The 10 men whose deaths will be commemorated tomorrow were executed by hanging in Mountjoy Jail in 1920 and 1921 during the War of Independence or Anglo-Irish war.

All were convicted of capital offences, and they were among the surprisingly small number of Irishmen - 24 - legally executed by the British during the War of Independence, in Dublin, Cork and Limerick.

Dublin Castle and Downing Street's deliberations on whether to let individual sentences be carried out were influenced largely by the competing claims of public pressure for clemency and the morale of the beleaguered Crown forces in Ireland.

This contrasted with the new Irish State's policy during the civil war of 1922-23, when executions and the threat of executions were an instrument of security policy, their frequency being related to the extent of continuing republican violence in individual localities.

The first Mountjoy execution, that of the 18-year-old UCD medical student Kevin Barry, occasioned great protest both in Ireland and abroad. Strenuous efforts were made to win a reprieve.

His case was carefully considered by the British government before the decision was taken to let the execution proceed on November 1st, 1920. In the British view, the strongest arguments in favour of clemency rested on Barry's age and on the likely impact of his death on moderate opinion in Ireland and abroad, as there was no doubt he had been a willing participant in the crime with which he was charged.

He went to his death, as a Dublin Castle official noted, in good spirits and "with callous composure". He could hardly have wished for a better epitaph from his enemies.

There were, however, very serious legal doubts about the fairness of the convictions of other men later executed in Mountjoy, including Patrick Moran and Thomas Whelan, and Edward Foley and Patrick Maher.

For a time the fate of the six men eventually hanged on March 14th, 1921 - Thomas Bryan, Patrick Doyle, Frank Flood, Patrick Moran, Bernard Ryan and Thomas Whelan - lay in the balance, because of tentative secret contacts established between the separatist leadership and the British government, through intermediaries including A.R. Vincent of Killarney, Shane Leslie and Sir Basil Thomson of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch.

It appeared possible that, if a senior Sinn FΘin figure could be spirited to London for secret negotiations, the basis for a truce could easily be agreed and a meeting arranged between de Valera and Northern leader James Craig.

On March 9th, Thomson sent A.R. Vincent a note saying he could immediately fix a safe conduct for "Anyone but \ Collins. There may be difficulty about him and there is not time for me to speak to Dublin. But anyone else".

In the event, these exploratory contacts were ended after Lloyd George told Vincent at Chequers on March 13th that "he much regretted a reprieve \ impossible for him to give, as he could not go behind the Irish Executive".

The executions went ahead a day later, and they were followed by 10 more in Ireland, including those in Mountjoy of Thomas Traynor (April 26th) and of Edward Foley and Patrick Maher (June 7th), before the truce of July 9th, 1921 effectively ended the Anglo-Irish war.

Tomorrow's reinterment with full State honours has provoked critical commentary in Irish and British media, much of it considered, but some the work of prolix hysterics. It is surely right to remember all the dead of the War of Independence, and these funerals should be seen as a part of that process rather than as an exercise in atavistic republican triumphalism.

The key point which many critics fail to grasp is that it is not merely desirable but essential that the right to commemorate these men be claimed by the law-bound and democratic independent Irish State which came into being as a result of the treaty of December 1921. That settlement, democratically ratified by Dβil Eireann in January 1922 and by the Irish electorate ever since, brought the phase of Irish political violence in which these men had perished to an end.

Their memory should not be tarnished by automatic association with the ideological confusions and atrocities of post-1921 militant republicanism, whose enduring appetite for Mosleyite street politics was so menacingly visible in Dublin in the Hunger Strike commemoration last Saturday.

Eunan O'Halpin is Professor of Contemporary Irish History at Trinity College, Dublin, and author of Defending Ireland: the Irish state and its enemies since 1923 (Oxford, 1999).