Spies and their sources: wrong man was singled out
I did no such thing.
On the contrary, I argued exactly the opposite and, on page 234, explicitly rejected the possibility that Barton could have been the source because he was imprisoned on the Isle of Wight at the relevant time.
Yet it is this fact of Barton’s incarceration — about which Ryle Dwyer clearly believes I knew nothing — that he flourishes to rebut an argument that I never supported in the first place!
If he has read my book, then I am at a complete loss to understand how he could have got things so mixed up.
Given his hopeless confusion, Ryle Dwyer is in no position to impugn the scholarship of another historian, and I resent someone whom I have never met accusing me of being motivated by a desire for publicity.
Unlike Ryle Dwyer — who has researched in the same field of intelligence — I actually found the documents on which the controversy over Molly Childers is based and I stand by every word that I have written on this matter — though not your columnist’s garbled and inaccurate version of them.
Dr Michael T Foy
1 Brookeborough Ave
Carrickfergus BT38 7LG
Co Antrim
:
I READ all of Michael Foy’s book with great interest.
On the whole I found it very good, with an amount of fresh material from the British perspective, but his solid scholarship was marred by silly, sensationalist speculation about Molly Childers being a spy.
He mentions on page 231 that the spy had a close friend, ‘Bob’, who was very upset at the arrest of Eamon de Valera in June 1921.
The author then goes into the close relationship between Bob Barton and Erskine Childers, who were virtually brothers. This was a clear attempt to lead the reader to suspect that Barton was ‘Bob’, and hence that Molly Childers was the spy.
On page 234, the author even says that “an obvious candidate was her relative by marriage Robert (‘Bob’) Barton. As the Dáil government’s Minister for Agriculture he was in Sinn Féin’s upper-echelons and served as a key Truce negotiator”.
It is only then, more than two pages after first mentioning ‘Bob’, that he mentions how Barton was in jail in England at the time, but Dr Foy goes on to speculate that Erskine Childers may have been the ubiquitous ‘Bob’ without a shred of evidence to back it up.
For the record, I never “alleged” that Dr Foy was depicting Bob Barton as the ‘Bob’ in question.
Like him (on page 232), I merely mentioned the close relationship between Barton and Childers, and he assumed I was therefore alleging that Barton was ‘Bob’.
This is obviously what he tried to do with the readers of his book thereby detracting from a work of real scholarship.
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