Naomi O’Leary:
Hi, listeners. And welcome to a brand new Season Three of the Irish Passport podcast.
Tim McInerney:
Hello. And before we launch into the first episode of this season, we have something to tell you all.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yes. It all started with an email from a listener called Ward Gahan, who’s originally from Clonmel in Tipperary. His nephew had tipped him off about our podcast.
Ward Gahan:
I listened to all kinds of podcasts, but a lot of them related to Irish kind of history and culture and current political affairs. I was sharing some of the podcasts with my nephew who lives in London, and he said to me, “Oh, you’ve got to listen to this one.”
Tim McInerney:
Ward lives in Michigan, in the United States. He moved there back in the 1980s for a job in electrical engineering. But all that time, he never lost touch with home in Ireland. On his trips back and forth, an idea came to him.
Ward Gahan:
I’d get the mail order catalogues and I’d look at the products in there. And a lot of it was –I’d suppose you’d call it now “plastic paddy” — was like, you take anything and stick a shamrock. And I said, you know, this isn’t really Irish. You know, it may be a perception of what Irishness is or what Irish products are, But rather than this mail order thing, with my electronic engineering background and all of this interesting kind of tech developments, I said, “I wonder if I could start a business here selling products online.” I didn’t want to get into the people who are the mass producers. So I was looking for something that that you wouldn’t be able to find everywhere; something that was unique and different and distinctive. And I think people like that as a gift, that you know you’ve put a bit of thought into, that you’re going to give them something that they’re not necessarily going to find every place else.
Naomi O’Leary:
This was the early 2000s and Ward decided to use his electrical engineering background to create an online shop that would allow people anywhere in the world to buy products made by small family businesses and crafts people in Ireland. The result was BiddyMurphy.com, an online retailer of authentically Irish products that are made on the island. I asked him how he came up with the name.
Ward Gahan:
Biddy, actually, is from my mother, Bridget Murphy. She was from Killenaule, County Tipperary. She was one of a family of ten and she was known as Biddy Murphy. And I thought there was nobody authentically Irish as Biddy. We want to make sure that we’re real Irish products from some very Irish people. I thought it was fitting to use a name like Biddy Murphy as the name of our shop.
Tim McInerney:
Biddy Murphy, Ward told us, wasn’t just a way to make a living for him, but also to support local businesses and to keep traditional manufacturing alive in rural Ireland.
Ward Gahan:
They have a small business going in their community and they may be employing a few couple of people or a few dozen people locally. And that to me is doing something to work together to help maintain a little bit of commerce in places in and around Ireland, whether it’s outside Nenagh or up in Roscommon or out in Connemara, or wherever it is. So in some small way, we’re kind of doing better to preserve these skills that have been there for four generations.
Naomi O’Leary:
In tune with the spirit of patronage, Ward has sponsored Season Three of the Irish Passport podcast. In return for his support, we’ll be featuring some stories of those little family businesses and craftspeople from a Roscommon basket weaver to a Tipperary woollen mill with roots in the Irish land war of the 1800s.
Tim McInerney:
Having met some of the brilliant people behind the products on BiddyMurphy.com, we couldn’t be happier to have them as our Season Three sponsor. I think when you hear their stories later on in the season, you’ll see why.
Naomi O’Leary:
Thank you so much to BiddyMurphy.com and listen out for those reports during our season. So let’s get on with the episode. Hello, welcome to Irish Passport.
Tim McInerney:
Let’s do it.
Naomi O’Leary:
Welcome to the Irish Passport.
Tim McInerney:
I’m Tim McInerney.
Naomi O’Leary:
I’m Naomi O’Leary.
Tim McInerney:
We’re friends. Cé he bhfuil tú Naomi?
Naomi O’Leary:
Go hana mhaith ar fad, Tim. This is your passport to Irish culture, history and politics. I’m recording. 1 2 3. OK.
Tim McInerney:
“mná na hÉireann agus fir na hÉireann, you have chosen me to represent you and I am humbled by and grateful for your trust.” No, listeners, not me. Those were the words of Ireland’s first female president, Mary Robinson as she gave her famous inaugural speech in Dublin Castle in 1990.
Naomi O’Leary:
Suits you, Tim, I have to say. It’s a great quote. Listeners, welcome back to the Irish Passport podcast. And if you speak any Gaeilge, you might have guessed from that quote that we’ll be looking at the fascinating story of Irish women and politics, past and present.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, absolutely. And we’re really excited about this one. We’re going to be looking at the pivotal role that women played in the foundation of the state. We’ll be asking why they disappeared from politics almost entirely in the middle of the 20th century and why we may be in the middle of a second kind of revolutionary period when it comes to women in politics right now in Ireland. So later on, you’ll hear from the historian Mary McAuliffe, who says this:
Mary McAuliffe:
The thing about writing about women is it’s hard enough to write about straight women, but then finding women who made relationships, who made families together, is even more difficult. So you just have to follow little, little threads.
Naomi O’Leary:
We’ll also hear from first-time election candidate Hazel Chu, who could become Ireland’s first Irish-Chinese political representative.
Hazel Chu:
My mom is one of those very stoic Chinese people through and through. And she’s the type of tiger mother that will push you to do everything and secretly be very proud of you, but will never tell you. So when I told her I was running, there was a kind of a shy smile from her.
Naomi O’Leary:
And we hear from journalist Martina Fitzgerald, who says this:
Martina Fitzgerald:
Well, in the past, for instance, you had Mary Robinson in the late 70s and early 80s. And when she was seeking election for the Dáil twice, she was told by male and female voters to go back and mind her children; she should be at home minding them. She had a baby on the campaign trail.
Tim McInerney:
And we find out why hat design can sometimes be the making of a revolutionary with researcher in material studies Emma O’Toole.
Emma O’Toole:
Even when she went out fighting in 1916, the idea was that you were inconspicuous, you weren’t easily identified. But she made sure that everybody knew who she was by wearing that hat.
