Clodagh Finn: Mother’s Day Gaza vigil highlights Irish discomfort with female protest and dissent
Irish activist Maud Gonne MacBride with the writer Miss Barry Delany and Mary MacSwiney at Mountjoy Prison, during the hunger strike.
Light years ago — last Sunday — I felt a mix of inspiration and admiration watching Mothers Against Genocide gather outside the Dáil to highlight the slaughter of thousands of children — more than 14,500, according to Unicef — in Gaza.
It was, I thought, a very worthwhile way to mark Mother’s Day. Here was a group of women showing that mothers, so often straitjacketed into the domestic sphere, can be political too.
And here they were, giving up their Mothering Sunday treats to highlight the ongoing obscenity of pretending that mass murder in Palestine is some kind of proportionate response to the Hamas outrage of October 7.
On Monday, however, the protest took a very sinister turn. Gardaí, in bewilderingly large numbers, broke up a peaceful vigil and, according to the group, trampled on photos of children killed in Gaza and a symbolic washing line hung with blood-soaked baby grows.
Later, the Dáil heard that one of the women was strip-searched, a claim denied by gardaí.
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One line of justification for garda action was that the group was blocking the entrance to parliament, although protesters say the gates were locked and nobody was seeking access at the time.
The Taoiseach has promised to follow up on the claims of strip-searching while Mothers Against Genocide is considering making a complaint to GSOC, the Garda watchdog.
We don’t need any investigation, though, to see that this was heavy-handedness in action. Yes, public order has to be maintained but the handling of the protest on Monday was reminiscent of a similarly disquieting event in Britain last week. Some 20 British police officers forced their way into a Quaker meeting house in London to arrest six female supporters of the activist group Youth Demand, as they discussed the assault on Gaza and the climate emergency over tea and biscuits.
One of the arrested women, student journalist Jennifer Kennedy, told the press that her phone, camera and laptop were confiscated and she not allowed to make a phone call so family and friends did not know where she was.
Her crime, and the crime of the other activists? In the words of journalist George Monbiot, it was simply dissent.
There is certainly something in that, and you have to ask if we have an issue with dissent and protest here too? Particularly protest by women.
The scenes outside the Dáil on Monday reminded me of another protest, by less than a handful of women, which brought the police out in ridiculously high numbers.
There is, let me be the first to admit, a vast difference in scale and in context here, but it’s still worth revisiting that day in 1917 when 400 policemen were called out to take on four women.
On the first anniversary of the execution of the Easter Rising leaders, activists Rosie Hackett, Helena Molony, Jinny Shanahan and Brigid Davis went onto the roof of Liberty Hall in Dublin, barricaded themselves in and unfurled a huge poster that read: “James Connolly Murdered, May 12th 1916”.
The spectacle attracted thousands of onlookers who gathered along the quay to have a good gawk. Soon, hundreds of police officers were called in to stop the protest. It took them more than an hour to get into Liberty Hall.
Unlike this week, there were no arrests and not a line appeared in the press. As Rosie said of the incident later: “Of course, if it took four hundred policemen to take four women, what would the newspapers say?”
I was reminded of another one of the founding members of the state this week when , Leeann Lane’s new biography of a woman unafraid to speak to her mind, plopped on the hall mat.
I look forward to spending much more time with a woman whose imprisonment and three-week hunger strike in 1922 made national and international headlines. But, in a quick skim of this timely and important book, one section jumped out at me.
In 1975, republican and journalist Máire Comerford told historian Dr Margaret Ward that Mary MacSwiney was vilified because she was a woman who spoke her mind: “She was a most tolerant and kind person but she had great courage in confronting every situation. But the men… they made a harridan of her. But she wasn’t at all. But men won’t face up to a woman if they be in the wrong you know, and she was one person above all they couldn’t face.”
One man who did try to face up — or face her down, might be a more apt term — was Éamon de Valera. In 1922, he delivered this memorable line: “I have done my utmost to be angry with you, but it is impossible — you are incorrigible!”
She was certainly that. And speaking of protests, there is a wonderful photo of her protesting outside Mountjoy jail in 1922, along with Maud Gonne and Charlotte Despard.
Incidentally, few embody the spirit of female protest better than Charlotte Despard, activist, socialist, pacifist and co-founder of the Irish Women’s Franchise League. There is a famous photo of her, aged 90, still giving it socks at an anti-fascist rally in London in 1933.
She was jailed four times but that did not stop her advocating for women’s rights, peace and the relief of poverty, among many other issues.
Looking back now, it’s surprising — though so inspiring — to see such vocal women because things went so quiet after the new Irish State established itself.
To remember just how quiet, pick up a copy of Ailish McFadden’s beautifully illustrated and thought-provoking volume, (Liffey Press).
Given the recent Mother’s Day protests, it is really interesting to read what she says about three of Ireland’s central figures — Patrick Pearse, Archbishop John Charles McQuaid and Éamon de Valera — and their relationships with their mothers.
Pearse’s mother Margaret was a pious woman who devoted her life to her four children; a worthy role model for a new state. The archbishop and the man who would be taoiseach and president had more complicated stories.
Archbishop McQuaid was said to be devastated when, as a teenager, he found out that the woman who cared for him, his father’s second wife Agnes, was not his biological mother. His mother, Jennie Corry, had died eight days after he was born in 1895, but he was never told.
Dev’s complicated relationship with his mother, Catherine Coll, is well-documented. Born in New York in 1882, a very young Éamon was sent back to Ireland into the care of his grandmother after his father Vivion de Valera died.
The only evidence that his parents were married was his mother’s word for it. Despite a search, a marriage certificate was never found.
As McFadden points out, little wonder McQuaid and de Valera both sought to create a country full of stable, mother-centred homes. The influence they had in shaping the day-to-day life of women and children cannot be underestimated, she writes.
In the years that followed, there was little place for protest, dissent or female anger. Recall that in 1952, the Irish Housewives Association was accused of being a band of Marxist agitators responsible for riots on O’Connell Street in Dublin.
Happily, the blessed winds of change blew furiously in the 1970s. The buoyant spirit so evident in the photo of members of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement defying customs as they brought illegal contraception from Belfast to Dublin still gives me a kick. And there have been very many female protests that passed off without incident since, even if female anger still sticks in the collective craw.
Now, though, it’s time to unleash that anger and get to the bottom of the troubling garda response to the Mothers Against Genocide protest. As that group has said: “We won’t be silent.”
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