Michael Barrett (184126 May 1868) was an Irish activist. He was a member of the Fenians. Barrett was the last man to be publicly hanged in England, for his part in the Clerkenwell explosion in December 1867. The bombing killed 12 bystanders and severely injured many more. Barrett was arrested with several others in a wide ranging sweep of sympathisers with the Irish Republican cause and was the only one found guilty. Background Barrett was born in Drumnagreshial in the Ederney area of County Fermanagh. As a young man and in search of work, he moved to Glasgow where he joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood or the Fenians. At the age of 27 he joined the Fenians, which, in the 1860s, was a political movement that dominated Irish Republican politics and defied the Catholic Church, middle-class nationalists who advocated milder approaches and Irish Unionists. Tens of thousands of Irishmen in both Ireland and Great Britain were recruited into its ranks. Clerkenwell explosion The Clerkenwell bombing was the most infamous action carried out by the Fenians in mainland Britain. It resulted in a long-lived backlash that fomented much hostility against the Irish community in Britain. The events that led up to the bombing started with the arrest, in November 1867, of Ricard O'Sullivan Burke, a senior Fenian arms agent who planned the "prison-van escape" in Manchester a few months earlier. O'Sullivan-Burke was subsequently imprisoned on remand in the Middlesex House of Detention, Clerkenwell. On 13 December an attempt to rescue him was made by blowing a hole in the prison wall. The explosion was seriously misjudged; it demolished not only a large section of the wall, but also a number of tenement houses opposite in Corporation Lane (now Corporation Row), killing 12 people and wounding up to 120 more. The bombing had a traumatic effect on British working-class opinion. Karl Marx, then living in London, observed: The Radical, Charles Bradlaugh, condemned the incident in his newspaper The National Reformer as an act "calculated to destroy all sympathy, and to evoke the opposition of all classes". The day before the explosion, the Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, had banned all political demonstrations in London in an attempt to put a stop to the weekly meetings and marches that were being held in support of the Fenians. He had feared that the ban might be challenged, but the explosion had the effect of turning