Cork's forgotten revolutionary - how Tadhg Barry became lost in the smoke of the Treaty

Alderman Tadhg Barry was shot three weeks before the signing of the Treaty. We don't know how he would have responded to the Treaty and the split, but he would have acted in a way he thought best for the cause of social justice

The body of Alderman Tadhg Barry is carried from Lower Glanmire Road railway station to St Finbarr's Cemetery on November 20, 1921. The graveside oration was delivered by the commanding officer of the Cork IRA, Seán O’Hegarty, who declared that his old comrade had now joined the martyrs who had all ‘made the supreme sacrifice. 

Alderman Tadhg Barry did not have to face the dilemma of how to respond to the Treaty. Just three weeks before it was signed, the Cork man was shot dead by a sentry at Ballykinlar internment camp in Co. Down.

Barry was the last high-profile victim of the Crown forces in the Irish war of independence. A veteran republican activist, he was a full-time organiser for Ireland’s largest union, the Irish Transport & General Workers’ Union (ITGWU), secretary of its Cork branch and an alderman on Cork City Corporation at the time of his arrest and internment without charge or trial in early 1921.