I

Prior to the First World War, most Irish Australians were keen supporters of home rule and so were confused and angered by the Easter Rising in 1916, which they viewed as disastrous to its success.Footnote ¹⁰ In the wake of the harsh treatment of the rebels by British forces after the Rising, most Irish Australians were more sympathetic to the republican struggle for independence and supported the Irish in the war against the British from 1919 onwards.Footnote ¹¹ The majority of Irish Australians then greeted the end of the fighting in 1921 with relief. The Treaty seemed to many Irish Australians to be a reasonable, if not ideal solution.Footnote ¹² The editorials of the main Australian Catholic newspapers agreed that the Irish outside Ireland should accept the decision, with the lead article in the Sydney Catholic Press stating: ‘The matter is one for Ireland alone to decide. It is not for Australians, or any other people, to dictate to them.’Footnote ¹³ Many Irish Australians were dismayed by the Civil War that broke out in 1922 and were relieved when it ended with the truce in 1923. Catholic newspapers published letters from readers who supported de Valera and the anti-Treaty forces, as well as those who condemned him, such as this letter writer in December 1922, ‘De Valera, in this writer's opinion, has forfeited every atom of respect, gratitude, and esteem for everything he has done in the past by his present course of action in dragging the name of Ireland down in the eyes of the world’.Footnote ¹⁴ A number of Irish-Australian republicans supported the de Valera, anti-Treaty republicans and Sinn Féin during the Civil War and in its immediate aftermath. While it is impossible know the number of Irish Australians who opposed the Treaty, it is clear that individual members of many Irish Australian cultural, social and political organisations were vocal in their support for de Valera and their opposition to the Treaty and the Free State. They, in turn, were buoyed by the overt republicanism of Archbishop Daniel Mannix, who continued to raise money and campaign for his friend, Éamon de Valera.

Apart from Mannix, some Irish Australian organisations also maintained opposition to the Free State. The main one, although always small, was the Irish National Association (I.N.A.).Footnote ¹⁵ Albert Dryer, the Australian-born son of an Irish mother and a father of German descent, founded the I.N.A. in Sydney in 1915.Footnote ¹⁶ Branches of the I.N.A. were established in Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide, and Dryer made contact with radical cultural and political groups, like the Gaelic League in Ireland and the Irish Republican Brotherhood in the United States. He modelled the I.N.A. on the Gaelic League by promoting Irish cultural events in tandem with fund raising for Irish-American Fenian organisations and paramilitary training at camps in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney.Footnote ¹⁷ There was certainly enough support from the I.N.A., Mannix and others to justify the tour of O'Flanagan and O'Kelly in 1923. While fundraising in Australia for anti-Treaty forces was their prime objective, their lack of tact in dealing with rival factions among Irish-American groups was probably one reason why they were diverted to Australia by de Valera.Footnote ¹⁸ Their controversial Australian tour ended not only with their deportation but also with alienation of most of the Catholic hierarchy, since they crowned their tour with a public meeting in Brisbane where O'Kelly declared: ‘If the Irish envoys were insulted in Australia … the Irish people would remember it against prelates as well as other people.’Footnote ¹⁹ Archbishop James Duhig of Brisbane, in particular, was incensed by this, commenting to William Cosgrave in a letter, ‘Father O'Flanagan and Mr O'Kelly created a good deal of trouble here. Brisbane proved to be their Waterloo.’Footnote ²⁰

Notwithstanding Duhig's comforting assertion to Cosgrave in the same letter that ‘Australia is being slowly but surely permeated with a favourable impression regarding all of you who have stood out against the extremists’, tensions remained within Irish social and cultural organisations when Barry and Kearns arrived. The women did not extend their tour to South Australia for instance because they were advised by James Flaherty, of the Adelaide branch of the Irish Foresters’ Benefit Society, that: ‘The mixed state of affairs in Ireland has split national opinion here in twain, in our National association some are Free Staters and others like myself Republicans.’Footnote ²¹ The women were well briefed about these tensions by their contacts in Australia, many of whom were allied with the I.N.A., and much of their success lay in the women's ability to bring different factions together over common goals of charity and support for unemployed Irish families.

II

At the time of the Australian tour in October 1924, Linda Kearns was a thirty-eight-year-old trained nurse. Like many of her generation, she had been politicised in the years before 1914.Footnote ²² During the 1916 Rising she had set up a first aid station and was a messenger between garrisons in Dublin which were often under fire. From 1919 onwards, she transported guns, men and orders in her own car primarily around Sligo for which she was arrested and imprisoned, eventually escaping with three other women from Dublin's Mountjoy prison in 1921 and then going into hiding until after the ceasefire.Footnote ²³ She opposed the Treaty and when the Civil War broke out ran a field hospital in the centre of Dublin, and was alone under fire with one of the key republicans, Cathal Brugha, after their companions had been arrested. In a burning hotel, she attempted unsuccessfully to persuade him not to charge into the gunfire, and then attended to him after he was shot, while under fire herself.Footnote ²⁴ Between August and October 1922 she went on her first speaking and fund-raising tour to the United States for the anti-Treaty forces with Muriel MacSwiney and then Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington.Footnote ²⁵ While on this tour, Kearns gave speeches to ‘Tell the truth about the state of affairs in Ireland … there are only two parties in Ireland – the party that is for England and the party that is for Ireland’.Footnote ²⁶ After Muriel MacSwiney returned to Ireland in October 1922, Kearns stayed in the United States and continued fundraising with Hanna Sheehy Skeffington and Kathleen Boland.Footnote ²⁷ She returned to Ireland in the spring of 1924.Footnote ²⁸

