This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Lawrence William White. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Born: 19 October 1896, Ireland
Died: 10 January 1969
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: Catherine Agnes Barry, Kathleen
Moloney, Katherine (Kathleen) (1896–1969), republican and trade unionist, was born Catherine Agnes Barry on 19 October 1896 in the family home at 8 Fleet Street, Dublin, eldest child among five daughters and two sons of Thomas Barry (d. 1908), prosperous dairyman, and Mary Barry (née Dowling; d. 1953); both parents were natives of Co. Carlow. The family owned an 86-acre (35-hectare) dairy farm at Tombeagh, Hacketstown, Co. Carlow, and a retail outlet on the ground floor of the Dublin address. On Thomas Barry’s death, some of the children, including Katherine, remained in Dublin with his sister Judith, while Mary Barry moved with the remaining children to the Tombeagh farm.
Interested in politics from an early age, Katherine Barry and her younger brother, Kevin, were the first of the family to embrace advanced nationalism, upon attending a ‘Manchester martyrs’ commemoration in Dublin’s Mansion House (November 1915). Amid the post-Easter rising reorganisation of the Irish Volunteers, the Barry family provided a consistent line of communication between the Volunteers’ Dublin HQ and the Carlow Brigade (within which the elder brother, Michael, became a battalion OC). Her sympathies notwithstanding, for some years Katherine’s active involvement in republican politics was restricted by her responsibilities as the eldest child to assist her mother and aunt in rearing and providing for the younger children and managing the family business. She joined both Sinn Féin and the Gaelic League in 1917. By the time of her brother Kevin’s arrest for his part in an armed action resulting in the deaths of three British soldiers (September 1920), Katherine was employed in Abbey Street as private secretary to businessman and civic campaigner Ernest Aston, who was energetic in high-level efforts to secure a reprieve after Kevin’s murder conviction. (While the Barry family, in accord with republican principle, did not seek a reprieve owing to such an action’s implicit recognition of British authority over Ireland, they ‘were grateful to friends and strangers who worked to that end’ (witness statement, appendix A, p. 18). Katherine’s 1952 witness statement to the Bureau of Military History is primarily concerned with the events surrounding Kevin’s incarceration, court martial and execution, including abandoned IRA plans to rescue him; upon its completion, she felt unable to face writing a statement of her own activities of the period (Barry Moloney papers, descriptive catalogue, p. 9).
Her brother’s fate seems to have galvanised Katherine Barry’s immersion in republican activism. In late 1920 she joined the university branch of Cumann na mBan, in which her duties involved occasional carrying of messages and guns, and clearing incriminating evidence from locations in danger of a raid. Working under Austin Stack in the Dáil Éireann Department of Home Affairs, she was a judge in the republican courts. As part of a seven-person republican delegation (including Stack, Countess Markievicz and Michael O’Flanagan) that undertook a fundraising and publicity mission to the USA (April–June 1922), she spoke at public meetings coast to coast. After the fall of the Four Courts upon the outbreak of the civil war, she was one of three women who remained with the relocated anti-treaty headquarters garrison in the Hammam Hotel under heavy shelling throughout a week-long siege by Free State forces. Active with the Irish Republican Prisoners’ Dependants’ Fund from June 1922, and general secretary from December 1922, she travelled widely throughout Ireland distributing relief. She later remarked that her civil war activities would read like ‘a resistance thriller’ (ibid.). Arrested in possession of papers relating to the dependants’ fund and imprisoned among common criminals in Cork county jail, she went on hunger strike till transferred to the city jail, then resumed the hunger strike till a colleague was likewise transferred (February–March 1923). She toured Australia for seven months raising money on behalf of the dependants’ fund (September 1924–April 1925).
Shortly before her departure for Australia, she married (8 September 1924) James Moloney (1896–1981), a recently released republican prisoner, also from a family with multi-generational republican engagement. Upon her return from Australia, Katherine withdrew from political activity for some years to concentrate on rearing their four daughters and one son; their twin eldest daughter was the stained-glass artist Helen Moloney. The remarriage in 1927 of James’s widowed father complicated ownership and management of the medical hall, and for some years thereafter James struggled to secure stable employment, at times taking temporary positions in locations that necessitated his living apart from Katherine and the children. After the birth of their fifth child, Katherine became sales publicity advisor with the ESB (1930–50); for several years her income was the family’s chief support. Assisted by the intervention of the Fianna Fáil minister for finance, Sean MacEntee, James obtained a clerical position with Irish Sugar in Carlow in 1934; acknowledging Katherine’s letter of thanks for his assistance, MacEntee wrote: ‘I and the rest of us in matters of this sort regard ourselves as trustees to do what we can for those of our people who have suffered’ (ibid., p. 27). The family moved during the 1930s to Carrickmines, Co. Dublin, and in later years lived in Dublin city at 3 Palmerston Road, Rathmines, and 4 Winton Avenue, Rathgar.
Active in the Amalgamated Transport and General Workers’ Union, Katherine was a member of the Women’s Industrial Development Association (1932–9). As union representative for women staff in the ESB (1942–50), she worked strenuously to secure equal conditions for women workers, and to address the effects on workers’ living standards consequent upon the wages standstill order of 1941 and the postponed implementation in the ESB of the new national wage structure of 1947. Her early retirement was induced by ill health. After offering qualified support to Fianna Fáil throughout the 1930s, she and James agitated against the executions of republican prisoners during the Emergency, and supported the launch of Clann na Poblachta in the late 1940s. Katherine Barry Moloney died in the Meath Hospital, Dublin, from the consequences of a stroke, on 10 January 1969. Suffering from heart disease, James Moloney died suddenly on 3 April 1981. They are buried in Glasnevin cemetery.