Clodagh Finn: The women who tried to tunnel out of the ‘Irish Bastille’

Early female activists endured jail and hunger strikes, but today they face another kind of imprisonment — suspended in the stocks of a no-holds-barred social media

Cumann na mBan member Sighle Humphreys wrote on her cell wall in 1923: 'Tunnel begun in basement of laundry'. Picture Courtesy of Kilmainham Gaol Museum

WHEN Cumann na mBan member, Sighle Humphreys, was locked up in Kilmainham Gaol 100 years ago, she wrote this tantalising note on her cell wall: “Tunnel begun in basement of laundry".

The inhabitants of B Wing had become restless and, as fellow prisoner Margaret Buckley recounts, “the time-honoured idea of digging a tunnel took root”.