Kathleen Barry was ten years younger than Kearns and an active member of Cumannn na mBan from 1919 onwards.Footnote ²⁹ In 1920, her younger brother, Kevin, an eighteen-year-old medical student, was arrested for taking part in a raid in Dublin that killed British soldiers and became the first Irish republican to be executed since the 1916 Rising.Footnote ³⁰ Barry, along with others in her family, opposed the Treaty and continued to support de Valera and the anti-Treaty forces. She accompanied Constance Markievicz on a fund-raising and speaking tour of the United States in early 1922.Footnote ³¹ Later that year, she worked on communications and in support lines between Liam Lynch, then Commander of the Southern Division of the I.R.A. in Cork, and the Dublin headquarters and was arrested and imprisoned after working with Linda Kearns under fire in central Dublin before Cathal Brugha died.Footnote ³² At the end of 1922, she was appointed secretary of the I.R.P.D.F. and tasked with its reorganisation by Éamon de Valera, as leader of the anti-Treaty republicans and Liam Lynch, then chief of staff of the I.R.A.Footnote ³³

The I.R.P.D.F. was one of a number of support organisations staffed mostly by Cumann na mBan members during the war with the British. After the Treaty and the start of the Civil War, the I.R.P.D.F. also split and the anti-Treaty organisation that emerged was the sole support agency for families of anti-Treaty men who were fighting, on the run or in prison.Footnote ³⁴ From its beginning in June 1922, there were difficulties raising money and ensuring that support funds reached those in need.Footnote ³⁵ Barry reorganised the I.R.P.D.F. during 1923 to ensure there was more efficient communication with the head office in Dublin and a greater emphasis on domestic fund raising rather than relying on donations from overseas, particularly the United States. However, although her work seems to have made the organisation more efficient, the money was never enough.Footnote ³⁶ After the end of the Civil War, the I.R.P.D.F. could not keep up with the demands on its funds from the families of the imprisoned men.Footnote ³⁷ Barry wrote in June 1923: ‘I'm nearly distracted at present with the Dependants. We've next to no money and the little we have will soon be at an end and what will happen then I don't know.’Footnote ³⁸ One of the only external funding streams the organisation had was from Australia. This was because funds from the United States were rapidly decreasing after the end of the Civil War, with Irish American groups less convinced of the need to support Irish independence once the Free State was established.Footnote ³⁹ The speaking tours of Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, Kathleen Boland and Linda Kearns in 1923 were raising less money than previously. After the end of the Civil War, tours of women republicans in the United States had some success but only when they were tightly focused, such as the tour by Margaret Pearse to raise money to keep her son, Padraig's, school, St Enda's open.Footnote ⁴⁰ When Mary MacSwiney returned to the U.S. in 1925, she was disappointed with the response, ‘our faithful friends are nearly run dry’ and others were more reconciled to the Free State and so not inclined to give money to those still opposed to its existence.Footnote ⁴¹

Archbishop Mannix, almost alone of the international Irish Catholic hierarchy, continued to be outspoken in his condemnation of the Treaty and the Irish Free State.Footnote ⁴² As such he was the main link between fund raising efforts in Australia and republican organisations in Ireland. As part of this support he collected over £3,000 through local fundraising and sent this through to the I.R.P.D.F. in September 1923. He also sent private and public letters and telegrams to W. T. Cosgrave protesting against de Valera's imprisonment.Footnote ⁴³ In November of that year, Kathleen Barry in her role as secretary of the I.R.P.D.F., sent letters to Catholic archbishops in Australia, including Mannix and probably to Archbishop James Duhig of Brisbane, seeking more funds to relieve distress among the families of anti-Treaty republicans who were in prison.Footnote ⁴⁴ While Mannix wholeheartedly agreed with the November 1923 appeal for funds and pressed fellow Australian archbishops for their support, Duhig sent a cable to Cosgrave asking: ‘Is Irish distress appeal Australia necessary and approved?’Footnote ⁴⁵ Cosgrave was sufficiently concerned about the potential for financial and ecclesiastical support from Australia to research and write a fifteen-page rebuttal to Duhig of each point that Barry had made in her appeal letter.Footnote ⁴⁶ This ensured that no money came from Queensland at this time.Footnote ⁴⁷