Naomi O’Leary:
Tim let’s start with that Mary Robinson quote. It’s symbolic in so many ways. Like for one thing, it’s actually a reference to the first words of the 1916 Proclamation. Irish men and Irish women. But here Mary Robinson switches it around and puts the Irish women: Mná na hÉireann. And there’s something really powerful about that, especially stating it in the Irish language. Here she was, President of the Republic, the first female one, loudly asserting the women of Ireland as an integral and founding part of this country.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, it was, I mean, it was a big deal back in 1990. Mary Robinson was seen as a total underdog during that election. You know, not only was she a woman in a political landscape that was totally dominated by men as we’ll see, but she had also openly criticized the Catholic Church regarding their position on contraception and divorce. But she won. And in doing so, she became the first president in the history of the office not to come from the Fianna Fáil party, famously founded by de Valera back in the day. And her acceptance speech was broadcast on RTÉ in place of The Angelus, which says a lot.
Naomi O’Leary:
That is so stunning. I mean, the first one not from Fianna Fáil, It’s just amazing to think. Now after Mary Robinson we, of course, had another woman president again called Mary, Mary McAleese this time. But overall, particularly when it comes to policy-making positions, Irish politics in general remains extraordinarily unbalanced when it comes to gender. So roughly only one in five elected representatives are women, both at local and national level. And before the 2016 election, the percentage in the Parliament was even lower. It was just 16 percent. We’d never had a woman Taoiseach; neither of the biggest parties Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil have ever had a woman leader, and we’ve never had a woman Foreign Minister, Minister of Finance or Defence.
Tim McInerney:
Right, yeah. And this is quite jarring right now, given the cultural context in Ireland. The two landmark referendums on equal marriage and abortion access have widely been seen as a kind of popular revolt against the Catholic Church’s interference in national law, and that includes its historically oppressive policies on women. The most recent landslide result saw two-thirds of the Irish voting population openly declare their support for female bodily autonomy. And that has had this massive impact culturally. The momentum from that hasn’t dissipated. In fact, you know, issues that affect women particularly have continued to dominate national politics since the vote quite consistently.
Naomi O’Leary:
At the time of recording, a number of elections are on the horizon, local and European elections in May and potentially a general election too before too long but we don’t know exactly when. There’s a feeling that these elections could be a breakthrough in Ireland in the same way that the midterm elections were in the United States. There’s a number of women running for positions who are trailblazers in one way or another. The two recent referendums, first on equal marriage and then on abortion, have drawn in a new generation of women into politics, including from very diverse social and cultural backgrounds.
Tim McInerney:
Both campaigns involve really significant grassroots movements and made activists out of countless people who otherwise might not have been engaged in politics before. And in that way, the referendums acted as a kind of crash course in campaigning for lots of people, particularly young women, around whom this issue chiefly revolved.
Naomi O’Leary:
There’s a tension, though, between this moment of change that’s being driven by women and the reality of gender inequality in the country. Ireland has the same kind of issues of gender-based violence and the difficulty prosecuting the crime of rape that are familiar throughout the world. Women are also paid about 14 percent less than men in Ireland, which is a gap that has actually increased in recent years. The bulk of domestic chores and childcare still fall on women, and there’s still a substantial contingent of people who think that that really is correct and that things should be that way or who are very resistant to acknowledging that inequality exists in the first place. So that makes women and politics, like many parts of the world, a kind of a wedge issue that can really polarize people and provoke extreme reactions at times.
Tim McInerney:
Now, before we hear those voices from current day politics, I think we should straightaway delve back into the past on this one, because, Naomi, as we’ve seen time and time again on this podcast, women had this really huge, you know, unusually huge for the time role, in the establishment of Ireland as an independent state. This was partly because the revolutionary period, which was roughly from 1916 to 1922, that period coincided not by coincidence with the international movement for women’s suffrage. And Irish women were very much at the forefront of that in loads of ways.
Naomi O’Leary:
As we’ve mentioned before, the revolutionary period brought together a number of radical strands: internationalism, including socialists and particularly suffragettes and they often saw independence as a way to create a better society for women. So women were of course, central to the revolutionary period, though they are rarer among the famous names who went on to be remembered as legends and martyrs. Women really did power that moment of change.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, and that came across really strongly in the testimonial of the 1916 rebel Helena Molony, who we heard on a previous episode. If listeners might remember, she told the story of bands of “girls”, as she calls them, roaming the streets of revolutionary Dublin with their revolvers. And, you know, there’s all these female doctors appearing out of nowhere from the College of Surgeons, and it comes across very clearly that these women are really running the show. But this aspect of history has not only been largely forgotten, in lots of ways it’s been deliberately obscured from popular memory. Naomi, you pointed out a really good example of this in a recent tweet of yours actually, on your famous Twitter account. You were talking, I think, about the rebel Grace Gifford, who is the subject of a famous song called Grace, which a lot of Irish people will know. But the words of that song, they make it seem like she was just this loyal wife on the side lines rather than being an integral part of The Rising, which, of course, she was.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah. So this is one of those songs that I quite like singing myself. But I found that at a certain point I couldn’t bring myself to say the actual lyrics of the song. So it was written by Frank & Sean O’Meara in 1985. And it’s a song that’s based on a real life tragic incident.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, right. If I’ve got it right, it was Joseph Mary Plunkett. He was one of The Easter Rising rebels. He was captured and locked up in Kilmainham jail and sentenced to death. And Grace Gifford was his fiancée and she got through to see him before he was killed and managed to persuade the prison authorities to allow them to marry before his execution. And she brought her own ring with her. And the two of them were married in the prison chapel. And then he was executed just a few hours later, I think.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah, it’s a true and extremely tragic story. And the song is sung telling that story from the perspective of Plunkett and he’s addressing Grace in it. And it’s about that prison wedding. And, you know, it is really powerful but there is this one verse where the Joseph Plunkett character explains his motivations for ending up where he is and what he says is “Now, I know it’s hard for you, my love, to ever Understand, The love I bear for these brave men, my love for this Dear land.” And to me, it’s like, what are you talking about? Like you’re talking to Grace Gifford, that doesn’t make any sense. Like, it totally erases who Grace Gifford was because she was, of course, a patriot herself. She was a political cartoonist long before she ever met Joseph Plunkett. And she was an activist. She was so heavily involved with the nationalist movement that she was actually elected to the Sinn Féin Executive in 1917. So this really bizarre characterisation of her that she wouldn’t be able to comprehend how he ended up in Kilmainham jail, do you know what I mean? It just makes the total blank of her. It also, it just makes their relationship make no sense as well. Like this was a woman who rushed to jail to marry her rebel fiancée, you know, to marry him before he was killed. So, yeah, what I said on Twitter, the tweet that that Tim referred to, was that I’d noticed this in the song and I didn’t want to say that anymore. So I modified the lyrics for the version that I sing and instead I say rather than “Now, I know it’s hard for you, my love, to ever Understand” I say, “Now, I know that you’re a rebel, too, and that you’ll understand.”
