Interview with Siofra O'Donovan - the author of ''Yours 'Till Hell Freezes: A memoir of Kevin Barry''
Siofra O'Donovan is one of those writers who are actively engaged in the life of a writer rather than a life of self-promotion and presenting a content of triviality that has great market value and offers a good product ready for consumption. She comes from Wicklow, Ireland.
She has a great body of work as a writer and leading the creative writing workshops, In her career she has published a variety of different types of work e.g. travelogues such as Pema and the Yak, 2006 and Lost in Shambhala, 2015, historical novels - Malinski, 2000, and has written a series of novels set in 12th Century France. You could read her cultural and travel features for the Irish Examiner, the Irish Times and the Warsaw Voice. Being on the panel of Writers in Schools Poetry Ireland as well as Writers in Prisons panel she teaches writing workshops in schools, mental health and prison facilities where she is using the dynamic and archetypal Hero s Journey model based on the ideas of Joseph Campbell and many other tools.
1. If you were to describe your profile as a writer, what topics, areas are interesting and which are the ones which you use in your work?
Exile. For some reason, perhaps because I’ve never felt I belonged not only to my town, my country and planet earth… exile is a theme that fascinates me. In my novel Malinski, Henryk is exiled to Ireland with his mother during World War Two, Stanislav his brother is therefore exiled from the family, yet left with his mad aunt Magdalena in Krakow. The Time I got Lost Looking for Shambhala, is a travel memoir about Tibetans in Exile, in the Himalaya. I collected stories from lamas, DJs, spies, Kings, Queens, doctors, poets… all of them struggling in exile from Tibet, living with the dream of returning. Maybe Yours Til Hell Freezes, the biography I wrote about Kevin Barry was the only one of my books that wasn’t an exile… I wrote that out of duty to my ancestors. Out of duty to my Father Donal, who published a biography of him in 1989, my grandfather Jim, whose biography of Kevin was never published.
But there was another writer in the family, Father Gerald O’Donovan who was curate of Loughrea Co. Galway. He fled the priesthood in 1906 and married a Protestant woman, and had an affair with a writer called Rose McCauley in the Bloomsbury Circle in London…he published many novels.. well as you can imagine the family back here said he died, was lost at sea… anything to dissociate… but there you have it again. He was the perfect exile. Think of Joyce, Beckett… they all went into self imposed exile… So I’d love to get that together myself… having lived for long periods in Poland, India and America, I would like to go into exile again.. somewhere they grow lemons and olives.
2. A mistake and a song by Leonard Cohen brought my attention to the topic and the figure of Kevin Barry. What inspired you to start work on material for the book on Mr Barry?
I’ve never heard about much else in my childhood, other than of Kevin Barry. Well, it’s not quite true of course but I was the one who listened to my father, who felt a deep connection to his uncle. My father’s mother, my grandmother Monty (Barry) O’Donovan, forbade that song to be sung in the house. It was maudlin, she said. I used to go with my father down to Tombeagh, the Barry ancestral home in County Carlow, where Kevin Barry Junior (the son of Kevin Barry’s brother Michael Barry, who inherited the ancestral home) and his family lived. He used to tell great ghost stories. Of the Headless Horseman, Kitby (Kevin’s sister) on the stairwell long after she was dead, the Bean Sídhe… So I was soaked in stories from that house where the Barrys had lived since the 1700s (one of them came back from a famine ship as a ghost, and haunted the land).
It was when my father died in 2009, that I decided to get his book, Kevin Barry and his Time (1989) republished. Merrion Press wanted to do it. However the book basically metamorphosized into another book. I had a contract with Merrion Press, and have a few chapters in another biography they published around the same time, that was completed by another person. I quickly went on to publish my biography with Currach Books in 2020.
I found so much interesting material, especially in the Bureau of Military History and in other papers that belong to the Kevin Barry estate, in talking to Kevin Barry Junior at length, and to many people in the Carlow and Wicklow communities whose fathers or grandfathers or mothers or grandmothers had direct and vivid and accurate memories of the War of Independence. Some remembered their parents telling them of the time that the rosary was said as Kevin was being executed at 8am on the 1st November 1920. In some ways, I felt as if I was in a time loop, as I spoke to these people. They remembered the events as if they were yesterday.
I also listened to all of my father’s interviews on cassette with many who are now deceased, and the detail within those interviews was fascinating, brought the mechanics, nuts and bolts of the War of Independence entirely to life. I was given a detailed account, in an interview with a man in Knockannananagh in County Wicklow, of the attempt by Kevin Barry, his brother Michael Barry and other members of the IRA C Company in Carlow in the summer of 1920, to burn down the Aughavannagh Barracks, on orders from the Active Service Unit, operated by Michael Collins.