By June 1924, Barry was again in despair over the lack of money and was contemplating the end of the organisation.Footnote ⁴⁸ The continued support from Archbishop Mannix however showed that Australia was the most hopeful prospect for raising badly needed money.Footnote ⁴⁹ As de Valera faced the reality of post-Civil War Ireland, he wrote to P. J. Ruttledge from jail, ‘the people can only be won over with a programme which will remove the present nightmare of war, which they dread’.Footnote ⁵⁰ The provision of financial support for families of imprisoned men and funds to help them re-establish themselves became part of this overall goal. A further tour of Australia to raise funds to pay for this programme may have been planned from April 1924 when it was clear that the anti-Treaty prisoners were being gradually released from Free State prisons and that relief money from the United States was not enough to cover their needs.Footnote ⁵¹ At the height of the Civil War up to 12,000 anti-Treaty men and women were imprisoned and many went on hunger strike, including Barry herself, her sister, Elgin, and Barry's fiancé, Jim Moloney.Footnote ⁵² On their release, many ex-prisoners found it hard to find work and complained that they could not access what little government assistance was available. It was to alleviate this situation that the I.R.P.D.F. started a new scheme to distribute funds to re-establish men and women in employment. On 7 July 1924, Kathleen Barry agreed to head a fundraising and speaking delegation to Australia to raise funds for this reconstruction fund of the I.R.P.D.F.Footnote ⁵³. In speeches in Australia, Barry spoke eloquently of the plan for the I.R.P.D.F. to use money as loans rather than weekly doles in order to promote self-sufficiency and stem the tide of post-war emigration.Footnote ⁵⁴

Éamon de Valera was in jail between August 1923 and 16 July 1924, with P. J. Ruttledge acting as president of the anti-Treaty republicans, and it was Ruttledge who formally thanked Barry when she agreed to go to Australia.Footnote ⁵⁵ It took some time for another delegate to be appointed.Footnote ⁵⁶ It was a clear strategy by de Valera to send women on the delegation as they were more readily identified with charitable causes and they could allay potential concerns that the money would be used for arms against the new Free State. Barry believed that several women had been approached to go on the tour, but had refused.Footnote ⁵⁷ She herself saw it as her duty, even though her fiancé had only recently been released from prison, and ‘everyone considers it inhuman that I have to go’.Footnote ⁵⁸ In the end Barry and Jim Moloney were married just before she left Dublin for Australia in early September 1924. Although de Valera introduced her as Mrs Moloney in his formal recommendation to organisations in Australia, and individuals in Australia addressed her privately as Mrs Moloney, in public she was always Miss Barry. While there were no doubt pragmatic reasons for this – her passport was in the name of Barry – using her family name ensured the public was always aware of the connection with her brother, Kevin. She herself wanted to separate her public political persona from that of a wife, writing to her husband, ‘By the way I am Kathleen Barry in public mostly because I don't want the name Moloney to be mixed up with the organisation.’Footnote ⁵⁹

III

The tour commenced in Melbourne where the women were assured of a friendly welcome from Archbishop Mannix. A meeting with him in late October 1924 was one of their first engagements, and he promised to do whatever was necessary to support their tour including acting as trustee for the fundraising committee. There followed a series of concerts and fund raising meetings with Irish organisations, such as the Irish Pipers Association and the I.N.A. Both Barry and Kearns were delighted with their fund raising successes, raising £500 in the first week of the campaign in Melbourne.Footnote ⁶⁰ After the Melbourne events, the women went on a tour of western Victoria, where there were strong Irish communities in towns like Koroit and Port Fairy. By Christmas, over £2,000 had been raised and sent back to Dublin in £500 instalments.Footnote ⁶¹

Throughout the Australian tour, the women were always careful to, as Barry put it, ‘stick to relief’ and not talk about politics in any of their public appearances. Barry explained to her husband: ‘all the time I've been having an awful time holding back what I want to say. I feel I'd just adore to make one real good speech for them and let them see what I can do.’Footnote ⁶² She was proud of their achievements, ‘we've established the fact …. that women can speak just as well as men’.Footnote ⁶³ Although they described themselves as apolitical, their speeches at various events made clear that they did not support the Treaty or the Free State. At a concert in Melbourne, Barry said: ‘The Treaty had failed, and Ireland continued on her march to independence.’ Kearns in her speech said: ‘The people of Ireland have a just cause and the world is beginning to recognise it.’Footnote ⁶⁴ However, they avoided any overtly republican rhetoric or rallying calls against the Irish Free State, and their carefully formulated speeches emphasised the charity work of caring for anti-Treaty I.R.A. men's families and helping the men to readjust to civilian life. Appeals like this, often run by women volunteering through the Red Cross and other organisations, were common in Australia both during the First World War and in its immediate aftermath, and raised large sums.Footnote ⁶⁵ The I.R.P.D.F. appeal, with its emphasis on loans for establishing small businesses and employment for ex-soldiers and their families, was structured similarly to other appeals in various Australian states. By November 1924, for example, the Citizens’ Unemployed Soldiers’ Relief Committee, the Returned Servicemen's League and the Fathers’ Association in Brisbane were running public fund-raising appeals.Footnote ⁶⁶

One of the reasons for Kearns and Barry's success in raising both money and awareness of the Irish situation was that they moulded their message to meet conventional expectations of the way women, particularly Irish women, should behave. Stereotypes about non-violent Irish women were common in Australia at the time, such as those expressed during a fundraising tour with Irish envoy T. J. Donovan and home rule M.P. William Redmond in July 1912. At an event organised by the Ladies Shamrock Committee in Melbourne, Donovan and Redmond both commented approvingly on the enthusiasm and support for home rule shown by Irish-Australian women during their tour. Donovan in his speech expressed his disgust at the recent news that suffragettes had thrown a hatchet at British Prime Minister H. H. Asquith while he was in Dublin with William Redmond's brother and leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, John Redmond. The Advocate reported that ‘He was pleased to say these women were not of Irish parentage … they adopted tactics towards their Prime Minister such as no Irishwoman would ever have adopted.’ These comments reportedly were endorsed enthusiastically by the meeting with clapping and cheering.Footnote ⁶⁷

