Rebel countess blazed the way for a hardline set of women republicans
The event was commemorated in the Dáil this week. The countess was not only the first woman elected to the Dáil, but also the first woman elected to the British parliament.
She was obviously selected as a Sinn Féin candidate in 1918 because of her role in the Easter Rising. In the immediate aftermath of the rebellion she was sentenced to death, but this was commuted.
Countess Markievicz was elected in 1918 and became a member of the first cabinet in 1919, even though she had a reputation among her contemporaries of being somewhat of a crank. Some called her “the Cracked Madame,” according to Seán Ó Faoláin, one of her contemporary biographers.
The Sinn Féin candidates elected in 1918 were officially elected to the British parliament, but they did not take their seats at Westminster. Instead, those who were not in jail met in Dublin and established Dáil Éireann. Although Michael Collins was one of the main influences on the selection of the candidates, he did not get along with women politicians. He certainly had little appeal for the women who were elected to either the first or second Dáil.
In one of his first political speeches as a teenager in London in 1908, Collins argued that Ireland should follow the example of Finland in the quest for self-government. When the Finns were given their own parliament, they became the first country in Europe to introduce universal adult suffrage for women.
Collins cited that in an obvious effort to appeal to women in the audience, but what he admired most about the Finns was they murdered their Russian governor in 1904. Following the murder, the tsar gave them their freedom.
“I do not defend the murder simply as such,” Collins told his Irish audience in London in 1908. ‘I merely applaud it on the ground of expediency.”
Many women were repulsed by the horseplay that Collins relished, even into his 30s. At dinner he would throw food at people.
“The society of girls had apparently no attraction for him,” according to Piaras Beaslaí, his first biographer. He had been friendly with Collins during his immigrant days in London and he was the only biographer who could claim to have actually known Collins.
“The usual philandering and flirtations of young men of his age had little interest or attraction for him, though he sometimes amused himself by chaffing his young friends over their weaknesses in that direction,” Beaslaí added. “He preferred the company of young men and never paid any attention to the girls belonging to the (Gaelic League) branch, not even to the sisters and friends of his male companions.”
One relative of Collins told me that as a youngster he concluded Collins was possibly gay. He said this to Collins’s eldest brother Johnny, who just laughed. If Michael had a problem, he said it was not that he was not fond of women.
With Collins in danger of being depicted as gay, it suddenly became trendy to stress his relationships with different women — not just with Kitty Kiernan, but also with Susan Mason, Hazel Lavery, Moya Llewellyn Davies and even Dilly Dicker, the mysterious piano player.
One author even absurdly suggested that Hazel Lavery blackmailed Collins into signing the Treaty by threatening to disclose that he was the father of the young son of Moya Llewellyn Davies.
Before signing the Treaty, Collins realised that all five women members of the Dáil would oppose it. They duly backed de Valera, but this did not last because he obviously was not the kind of person they assumed.
In the aftermath of the Dail’s acceptance of the Treaty, when Collins called for a committee of public safety to be drawn from both sides of the Dáil to preserve order, some people were convinced de Valera was about to agree until Mary MacSwiney intervened to denounce the vote to approve the Treaty “as the grossest act of betrayal” ever perpetrated on Ireland.
“There can be no union between representatives of the Irish Republic and the so-called Free State,” she declared.
A few days later de Valera resigned as president and ran for re-election, but he was defeated. Then as Arthur Griffith was about to be elected, the Long Fellow walked out of the Dáil in a contemptuous insult to both the assembly and Irish democracy.
Collins was indignant. “Deserters all!” he shouted at those leaving. “We will now call on the Irish people to rally to us. Deserters all!”
“Oath-breakers and cowards,” Countess Markievicz shouted back.
“Foreigners — Americans — English,” snapped Collins.
“Lloyd Georgeites,” cried Markievicz. Mary MacSwiney also shouted something but her words were drowned out amid cries of “Up the Republic.”
Mary MacSwiney later became extremely disillusioned with de Valera because he was not prepared to allow the IRA to provoke a war with the British in the 1930s or allow them to strike at Britain during the Second World War. “Was there ever a period in which England’s difficulty was more surely Ireland’s opportunity than now?” she wrote to de Valera in 1940.
“You could unite the country for the Republic,” she added. “You still have the chance to do that. Failure to do so, here and now, will write you down in the time to come as the greatest failure Irish history has ever known. The pity of it! If you bring a new civil war on this country, and you are going the right way to do just that, you will deserve a fate worse than Castlereagh’s.”
SOME of the women were the bitterest opponents of the Treaty. These later broke with de Valera, and it was noteworthy that he never again selected a woman to his cabinet.
Neither did his successor Seán Lemass. When he decided to step down as Taoiseach, he told Jack Lynch he wanted him as his successor.
“He pointed out that I owed the party a duty to serve, even as leader,” Lynch said later. “I told him I would consider my position and would discuss it with my wife. We decided after a long and agonising discussion that I would let my name go before the party,” Lynch continued.
Lemass informed the other candidates that he would be backing Lynch, and he essentially asked them to withdraw. George Colley told him he would first have to consult his wife, Mary.
“What kind of people have I got when one man has to get his wife’s permission to run and the other has to get his wife’s permission to withdraw?” Lemass asked. He never consulted his wife on such matters. She later told the press that Lemass just came home and told her he had \
announced his resignation as Taoiseach.
Mary MacAleese has done the image of women politicians a power of good in this country. Although she was known as the bishops’ woman when she was first elected president, she quickly demonstrated that she was the first Irish politician with the guts to put the bishops in their box.
In the process she has helped to dispel some of the damage done by our earlier pioneering women politicians.
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