In the interview, I learned that it was the housekeeper of the barracks who scolded Kevin for the cheek of him breaking into the barracks. She told them all to go home, and the barracks wasn’t burned down. It is incidents like these that make history.. not the official accounts. I was also fascinated by the women in the Barry family. Most especially Kitby (Kathleen Barry Moloney) who was a domineering, but very capable woman who was right behind Kevin’s involvement in the IRA from 15 years of age. And her sister Shel (Sheila Barry) who was in Cumann na mBan, the women’s branch of the IRA. My grandmother Monty was too young to be involved. And her younger sister Peg, was too young also.
3.What is particularly interesting in Barry apart from his political activity?
He was a young man of the world. He was a drinker, a dancer, a gambler. He loved women. This was the Kevin my father told me about, a student who loved binges, who picked up a Belgian ‘mot’ in Glendalough Hotel, fell in the ditch drunk from his bike… we read his letters to his cousin Bapty Maher (who married Shel Barry) as children. It was all great entertainment and my father did not attempt to inflict the notion of a pious martyr on us as children. Kevin was a great and brave soul who died for Irish Independence, but that did not mean he was above being human…
Kevin was a good enough student in Belvedere but he failed his first year medical exams in UCD due to his activities with the IRA. Remember that the IRA was the military wing of Dáil Éireann, which was the democratically elected government of Ireland, even before the British left. They were not terrorists, as revisionist historians will try to tell you. They were the army of a democratically elected party, Sinn Fein. (The old Sinn Fein of course, the new Sinn Fein have no clear ideology nor vision).
4. Could you tell us please about his ancestors?
What really took me by surprise was when I read Edward O’Toole’s (‘Whist for your life, that’s treason – Recollections of a Long Life, Dublin: Ashfield Press, 2003) who was Kevin Barry’s school teacher in Rathvilly, Co. Carlow. He traced the Barrys back to Norman conquest of Ireland, when King John came here, son of Henry II who began the conquest of Ireland under a Papal Mandate in 1170.
Geraldus de Barri was the first recorded Barry to arrive on Irish Soil. He was the tutor to King John, and they came here in 1185. It is the greatest irony to me, that one of the most infamous martyrs to the cause of Irish freedom and independence was descended from an Anglo-Norman scholar. A well known one in our line of Barrys was ‘Black TOm’ in the 1700s who put down roots as a strong farmer in Carlow. There was an ancestor called John Hutchinson, a Quaker yeoman from County Tipperary, who was disowned by the Society of Friends on 16 March 1787, when he married a Catholic girl, Kate Meagher. His godfather, Sir John Lontaigne, bought him a farm in Ballyhacket, near Rathvilly in County Carlow, thus saving him from destitution. So there you have it, another exile.
The rebels of 1798 were part of the whole ‘mindscape’ of Wicklow and Carlow, as Kevin was growing up. You might say, these were his political ancestors. most especially with Michael Dwyer, the famous hero who was chased by the British redcoats for years, and several barracks were built in that area on the Military Road in Wicklow (Aughavanagh and four others ) to house the very soldiers that would catch Dwyer, now a hero. A bounty of £1,000 was offered for Dwyer’s head.
In the summer of 1920, by order of the Active Service Unit of the IRA, Kevin Barry and the C Company in Carlow attempted to burn down Aughavanagh Barracks, 120 years or so after it was built. That they did not do so may have been thanks to the resident housekeeper, who was a hard bargainer.
5.What were the circumstances that led to his arrest?
On 20th September 1920, his H Company were to execute a well planned ambush on the Monk’s Bakery on Church Street in Dublin (no longer exists). IT was all in the timing. The British lorry that had come to collect rations was late.
As my father said, ‘It was a simple plan. Occupy the bakery, isolate the short street of Upper Church Street – fifty-seven yards precisely, as the Royal Engineers cartographer calculated it later from the court martial; close in on the lorry and disarm the men on it. It had worked at the King’s Inns; [a recent Ambush in June 1920) it should work again.’
‘If the plan went successfully and the British surrendered, the Volunteers covering the sides of the lorry were to keep the troops covered; the men at the rear of the lorry were to disarm the British and load the rifles into the waiting van.’
It was not successful. The lorry was half an hour late. The back of the lorry was let down. There were about twenty men. Bob O’Flanagan and the Captain, Seamus Kavanagh, could see Kevin Barry at “D” position, calmly pretending to read a paper, but another man was popping his head round the corner and drawing back. Frank Flood said, “If that fool doesn’t stop popping his head around the corner, he will have us all spotted and we’ll have to fight our way out”
The signal was given, and the result was more or less chaotic, with shootings that had never been planned. All they wanted was to hold the soldiers at gunpoint, disarm them and take their ammunitions. But there was a shoot out. Kevin’s Mauser parabellum jammed, as they were wont to do, and he jumped under the lorry for cover. A woman, Mrs. Brennan, saw him from her shop and shouted “There is a man under the lorry!” And the rest is history. Poor Mrs. Brennan, urban myth had it, ended up in an asylum. This may not be true, however.