Australian press coverage of the fighting in Ireland from 1916 to 1921 was characterised by disapproval of women who were armed and actively engaged in fighting. Australian newspapers of course had limited access to eyewitness reporting and, especially with wartime restrictions, relied instead on syndicated news from English and American newspapers which had reporters closer to Dublin. In many reports printed in Australian newspapers, Constance Markievicz was described or depicted as mad or unwomanly for her vehemence as well as her military exploits. The other group of Irish nationalist women who received press coverage in Australia and throughout the English-speaking world were the grief-stricken widows, mothers and sisters of the fallen, particularly the executed leaders of the Rising. In July 1916, many newspapers in Australia, like the Melbourne Advocate, reprinted articles originally published in Lloyd's Weekly. These were descriptions of Grace Plunkett, widow of the executed leader Joseph Plunkett, and her sister Muriel, widow of the executed Thomas MacDonagh, as ‘refined artistic girls’ who had been ruined by the ‘insane folly of [their husbands]’, while behind them all ‘looms the strange mysterious figure of Countess Markievicz’.Footnote ⁶⁸ In December, the Sydney Catholic Press reprinted the article by Eileen Moore of the Chicago World about Muriel MacDonagh, emphasising her vulnerability and youth.Footnote ⁶⁹ Concentrating pity and sympathy on the widows and family members of the executed was a deliberate tactic used by many of the republican women activists, including the widows themselves, to create an avenue for people to support the Irish cause.Footnote ⁷⁰ The Catholic press in Australia picked up on much of this news coverage in sympathetic reports about the widows and mothers of the executed leaders throughout the revolutionary period. In 1919 the Sydney Catholic Freeman's Journal, for example, reprinted an article on Margaret Pearse, titled ‘A mother of martyrs’ and illustrated by photographs of her two executed sons.Footnote ⁷¹

Presenting republican women through their familial relationships with dead Irish heroes was also a familiar tactic of women speakers and organisers in the United States. Hannah Sheehy-Skeffington, Muriel MacSwiney, Mary MacSwiney, Margaret Pearse and Kathleen Boland were all introduced to audiences by their relationships with their dead husbands, sons and brothers.Footnote ⁷² In keeping with the tactic of eliciting sympathy, and funds, by focusing on the grief of female relatives, during the Australian tour the fact that Kathleen was Kevin Barry's sister usually featured prominently in the publicity for the fund-raising events. These explicit links worked in eliciting emotional responses from audiences as Barry reported that often people approached her and ‘cried over Kev’.Footnote ⁷³ In March 1925, for example, the Catholic press reported that crowds had turned out for a meeting at Paddington in Sydney ‘to give a rousing welcome to the sister of the immortal Kevin Barry’.Footnote ⁷⁴

Throughout their Australian tour, the history of the women's own activism with the anti-Treaty forces was referred to only incidentally. Usually Barry's work was described rather vaguely as administrative and Kearns's role as a nurse was highlighted. Occasionally more detail was published, such as in Warrnambool in western Victoria in December 1924, when stories of Barry's arrest, her sister's arrest, and hunger strike, as well as Kearns's imprisonment and escape from Mountjoy were described in an article in advance of their planned meeting in the town.Footnote ⁷⁵ Usually however, the biographical notes published in advance of their speeches, sourced from the women themselves, did not go into these details.Footnote ⁷⁶ It is likely that the writers of articles like those published in Warrnambool had access to information from Ireland. Several Irish people who had known Barry during the war years and were now settled in Australia got in touch with her, including Fr Tom Lynch, Liam's brother, who in 1924 was parish priest in the small western New South Wales town of West Wyalong.Footnote ⁷⁷ There were undoubtedly others who were familiar with Barry and Kearns's activism. In general though, the women, both in their speeches and in the publicity that they organised, downplayed their active military experience, focusing on their links with Irish martyrs and their work nursing volunteers. In this way, Barry and Kearns, with the help of the Catholic press, presented themselves to Irish-Australian audiences in the context of traditional female patriotic roles, as nurturers and supporters of men fighting for Irish freedom. This was in contrast to how they were perceived by many Irish Americans on earlier tours in the United States. After Kearns's death, Máire Comerford who had toured with her on the American speaking circuit, wrote of the surprise of many of the organisers when they found that the woman who had spoken so vehemently and worked so successfully for the I.R.A., was also an accomplished needlewoman.Footnote ⁷⁸

