Margaret Kearney Taylor: Woman with Cork roots who helped refugees escape the Nazis 

Her mother was born in a workhouse in Kanturk, but her tea rooms in Madrid were a popular haunt of Spain's elite, and provided cover for her secret life. A new play pays tribute to her little-known deeds  

Margaret Kearney Taylor ran a tearoom in Franco-ruled Spain during the Second World War. 

It sounds like the plot of a Hollywood movie — a woman born in a workhouse ends up running her own business in Madrid during the Second World War, and risks her life to help refugees escape the Nazis, right under their noses. It is in fact the true story of Margaret Kearney Taylor — known as Margarita in her adopted Spain — whose remarkable double-life was not uncovered until after her death in 1982.

Now her story is being told on stage in a new play written by Féilim James and presented by theatre company Smashing Times as part of the Dublin Arts and Human Rights Festival. River of Thorns is a dramatic monologue which tells the story of the woman born Margaret Mary Taylor in a workhouse in Christchurch, England to a single parent, Ellen Taylor, a Protestant who was herself born in a workhouse in Kanturk, Co Cork, in Ireland in 1871.