Sir, - With reference to Kevin Barry and his comrades, some of your readers and writers seem to overlook a number of important points:
1. The British were an occupation force, their soldiers conscripted and paid. They killed Irishmen and women in Ireland.
2. The Volunteers were unpaid and fighting on their own land to free it.
3. When they surrendered to the British they should have been treated humanely, as were prisoners taken in the Great War. Execution was a crime, indeed murder. - Yours, etc.,
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Dr Robert Gallagher, Lower Main Street, Belmullet, Co Mayo.