Women at heart of Ireland’s 1916 rising

Q&A:  Liz Gillis

Far from simply playing a vital support role in conflict, women have often fought valiantly alongside their menfolk.

In Ireland an invisible army of women suffered and fought, not just for the freedom of their country, although that was uppermost in their minds, but for education for all children, fair employment and humane treatment for prisoners.

Yet the current debate surrounding the commemoration of the Easter Rising still seems to be a highly genderised discussion with continued references to the “men” of 1916, masking the role that women played in the liberation of the state.

Some 90 women participated in the citywide rebellion of Easter 1916. Sixty of these were members of Cumann na mBan which had been established in 1916.

On the day of the rising, 40 well-trained women, including the doughty Winifred Carney — who arrived armed with both a Webley revolver and a typewriter — entered the GPO.

By nightfall, women insurgents were established in all of the major rebel strongholds throughout the city.

Under the command of Sean Connolly, a contingent of ten men and nine women armed with revolvers launched an attack on the gates of Dublin Castle but when they failed to gain entry, they occupied City Hall.

Dr Kathleen Lynn, who was the only officer present, eventually surrendered this position to the British forces.

But the British refused to accept surrender from a woman and seemed confused by the women they encountered throughout the city, initially asking them to “go home”.

Many like Kathleen Lynn were eventually arrested and were sentenced to death, but after staging hunger strikes succeeded in having their sentences commuted to life imprisonment and were eventually released.

In the years that followed, women continued to play a high profile in the emerging Republic.

All over the country in small towns and remote rural areas, women from all walks of life were hiding men who were on the run, organising fundraising events and risking life and limb in the fight for freedom. And all the while, they fed and cared for their children and tried to maintain some semblance of normal family life.

A London Newspaper of the time, The Sunday Graphic, published an article headlined “Irish Gunwoman Menace”, describing Irish women as “trigger happy harpies” and in a pastoral letter of 1922, the Catholic hierarchy urged all women to desist from revolutionary activities.

Incredibly, one UK Minister for Home Affairs at the time described these female dissidents as “hysterical young women who ought to be playing five-fingered exercises or helping their mothers with the brasses”.

Women of the Irish Revolution recently released by Liz Gillis is an account of these remarkable women.

Liz, how long did it take you to put this book together?

It took about nine months. I wanted this book to be a photographic record as well and so I advertised in newspapers and on social media and the results were astounding. I had responses from Australia, France, the US.

Their generosity was incredible. I was entrusted with some extraordinary photos. When I was writing the book, I got very angry for the women who had sacrificed so much and who were left in such a lonely place.

Many of them didn’t talk about what had happened and they didn’t want their children to suffer as they had.

When I was reading your book I was surprised by the suffering many of these women endured for years after the Easter Rising.

Yes, the women who were involved had their houses trashed, were imprisoned and all the while, had to somehow keep their families going.

What these women did was to show the men as people, they became more than faceless names.

The women organised remembrance Masses, collected funds for the relatives of the deceased and travelled to England to visit the prisons.

Did your attitude to these women’s contribution change as a result of writing this book?

When I began researching I knew that women had played a central role in the struggle for Irish freedom.

What I did not realise was just how vital they were to the revolutionary movement. The men were fighting for the Republic, the women, while also fighting for that ideal, were additionally fighting for real change.

They asked what this Republic would mean for the ordinary people, for the poorer parts of society. The women sought to uphold the ideals which the 1916 Proclamation set out.

They became the matriarchs of Ireland, and the people of Ireland need to remember just exactly what they did.