Unlikely Rebels

by Anne Clare

  After that they stood three deep and sang Mary MacSwiney’s favourite songs, fastening the doors of the cells as they waited in darkness, only one lit window illuminating the huge place. At 10 p.m. their leaders were called to Mr O’Neill, Governor of the NDU. Much softer in his approach than the wife-beating Begley, he promised that if eighty-one would go quietly to the NDU, no others would be sent away before Miss MacSwiney and that if they failed to cooperate, their privileges would be withdrawn. They had ten minutes to decide. Their answer was no.

  Next, a worried matron, carrying a lighted taper, came to tell them that it was not soldiers but the Criminal Investigation Division and military police who would eject them, both of whose members she described as ‘horrible men’. She was wasting her well-intentioned intervention, but she was right about the men, whose violent rush up the stairs brought down the first two girls, crushed and bruised. Dorothy Macardle’s words describe what followed:

  Our Commandant, Mrs Gordon, was the next to be attacked. It was hard not to go to her rescue. She clung to the iron bars, the men beat her hands with their clenched fists again and again; that failed to make her loose her hold, and they struck her twice in the chest; then one took her head and beat it against the iron bars. I think she was unconscious after that; I saw her dragged by the soldiers down the stairs, all across the compound and out at the gate.

  The men seemed skilled; they had many methods. Some twisted the girls’ arms, some bent back their thumbs; one who seized Iseult Stuart kicked her on the stairs with his knee. Brigid O’Mullane, Sheila Hartnett, Roisín Ryan and Melina Phelan were kicked by a Criminal Investigation Department man who used his feet. Florence MacDermott was disabled by a blow on the ankle with a revolver; Annie McKeown, one of the smallest and youngest, was pulled downstairs and kicked, perhaps accidentally, on the head. One girl had her finger bitten. Sheila Bowen fell with a heart attack. Lily Dunn and May O’Toole, who have been very ill, fainted; they do not know where they were struck. There was one man with a blackened face. When my own turn came, after I had been dragged from the railings, a great hand closed on my face, blinding and stifling me, and thrust me back down to the ground among trampling feet. I heard someone who saw it scream and wondered how Miss MacSwiney would bear the noise. After that I remember being carried by two or three men and flung down in the surgery to be searched. Mrs Wilson and Mrs Gordon were there, their faces bleeding. One of the women searchers was screaming at them like a drunkard in Camden Street on a Saturday night; she struck Mrs Gordon in the face. In spite of a few violent efforts to pinion us they did not persist in searching us. They had had their lesson in Mountjoy. They contented themselves with removing watches, fountain pens and brooches, kicking Peg Flanagan and beating Kathleen O’Carroll on the head with her shoe.

  I stood in the passage then, waiting for the girls to be flung out, one by one. None were frightened or overcome, but many were half-fainting. Lena O’Doherty had been struck on the mouth; one man had thrust a finger down Moira Broderick’s throat. Many of the men were smoking all the time. Some soldiers who were on guard there looked wretched; the wardresses were bringing us cups of water; they were crying. The prison doctor seemed amused at the spectacle until the women were finally thrown into the waiting lorry, the whole procedure having taken five hours.[14]

  The Mrs Wilson whose face was bleeding was, of course, Kate, the eldest Gifford daughter.

  It was an ugly business, but just as ugly, in a different sense, was the observation of Kevin O’Higgins. He was Minister for Home Affairs at the time and referred contemptuously to the Kilmainham Gaol disturbances as being caused by ‘hysterical young women who ought to be playing five-fingered exercises or helping their mothers with the brasses’. He conveniently forgot the huge input of the Easter Week women, from Countess Markievicz’s command at the Royal College of Surgeons to the lone figure of Nurse O’Farrell carrying her improvised white flag of surrender through streets where she could have met her end at any moment. O’Higgins is said to have been the last minister to sign the execution order for the four republicans shot in Mountjoy in 1922, perhaps reluctantly because one of them, Rory O’Connor, had been best man at his wedding.

  O’Higgins himself did not die immediately when shot by republicans after the Civil War had ended, and Roger Gannon, son of Bill Gannon, one of the three assassins of O’Higgins in 1927, approached his daughter Una O’Higgins O’Malley with an account of the shooting given to him by his father during his last illness.[15]The story was that O’Higgins had told his attackers that he understood why they had shot him, that he forgave them, but that this had to be the last killing.

