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.
Ambush of British soldiers
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 time indicate that they were not.
That one of these victims was a boy-soldier, suggests that newspaper accounts were correct. The cemetery register for 4603001 Private Harold Washington, of the 2nd Battalion Prince of Wales Regiment, from Salford, suggests he was an orphan, as many boy-soldiers were.
Although boy-soldiers were given arms-training in barracks, they were not allowed to carry weapons in public. It is not a huge point, but merely a nudge closer to the historical truth of what happened that day in September 1920.
The two other soldiers killed in the ambush were Thomas Humphries, aged 19, son of Sarah Humphries, a widow living in Bradford, and Marshall Whitehead, aged 20, son of Alice Whitehead, a widow of Halifax. Without knowing how their widowhood had come about, would it be unreasonable to suppose that their husbands had been killed in the Great War? And would it be perfectly unreasonable to propose there was no monopoly of suffering in all this?
As we all know, Kevin Barry was caught at the ambush scene, and sentenced to death. He was not the first participant in the Troubles to be sentenced to be hanged in Mountjoy Jail, but the second.
Policeman executed
His predecessor was Constable Mitchell, a Black and Tan RIC man who had been found guilty of murdering a civilian. Mitchell was hanged a couple of weeks before Barry, on the same gallows by the same hangman. There was no public campaign to save him.
If the crown was prepared to hang one of its own policemen for murdering a civilian, is it altogether surprising that it would not spare the life of an IRA man involved in the murder of three of its soldiers?
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.
In Kerry that night there was an outbreak of utter savagery. Three constables in the tiny village of Ballyduff - Robert Gorbey, from Newcastle West, Co Limerick, William Madden from Tipperary and George Morgan from Mayo - were overwhelmed and murdered by a very large party of IRA men from at least five companies
RIC men abducted
At Hillville, near Killorglin that same night, some RIC men returning from leave were ambushed. Constable Herbert Evans, aged 22, from Belfast, and Constable Albert Caseley, 24, from Kent, were killed, and Constable Ernest Bright, from London and Constable Charles Mead from Middlesex abducted. Also abducted that day, either at Hillville or in Tralee, was Constable Patrick Waters, from Galway.
None of these three men was seen alive again. It was reported that at least two of the captured RIC men were disposed of by being thrown alive into Tralee gasworks.
Now there was a time in the history of this State when a veil of amnesia was drawn over such deeds. 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.
The belief in that single narrative gave the IRA the spurious moral authority to start its war in 1970; to see that single narrative being reiterated by the State at this point in our history is not merely bewildering - frankly, it is terrifying.