Robert Barton
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- This article is about the Irish politician. For the Burroughs team leader, see Robert (Bob) Barton.
Robert Childers Barton (Irish: Riobárd Bartún; 1881- August 10, 1975) was an Irish lawyer, statesman and farmer who participated in the negotiations leading up to the signature of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. He was a cousin of Robert Erskine Childers.
He was born in County Wicklow into a wealthy Protestant land-owning family. Educated at Rugby and Oxford, he became an officer in the Dublin Fusiliers on the outbreak of the First World War. He was stationed in Dublin during the Easter Rising of 1916 and resigned his commission in protest at the heavy-handed British suppression of the revolt. He then joined the Republican movement.
In 1918 he was elected to Parliament as the Sinn Féin member for West Wicklow. Arrested in February 1919 for sedition, he escaped from Mountjoy Prison on St. Patrick's Day (leaving a note to the governor explaining that, owing to the discomfort of his cell, the occupant felt compelled to leave, and requesting the governor to keep his luggage until he sent for it). He was recaptured in January 1920 and sentenced to three years' imprisonment, but was released under the general amnesty of July 1921.
He was appointed minister for agriculture of the Irish Republic, then of foreign affairs. Barton was one of the Irish delegates to the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations. He reluctantly signed the Treaty in December 1921, defending it "as the lesser of two outrages forced upon me and between which I had to choose." He nevertheless supported de Valera's rebels during the Civil War.
He won election to the Irish Parliament in June 1922, but did not take his seat and left politics for the law, becoming a judge. He was chairman of the Agricultural Credit Corporation from 1934-1954. Barton died at home in County Wicklow on August 10, 1975, at the age of 94, the last surviving signatory of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Eamon de Valera, who was also heavily involved with the Treaty, died only nineteen days later, on August 29, 1975.
