Days of a Gaolbird 1916-1919
(1880-1921) Tadhg Barry
After the 1916 Rising, the British government cracked down heavily on Sinn Féin. Although Tadhg escaped arrest, draconian Defence of the Realm Act regulations restricted him to Cork city and its environs. As one of the few Cork republicans not imprisoned, he continued to organise and agitate for Sinn Féin, leading protests and disrupting AFIL and Irish Parliamentary Party meetings. His luck would soon run out, however.
On 26 November 1916, 1,500 people packed into the City Hall for the annual Manchester Martyrs commemoration, at which Tadhg was the keynote speaker. He told the buoyant crowd that Irishmen ‘could not serve two masters’ and that the Manchester Martyrs had died for an independent Irish Republic, which Sinn Féin stood for. This was technically not true as Sinn Féin still officially subscribed to the dual monarchy proposal (Irish independence but a shared monarchy with Britain) and was not yet a full-fledged republican party. Nevertheless, his remarks were considered seditious because they were ‘likely to cause disaffection to the king.’ Tadhg would have had it no other way! During the speech, members of the audience swarmed around a man whom they had correctly identified as an undercover policeman and took his notebook. Tadhg physically protected the man from being attacked and even retrieved his notebook for him. It was a costly act of goodwill.
The exterior of Cork County Gaol circa the late nineteenth century. Tadhg Barry was a prisoner here between January and July 1917. The prison, which was exclusively for men, held several prominent IRA volunteers during the War of Independence and Civil War. Its main walls and gate entrance have been incorporated into the perimeter of UCC. (Cork Public Museum)
The front page of Songs of a Gaol-bird , a collection of poems that Tadhg Barry wrote during his incarceration in Cork County Gaol, which was published in late 1917. (National Library of Ireland)
On 17 December, the police arrested Tadhg on his way back from 7am Mass and brought him to Victoria (now Collins) Barracks. They later raided his house and seized ‘seditious’ documents. On 9 January 1917, he was tried by court martial. Pleading not guilty, Tadhg argued that his intervention had saved the policeman from further harm and that the man could not have accurately transcribed what Tadhg had said because, as an Ulsterman, he could not possibly have deciphered Tadhg’s thick Cork accent! The court did not buy it, however, and found Tadhg guilty, with the policeman’s notebook the key evidence against him. He was sentenced to two years in Cork County Gaol without hard labour. ‘He is an erratic character in many ways but is essentially honest and religious’, Liam de Róiste said of Tadhg. The story of his first arrest certainly justifies that description! Released after a brief hunger strike for political status, Tadhg served eight months of his sentence. Along with the rest of the republican leadership in Cork, Tadhg was again detained on 24 October 1917. Dressed in military uniform, he was arrested for drilling 150 men after addressing a crowd of 600 at a ‘Sinn Féin meeting’ in Lisgoold. Tadhg lived up to his reputation as a ‘leading Sinn Féin extremist’, as Dublin Castle called him, by recruiting for the Irish Volunteers and using ‘seditious’ language that incited ‘violence and illegalities.’ Ten days after his arrest, he was released without charge. Six months later, he was arrested on what to many seemed a ridiculous charge. In April 1918, the British government announced the extension of military conscription to Ireland. The move provoked an enormous backlash from all strands
A short General Prisons Board report on Tadhg Barry’s and Pat Higgins’s hunger strike in Cork Gaol in July 1917. Located in Dublin Castle, the centre of British rule in Ireland, the General Prisons Board oversaw the administration of the Irish penal system. Its records are held in the National Archives of Ireland. (Courtesy of Donal Ó Drisceoil)
of nationalist Ireland, forcing the government to drop the plan. Sinn Féin had emerged from the fiasco as the political victors. To weaken the anti-conscription movement and halt the party’s advance, the British arrested
seventy-three leading Sinn Féiners across Ireland for allegedly conspiring with the German government – the ‘German plot’, as it is now known. Tadhg was the only city republican who was lifted. ‘There is no one in Cork, least of all those who know him, who believes Tadhg is concerned in a ‘‘German Plot’’ … The very writing of it makes me laugh at the absurdity’, Liam de Róiste wrote in his diary. Tadhg was sent to Usk prison in Wales. Conditions there were appalling, creating a breeding ground for the deadly Spanish flu pandemic sweeping the world. Several prisoners came down with the ‘pestilence’, as Tadhg called it, including his friend Richard Coleman, a Dublin Volunteer, who died shortly after. Tadhg, who was lucky never to contract the flu, was subsequently transferred to Gloucester prison where conditions were better. He was released in March 1919 and was given a rapturous reception by thousands upon his return to Cork.
A cell in Usk Prison, Wales, 1918-1919. Irish republican prisoners had converted the alter in this cell into a chapel. Tadhg was a prisoner in Usk, and subsequently in Gloucester, during this period. (National Museum of Ireland)
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