The day after the burial of Terence MacSwiney another Nationalist lost his life to the cause for Irish freedom. On November 1st 1920, young Kevin Barry walked bravely and without falter to the scaffold, to die for his country. His last reported words;
“It is nothing, to give one’s life for Ireland. I’m not the first and maybe I won’t be the last. What’s my life compared with the cause?”
https://www.glasnevintrust.ie/visit-glasnevin/interactive-map/kevin-barry/
Kevin Barry was an 18 year old medical student who joined the IRA as a boy of 15. He was sentenced to death by court- martial for the murder of a British soldier during a Sinn Fein attack. On the morning of 15th August 1920 Kevin Barry joined a party of IRA Volunteers who had been ordered to ambush a British army vehicle and capture their weapons. As the group surrounded the truck, a shot was fired and, in the hail of gunfire that followed, three soldiers were killed. Barry was the only Volunteer captured. Read more
On the morning of his execution thousands gathered outside Mountjoy Prison, praying and hoping for a reprieve, that never came. Instead the prison bell tolled, sending out the message that his young life had ended. When the official announcement of execution was posted outside the prison wall it was torn down by the crowd. Armored cars were sent in and the crowd dispersed. Emily, who was living in Dublin at that time, would certainly have been in that crowd hanging on for a last moment pardon.
Following his death, he was buried unceremoniously within the prison walls, somewhere between the male and female wings, where it lay for eighty more years. The only people present at his death an original burial were two Catholic clergymen and the prison guards. His family and friends deprived of accompanying him on his final journey.
Kevin Barry finally got the was denied, although it took 80 years. With the permission of the Irish government his body and that of ten others who were executed in the course for Irish Independence to be exhumed and reburied. On October 4th 2001 “The Forgotten Ten” were afforded full state honors with a private service at Mountjoy Jail, followed by a requiem mass at St Mary’s Pro-Cathedral in Dublin. As the cortège passed through Dublin, thousands lined the streets to Glasnevin Cemetery, where they were re-interred along with Michael Collins and those in the Republican Plot.
Kevin Barry’s short life was immortalised in Ballads, poetry, songs, and prose.
Sources
https://www.glasnevintrust.ie/visit-glasnevin/interactive-map/kevin-barry/
Leeds Mercury 02 November 1920
Dublin Evening Telegraph 01 November 1920
Sheffield Independent 03 November 1920