Tom Barry (29 page)

During the June hostilities the West Cork IRA kidnapped a number of British Loyalists, both from the armed forces and the civilian administration. ‘The action was taken to prevent the continuous shooting of prisoners by the British troops.' Three coastguards at Howe's Strand, three Royal Marines at Castletownsend, a British major at Bantry and four justices of the peace at Bandon and Clonakilty were all taken as hostages. The British administration was informed that should they shoot or hang any IRA, the hostages would receive similar treatment. ‘
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In Bandon, as well as the justices of the peace, a party under the direction of Seán ‘Buckshot' Hales and Jim O'Mahony kidnapped Lord Bandon under Tom Barry's instructions. Lord Bandon, Earl of Cork and Lord Lieutenant was held in high esteem by the British government. He was a descendant of Col Bernard, a British adventurer, who for his military service ‘in destroying the Irish, had been granted the lands of the dispossessed O'Mahonys'. His first cousin, the Earl of Midleton was ‘head of the southern Unionists'.

‘We wrote to General Strickland and to the British Prime Minister' to inform them ‘that if there was one execution of one of our men held prisoners that Lord Bandon would swing from the nearest telegraph pole'.
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Denis Lordan got in through the conservatory and let his comrades in through the main hall door. They looked through some rooms, but failed to find the occupants. Hales looked at Lordan, ‘As the bird has flown we will burn the nest', he said. No preparations had been made to burn Bandon castle, so they piled some furniture and curtains and set it alight. In another detached quarter they located Lord Bandon. Seán Hales, Jim O'Mahony and Charlie O'Keeffe kidnapped him and brought him ‘out in a side car to a farmhouse near Clogagh' where he was ‘guarded by the Clogagh Coy ... He got the best food and brandy, and whiskey daily.'
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In his presence, Barry instructed the guard to shoot him should the British appear likely to try a recapture. He knew the threat would be implemented and so became a model prisoner. As he played cards with the men he often told ‘his guard not to make so much noise as a British rounding up party might hear'. One evening as the Essex moved towards a house in Barryroe where he was being held, the woman of the house ‘had a nightdress pulled over her clothes and she was popped into the double bed with the Earl in the hope that he might be mistaken for her husband by the soldiers. The lads hid outside.' The Essex passed by ‘little thinking how near they were to their object'. Dorothy Stopford reflected that ‘he probably discovered more about his neighbours in Co. Cork than he had learned in seventy-odd years living amongst them in his castle.'
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Tom, with Seán Hales, dictated letters to Lord Bandon which he signed. They were sent to Lloyd George and General Strickland ‘giving particulars of the fate that awaited him and appealing to them to ensure that no IRA prisoner would be killed. He [Lord Bandon] wanted the IRA taken seriously. There was also the appeal for a worthwhile truce.' These ‘Lord Bandon' letters were intended to put pressure on the British administration.
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In June the Essex killed three Volunteers – Daniel Crowley killed near his home, Matthew Donovan was taken some distance and killed on the roadside, John Murphy, a farm labourer, was bayoneted to death in the field where he had been working. Barry said ‘when the news came of this brutal outrage, Lord Bandon's life hung on a very slender thread'. Luckily for him ‘although three of our patriot soldiers were brutally killed by the army of occupation' the IRA's ‘ultimatum could not possibly have reached' the authorities at the time.
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In West Cork the chronic problem of the lack of ammunition became increasingly acute. Tom Barry, bitterly disappointed at the failure of the Italian ship to arrive, decided to resort to new tactics that he felt would have a more penetrating effect on the British government.

Tom, with some of the column intended to attack a passing troop train at Kinsale Junction, on the Crossbarry line, went to the home of Barrett's in Killeady. Willie, an active IRA Volunteer was away, and Tom apologetically told Mrs Barrett, who had four young children, that they would have to use her home as one of the firing positions to cover the railway station close-by. He felt guilty asking a woman for such a favour. Angrily she asked, ‘Do you think the Barretts will worry if their home is burned afterwards?'

