By Tim Flynn

On Ash Wednesday, 7 February 1940, three Irish republicans faced very different fates.

In Birmingham's Winson Green Prison, Peter Barnes and James McCormick walked towards the gallows. In Liverpool, sixteen-year-old Brendan Behan stood in the dock and received a sentence of three years' Borstal detention for possession of explosives. On the day two Irish republicans met their deaths, another began the prison experience that would help shape one of Ireland's most celebrated writers.

Sixty years later, Peter Sheridan's film adaptation of Borstal Boy transformed that connection into one of the most memorable scenes in modern Irish cinema. A young Behan watches two condemned IRA men being led to execution. They exchange glances. He raises a defiant salute.

It is a powerful scene.

It is also entirely fictional.

There is no evidence that Behan ever met Barnes or McCormick. The prison-wing farewell was a dramatic invention, created to give visual form to a relationship that existed largely in memory and imagination. Yet the truth behind the myth is, in many ways, more compelling than the fiction.

Barnes and McCormick

History has largely reduced Barnes and McCormick to their involvement in the Coventry bombing of August 1939. Five civilians lost their lives when an IRA bomb exploded in the busy Broadgate shopping area, injuring dozens more. The tragedy hardened British attitudes towards the IRA's S-Plan campaign and ensured that the names of those connected to the operation would forever be associated with civilian deaths.

Yet behind the headlines stood two ordinary men.

Peter Barnes was born in Banagher, County Offaly, in 1907. A longtime republican activist, he joined Fianna Éireann as a teenager and later became a member of the IRA. By 1939 he was thirty-two years old and working for Offaly County Council before volunteering for active service in England. He was engaged to be married and maintained his innocence regarding the Coventry explosion to the very end.

James McCormick, born in Mullingar in 1910, was twenty-nine when he was sentenced to death. Operating under the alias "James Richards", he served as Officer Commanding of the IRA unit in Coventry. Like many republicans of his generation, he believed he was participating in a campaign designed to force Britain to abandon its claim to Northern Ireland.

Neither man was proved to have physically planted the Coventry bomb. Historical accounts indicate that another IRA operative, Joseph "Joby" O'Sullivan, later claimed responsibility for placing the device. Barnes and McCormick were nonetheless convicted under the legal doctrine of common purpose because of their involvement in the wider conspiracy.

Whatever judgment one passes on their actions, Barnes and McCormick were human beings before they became symbols.

That humanity, however, should not obscure the suffering of others. On 25 August 1939, five civilians were killed when the Coventry bomb exploded in Broadgate, a busy shopping district crowded with ordinary people going about their daily lives. More than seventy others were injured. The dead were not political abstractions. They were ordinary people whose lives ended without warning while going about their daily business.

Remembering Barnes and McCormick as human beings does not require forgetting the civilians who died. Historical understanding demands that both realities be held together. The Coventry bombing created victims in the street, but it also set in motion a chain of events that would lead two Irishmen to the scaffold and leave a lasting mark on a young Brendan Behan. Tragedy rarely belongs exclusively to one side.

The Last Night

The surviving accounts of their final hours reveal both political conviction and personal humanity.

Barnes never stopped protesting his innocence. On the night before his execution he wrote to family members insisting that history would eventually vindicate him. More striking than the political content of the letter is his concern for those he would leave behind. His thoughts turned not to strategy or ideology, but to parents, siblings and loved ones facing bereavement.

McCormick displayed a similar combination of resolve and humanity. At his sentencing he declared that, as a soldier of the IRA, he was not afraid to die. Yet his farewell letter to his sister reveals a man conscious that he would never again walk the streets of Mullingar or see his family. A nephew later recalled the profound grief that followed the arrival of that final letter.

History often compresses such men into labels: martyr, terrorist, hero or villain.

Yet the surviving letters remind us that political identities never tell the whole story. Barnes and McCormick faced death not only as republicans, but as sons, brothers and family members conscious of the grief their executions would cause.

Brendan Behan's Shadow

While Barnes and McCormick awaited execution in Birmingham, Brendan Behan was beginning his own journey through the British penal system. Arrested at sixteen carrying explosives intended for an IRA operation, he arrived in Borstal as a fervent young republican convinced of the justice of his cause.

The experience did not transform Behan overnight. Yet prison gradually redirected his attention from politics to people. Over time, the young militant who entered Borstal emerged as a writer fascinated by contradiction, humour, loneliness and human frailty.

The events of 7 February 1940 provide a striking lens through which to view Behan's later development. While there is no evidence that Barnes and McCormick directly inspired any particular work, themes of imprisonment, punishment and execution would recur throughout his writing.

His celebrated play The Quare Fellow is not principally concerned with politics. Instead, it explores the routines, anxieties and moral ambiguities surrounding an execution. The mature Behan's work increasingly examined imprisonment, punishment and human frailty alongside politics.

The teenage Behan who entered Borstal as a republican activist became one of Ireland's most distinctive literary voices, using prison, crime and punishment as lenses through which to examine society itself.

Why the Myth Endures

So why did filmmakers invent a salute that never happened?

Because it captures an emotional truth even while distorting the historical one.

Cinema struggles to depict interior reflection. What took years to develop in Behan's imagination had to be compressed into a few seconds of screen time. The salute becomes a visual shorthand for memory, solidarity, loss and the shadow cast by events that unfolded hundreds of miles away.

Yet the real story is richer.

There was no dramatic exchange across a prison landing. No final glance. No symbolic passing of a torch.

Instead there were three Irishmen connected by circumstance. Two walked to the scaffold. One entered a prison cell. All three would become part of Ireland's complex and contested memory of the twentieth century.

The Forgotten Humanity

In 1969, almost three decades after their executions, the remains of Barnes and McCormick were returned from England to Ireland. Thousands attended their reinterment in Mullingar. To some they were republican martyrs. To others they remained inseparable from a bombing campaign that had brought death to innocent civilians.

The debate will continue.

What should not be forgotten, however, is the humanity beneath the politics.

Peter Barnes was more than a name carved into republican memory. James McCormick was more than a defendant in a notorious bombing trial. The victims of Coventry were more than casualty statistics in a forgotten chapter of Anglo-Irish history. All left behind families, grief and unfinished lives.

The film version of Borstal Boy gave audiences a memorable myth.

History offers something more valuable: the chance to see the victims of Coventry, the families left behind, and the two condemned men not as symbols of competing causes but as people caught in a tragedy that extended far beyond politics.

The salute in Borstal Boy never happened.

The grief behind it was real.

And that, perhaps, is the harder act of remembrance.

About the Author

Tim Flynn is an Irish-Australian writer with family roots in Tuam, County Galway, and the Lancashire Irish community of north-west England. His work explores the relationship between history, memory, migration and identity, with a particular interest in the forgotten connections between Ireland, Britain and the wider diaspora. He is the author of The Twin Mirrors: How Nationalists and Unionists Reimagined the Ireland They Claimed to Inherit.

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