In Australia the women found that there was no single organisation to make all their arrangements. This was in contrast to the United States, where the fundraising tours they had participated in were under the auspices of the American Association for the Recognition of the Irish Republic that had previously hosted many successful tours of visiting Irish republican delegates.Footnote ⁷⁹ There was no equivalent organisation in Australia that had the experience or resources to plan and organise speaking tours on that scale. The I.N.A. and individuals affiliated with it such as Fr James O'Dwyer of Coburg in Melbourne and D. M. (Dennis) O'Flynn of Brisbane were essential in making introductions to locals, however the women had to do the bulk of the organising themselves.Footnote ⁸⁰ Sometimes when they arrived in a town, they found that nothing had been done beyond securing initial agreement from locals to host a talk, so they themselves had to undertake the basic tasks of publicity and booking venues. After a particularly challenging stay in Koroit in western Victoria, Barry noted wryly the difference between the speaking tours in the United States and those in Australia, likening the Australian ones to organising communications in Ireland during the Civil War: ‘When I was in America we were wrapped in cotton wool immediately on arrival – marked “fragile” and sent from place to place by special transport all the way. Home for me was a change after that. This past week has been exactly like trying to establish a line of communication [then] only that [then] there were more of us.’Footnote ⁸¹

The local organising committees that they established were designed to bring representatives of local Irish groups together in order to bridge political divisions and maximise the audiences at speaking and fundraising events. There were a wide range of Irish cultural, social and self-help groups throughout Australia at this time, including local hurling clubs, pipe bands, Sydney's Irish National Club, Melbourne's Shamrock Club and Celtic Club, the Queensland Irish Association, as well as many branches of the Hibernian Australasian Catholic Benefit Society (H.A.C.B.S.), Irish Foresters’ Benefit Societies and Catholic Young Men's Societies.Footnote ⁸² There was no single organisation that linked all these groups, although some organisations were national and had branches throughout Australia. Some members of these varied groups had become hostile to each other over the issues of the Treaty and the Civil War, and Barry and Kearns needed to exercise a great deal of tact to encourage these people agree to work together. The women did this through their unwavering focus on relieving distress and poverty, rather than publically criticising the Free State government. When telling her husband about her success in Brisbane, Barry described how: ‘while the class of cases to be relieved is clearly stated and understood it is also understood that those who hold F[ree] S[tate] views still hold them and are only actuated by charitable feelings’. Barry then described the committee she set up in Brisbane as a triumph of tactful management of the various disparate groups: ‘the most glorious mixture of labour leaders, high government officials, priests and wild Republicans’.Footnote ⁸³ The committee included members from the main Irish groups in Brisbane, the Queensland Irish Association, I.N.A., the H.A.C.B.S. and the Catholic Club.Footnote ⁸⁴

Barry and Kearns were very clear on what needed to be done in order to make the tour a success: hard work behind the scenes to ensure well-organised and publicised meetings, but above all social charm and tact. Barry summed this up in a letter to her husband, Jim, with a rather unflattering comparison of her abilities with other women republicans who had refused to go on the Australian tour: ‘Mary MacSwiney would have been hopeless here because she is too bitter and not enough of a vamp and Mrs O'Callaghan would have fainted if she had to do some of the things we have had to, she's exotic.’ Barry agreed with de Valera's judgement of what was needed: ‘I think Dev was right … the greatest [thing needed for success in Australia] is TACT’.Footnote ⁸⁵ After the successful launch of the Queensland fundraising tour in Brisbane in January 1925, where both Kearns and Barry gave long impassioned speeches about the sufferings in Ireland, Barry reported: ‘People said “Why didn't they send you two instead of O'Kelly and Fr O'Flanagan?”’, suggesting that it was not only the Australian government and the Catholic hierarchy who did not appreciate the rather bombastic speeches of the earlier envoys.Footnote ⁸⁶

Even so, there were limits to the number of speaking engagements that the women could fulfil. The distance between towns and cities was one of the main factors that meant that their tour was limited to the eastern states. The women separated a number of times and toured on their own to maximise their coverage. Kearns stayed in Victoria in December 1924 after Barry went to Sydney to set up events in New South Wales. Kearns then held meetings in country Victoria, probably in response to requests from specific groups in places like Castlemaine and Tynong.Footnote ⁸⁷ After Barry had left Sydney for Brisbane just before Christmas 1924, Kearns travelled to Sydney and met with the Sydney branch of Cumann na mBan among other organisations.Footnote ⁸⁸ The women met up again for a large meeting in Brisbane in January 1925, and then Barry returned to Sydney, while Kearns continued touring towns in Queensland.

While the fund raising events in Victoria and Queensland were generally successful, organising fund raising in New South Wales proved to be more difficult. This was apparent from the beginning of the tour. The main Irish republican organisation in New South Wales, the Irish National Association in Sydney were put out that they had not had any advance notice of the arrival of the women. It is probable that from the start de Valera and Mannix were keen to avoid a repeat of the deportation of the Irish envoys the year before and so did not publicise the women's arrival to Sydney-based organisations.Footnote ⁸⁹ In December 1924, Barry then tried without success to meet with the archbishop of Sydney, Michael Kelly, to gain his support.Footnote ⁹⁰ Kelly was a conservative man who had tried to calm divisions within Catholic Irish Australian opinion over the Civil War in Ireland.Footnote ⁹¹ It was therefore in keeping with these attitudes that he refused to meet with Barry when she called, saying ‘he was afraid of creating dissent if he helped me’.Footnote ⁹² She was irate about this, but she had been assured by her supporters that since the coadjutor archbishop, Michael Sheehan, was sympathetic they would still be able to go ahead with their fundraising.Footnote ⁹³ In the absence of official approval from Archbishop Kelly, gaining support from the Catholic press was even more crucial. The two Catholic newspapers in Sydney were also initially unsupportive, ‘very anti-us’, but Barry won them over, telling her husband, ‘I behaved like a perfect delegation and he [P. S. Cleary, the editor of the Catholic Press] promised to do all for us that the Melbourne papers had done. Our people here nearly died of shock when they heard. I then tackled the Freeman's Journal. The editor was inclined to be sarcastic at first but after half an hour he was eating out of my hand’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Once Barry had secured the support of Archbishop Sheehan and the Catholic newspapers, she left the organisation of the Sydney events in the hands of local organising committees before heading to Brisbane to meet with Archbishop Duhig.