She simply asked for permission to take the children to the safety of a neighbour's house. When she returned she made tea for the men before the fight. As happened many times the troops were not on the train. Later it became known that an informer had tipped them off.
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The column was now involved mainly in shoot-ups. During these few weeks Barry and his men entered Bandon no less than eight times – an Essex soldier, a Black and Tan and an enemy agent were shot. Under local officers, every enemy post ‘was sniped several times'. The British forces were pestered in many areas; soldiers were fired at entering railway stations and Barry was involved in five sniping attacks on Innishannon and other barracks. It was his intention to annoy them to the extreme. They tried to bring them from their barracks but were unsuccessful in luring them to a confrontation.
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The officers of Cork No. 3 Brigade were aware that the British army maintenance engineers had viewed several large buildings in West Cork that they intended to take over as temporary barracks. Field-Marshal Sir Henry Wilson noted that Marquess Curzon and the prime minister had decided to send five battalions to Silesia. Wilson said, ‘directly England was safe, every available man should go to Ireland, that even four battalions now on the Rhine ought also to go to Ireland … unless we crushed out the murder-gang this summer we should lose Ireland to the empire.' Two days later Wilson noted that ‘Macready absolutely backs up my contention that we must knock out or at least knock under, the Sinn Féiners this summer or we shall lose Ireland … we must make our effort now, or else, tacitly and in fact, agree that we were beaten.'
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One night in June Tom, Liam Deasy and other officers attended a Bandon battalion council meeting near Ballinadee and afterwards they set out for Rossmore, 17 miles away. The men were walking past Balwin's Bridge and along the Currivreeda Road about a mile outside Bandon, when Liam Deasy said jokingly, ‘Tough on you, Tom, to be so near Bandon and yet so far from it!'

Tom stopped, faced him with a never-let-it-be-said attitude. ‘Why shouldn't we go in now that we are so near and have a go at the curfew patrol?'

Liam said his challenge was a rash one, but he accepted, and immediately they changed direction. ‘He had terrier courage. He'd go in and bark and bite'. The four men went in, took up their position at Warner's Lane, where they expected the curfew patrol to pass. They waited some time but the enemy did not come. Eventually they left the town and headed for Rossmore.

According to Liam Deasy, ‘our visit became the talk of the town next day. The fact that four armed Volunteers, two of them well known to the townspeople, could dare to enter Bandon would soon be known to the enemy … but it had its morale value.'
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Orders came from GHQ that Commandant Barry was posted to the staff of the First Southern Division, so on 26 June he led his flying column into action for the last time. He was near Rosscarbery saying goodbye to some of his comrades when word reached them that the Auxiliaries had entered the town. He wasn't sure if it was a raid or if they were about to repossess the town. He regretted that he had only 33 men with him. Within 20 minutes he had them regrouped in three sections and they were on the march. One section was sent to enter the town from the high ground. With the stronger IRA group he would open the attack from the east. They advanced to engage what was believed to be a body of 150 Auxiliaries.

A burst of fire was heard when the western section encountered a few of the enemy. After a skirmish the enemy rapidly retired. Barry and his two sections engaged the enemy wounding some. After about 15 minutes ‘of wild and erratic fire' Barry with his small party knew it would be foolhardy to continue when the odds were too heavily against them. He withdrew his men eastwards and was not pursued by the Auxiliaries. Later he heard that the Auxies had withdrawn around the same time.
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Tom headed back to headquarters to meet Liam Deasy and others.