Tim McInerney:
Right. OK. And in case you think that Naomi’s being some kind of philistine here, the modifying lyrics like this is a grand old tradition in Irish traditional music, so that’s right on point there. Maybe it will catch on among Irish Passport listeners. Now, something I find interesting is how social activism in general at that time was tied up with national aspirations. You know, many of those women wanted to improve general social conditions for themselves and for their families, as well as lots of other reasons. And for them, the best way to do that was to establish an entirely new Ireland. You know, the women of The Rising that came from all social classes, lots of them were from the more well-off middle classes, of course, like lots of suffragettes, but also like lots of suffragettes you had a huge involvement from working class women, and a lot of women who were interested in socialism from whatever classic came from. One really interesting rebel was Margaret Skinnider, who was a schoolteacher. She was born in Scotland, but she became an Irish radical and revolutionary in 1916 and fought as a sniper in the fighting.
Naomi O’Leary:
Margaret Skinnider is a fascinating character. So she used to dress up as a boy to run messages incognito. And she was one of the few women who were fighters, as you say because she happened to be a trained markswoman. I recently spoke to UCD historian Mary McAuliffe, who’s preparing to publish a biography on Margaret Skinnider, which is called Doing My Bit for Ireland: Margaret Skinnider, A Life.
Mary McAuliffe:
She was this young Scottish woman who turned up in 1916 it seemed relatively out of the blue to fight in the 1916 rising as a member of the Irish Citizen Army. She was stationed in the Royal College of Surgeons. She was one of the few women who actually participated in military action during 1916. She could shoot. She was a trained markswoman; wounded three times, was operated on by the first-aid women in the College of Surgeons. Miraculously survived. Then the other thing you would hear about her is she applied for a pension in the early 1920s and was refused because the government said that the pension, the military pension was for soldiers, which is recognised only in the masculine sense. And that was it. That’s all I ever knew of Margaret Skinnider. Luckily, Margaret had written an eyewitness account of 1916 in 1917, and then of course I discovered that she was actually one of the women who went to America, 1917, 1918, with Hanna Sheehy Skeffington and Nellie Gifford and Min Ryan, and many of the other women who were also out in 1916 giving information to the Irish-American public about what they said was the true story of The Rising in Ireland. And I just have it here and she says here in the first chapter, she says, “My father and mother are Irish, but had lived almost all their lives in Scotland, and much of the time in Glasgow. She says Scotland is my home, but Ireland is my country. And she talked about the fact that the used to come back to Monaghan. So the Skinniders are originally from Monaghan. She began to read history books and she was very impacted about the story of the famine and the inequalities in Ireland and the land war and all of those things, that history of dispossession and colonization, immigration, forced immigration and all that, that her peoples, Irish people, went through. But also, she’s growing up in Glasgow and Glasgow is a very interesting place at this time, particularly for working-class communities. And it’s really known as, you know, there’s a lot of radical socialist thinking, particularly among working-class areas in Clydeside, it was known as Red Clydeside. There’s a lot of militant feminist activism. She’s also immediately by 1913/14 is joining the Irish volunteers in Glasgow firstly and then Cumann na mBan when it’s set up. From about late 1914 onwards, she is involved in attempted raids on shipbuilding industries in Glasgow to get gelignite and arms and ammunition for the Irish volunteers in in Ireland.
Naomi O’Leary:
Wow.
Mary McAuliffe:
So, they’re sending it back. She brings bomb-making equipment to Dublin on the mail boat when she comes over on one of her visits in 1915. So between 1911, 12 and 1915, you see the development of Margaret, the militant feminist, militant nationalist, moving towards becoming the rebel in 1916.
Tim McInerney:
God, Naomi, whatever about Michael Collins and The Wind that Shakes the Barley, where is the Hollywood blockbuster on Margaret Skinnider. Coming soon, I hope. One thing I found really fascinating that Mary McAuliffe says a bit later is the possible fact that Margaret Skinnider was gay and that she was part of a larger lesbian scene of Irish Republican women at that time.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah. And it brings together like this whole other dimension to the political movement that we don’t, you know, we’ve not really heard about. And it’s very difficult to retrospectively know for sure whether Margaret was gay or not, because obviously at the time, people were not very open about that. And they also used a very different vocabulary to what we use now. And however, she did have a lifelong female companion and there is evidence that the two were viewed by contemporaries as a couple. And either way her story reminds you that there were as many gay people in Dublin then as there are now. And just like today, they were at the centre of political life, very often.