Barry and Kearns were in contact with members of Irish republican organisations in Queensland, and in November, a member of the I.N.A. in Brisbane, O'Flynn, advised Barry that she should personally visit the archbishop of Brisbane, to solicit his support for the tour: ‘Circumstances of both private and public import lead us to hope your appeal to the archbishop despite his record of hostility to the cause you espouse or perhaps because of it, will be accorded a sympathetic reception.’Footnote ⁹⁵ Duhig, as mentioned above, had been hostile to O'Flanagan and O'Kelly and earlier, in 1924, had raised his suspicions concerning the I.R.P.D.F. appeal with W. T. Cosgrave. Although O'Flynn did not mention the circumstances he was referring to in the letter, his information was correct in that Duhig was predisposed to listen to Barry when she visited. It is probable that in late 1924, Duhig was looking for ways to heal the rifts that had arisen between the members of organisations like the Queensland Irish Association who supported the Free State and members of others, such as the I.N.A., who did not.Footnote ⁹⁶

Barry had tea with Duhig on 22 December 1924, and she seems to have charmed him, telling her husband that Duhig was reported to have said that he was ‘very very much impressed with that little woman’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Certainly she emerged triumphant from the meeting, with Duhig's approval to go ahead with the tour and his agreement to be chair of the official relief committee in Queensland. Irish republicans in Brisbane told her that after her meeting with Duhig, she ‘should be put on the next delegation that goes to make peace with England’.Footnote ⁹⁸ She continued this success when meeting with many of the other bishops in Queensland. The sympathetic parish priest in Cairns commented that she ‘had worked a miracle on the bishop [James Murray of Cairns]’ who, after meeting with her, said that he thought the Irish bishops were wrong in supporting the Free State.Footnote ⁹⁹ While Barry's tact and charm won her sympathetic audiences with bishops, priests and politicians, she obviously did talk about politics privately, convincing many to be more critical of the Free State.

Even with all Barry's tact, political skill and the support of the archbishop, the divisions among Queensland Irish communities were just under the surface and erupted at different points to diminish audiences and limit fundraising. The stalwart of Irish-Australian affairs in Queensland for many years had been the prominent politician and business man Frank McDonnell.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ He, along with others, had rejoiced at the passing of the home rule bill in 1914 and had intended to travel to Dublin as the representative of the Queensland H.A.C.B.S. for the opening of the first home rule parliament.Footnote ¹⁰¹ After the establishment of the Irish Free State, ‘he … felt that his work for Ireland was done’ and he would not ‘associate himself with any movement in opposition to the constitutionally established Government’.Footnote ¹⁰² In 1924, he was elderly, though still president of the Queensland branch of the Self-Determination for Ireland League of Australia, an organisation that had raised money for the Irish in the War of Independence and had then supported the Treaty and the Free State.Footnote ¹⁰³ When this organisation disbanded in January 1925, members sympathetic to Barry and Kearns worked to ensure that the remaining funds of the group were given to a new coalition, the Queensland Relief Fund, under whose umbrella the Barry and Kearns's tour would proceed. In a letter outlining the conditions on which this money was to be given, the secretary of the committee of the Queensland Relief Fund told Barry that it was purely for relieving distress in Ireland and was not to be taken as any sign of the group's opinion on the Irish Free State.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Barry responded to reassure the new committee that the fundraising mission was entirely apolitical and that all the funds collected would be used for the relief of distress.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ O'Flynn though was suspicious that McDonnell did not fully support the women's tour.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

That the funds would be used solely for charity was a point that was made in all the reported speeches made by the women. The examples given by Barry and Kearns about the purpose of donations included loans to former anti-Treaty volunteers who had now been released from prison: ‘the provision of employment at home for victims of the struggle who will otherwise be faced with the alternative of starvation or emigration’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Barry herself also emphasised that the organising committees they were setting up were healing the wounds among Irish Australians caused by differences over the Civil War. The Brisbane-based Queensland Relief Committee, she claimed, included ‘people, who a year ago, would not speak to each other on the street about Ireland were now working together for her’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The women also linked their Irish relief fund with other post-First World War relief funds that were collecting at the time. Kearns, in a speech in Sydney, drew parallels with Australia's generosity in donating to appeals to aid war refugees in Belgium, Russia, Greece and survivors of the devastating 1923 Tokyo earthquake.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

