldiers, two of them younger than him, were killed. Donal O’Donovan’s account of the ambush, drawn in part from the recollections of IRA men, indicates that all three soldiers were armed. In the heat of the moment, it’s not surprising that those IRA men thought this was the case. Newspaper accounts of the time indicate that they were not. That one of these victims was a boy-soldier, suggests that newspaper accounts were correct… As we all know, Kevin Barry was caught at the ambush scene, and sentenced to death… The night before Kevin Barry was executed, Mountjoy Jail was deathly quiet to mark his last hours on Earth. Things were deathly elsewhere, but they were not quiet. In Granard, Co Longford Capt Philip Kelleher MC, son a GP in Macroom, and formerly of the Leinster Regiment Kerry, now a district inspector of the RIC, was shot dead as he kept a mystery appointment in Kiernan’s Hotel. Within days, his father was to perform autopsies on seventeen of the Auxiliaries killed at Kilmichael… It is a normal human response to ignore the morally repugnant done by one’s own side. But no excuse remains today for the studied neglect of the reality of the time. This is particularly true in this country where, even before the unbelievable evil September 11th, we have over so many years had so many reminders of the reality of violence, and of the unspeakable heart-ache it brings. There’s no justification for a State funeral now, with all its pomps and pieties, for just 10 of the thousands of unfortunate victims of the violence of 80 years ago, for this is to reaffirm a single narrative of suffering and sacrifice.”
October
26: “So maybe Bertie Ahern was right to give a State funeral for
Kevin Barry and the other nine IRA volunteers after all. Maybe that act is
another drawing down of the historical curtain over the physical force
tradition, for all time. And maybe the worldwide political forces unleashed by
the abominable attack on the twin towers in New York City have, with an uncanny
synchronicity, served to foreclose on that tradition from
elsewhere… This doesn’t mean those who differ over the past can’t get on
in the present. Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness will never admit that they
have waged a purposeless, evil war, and only a bigot or a pathological
warmonger would refuse reconciliation until they did. And only an utter cretin
would deny now that what they have done, finally, to bring about the
decommissioning of some IRA weaponry has taken immense skill, courage and
determination. I doubt if this could have happened without the context
that was provided by the World Trade Centre bombing, any more than the Easter
Rising could have taken place without the context of the Great War, or the 1798
Rising without the war by the French Directory against the United Kingdom…
Henceforward, there will be no America to turn to spiritually, no America to
hide escaped prisoners in, no America to seek the dollars from… The
US is closed territory for terrorists for ever more; so maybe, just maybe, we can
start our history anew.”
These two more “moderately-toned” critiques of the Kevin Barry state funeral did not come from the liberal “leftie” wing of the ‘Irish Times’. They were in fact penned by Kevin Myers, in his “Irishman’s Diary”. It was in fact that paper’s supreme liberal “leftie” who ranted and raved. Fintan O’Toole, as its Assistant Editor, pulled rank one day ahead of that first column from Myers. O’Toole entitled his October 2 diatribe “A Grotesque Denial of Bloodshed”. I must confess that, in the intervening fifteen years, I had completely forgotten how hysterical O’Toole had been in his condemnation of Kevin Barry. For the centenary year of the 1916 Rising, O’Toole thought it more prudent to change the tone of his tune, strut the stage of the National Concert Hall, and promote Shaw’s no less egotistical “defence” of Casement – a nonsense criticised by both Brendan Clifford and myself in the Second and Third Quarters 2016 issues, respectively, of ‘Church & State’ magazine.
