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Archiver > MAYO > 2001-04 > 0987725684


From: "conaught" <>
Subject: [MAYO] Easter Week Series #12
Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 17:14:44 -0700



Robert Childers Barton (1881-1975) was born in Co. Wicklow and educated at
Rugby and Oxford. An extensive landowner and a progressive landlord, he sat
on the Committee of the Irish Agricultural Organization Society from 1910.
He was a British army officer during Easter 1916, resigned his commission
and joined the Irish Republican Army. The British arrested him for making a
seditious speech in 1919. He escaped from Mountjoy prison. He left a note
for the governor that he could not stay any longer because the service was
not satisfactory. They rearrested but released him on declaration of the
Truce in 1921.
As Minister of Agriculture in 1921, he founded the Land Bank, and headed the
Agricultural Credit Corporation, 1934-1954.
He signed the 1921 Treaty as "the lesser of two outrages forced upon me and
between which I had to choose" but later repudiated it.
He died at home in Wicklow, 10 August 1975.

© 2001
Ellen Naliboff

All rights reserved


Selected references:

Boylan, Henry, A Dictionary of Irish Biography, Third Edition, Gill &
Macmillan, Dublin, 1998.

Connolly, S.J., editor, The Oxford Companion to Irish History, Oxford
University Press, 1998.

Foster, R.F., Modern Ireland, 1600-1972, Penguin Books, 1988.

Fry, Peter and Fiona Somerset, A History of Ireland, Barnes & Noble, New
York, 1988

Llywelyn, Morgan, 1921, A Tom Doherty Associates Book, New York, 2001.






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