Mary McAuliffe:
She definitely lived her life with a woman called Nora. They lived together in Clontarf, and I have traced them back to at least, to about 1919, I know they’re living together. They are referred to then, in other people’s conversations, a memoir or archival sources and memoirs, together, Margaret and Nora. So it’s the hints you pick up as you go along. The thing about writing about women is it’s hard enough to write about straight women. There can be outside of the mainstream archives, but then finding women who made relationships, who made families together, is even more difficult. So you just have to follow little trends through the records. What I can definitively say is Margaret and Nora lived together for at least three decades. There doesn’t seem to be any other significant other in either of their lives. They also are in a group of women in which there were several other same sex couples working and living together during this period, all of whom were revolutionary women, whether there was feminist or nationalist or trade unionist or a mixture of all three. Interestingly, I gave a talk on radio some time last year about the same sex couples of 1916 and then I got an email from a person who I am following up with who said that her great grand uncle who was a pianist, played music at a monthly club in the early 1920s in Dublin in which female couples danced and had tea. It was a tea dance, I suppose, and was always told
Naomi O’Leary:
What an image! My goodness.
Mary McAuliffe :
What an image, yes!
Tim McInerney:
Now, of course, by far the most famous woman rebel of all in Irish history is someone who we’ve mentioned several times on the podcast, Countess Constance Markievicz. She was an English-born, Irish revolutionary. She was a founding member of the Irish Citizen Army, which was a socialist group, and the women’s rebel group Cumann na mBan and the first woman to be elected to both UK and Irish Parliaments. She was also, scandalously at the time, an aristocrat.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah, Markievicz came from the very well-to-do Anglo Irish Gore-Booth family, and she married into Polish nobility, which is why she’s got that Markievicz name from Poland. Her ancestral pile was the iconic Lissadell House which is this spectacular big house which is nestled at the foot of a very dramatic mountain in Ireland called Benbulbin. And there she used to hang out with loads of famous Irish nationalists and their kind of cultural coterie, perhaps most notably W.B. Yates, the poet.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, indeed. And Yates famously had a rather complicated relationship with Markievicz. I think her politics diverged quite a bit from his own more conventional, romantic vision of a new Ireland. And you definitely get the feeling that Markievicz just didn’t fit the bill of Yates’s feminine ideal. You can really see this in his poem that he wrote about Markievicz and her sister in 1927, which is no more than 10 years after The Rising. It’s called In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Constance Markievicz and the first few lines go, “The light of evening, Lissadell, Great windows open to the south, Two girls in silk kimonos, both Beautiful, one a gazelle. But a raving autumn shears Blossom from the summer’s wreath; The older is condemned to death, Pardoned, drags out lonely years Conspiring among the ignorant.”
Naomi O’Leary:
That’s a reference to Markievicz’s pardon after The Easter Rising because of course, she was sentenced to death but then she got a reprieve and her continued role in socialist politics. Not a very kind one, we might say. Mary McAuliffe told me a little bit more about the significance of Markievicz and how she kind of remained, still to this day, a divisive figure. But first, let’s hear from Emma O’Toole, who’s a researcher in materials studies and ESB fellow at the Centre for the Study of Irish Art. I spoke to her at the National Gallery of Ireland, and O’Toole explained that Markievicz’s self-presentation, the way that she designed her own image and iconography as a female activist, that played a major role in her political influence at the time.
Emma O’Toole:
Markievicz was born in London, not too far from Buckingham Palace and then moved over to Lissadell in Sligo and grew up, but a very privileged, aristocratic background. And, you know, she was home schooled. She had lessons in Irish. And then she was also going to debutante balls, was introduced to Queen Victoria. But that was one side of her life. And then the other side, it really happens, I suppose, was really by 1908, she gets massively involved in Irish politics and the Irish suffrage movement, both of them, which were really kind of entwined at the time in Ireland. And it’s then that she has this different image. So she had an aristocratic, very aristocratic image at the start. And then suddenly she’s more of her political identity and she’s very aware of this identity. And she gets photographs commissioned to be taken of her. and she’s so aware of what she’s wearing and how she is actually portrayed in these photographs, because what she wears is very significant types of clothing that reference back to Irish Celtic warrior queens and this is very much tied up in the Irish suffrage movement and encouraging women to join the Irish suffrage movement. But also involved in the nationalist movement and, obviously, 1916. And you also have images of her in her 1916, the Irish Citizen Army uniform and she’s encouraging women to fight for the cause for Irish freedom.
Mary McAuliffe:
I would imagine she would have been a bit of a difficult woman. But her life story is fascinating, going from, you know, the daughter of the big house to dying in a pauper’s ward. Of course, she is the first woman elected to both the House of Commons, and then when she doesn’t take her seat, along with the other Sinn Féin TDs, she’s the first woman TD. Then she’s the first woman minister in an Irish government.
Emma O’Toole
Really, that really significant image of Markievicz in the studio that was down on Dorset Street. She literally walked into that studio wearing an Irish Citizen Army uniform and holding a revolver, which is quite unusual anyway. But that that image of her, it’s the Irish citizen army uniform that she wears, it’s actually Michael Mallin’s jacket that she wears and she tapers it with a leather belt and she has the brass buttons. She also wears breeches, which is quite unusual for women to wear at the time as it’s typically skirts that they would have worn and even in the military as well. It was the idea was with Cumann na mBan, you wear skirts, but she didn’t, she chose to wear breeches. The hat in that image, it’s really, really significant as well. It’s a cock fettered hat and it’s quite large. And it was quite unusual to wear something like this because even when she went out fighting in 1916, the idea was that that you were inconspicuous, you weren’t easily identified. But she made sure that everybody knew who she was by wearing that hat. But that hat has actually got really historical traces right back to 1798 and is actually associated with an Irish heroine from the 1798 rebellion. And it’s something that she Markievicz referred to continuously when she was writing for suffrage magazines in Bean Na hÉireann or the Irish Citizen. And she kept making references to 798 rebellion and how important women were in this rebellion. Markievicz wasn’t the only one to get these image take images taken, Pádraig Pearse would have been another one. And several of the 1916 leaders did this, months prior to the 1916 Rising, but when they decided to get their image taken, they often wore just normal suits but Markievicz chose this uniform, and the uniform she purposely chose it not only to say to women, fight for the Irish cause, but also to show the differences over her original background that she wasn’t necessarily just aristocratic, that she was ready to fight. But the interesting thing was, that the idea was that these photographs that were taken that after 1916 in case she died during the fighting or like that, she what did happen was that she was incarcerated, that these images, she knew that these images would then be published in newspapers. And they were but unfortunately it just wasn’t the image that she wanted. Instead, the newspapers actually really focused on the fact that she had an aristocratic background and actually photographed her in aristocratic dress and these were the images that were typically published in Irish newspapers rather than the one of her in her our Irish Citizen Army uniform.