Yet it is worth noting that, in writing about Casement during this past centenary year, O’Toole opted to adopt a quasi-reverential tone. For example, on March 26: “As for Shaw, like any artist he wasted nothing. His last great play, ‘Saint Joan’, is, at heart, his considered response to the Rising and in particular to Casement’s martyrdom. Joan’s unbreakable will to sweep the English out of France, her trial and her ultimate decision to choose death over imprisonment all echo Casement’s real drama. Joan, too, returns after death as an image and an inspiration: nothing in heaven and earth can prevent her spiritual and temporal triumph.” And, in the process, he could once again blow his own trumpet this past October 29:
“It does not seem at all accidental that it is the most ambiguous figure of the Rising, Roger Casement, who has been of most interest to artists this year. Colm Tóibín and Donnacha Dennehy’s ‘The Dark Places’, the Hugh Lane Gallery’s fine exhibition centring on John Lavery’s long-neglected painting of Casement’s trial, Owen Roe’s reading of Bernard Shaw’s unused speech for Casement to deliver to the jury, and Fearghus Ó Conchúir’s ‘The Casement Project’ – as well as works by others, including myself and Una Mullally of this parish – explored the multifaceted nature of Casement’s personality and legacy, from his homosexuality to his pioneering human rights investigations, from the body politic to the politicised body. If Casement symbolically replaced Patrick Pearse as the most magnetic figure of the Rising, it is because his doubleness is deeply attractive to a culture that has become more comfortable with, and more interested in, mixed feelings.”
Being wise to O’Toole’s current agenda, does not mean that its moderately-expressed tones cannot leave a poor memory quite unprepared for meeting up, once again, and fifteen years later, with the unmitigated vitriol of his denunciation of the 2001 state funeral accorded to Kevin Barry. I might have been better prepared if I had read – before now – O’Toole’s 2012 sneering commentary on the 1965 state funeral accorded to Roger Casement. This was written for the US liberal magazine, ‘The New Republic’. I have not seen anything that might suggest that this Wikipedia summary of The New Republic is unreasonable or inaccurate:
“The ‘New Republic’ is a liberal American magazine of commentary on politics and the arts published since 1914, with influence on American political and cultural thinking. Founded in 1914 by major leaders of the Progressive Movement it attempted to find a balance between a progressivism focused on humanitarianism and moral passion, and on the other hand sought a basis in scientific analysis of social issues. It supported American entry into World War One… Domestically, ‘The New Republic’, as of 2011, supports a largely modern liberal stance on fiscal and social issues, according to former editor Franklin Foer, who stated that it ‘invented the modern usage of the term ‘liberal’, and it’s one of our historical legacies and obligations to be involved in the ongoing debate over what exactly liberalism means and stands for’.”
“The Multiple Hero” was the title of O’Toole’s Casement article for ‘The New Republic’ on August 2, 2012 – an essay-in-review prompted by Mario Varga Llosa’s novel ‘The Dream of the Celt’. O’Toole opined: “Competing narratives, multiple selves, friction between public image and private desires, a personality constructed through texts: Casement is the perfect postmodern subject.” O’Toole was careful not to challenge the World War One narrative of ‘The New Republic’ itself, and there was a tone of disapproval regarding Casement’s engagement with Germany. But O’Toole also played up to the more modern liberal preoccupations and predilections of ‘The New Republic’s readers. Swallowing the “Black Diaries” as authentically Gospel, O’Toole served up judicious and salacious quotations, designed to illustrate Casement’s supposedly “huge” obsessions. What was particularly noticeable, however, was how, from the very start of his article, O’Toole fully played up to WASP anti-Catholic – and anti-Irish – prejudices:
“Perhaps, once a man’s bones have been hauled from his grave, he will forever be unquiet… In February 1965, Casement’s long bones were dug up from an unmarked grave in Pentonville prison in London, where he had been hanged for high treason in August 1916, and flown to Dublin. The return of the remains followed a long campaign by the Irish government, which was preparing to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the armed rising in Dublin in 1916 that is the founding myth of the Irish state… The bones were received like religious relics being brought to a medieval city. They lay in state for five days in a Catholic church. As ‘The Irish Times’ reported, ‘People in small groups, mostly women, children and older men, passed quietly through the church, kneeling for some minutes to pray.’ Children were given a day off school and government workers were allowed to leave work to attend the funeral procession. These public rituals were intended to fix Casement’s identity once and for all. The ceremonies were ostentatiously Catholic and explicitly defined Casement as a martyr. The president, Éamon de Valera, himself the leading survivor of the uprising of 1916, welcomed the returning hero ‘amongst his own people’, the Catholic Irish: ‘For them he died and as long as this nation exists and Irish men live, his sacrifice will be recalled and his memory revered’.”
