"Ultimate Cause"

The clock of bleak Winton Green Prison in Birmingham chimed 9. A milk delivery cart rattled down the street outside the prison walls, where 500 persons stood shivering in a cold Midlands fog.

The Rev. Father John Collins had finished the Church's last rites to two youthful prisoners. The priest left, and then the young men walked down the prison yard to a scaffold. Their hands were tied, black hoods were slipped over their heads, and a rope was fitted snugly around their necks. As the executioners sprang the traps, witnesses removed their hats.

In a few minutes the chief warden came through the gate and posted a notice on the prison door. One by one the waiting crowd filed by to read: "The judgment of death has been executed. . . ."

Thus Peter Barnes and James Richards, defiant and calm, were last week hanged by their necks until dead. They had been convicted by a jury of their peers of planting on Coventry's main street a bomb that blew to bits five innocent citizens. Most Englishmen could only say that they were murderers who got their just deserts.

But many an Irishman believed differently. Barnes and Richards were members of the Irish Republican Army, which, on & off for more than a year, has carried on a campaign of terrorism in Great Britain. Their aim was to end the partition of Ireland and to join to independent, Catholic Eire the six counties of predominantly Protestant Northern Ireland that still swear allegiance to the British Crown. To their compatriots, Peter Barnes and James Richards were far from ordinary criminals. They were Ireland's latest martyrs for whose death the hated British would some day pay in kind. Even as Barnes and Richards went to the gallows more I. R. A. bombs burst in Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, London.

As execution day approached, Eire's Government did all in its power to stay the hanging. Prime Minister Eamon de Valera's record on the subject was unmistakably clear. He had forcefully condemned I,. R. A. direct action. An I. R. A. veteran himself, he had nevertheless outlawed the organization at home. Publicly he had declared that the program of terrorism "has put us back" in Eire's official--and legal--campaign for the union of Ireland. But none knew better than Mr. de Valera that Barnes and Richards dead on English gallows would rekindle anti-British feeling in Eire, would strengthen the purpose of the most irresponsible, ir reconcilable elements of his country.

In London Eire High Commissioner John Dulanty, on orders of the Prime Minister, appealed to Dominions Secretary Anthony Eden for clemency, spent 20 minutes trying to persuade Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to stay the sentence. Mrs. Tom Clarke, the Lord Mayor of Dublin, whose husband was killed by the British in 1916, telegraphed Mayor Joseph Holt of Coventry to ask that he appeal for a reprieve. Mayor Holt replied: "Am sure you will agree that the Coventry crime was dreadful in its deliberation and consequences to innocent people." Eire labor unions threatened strikes as a "mark of humiliation."

In Dublin the Irish Times editorialized: "According to all principles of British law, there can be no doubt of their guilt. The appeal we are making is ad misericordiam. Admittedly we have no case, but in our view there are higher considerations than stern justice and law." In Britain the Manchester Guardian, recalling the three Irish Republicans hanged in 1867 for killing a Manchester police sergeant, warned: "Nobody looking back on Irish history can fail to see the immense importance that the fate of individuals tried and punished by British authorities has had in Irish history."

After the executions a thousand angry demonstrators carried black flags with skull and cross bones through Dublin's streets. They tried to storm the British Representative's office. At the Post Office, bloody scene of the 1916 Easter Rebellion, they stood silent for two minutes. Sports were canceled, cinemas closed. At Mountjoy Prison, where once Mr. de Valera himself was jailed and where in 1922 the British shot Rory O'Connor, railroad engineer and onetime I. R. A. staff member, a crowd burned the Union Jack.*

It was a crowd which still remembered vividly the martyrdom of men like Terence MacSwiney, playwright, editor, onetime Mayor of Cork, who starved himself to death in a London prison; of Sir Roger Casement, convicted of high treason and hanged in Pentonville Prison; of James Connolly, whose Easter Rebellion wounds the British cured only so that he could later be shot. Whether or not Richards and Barnes would measure up to the martyrs on this list, the fact was that the 700-year-old Irish hatred for Britain was again sorely inflamed. Best expression of Irish feeling came in a resolution by the Dublin committee which worked for the prisoners' reprieve: "Whatever may be said, the ultimate cause of their deaths is the aggression of England against Ireland."

*In New York members of Irish-American societies placed a laurel wreath at the foot of the flag pole at the World's Fair Irish pavilion in memory of the "martyrs."

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