Kevin Barry was placed in the back of the lorry with the young body of Private Harold Washington, and also with Washington's comrades, transported to the North Dublin Union, taken under military police escort to the defaulters' room where he was searched and handcuffed. After a Court Martial on 20 October 1920, he was sentenced to death by hanging and stayed in Mountjoy Jail until he was hanged on 1st November, All Saints’ Day, 1920.
6.Tombeagh seems to be an interesting place linked to Kevin's life. Could you say a bit about that, please?
Apart from the ghost stories that fascinated me as a child, it was a stronghold dairy farm. The landlords were the Parnells of the famous Charles Stuart Parnell family. The Barrys survived the famine. They did well and invested in a dairy farm in Dublin. Tom Barry, Kevin’s father, bought, on the advice of his sister Judith, a dairy yard in Pimlico Dublin in the early 20th C. There were pasturelands, grazing lands all over Dublin, then. They also had a house on 8 Fleet Street.
There are of course many strands in the family tree. The Dowlings of Drumguin. The McCardles. The Hutchinsons, who were steeped in 1798 Rebellion activities. Kevin’s grandmother was Ellen McCardle who married James Dowling of Drumguin. She was a woman gifted with ‘the second sight’, and she made a strong impression on my aunt Sheila, who told me stories about her.
7.What was the process of getting the research done? How important was Kevin Barry Junior?
It was long and laborious. I read about 30 Witness Statements from the Bureau of Military History, most of them were fascinating. The letters written by Kevin Barry revealed a brilliant and humourous mind, and a young man who loved to drink, dance and chase girls. Nothing of his political activities is revealed in his letters ,until his last few weeks in Mountjoy. ‘Hold on and Stick to the Republic’ he told his sister Kitby to tell his comrades and friends. He knew what his death would mean, that by hanging a young Irish man of eighteen years old on All Saint’s Day, they were creating a martyr.
I conducted many interviews with family members, with Mountjoy guards who were involved with the reinterment of his body in 2001 (condemned by the bourgeoisie as a glorification of terrorism). I travelled regularly to Carlow to talk with my cousin, Kevin Barry Junior, and people of his age in the locality who remembered Kevin Barry’s legacy, and in some cases gave me details that could change one’s perception of historical events- such as the housekeeper at Aughavanagh, the barracks that the C Company with Kevin and his brother Michael were ordered to burn down in July 1920.
UCD archives has a wonderful archive of Kitby Barry’s letters and papers, (she went on to fundraise for the Republic with Countess Markiewicz, under Eamon De Valera’s orders , during the Civil War) Elgin Barry’s papers (she was hunger striking in the North Dublin Union during the Civil War) are also fascinating. She married Mac O’Rahilly, whose father Michael Joseph O’Rahilly had died in action in 1916. UCD archives also has an archive of my grandfather James L. O’Donovan, who wrote his own (unpublished) biography of Kevin Barry in the 1950s.
8. What is your message or messages that you would like to put forward through the book and the narrative contains?
To not forget those who gave their lives to retrieve the sovereignty of Ireland from the Crown clamp. I feel however that we are still contending with this.
9. What, in your opinion, is important for a contemporary writer as your dear Self in terms of creative accomplishment and fulfillment?
Of course it is to be published, to be read and to be appreciated for the endless hours of work that goes into writing a book. It is to feel that what you write has an effect on the soul of the reader, and that they might discover something of themselves as they read the words on a page.
10. Plans for the future?
Ironically, my mother line descends from Plantagenets, and even while I was writing Yours Till Hell Freezes I was writing about my heroine- Eleanor of Aquitaine. I have spent a number of years researching my current novel, ‘The Curse of Melusine’, which is about the incarceration of Eleanor of Aquitaine by Henry II, her husband and the King of England until 1189. It was punishment for her leading a Rebellion against Henry with their sons- Henry the Younger, Richard the Lionheart and Geoffrey of Brittany. The story is of a curse that is carried through the family, and takes the lives of their sons. It is full of the very legends, myths and stories that fascinated the people of that time- of Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot and Merlin, whose prophecies in ‘Vitae Merlinae’ as written down by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the Lives of the Kings of Britain, figure largely in my novel. It is nearly complete.
Oh and I plan to live in a country where I can grow lemons and olives .
And putting my writing courses online, so that I can live anywhere in the world.
Next Writing Workshop Series in January 2025
https://siofraodonovan.com/away-with-the-faeries-writing-workshops/
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