But this was unconscionable caricature from the pen of O’Toole. There was no Catholic sectarianism in de Valera’s funeral oration. Dev pointed out: “Casement was of Ulster stock and he loved the province of Ulster, particularly because of the part the people of Ulster had played throughout Ireland’s history.” Nor was there any expression of narrow nationalism, as de Valera continued: “If there had been no 1916 and there had been no European war of 1914, the man whose bones lie here would deserve to be honoured and revered. He would deserve to be honoured for the noble part he played in exposing the atrocities in the Congo, for his championship of the downtrodden people there and for his championship in the same way of the people who were subject to the atrocities of the vilest type in Putamayo. It required courage to do what Casement did, and his name would be honoured, not merely here, but by oppressed peoples everywhere, even had he done nothing for the freedom of our own country.”
Shameless selectivity is O’Toole’s stock-in-trade. This could not have been more evident than in his Kevin Barry opinion piece in the ‘Irish Times’ of October 2, 2001. “A Grotesque Denial of Bloodshed” screamed his headline, as O’Toole alternated between sneering and ranting:
“On Sunday week, unless there is a last-minute outbreak of sanity, we will be treated to an extraordinary spectacle. Coinciding with the Fianna Fáil Ardfheis, the State will stage one of the most elaborate political ceremonies in its history. After a religious service, the remains of 10 IRA men, recently exhumed from their graves near the perimeter wall of Mountjoy Prison, will be draped in tricolours and loaded into 10 hearses. The cortege, accompanied by an Army motorcycle escort, will then move at walking pace through the north side of the city towards the Pro-Cathedral, stopping on the way at the Garden of Remembrance and the GPO. From the cathedral, the procession will eventually move back to Glasnevin Cemetery, where to the accompaniment of the setting sun and an oration by the Taoiseach, the remains will be buried. The entire event will be relayed live on television. The President and the entire Cabinet will officiate…”
“Yet even before the events of September 11th, an elaborate State funeral was a very bad idea. It was likely to achieve two things: sickening many citizens by its ghoulish cynicism and offering a great boost to those who want us to feel that the only difference between a terrorist and a patriot is the passage of time… Donal O’Donovan, Barry’s nephew and author of the excellent Kevin Barry and His Time, recalls a conversation between Barry and his sister, Kathy. Barry had just taken the oath of allegiance to the newly established Dáil. ‘That’s good’, said Kathy, ‘now you’re a real army.’ Barry’s reply was ‘I don’t know. Anyway, when this damned Dáil takes Dominion Home Rule, they needn’t expect us to back them up.’ Nor was Barry’s short military career very far from what we would now call terrorism. In July 1920, he took part in a raid on the home in Aughavanagh, County Wicklow of the elected Nationalist MP, Willie Redmond. The following month, he was involved in an attack on a Church of Ireland rectory in Co Carlow. The clergyman fired a shotgun at his attackers from an upstairs window. The IRA men fired back but then left. ‘We decided’, as one of Barry’s fellow raiders later recalled, ‘not to go near the minister that night but to take him unawares’ at some later time…”
“None of this means that Kevin Barry was not a nice, bright, middle-class boy who, in normal times, would have ended up as a popular local GP and president of the rugby club. The State must acknowledge the circumstances of its own creation. The elaborate act of piety that is being foisted on us is not, however, an act of acknowledgement. On the contrary, it is an act of denial, deliberately designed to sanitise the ambiguities of people like Kevin Barry whose idealistic certainty makes them reckless of other people’s lives. Before September 11th, that was a stupid mistake. After September 11th, it borders on the grotesque.”