[skipto time=29:17]Mary McAuliffe
:
I think there’s lots of things we still have to question about Markievicz, including her as a minister. She was on the run most of the time, as were most of them, and she was in jail for a large period. But Lauren Arrington and her Recent Revolutionary Lives has a much more nuanced take on Markievicz, including the real influences from Bolshevism and how that influenced her, very radical ideas on land distribution and ownership and capitalism. And a lot of ideas were probably too radical for many of the other members of the of the first Dáil.
Tim McInerney:
Of course, when we talk about women in Irish politics, we’re not confined to these few historical figures that most people will know. Women were always key to political education on the ground in Irish history. Our listeners might remember, for instance, from a previous episode that women were at the forefront of that seminal strike against Captain Boycott in the 1880s, which inspired a whole revolution in landownership in Ireland.
Naomi O’Leary:
And more than that, women often bore the brunt of war more than anyone else. Many of the battles in Irish history have essentially been guerrilla wars, and that means the fighting comes to the home. Violence against women, Mary told me, has been a largely forgotten, perhaps deliberately, element of war in Ireland, not only in the revolutionary period, but also throughout the conflict in Northern Ireland.
Mary McAuliffe:
The violence that was visited on women is, it’s not one sort. So if you look at what the Black and Tans were doing, for example, in the auxiliaries, the ground forces, if we use that term, which would include the police and the military. Fighting a guerrilla warfare, very hard to find the enemy, so what you’re doing is you’re raiding communities, you’re raiding family homes. And part of those raids was pulling women out of bed late at night, separating them out, taking them out maybe into the front yard of an isolated farmhouse or into the streets. And they’re surrounded by, you know, a group of men in uniforms with guns. They’re assaulted, you know, it’s sometimes it’s hard to tell whether the assault is sexual assault as well, because, of course, the language used is very different from the language we would use today. And sometimes it makes it difficult to unpack exactly what is happening. But one thing we do know that was happening is there hair was being shaved off, being cropped or shorn to send a message. So sometimes the women, in their military files were in Cumann na mBan, talk about the raids. And I remember one woman, Julia Duffy in Longford, talks about being beaten so badly about the head with rifle butts that nine of her teeth fell out or were broken. Other women had their hair shaved off. Other women saw their houses burned and had their hair shaved off. So there’s that very visceral violence being deliberately visited on women and the women are being deliberately targeted. It’s to send a message, I would argue, to the IRA. You can’t protect your women. You know, it’s a very much of how war is played out in masculine terms. On the other side, you have the IRA targeting women who are perceived to be committing sins against proper behaviour of an Irish woman, i.e. they might be flirting with or going out with an RIC officer or a Black and Tan or a soldier. They’re chatting, usually they’re younger girls, so their houses are raided and they are taken out and again surrounded late at night. The most we know that happens is that their hair is shaved off. But people talk about, and other outrages were committed, so you have to ask the question, what are the other outrages? I recently came across a reference in a British newspaper to a raid in Northern Ireland by the IRA. They said the young woman was both speaking to soldiers, but also potentially may have been a spy, shaved her hair and put three pig rings through her flesh, you know the rings you would put in a pig’s nose or a bull’s nose, and they forced three of those through her flesh. They didn’t say what part of her body, but they stripped her to do that. And so, you know, people are, there was arguments back and forth about whether this constitutes sexual violence. But for me, because it is invasive of the body and it is marking the body of women and particularly women’s hair was always seen as her crowning glory, as part of her femininity and her attractiveness as a woman, part of her sexuality, that it is sexualized violence committed on women.
Naomi O’Leary:
By the way, we’re going to put the full interview with Dr Mary McAuliffe up on our Patreon page, which, of course, is Patreon/The Irish Passport. It was an absolutely terrific conversation. She’s an amazing talker, so do head over to check that out.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, let me second that. Anyway, in 1918, there was this landmark general election that we’ve talked about before in which nationalists who were seeking outright independence swept to an overwhelming victory and set the Irish revolution really in process. And women were part of that, too, in a huge way. The British government had just granted women in the whole of the UK the right to vote for the first time just before that election. The franchise was extended to all men. Over 21 and most women aged over 30. Naomi, you know why that age restriction was chosen, right?
Naomi O’Leary:
Was it to do with the concept of maturity? Like a younger woman wouldn’t be able to handle politics or something like that?
Tim McInerney:
Well, yeah, fair enough guess. Well, it was actually mostly because without it, women would have been the majority in the electorate because just so many men had disappeared during the First World War. So, you know, already women had the upper hand at this point in history. They were running the show in so many ways.
Naomi O’Leary:
So, they could have actually had a voting majority, which is amazing. It’s kind of fascinating, also bleak given the death rates, geez.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah.
Naomi O’Leary:
It’s kind of interesting to think about an alternative history where women did become the voting majority.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, absolutely. I suppose. I mean, like in general, women are the majority, I think, globally. But now something that’s interesting is that in Ireland, even after this huge movement where they’re so central, the visibility of women at the frontline of politics just falls away after the 1922 treaty ended the war of independence. Now, of course, a lot of those political women were anti-treaty because the free state that the treaty established, you know, really didn’t deliver the feminist reforms that a lot of them had been fighting for since 1916. So in the 1920s, those women might have found themselves on the losing side of Ireland’s civil war and a good lot of them fled the country after that or were imprisoned.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah, of course, it’s a complex story. You did have women on the pro-treaty site also who may have been a bit more conservative and perhaps, you know, more representative of popular Catholic opinion at the time. And there was also a feeling once the free state was established, that women should kind of go back into their box, you know, like the radical movement had been something of a deviation from normality and if the free state was to be successful and respectable, women needed to turn to, return to a kind of structural, “natural” family role.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, right. And to be fair, that’s not something that was unique to Ireland at this time. You know, after it through the two world wars, you had the same phenomenon of “surplus women” who outnumbered men because so many men had died. They were driving the buses. They were running the shops. They were stepping into traditional men’s roles and that made people really, really uneasy. So all over Europe, you saw this cultural backlash against the idea of working women. And of course, later on we see that kind of morph into this 1950’s post-war housewife ideal of a woman who just, by definition, doesn’t work.