In Queensland the women also met with politicians and received considerable support from the Australian Labor Party premier, Ted Theodore, and other members of his government, including outspoken Irish-born politician, John Fihelly.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In 1925, the main political landscape in Australian politics, both federally and in each state, was dominated by two political groups – the Australian Labor Party (A.L.P.), aligned with working class interests, and various non-labour parties, broadly aligned with the interests of Protestant middle class. Irish Catholics in Australia usually supported the A.L.P. both in the federal parliament and in the separate state parliaments and, in turn, the A.L.P. was generally supportive of Irish independence.Footnote ¹¹¹ During the war, two separate national plebiscites were held in 1916 and 1917 on the issue of conscription, to increase Australia's contribution to the war effort. Although the issues were complex, many who supported conscription blamed Irish Catholic opposition to conscription for defeat in both votes.Footnote ¹¹² The A.L.P. split after the 1916 conscription vote, with those supporting conscription leaving the party, now with an increased proportion of Irish Catholics.Footnote ¹¹³ The bitterness over the conscription votes was still raw in the 1920s, with high levels of sectarianism, particularly in New South Wales, where the conservative government was strongly anti-Catholic.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Barry and Kearns were aware that they were more likely to find support among A.L.P. politicians.

The great distances between urban centres in Queensland meant that the women toured separately through late January and February 1925. Barry travelled by rail to north Queensland, with meetings in Rockhampton, Mackay, Townsville, Innisfail and Cairns, while Kearns visited Bundaberg, Maryborough, Gympie, Beaudesert, Ipswich, Toowoomba and Warwick. The northern Queensland programme was disrupted by the weather, with tropical storms reducing attendance at several venues. Severe flooding finally closed the railway lines so that Barry was stranded in Townsville. She was fortunate to meet up with the Queensland minister for mines, Alfred Jones, who invited her to join his inspection party that was travelling west before going south again.Footnote ¹¹⁵ In a letter to her husband, Barry admitted that they had underestimated the distances and the effect of travelling during the tropical rainy season.Footnote ¹¹⁶

IV

The divisions within Queensland Irish communities came overtly to surface in several towns, notably Ipswich, Maryborough and Rockhampton.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Barry went to Rockhampton first, and her supporters believed that the opposition to the tour was due to the influence of Frank McDonnell. Barry's supporters, mostly those affiliated with the I.N.A., believed he was working behind the scenes to disrupt the visit to Rockhampton by persuading people not to attend meetings.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Perhaps more importantly, the bishop of Rockhampton, Joseph Shiels, did not support the women's appeal. Although he did not openly oppose Barry's first visit, he refused to be publically associated with it and would not allow collections after mass, as he did not believe that Barry was collecting purely for charity, but for political purposes. Barry recognised that this was a blow as ‘he carries all the influential people and the Hibs [H.A.C.B.S. members] with him’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ In light of this clerical opposition, along with the advent of the rainy season, Barry was pleased that the turnout was as good as it was on her first visit to Rockhampton. Lack of support from local priests also meant that Kearns's visits to Ipswich and Maryborough were complicated, although both still went ahead.Footnote ¹²⁰ When Kearns arrived in Rockhampton in March 1925 for a repeat visit there was again a poor turnout. This time it seems that there were rumours circulating that the women did not have correct credentials with them and so therefore their collections were not legitimate.Footnote ¹²¹

The rumours that circulated in Rockhampton were no doubt based on the questions that had been aired in Sydney by prominent Protestant politicians. The Sydney lectures and events held in mid-February 1925 opened with a lecture by Barry followed by a civic reception hosted by the lord mayor and a public meeting chaired by Michael Sheehan, the coadjutor archbishop.Footnote ¹²² The lord mayor, Irish-Australian Patrick Stokes, on this occasion did not include a toast to the king, opting for the singing of the ‘Soldiers’ Song’ and ‘God Save Ireland’. This seems to have been when the tour came to the notice of an organised anti-Catholic and anti-Irish opposition, with the Freeman's Journal noting a rumour that the anti-Catholic Nationalist Party were ‘making political capital’ out of the events.Footnote ¹²³ Protestant politicians wrote letters to the Sydney Morning Herald expressing outrage that the loyal toast had been omitted by the mayor, a member of the A.L.P., with some attributing this omission to the spread of Bolshevism.Footnote ¹²⁴ The link to communism may have been underlined by an invitation to Barry and Kearns to hold a fundraising meeting at Communist Hall in Sussex St., Sydney.Footnote ¹²⁵ On 23 February, a meeting of the Protestant Defence Association in Sydney was calling for the women's ‘movements to be made illegal’.Footnote ¹²⁶ A meeting at the same time of the King and Empire Alliance passed a resolution condemning the lord mayor.Footnote ¹²⁷ On 24 February, the colonial secretary, Charles Oakes, himself a member of the Orange Order, publicly suggested that the women should be deported like O'Flanagan and O'Kelly, as they ‘were breeding dissension’ and revolution.Footnote ¹²⁸ He made representation to Prime Minister Stanley Bruce, recommending their deportation. While Bruce replied publicly that no action was contemplated as there were no grounds for deportation, Barry reported to her husband that the intelligence services were ‘after her’.Footnote ¹²⁹ The hostile reaction of New South Wales ultra-Protestant politicians, such as Oakes, to the omission of the loyal toast certainly vindicated the women's strategy of refusing to talk publicly about politics, and to be always careful about ‘sticking to relief’. There is little doubt that if they had not been so strategic in their approach, Barry and Kearns would have come to the attention of hostile politicians much earlier than they did. As it was, Barry was already planning her return to Ireland, as by late February she was ill, probably as a result of overwork.Footnote ¹³⁰ She left Australia in early March, while Kearns continued to fulfil planned speaking engagements in Queensland until the end of March.