This, then, was O’Toole’s post-9/11 “war on terrorism” – setting out to portray Kevin Barry as a bigoted Catholic terrorist proto-type for al-Qaeda. And, in the process, the three “examples” he gave from O’Donovan’s biography were quoted out of context, constituting mendacious misrepresentation.
As for Kevin Barry’s remarks about the possibility of the Dáil bowing to superior British force in denying the achievement of the Republic voted for in the 1918 General Election, O’Donovan’s narrative proceeded to recall how Kathy Barry vividly remembered that conversation with Kevin, and brought it up in one of her frequent arguments about the Treaty with Michael Collins in the early months of 1922. Kathy recounted: “Mick listed a number of very fine soldiers who supported it (the Treaty) and said: ‘How do you know your brother would not have supported it too?’ I told him this little story and, with characteristic generosity, he said: ‘That is good enough. I won’t say that any more.’” (p 49).
O’Toole’s wrote of the raid on the home of “the elected Nationalist MP Willie Redmond” as if it was Remond’s Waterford electoral mandate that had made him a target. But O’Donovan had written of a very different reality:
“Aughavanagh was one of the military barracks built in 1802 to capture Michael Dwyer. It was a gaunt, huge, rough-stone building made to house 100 redcoats… John Redmond paid over the odds for the house… In July 1920, Aughavanagh was occupied by John Redmond’s son, William, MP for Waterford… Word had reached C Company that Aughavanagh was to be occupied by the British Army and soon afterwards they received orders from GHQ to burn the house down. ‘One wet night (Matt Cullen recalled) fourteen members of C Company cycled to Aughavanagh, including … Kevin Barry and myself… In the back there was a door with a small pane of glass in it; it was broken and Kevin Barry got in through it… Inside he found Captain Redmond with a large club ready to strike him, but the sight of Kevin’s automatic vanished the pluck of the Captain… Mick McDonnell informed him we were going to burn the barracks… He denied knowledge of the military coming, said that he was an MP attending the British Parliament, and assured us that he would have a very serious row there if such a thing were thought of.’ The Volunteers withdrew from the Captain to have a consultation and decided not to burn the house at all, but to hold Captain Redmond responsible that if the barracks were occupied by the British troops he, Captain Redmond, would be shot. The terms were conveyed to him and the Volunteers withdrew. In fact, Aughavanagh was occupied by Auxiliaries less than a year later without any harm coming Captain Redmond.” (pp 65-67).
And what O’Toole disingenuously implied had been a sectarian attack on an Anglican rectory in Carlow, was anything but the case. It was, in fact, just one of a series of raids on the premises of known gun-holders, for the purpose of acquiring arms for the Army of the elected Government of the Republic. Of course, as well as the British Government, there were also numbers of Irish Empire Loyalists who refused to accept the democratic mandate of Dáil Éireann, and who resisted it in arms. O’Donovan related how, on September 2, 1920, C Company gathered to raid Jones’s of Woodside for arms. They got some guns; they then went to the Church of Ireland rectory, where they surrounded the Rev. Charles Stuart Stamford Ellison’s house. Matt Cullen later recalled (with a demonstrable lack of the sectarian murderous blood lust attributed by O’Toole’s judiciously edited version to Kevin Barry and his comrades):
“Kevin Barry, Mike McDonald and myself went up to the hall door. We were refused admittance, demanded that the door be opened, and then saw the minister let down the window and fire from a shotgun point blank range at us. No one was injured but some of our men got a fright. We were now prepared to reply, Kevin with an automatic, Mike Mac and myself with revolvers through the window. We got back to get cover, and he kept firing out and we kept firing in for some time. We could not afford to waste ammunition as he would not give in unless we shot him. This we did not like to do without getting authority. We received orders that night to take the gun by all means. We decided not to go the minister that night but to take him unawares. But the (British) military took the gun that night.” (p 68). And with the gun gone, there was no longer any reason for a further raid on the rectory.
