Generational change in Rising memories

When Eleanor Burke eventually asked her grandmother why she never spoke about her membership of Cumann na mBan in Kerry, Ellie Rice replied: “We learned not to speak or say anything because one idle word during that period could cause somebody’s death.”

Speaking to oral historian Maurice O’Keeffe for the Irish Life and Lore 1916 Rising Oral History Collection, Eleanor explained how she only latterly learned the full extent of her family’s involvement in the republican movement. Her mother, Rosalie Rice, who worked in the post office in Kenmare, “would never tell you anything” about her integral part in the IRB plans for communicating with Clan na Gael in the US.

On Easter Monday 1916, using the alias Kathleen McCarthy, 18-year-old Rosalie “filed a telegram to her first cousins, [IRB men] Eugene and Tim Ring, at the Western Union cable station on Valentia Island which alerted America and the world that the Irish had risen”. The coded message read: “Mother operated on successfully today.”