Dr Martin Doherty, Principal Lecturer in History at the University of Westminster, contributed to a discussion on RTE Radio 1 on the 100th anniversary of the execution of Kevin Barry, who was hanged for his involvement in an IRA raid on a British Army lorry.
Dr Doherty spoke about how this event was manipulated in Republican propaganda at the time, and how and whether events like this should be commemorated or remembered. He said: “One of the soldiers that Barry killed was a boy of 15 and yet the names of these soldiers scarcely appeared in the British newspapers.
“I seem to remember seeing in the Daily Mail or the Daily Herald a photograph of Kevin Barry with the headline, ‘The boy who is to die’, and yet there were no photographs of the soldiers, no stories about their weeping mothers and so on. So, while the name of Kevin Barry is remembered today in Ireland, the names of the three soldiers that he was involved in killing are completely forgotten.”
Listen to the full show on the RTE News website.