In his address at the reburial ceremony in Glasnevin Cemetery on October 14, 2001, the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, refuted some of O’Toole’s wildest rants:
“We are gathered here today in honour of the ten Volunteers who died on the scaffold in Mountjoy Prison in the cause of freedom and the cause of Ireland. We are all here to lay their remains to rest in this soil at last with dignity and honour… In the war they fought, they had one support that could not be ignored. That was the mandate for independence from the General Election of 1918. They knew the people were with them. Dáil Éireann was formed from those who were elected, and who were willing or able to attend. When the Declaration of Independence was passed, the Ceann Comhairle of that First Dail said to the Deputies present that they all understood that war would be the consequence of the Declaration. They understood that. They were satisfied, if necessary, to fight to liberate the country. The big powers had said that it was for the small nations that the First World War was fought. The people of Ireland were determined that the principle of national self-determination must also be extended to the Irish nation… The men we honour belong to a period, when the entire national movement was united in a tremendous effort to achieve Ireland’s independence that was desired and voted for by a large majority of the people. War, for whatever cause and whatever circumstances, always has cruel consequences. But every nation, both large and small, has a right to defend and vindicate its freedom in accordance with the will of its people… The 10 Volunteers executed in Mountjoy died defending and upholding the independence proclaimed by Dβil Eireann on 21 January 1919. The British government of the day, who would relinquish control of this part of Ireland in 1922, were seeking in vain to maintain their continued rule by force, long after popular consent had been definitively withdrawn. Erskine Childers, who with Desmond FitzGerald was charged with explaining the Irish case to a wider international audience, stated that Kevin Barry was doing precisely what Englishmen would be doing under the same circumstances and under the same provocation, and that what was involved was a national uprising, ‘a collision between two governments, one resting on consent, the other on force’... Before the Truce, the Dáil and the Government, all members of the Dáil, took formal responsibility as the elected representatives of the people for the actions of the Volunteers, and recognised them as their army. They explicitly acknowledged the democratic legitimacy of the campaign that they had fought, and accepted accountability for it. So those of us who are proud of our national independence should have no reservations about honouring those Volunteers.”
Elementary humanity was demonstrably absent from O’Toole’s ranting and raving, and he went on to sneer at Barry as “the nice, bright, middle class boy”. If Myers was demanding recognition of “plurality and complexity”, well, it was in the form of a letter from within a strand of “plurality and complexity”, that an example of elementary, decent humanity was to find a voice to subvert O’Toole’s vitriol. As Lillian Roberts Finlay wrote (October 19, 2001):
“I was six years of age on the day Kevin Barry was executed in Mountjoy Jail. I have never forgotten the desolate weeping of all the neighbouring women on Ringsend Road where we lived, close to Boland’s Mill. My grandmother went on and on, lamenting the bitter day, the bitter day, his poor mother, God help her, the poor, poor woman. My own mother was afraid to show her face; my father was a British officer. She was crying too, and I wanted to console her, but I was afraid to take sides. Those were tough times, either side. When I was in my late forties I visited a sick friend in the Mater Hospital, Rosaleen McDonnell, who introduced me to Kevin Barry’s mother in the same small ward. Mrs Barry had the loveliest face I had ever seen, and the gentlest voice – not a Dublin voice, a country voice. If she was seriously ill, it did not show in her fresh skin and wonderful eyes, nor in the serenity of her folded hands. ‘He was only a lad’, she told me, ‘going on to be a famous doctor!’ Her tender smile was sad… The old lady said to me: ‘Tell your little children that today you met Kevin Barry’s mother. Tell them proudly.’ And I did tell them, in every detail, just as I’m telling you, proudly. One of my sons knew all the words of that old heart-breaking ballad: ‘High upon a gallows tree, Kevin Barry gave his young life, For to set Old Ireland free’.”
IN MEMORIAM KEVIN BARRY, EXECUTED NOVEMBER 1,
1920
Comments are closed.