Naomi O’Leary:
And of course, when we think about the early years of the free state, it was so poor that it relied heavily on the Catholic Church for social provision, everything from education to hospitals to schools and all manner of social work. It was a really, quite ,a conservative state that was being formed and that the skeleton of that system still remains in place in many respects in Ireland today. It’s a kind of a strange fact as well that in some ways this system was also kind of run by women. But they were, it was run by nuns.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, right. Exactly. You know, the free state did establish this kind of arch-conservative regime across the country in which lots of other women were quite literally in fear of their lives if they stepped out of line, let alone stepping into politics again.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah, that could be really high stakes for women who were deemed to be deviant in some way that, you know, they could face exile and ostracization and incarceration. There was incarceration of women of all sorts in various asylums from mother and baby homes to Magdalene Laundries. Sometimes, you know, teenagers who were thought to kind of just be going down the wrong path or something could end up in these places for petty theft or, you know, whatever. Floods of young single women in particular left the country throughout the 20th century. The society was reflected in politics, too. So this is an amazing fact. Although we had Markievicz as a cabinet minister in 1919, amazingly, there was not another female minister until 1977 when Máire Geoghegan-Quinn was made junior minister and later brought into the cabinet as minister for the Gaeltacht. There were women in Parliament throughout those intervening decades, but most of them, most of the elected TDs, they were widows or daughters of lawmakers who died, taking up your husband’s seat after his death actually was known as the widow’s mandate.
Tim McInerney:
Wow, god. The widow’s mandate. Like what a way to just describe women’s work as actually just a vector for men’s work, you know, even after their death. But yeah, indeed. Until 1973, there was also something called the mark the Marriage Bar in place. Now, that’s a practice whereby women’s employment is automatically terminated once they get married. And the reasoning for this back then was that those women would be occupying a job that could be given to a man and therefore finance a whole other family, and the only reason that law was abolished is that it was one of the conditions of Ireland joining the EEC, which was a predecessor of the EU back in 1973.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah. And that that landmark was followed by a wave of equality legislation which was also tied up with joining this embryonic European Union, like the Anti-Discrimination Pay Act, which meant that employers weren’t allowed to pay women less for doing the same work. Then there was the Employment Equality Act in 1977, which banned discrimination based on gender or marital status and the Maternity Act, which was aimed to prevent employers firing women essentially for being pregnant. Maternity leave was introduced in 1981, so there were these real concrete strides that being made to remove these very practical barriers that were in the way of women’s life outside the home.
Tim McInerney:
During that period in Ireland and domestic campaigns for women’s rights began to gather pace. This was when Mary Robinson and fellow campaigners were demanding the legalisation of contraception, which was amazingly only won in 1979.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah, the 60s kind of bypassed Ireland. And of course, with that progress, there came a backlash. Because only a few years later, you might remember, a ban on abortion was inserted into the constitution in 1983. And of course that was only repealed last year. There was an attempt to legalise divorce in 1986, but that failed. Divorce, amazingly, remained illegal until a referendum approving it in 1995, which actually passed by the incredibly tight margin of 50.28 to 49.72, So literally divorce was legalized by a hair. Tim, it just blows my mind to think that not only do I remember that divorce referendum happening, but I was actually on the anti-divorce side at the time. I had the firm view that mommies and daddies should stay together.
Tim McInerney:
And I mean, like I mean, to make it more amazing, I totally understand that But yeah, of course, I remember, too. I was on the opposite only from a chance listen to the radio. I think the divorce referendum actually radicalized me, but that was the status quo. And, you know, I would’ve been about nine or ten at the time. And children were being told very much by the culture around them that, you know, it was almost their role to protect divorce being illegal. And I do remember, I just happened to be in the car one day listening to political broadcast on the radio and the anti-divorce faction’s argument, which I remember very well, was shamelessly directed at children like myself. You know, it was all mummy and daddy are going to abandon you if divorce is legalized and, of course, as a child that causes huge amounts of anxiety and you’re like, “oh, no.” But then I remember hearing the pro-legalization argument and it had something to do with a real case, I think, of a woman whose husband had left her 15 years earlier and moved to Australia or something, and that she was still legally tied to him basically forever.
Naomi O’Leary:
And, you know, he just absconded to the other side of the world.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, exactly and she had no recourse whatsoever. And for me, that was that. I mean, not only I was like, for the love of God, what is this law? Let the woman get a bloody divorce. But it really made me question like, hold on, what is this society that we’re arguing against this?
Naomi O’Leary:
That’s so interesting. I mean, it’s definitely, you know, one of those memories that just, it just makes me realize what a different Ireland that we grew up in. Like, can you believe like that the referendum was so tight as well. Like it really could have gone the other way in 1995. Like if you think back to like when we were kids that time, you know, very, very few people would have been divorced because of course it wasn’t legal, you would have had to do it in another country. And of course you did have people who were separated, but there was also kind of a taboo about that.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, there was absolutely a taboo. Yeah. I mean, like you say, this is one of those things that sometimes it comes up with people who are not from Ireland and it really makes their jaws drop when you tell them that, you know, this was so, such a short time ago. Laying out those milestones, you know, it brings into perspective the amazing leaps that Ireland has made in such a short time. And also, it shows why it was so profound that the equal marriage and abortion referendums were passed with resounding mandates. Just, you know, 20 years later, even same sex activity was only decriminalized in Ireland in 1993.
