Kevin Barry - Capture and Torture

Capture and Torture

Kevin Barry was placed in the back of the lorry with the body of Private Harold Washington, and was subjected to some abuse by Private Washington's comrades. He was transported then to the North Dublin Union.

On arrival at the barracks he was taken under military police escort to the defaulters’ room where he was searched and handcuffed. A short while later, three sergeants of the Lancashire Fusiliers and two officers began the interrogation. He gave his name and an address of 58 South Circular Road, Dublin (in reality his uncle's address), and his occupation as a medical student, but refused to answer any other questions. The officers continued to demand the names of all involved in the ambush.

At this time a publicity campaign was mounted by Sinn Féin. Barry received orders on 28 October from his brigade commander, Richard McKee, "to make a sworn affidavit concerning his torture in the North Dublin Union." Arrangements were made to deliver this through Barry's sister, Kathy, to Desmond Fitzgerald, director of publicity for Sinn Féin, "with the object of having it published in the World press, and particularly in the English papers, on Saturday 30th October."

The affidavit, drawn up in Mountjoy Prison days before his execution, describes his treatment when the question of names was repeated:

He tried to persuade me to give the names, and I persisted in refusing. He then sent the sergeant out of the room for a bayonet. When it was brought in the sergeant was ordered by the same officer to point the bayonet at my stomach. . . The sergeant then said that he would run the bayonet into me if I did not tell. . . The same officer then said to me that if I persisted in my attitude he would turn me out to the men in the barrack square, and he supposed I knew what that meant with the men in their present temper. I said nothing. He ordered the sergeants to put me face down on the floor and twist my arm. . . When I lay on the floor, one of the sergeants knelt on my back, the other two placed one foot each on my back and left shoulder, and the man who knelt on me twisted my right arm, holding it by the wrist with one hand, while he held my hair with the other to pull back my head. The arm was twisted from the elbow joint. This continued, to the best of my judgment, for five minutes. It was very painful. . . I still persisted in refusing to answer these questions. . . A civilian came in and repeated the questions, with the same result. He informed me that if I gave all the information I knew I could get off.

On 28 October, the Irish Bulletin, a news-sheet produced by Dáil Éireann's Department of Publicity, published Barry's statement alleging torture, which had been organised by Dick McKee, the IRA Commandant of the Dublin Brigade. The headline of the paper read: English Military Government Torture a Prisoner of War and are about to Hang him. The Irish Bulletin claimed that Barry was a prisoner of war, suggesting a conflict of principles was at the heart of the conflict. The English did not recognise a war existed and treated all killings by the IRA as murder; the Irish republicans claimed that they were at war and it was being fought between two opposing nations and therefore demanded prisoner of war status. John Ainsworth has pointed out though that Barry had been captured by the British not as a uniformed soldier but disguised as a civilian and in possession of flat-nosed ammunition in his pistol, in breach of the Hague Convention. Erskine Childers addressed this question of political status in a letter to the press on 29 October, which was published the day after Barry’s execution.

This lad Barry was doing precisely what Englishmen would be doing under the same circumstances and with the same bitter and intolerable provocation — the suppression by military force of their country’s liberty. To hang him for murder is an insulting outrage, and it is more: it is an abuse of power: an unworthy act of vengeance. contrasting ill with the forbearance and humanity invariably shown by the Irish Volunteers towards the prisoners captured by them when they have been successful in encounters similar to this one. These guerrilla combats with soldiers and constables—both classes do the same work with the same weapons; the work of military repression — are typical episodes in Ireland. Murder of individual constables, miscalled ‘police,’ have been comparatively rare. The Government figure is 38, and it will not, to my knowledge, bear examination. I charge against the British Government 80 murders by soldiers and constables: murders of unarmed people, and for the most part wholly innocent people, including old men, women and boys. To hang Barry is to push to its logical extreme the hypocritical pretense that the national movement in Ireland unflinchingly supported by the great mass of the Irish people, is the squalid conspiracy of a ‘murder gang.’ That is false; it is a natural uprising: a collision between two Governments, one resting on consent, the other on force. The Irish are struggling against overwhelming odds to defend their own elected institutions against extinction.

In a letter addressed to ‘the civilised nations of the world,’ by Arthur Griffith — then acting President of the Republic wrote:

Under similar circumstances a body of Irish Volunteers captured on June 1 of the present year a party of 25 English military who were on duty at the King’s Inns, Dublin. Having disarmed the party the Volunteers immediately released their prisoners. This was in strict accordance with the conduct of the Volunteers in all such encounters. Hundreds of members of the armed forces have been from time to time captured by the Volunteers and in no case was any prisoner maltreated even though Volunteers had been killed and wounded in the fighting, as in the case of Cloyne, Co. Cork, when, after a conflict in which one Volunteer was killed and two wounded, the whole of the opposing forces were captured, disarmed, and set at liberty.

John Ainsworth alleges that "Griffith was deliberately using examples relating to IRA engagements with British military forces rather than the police, for he knew that engagements involving the police in particular were usually of an uncivilized nature, characterized by violence and brutality, albeit on both sides by this stage."