Barry and Kearns had hoped that the various local fundraising committees they had put in place, like the Queensland Irish Relief Fund committee and the branches of Cumann na mBan in Sydney and Melbourne, would survive and continue to organise in support of Irish republican causes. However, many of these fledgling groups fell into difficulties quite quickly, some over differences between personalities or over money, while others moved on to other more immediate local concerns. While the Sydney Cumann na mBan continued to appear in St Patrick's day parades until the mid-1930s, it seems to have faded after that.Footnote ¹³¹ The Melbourne Cumann na mBan was beset with internal strife over personalities and the destination of their fund-raising efforts, with some arguing the money should be given wholly to a local Irish republican newspaper and others that half should be kept for their own activities.Footnote ¹³² It disbanded soon after Kearns and Barry's tour ended. The Queensland Relief Fund committee reconstituted in August 1925 to organise the jubilee of the local Christian Brothers school.Footnote ¹³³ Local Irish-Australian concerns were now foremost in the minds of many of the women's supporters, though one lasting feature of the Queensland committee was that it did bring people together who had formerly opposed each other over the issue of the Treaty.

After her return from Australia, Barry retired from republican activities to raise her own family. From the 1930s to the 1950s she worked for the Electricity Supply Board, using her considerable organisational abilities in the Amalgamated Transport and General Workers’ Union's campaigns to improve employment conditions at the E.S.B.Footnote ¹³⁴ She remained a committed anti-Treaty republican all her life, and did not follow de Valera into Fianna Fáil.Footnote ¹³⁵ Linda Kearns, by contrast, a foundation member of Fianna Fáil, was elected briefly to the Seanad in 1938, and held a position on the Fianna Fáil executive until her death in 1951. She was also secretary of the Irish Nurses Association and a member of the National Council of Nurses in later life.Footnote ¹³⁶

The women remained proud of their efforts in Australia, pointing out in an interview in 1925, after their return to Dublin, both the difficulties they had encountered and the generosity of the Australian audiences.Footnote ¹³⁷ The money raised, about £8,000, was used by the reconstruction committee of the Irish Republican Prisoners’ Dependants Fund to provide lump sums to individuals to set up businesses or other employment schemes.Footnote ¹³⁸ The sums varied, with small sums loaned to individuals, while other larger amounts went to companies or groups, such as £130 to the Leinster Soap Company in south Dublin.Footnote ¹³⁹ While the funds were initially loans, by mid-1926 these had been converted to grants and the fund was wound up by September 1927.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Money from Australia still trickled in, with a further £120 arriving from the I.N.A. in 1926. De Valera then asked Kearns, as well as others, to form a committee to administer this and other small amounts of relief money.Footnote ¹⁴¹

V

Many Australians who heard Barry and Kearns speak would have agreed with Fr Moran, parish priest in Cairns, who described the women as a ‘splendid type of Irish womanhood, Irish simplicity and Irish modesty’.Footnote ¹⁴² Reports of their speeches emphasised their accents, their dress and their beauty. Barry's ‘slight, graceful figure’, her clinging frocks and ‘her cropped hair suiting well her attractive face’, were often commented upon, as was her possession of ‘one of the prettiest “brogues” we have ever heard’.Footnote ¹⁴³ Both Barry and Kearns, however, viewed themselves more as soldiers under orders than ornamental Irish women. In her more despondent moments, Barry railed privately to her husband against these orders: ‘I had to come, … I had the bad luck to be a good soldier, and I'm bitter against Dev for having sent me.’Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Kearns also thought of herself as a soldier, saying to her daughter before her death: ‘I want you to promise you'll never forget you are the daughter of a soldier.’Footnote ¹⁴⁵ They were not alone in seeing themselves this way: many women of the revolutionary period also explicitly drew comfort and courage from their self-identification as soldiers.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

Using successful strategies honed through fundraising tours of the United States by prominent women republicans, Barry and Kearns presented themselves to Australian audiences as charming Irish women working within traditional gender roles of devoted grieving sister and caring nurses. They were always well aware that this strategy was calculated to achieve their goals and they consciously used these roles to further their cause – support for republicanism in Ireland. As women engaged in a fundraising tour for charity, they were mostly successful in evading the notice of conservative Protestant politicians, unlike the much more political and combative tour of O'Flanagan and O'Kelly in 1923. They also had considerable success in bridging the divisions that had formed within Irish-Australian communities over the Civil War. As women they had not been in the I.R.A. and they were seen as less politically dangerous than men and so could gather support from both Irish Australians who supported the Free State and those who still opposed its establishment. Barry and Kearns achieved this through their deliberate gendered strategies, organisation skills, political acumen, diplomacy and tact.Footnote ¹⁴⁷