Naomi O’Leary:
This reality makes the women who did succeed in political life during those years even more fascinating. I spoke to Martina Fitzgerald who’s a former political correspondent at RTÉ, the national broadcaster, and she recently published a book called Madam Politician. For that book, Fitzgerald interviewed all surviving 17 of the 19 women ministers that Ireland has had, as well as the two President Marys to find out what life was like as an Irish woman politician and why there have been so few of them.
Martina Fitzgerald:
Well, in the past, for instance, you had Mary Robinson in the late 70s and early 80s. And when she was seeking election for the Dáil twice, she was told by male and female voters to go back and mind her children; she should be at home minding them. She had a baby on the campaign trail and she also had to look for a safehouses to breastfeed the baby, because at that time it was a different Ireland. If you look at Gemma Hussey in the 80s, she was told once you’re taking the job of a man and she was well able to combat that. So women had to deal with societal judgments on them and putting their names forward. There are very few women in the Dáil at present who have connections to a former officeholder, whether before there might have been a daughter. If you look at Máire Geoghegan-Quinn or Mary Coughlin, they were daughters. Or they could have been a widow. Eileen Desmond. But now you’re seeing a change, a huge dynamic that women that are coming forward for election are not connected to a previous officeholder, to a male officeholder. They’re deciding to get involved in politics, Mary Harney, for instance, a long time ago, but she was our first Tánaiste and the longest serving TD, female TD, the longest serving female minister. She’d no political connections. And more and more women are coming forward like that. And that’s a positive move. They’re not connected. But even those who are connected to previous officeholders, they will tell you that they face challenges because of their gender or in some cases where there were the daughters, because of their youth, that they were seen as very young to be taken up the mantle, so people face challenges across the board. But the kind of woman they’re coming true, the political landscape is changing. Now, not fast enough, there’s no doubt about that. The numbers are still so low. And in terms of female ministers, they’re appalling. And it is stark, but it is beginning to change. And I think people are confident that it’s going to change further. And we’ll see what these local elections, but the next general election to build on what happened with gender quotas in 2016.
Tim McInerney:
That’s just amazing. Like we’re predominantly speaking about the Republic here, by the way. But we shouldn’t neglect to mention that during those decades, a women had a hugely important role to play in the north, too. In our Derry episode, we spoke a bit about Bernadette Devlin Mikulski, who was this internationally recognized figure in the civil rights movement up there and continues to be very highly respected today. Of course, these days, both leaders of the major political parties in Northern Ireland are women. There’s Mary Lou McDonald of the all island Sinn Féin Party who spoke to us on the pod actually in season two. And Arlene Isabel of the DUP, the Democratic Unionists, but we’re still waiting on her interview. You can pencil us in whenever you have time, Arleen. Now, in 2019, there are a couple of things at play in this political situation. First of all, since the 2016 election, there have been gender quotas in place in general elections, at least 30 percent of the candidates for election that political parties nominate have to be women or they face sanctions to their state funding. The first election in which those gender quotas were in place in 2016 saw a five point increase in the women elected; it went right up from 16 percent to 21 percent. So, Naomi, where are we right now with that?
Naomi O’Leary:
Well, let’s hear from Hazel Chu. She’s running right now in the Dublin City Council elections for the Pembroke Ward for the Green Party. Hazel has quite an amazing backstory. Her parents were immigrants from Hong Kong. They came to Ireland in the 70s, I believe, and worked as kitchen staff and dishwashers with very little English and they worked their way up. And now her mother owns not one, not two, not three, but four restaurants. Chu herself was the first in her family to finish high school and attend university, and she was the first Irish-Chinese person ever to be called to the bar. So that’s the qualify as a barrister who are the lawyers that argue cases in court in the Irish system. I met her to discuss this issue of where we are with women in politics right now in her home in south central Dublin and she chatted to me about why people of a migrant background as well as women are underrepresented in Irish politics and how activism through referendums like Repeal the 8th can draw people into the political system. She learned on the job somewhat because she ran the campaign of her husband, who’s Green Party Councillor Patrick Costello, before taking the plunge into politics herself. Let’s hear from her.
Hazel Chu:
My mum is one of those very stoic Chinese people through and through and she’s the type of tiger mother that will push you to do everything and secretly be very proud of you, but will never tell you. So when I told her I was running and would be the first Chinese woman, if elected, to be in any political seat, there was a, kind of, a shy smile from her and I was like, “Oh, yes! Finally, I’d made it. My mother is proud of me.” But she didn’t say it, of course. But she did then go on to say, she asked the same question, why did it take so long for us to get here? Surely her thing was, well, surely there’s other people in local government or national that is from an immigrant background, and they say, well, there is Taoiseach, but at the same time I don’t think there’s a woman and I don’t think there’s one from Asian background. And I started looking into why then. I think it’s because there is inherently a barrier there. There’s a barrier for women. There’s a barrier for migrants. And in my case, it’s a bit different because my family migrated 45 years ago. So in a lot of ways, I am, well I claim myself to be Irish, this is my home so it was a little easier for me in that regards. I didn’t have a lot of barriers that migrants would have. But there are there are, those barriers are still there. They’re, definitely having to juggle different positions between home life and work life is here, having the know-how, I think, also of running is there as well, that I ended up knowing, how do I want to say it, I ended up kind of building that launch myself through running a campaign and through getting involved. And I think also getting involved in campaigns like marriage referendum and Repeal really do open your eyes to how the system works and you start to actually become more involved, not just towards a party, but towards a cause. And you feel like you have to work towards that. And I think a lot of people like that, especially from a migrant background, because they have so much to worry about already. They have to worry about well, where’s my next home going to be? Am I going to have a visa to stay here? Or if I am already a resident here –my mom’s main worry was about her kids — how would our kids grow up and fit in here? So there were different worries, the language barrier as well. So for migrants, it’s very hard because there is that issue of not having fully integrated, so never mind going into politics then because you’re not even integrated into communities. Women just like to get the job done. It’s funny, like I look at a lot of project managers at work and they are women. They’re very capable with women but they tend to kind of steer towards a project. So activism, I think, certain women see this issue as a project and they want to get it done. They want to get over the line. And then once it’s done, it’s great, it’s amazing. But I think they don’t then automatically see the next step, which is, well, why not everything else? Why not take that next step?