On 29 June, Tom and Liam set out for North Cork near the Kerry border where a divisional training camp was to open on 1 July for a fortnight. Liam Lynch had appointed Tom as operations' officer and IRA deputy divisional commander of the First Southern Division. He was to conduct this training camp which was to be attended by the commandants and three senior officers from each of the nine brigade areas.
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Barry was now the first IRA deputy divisional O/C in Ireland. He was in control of co-ordinating all flying columns in Cork, Kerry, Waterford and West Limerick. Gearóid O'Sullivan, adjutant general, told him that Michael Collins and GHQ ‘had decided on the appointment before Liam Lynch had suggested it'. When Barry questioned the adjutant on ‘the grave responsibility of this position' especially if an occasion arose when Barry himself disagreed with Lynch ‘on strategy or major tactics about the use of those armed men.' The adjutant assured Barry that Lynch had agreed to give him full divisional O/C responsibility. This divisional area ‘was both numerically and in fighting power as strong as the three next divisions in Ireland combined'. (Barry was again given this title within the army executive council during the Civil War.)

Tom wasn't in agreement with the idea of a divisional training camp then, nor was he with the hindsight of almost 60 years. His first objection had to do with security. By bringing together so many senior officers, he felt that the IRA was running the risk of putting the entire armed effort in the south-west of Ireland in jeopardy. If the officers were to be captured or wiped out in a confrontation it would cripple the decision-making of the remaining Volunteers, as well as being a devastating blow to morale.

His other objection was based upon his opinion that guerrilla warfare can only be learned in the field and cannot be taught. He said that the amount to be learned in the proposed camp could be circulated to all brigades on half a sheet of notepaper. In July 1971, he told Raymond Smith that the circular could have read: ‘Select as your active service leaders men who are dedicated, will lead from the front are not afraid to die. Men who will judge a situation, attack or refuse battle, who realise that they and their Volunteers are alone: men who must above all be security minded, make instant decisions and ensure that they are carried out.'
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Barry said that is was useless to try to train men ‘who had already proved that they neither could not, nor would not fight'. Instead of forming divisions, he felt that by the opening of 1921, GHQ should have weeded out useless commanders and staffs who hindered other brigade areas.

Barry wanted men with initiative and aggression. Such men could have come to the active areas from the inactive ones. Such a system would be superior to any camp training, he insisted, because they would see and participate in action. He knew that there were men in other areas just as capable of guerrilla fighting as those in the West Cork area if they were properly trained and commanded. ‘Any kind of war is a serious responsibility, but this was particularly true of that in which our small guerrilla force was pitted against the then mighty Britain.'
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In spite of his disagreement, Barry respected Liam Lynch's decision on the divisional training camp and continued on his way towards the Cork-Kerry border where the proposed camp was to be conducted. However, at the end of their day's journey Tom and Liam Deasy were stopped by a dispatch from Lynch informing them that the area of the proposed camp was infested with the enemy and that it would be advisable to wait until the enemy withdrew. Next day they returned to West Cork.

Back in West Cork Tom Barry provisionally disbanded the flying column and with his comrades continued to follow the bulletins in the daily papers. On 4 July it was announced that the Truce between the Irish and British forces had been agreed upon. Though the morale and confidence of the Third Cork Brigade was high Tom and his men welcomed the Truce. For those on the run and for the ordinary citizens it was a rest from the hardships and killing of war. He was also glad that the enemy had been forced to offer terms that were, in his opinion, a signal of victory for the IRA.

Strickland obviously disillusioned wrote: ‘and so this is the end of 2-years toil. A year on we had a perfect “organisation” and had “them” beat – a short time more would have completed it thoroughly. All our labours and energy occupying have been thrown in the gutter'.
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Weighing up the activities of the war, Tom said, ‘I made my brigade flying column fight aggressively, and I placed it in many difficult and dangerous situations, but those were risks well calculated by me. On the other hand, I never had any hesitation in avoiding battle with the British and retiring the column if we had not a reasonable hope of victory.' In his opinion military men throughout the world judge the success of a battle by the number of casualties inflicted on the enemy ‘and West Cork had done fairly well in this respect'. In the precarious situation of guerrilla warfare, however, Tom also judged results on how few men were lost in action in achieving victory. He considered his men as part of his family and hated to lose any, so he felt happy at the end of this period because, he said, ‘The flying column under my command lost only seven with seven or eight wounded in all its many actions.' British acknowledged casualties during the same period were over 100 dead and 93 wounded.
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