Naomi O’Leary:
I think it’s worth noting that alongside these big progressive leaps and bounds that Ireland has been taking, there’s also an angry kind of backlash in some quarters. And sometimes it’s tied up with kind of violently macho, sometimes sort of sport-centred ideology. And I’m thinking of in particular of the very divisive debate that happened around the Belfast rape trial last year. This was a topic that came up in my recent discussion with Aisling Cusack. She is Vice President of Equality and Citizenship with the Union of Students in Ireland, and even though she was a college student in these times of rapid change, she told me her experience was something at odds with what you might imagine. She was initially discouraged from running for election as it was assumed that as a woman, and an openly gay woman as well, she just wouldn’t have a chance of being elected. And she also talked of quite a hateful backlash against her with a targeted campaign by supporters of a rival male candidate to get her out of office. She explained to me some of the changes that have taken place in the last two years.
Aisling Cusack:
I first spoke to the then SU president about my consideration of running, and I didn’t exactly receive much support because I’m an openly, out gay woman. And the thoughts back then in Tallaght was that one a woman wouldn’t really get elected if they were running against a man, but particularly not someone who looks like me and fits that maybe stereotypical lesbian look. So that was when I first reached for support, I didn’t get it. But what was important, I still run, of course. And but it but it was not easy, to be honest.
Naomi O’Leary:
What year are we talking about here?
Aisling Cusack:
Four years ago.
Naomi O’Leary:
So it’s really not that long ago.
Aisling Cusack:
It’s not that long ago at all, but it would have been the year of marriage equality, but it was, also it depends what kind of circles you’re in, what society you’re in and kind of maybe how active those societies are in terms of LGBT rights and speaking out about them and whether they’re maybe the safest communities for people to be openly gay or openly trans or anything like that.
Naomi O’Leary:
Now, of course, you did go on to prove them wrong.
Aisling Cusack:
I did. Yeah. I ran. I ran a great campaign on. I got great support. But it was a shock. I think it was a shock. I don’t think we had an openly gay woman elected in Tallaght, as long as I can remember. I don’t know anyone that came before me that was gay, anyway. I definitely think we’re going through a huge moment of change. I think the youth are getting a lot more politicized and we’re finding our voice. And I think, I definitely think, that the youth have been the driving force, students in particular, in both the marriage equality referendum and the repeal referendum. But although that change has come on, I’d like to see it go forward and I’d like to see us keep continuing to campaign for the rights of migrants, to campaign to end direct provision. But I also would still be fearful that one fatigue will come in and because it’s tiring being involved in campaigns, particularly year after year, but also complacency. When people are whispering in your ear, equality has been achieved when the reality is it hasn’t been achieved at all for so many people. But even though when we’re going such huge steps forward, we can see that happening in other parts of the world where they go huge steps backwards and we see it in the United States of America, where they have a black president and then next comes in a misogynist and sexist President with Trump, so I still think we need to be wary and I think that’s why we need to keep driving forward, not lose the momentum and bring more people on our journey of activism. I think change is happening. I think the feminist movement is growing and there’s many male feminists, non-binary feminists, and I think if that feminist movement continues to grow and people keep giving space to others, that will be a success. Like, I know that if you’re gonna organize an event, for example, and have a panel, it’s important that maybe, you know, whether you should be on the panel or not. We spoke earlier in an Activism 101 workshop about the power of stepping up, but stepping back and how stepping up is sometimes actually stepping back and allowing that space to be filled by someone else who may not be as privileged as yourself.
Tim McInerney:
I think it’s a really important point there that Aisling made actually that, you know, people have to be wary that this kind of thing can go both ways. Like the history that we looked at is a really good example of progress. Maybe going forward and then coming back again, like we have in the past gone from a situation where women succeeded in winning fundamental rights against all odds in a system where they had practically no rights, to a situation where they were almost entirely absent from politics for decades.
Naomi O’Leary:
Absolutely. And I think people are aware of that. There is a feeling that there’s a kind of urgency that now is the time to take the bull by the horns because there was so much political energy behind that referendum and after it. There’s a feeling that this generation could achieve a lot as long as they stay focused and stick to their guns.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah. Right. Now, Naomi, I mean, you’ve been covering Irish politics for a long time, no? Like, do you have a sense that this is a turning point in this issue?
Naomi O’Leary:
That is certainly what you hear when you speak to people on the ground. So almost anyone you talk to who works in this area says that they do get a sense of a real energy for change in the air and they also note that new kinds of women are coming into politics. So not necessarily women from old political party families and other kind of well-worn roots like that, but people from very varied socio-economic backgrounds. And I also get a sense of a real confidence in the generation that have come through those referendums. You know, it was great practice for debate and, you know, asserting your belief and that kind of thing. And there’s also, there’s a new focus on the fact that politics isn’t just something that’s about men and done by men, you know, to address the concerns of men. And across the spectrum of activism in Ireland, women really are driving the conversation. It will be interesting to see whether that translates into breakthroughs in the coming elections in a similar way to what happened recently in the United States.
Tim McInerney:
It will be interesting, indeed. Well, yes. And on that note, we better leave it there. We’ve run out of time. Thanks so much for listening as ever, guys. And remember to like and share the pod if you like it so that others can find out about us.
Naomi O’Leary:
Of course, if you’re a Patreon supporter, check out our new videos where we answer your questions. And if you’re not a Patreon supporter, head over to Patreon.com/theirishpassport and get access to our full archive of Half Pints and behind the scenes material today.
Tim McInerney:
Thanks again to our sponsor BiddyMurphy.com, the online shop where you can get authentic Irish gifts made by small manufacturers and crafts people. Slán, everyone. The music you heard in this episode is L’etoile danse by Meydän from their album Havor.