  Doubts have been expressed about the authenticity of this account, but Roger Gannon’s disclosure emerged as a result of a commemorative mass, publicly announced for ‘Kevin O’Higgins, Tim Coughlan, Archie Doyle and Bill Gannon’. Its bonding of the assassinated and the assassins touched a chord and prompted Roger Gannon to pass on his story, and the account indicates magnanimity in O’Higgins, despite the four executions and despite his contemptuous dismissal of the role of republican women in the War of Independence.

  The jailed women at Kilmainham, including Isabella’s imprisoned daughters, Kate and Grace, were all duly bundled into the NDU from the lorries that had taken them from Kilmainham Gaol. Documents held there indicate a difference made between the sisters. The records are as follows:

  Philipsburgh Ave. Fairview – PLUNKETT, MRS GRACE; date of arrival 6/2/23. Also brought to NDU. Release date 13/8/23.

  Prisoner number 3101.

  Philipsburgh Ave. Fairview – WILSON, MRS CATHERINE; date of arrival 6/2/23. Also brought to NDU. Release date 28/9/23.

  Released from NDU, number 3102.[16]

  These dates show that Grace was imprisoned for almost seven months. There is no indication why Kate was detained in prison for almost seven weeks longer than Grace, who, in fact, on being told of her forthcoming release, informed the authorities that she refused to go without her sister. They told her that she could either go quietly or be removed by force. No doubt Kate counselled her to go. Perhaps Grace’s presence was an embarrassment to the Free State, her being the widow of a signatory of the Proclamation. Whatever the reason, her sister’s detention order makes strange reading:

  This most gracious lady a danger to public safety? One wonders from where did this Kate emerge. The faces of all who knew her lit up at the mention of her name: soft-voiced gentleness, kindness and academic ability were the images conveyed – the paragon of the Gifford family, one of the Giffords whom Countess Plunkett and her daughter Geraldine found charming, the chosen executrix for both her parents’ wills, the respected language teacher, the mother figure for her junior siblings, the lady who was to leave behind her a legacy of loving memories – this Kate Gifford-Wilson was considered by the Free State to be a danger to public safety. What on earth did her mother think of her solid Kate being described as a danger to the state? Of the six unlikely rebels whom Isabella had bred and nurtured, this lady was surely the most unlikely to be such a danger.

  When Kate was released from the NDU on 28 September 1923, the Civil War was already over. Liam Lynch was dead, and Frank Aiken, the new Chief of Staff of the IRA, declared a ceasefire for republicans. The Irish Free State was tottering along awkwardly but determinedly, a nation taking its first steps of partial freedom since the twelfth century.

  Notes

  [1] R. M. Fox, Rebel Irishwomen, Dublin: Talbot Press, 1935, pp. 75–89.

  [2] In conversation with Maeve Donnelly in the early 1990s; An Cosantóir, August 1945, vol. V, no. 10, p. 534.

  [3] In conversation with Maeve Donnelly in the early 1990s.

  [4]Ibid.

  [5] ‘The White Flag of the Republic’, The Republic, March 1922. Grace published a similar argument in the Irish Independent.

  [6] T. Ryle Dwyer, Michael Collins and the Treaty: His Differences with De Valera, Cork: Mercier Press, 1981.

  [7] Tom Barry, Guerilla Day
s in Ireland, Dublin: Anvil Books, 1981, pp. 168–169.

  [8] In conversation with Maeve Donnelly in the early 1990s.

  [9] Grace has used a different spelling for Ciarán’s name. ‘Gus’ was the pet name for Gabrielle, whose daughter, Aoife, preserved the sketch in Australia.

  [10] NGDPs.

  [11] Material supplied by Niamh O’Sullivan, Archivist, Kilmainham Gaol, where many of the autographs are held.

  [12] This extract is taken from Dorothy Macardle, The Kilmainham Tortures, courtesy of Kilmainham Gaol Archives. There is also a script in the National Library of Ireland headed ‘Farewell to Kilmainham’ by Dorothy Macardle which is almost the same but there are very slight, insignificant word differences in the last few lines of these accounts. The author is grateful to the National Library for providing her with a copy of this account.

  [13]Ibid.

  [14]Ibid.

  [15] National Archives, ref. no. NA 999/951, pp. 110–13.

  [16] Courtesy of Niamh O’Sullivan, Archivist, Kilmainham Gaol.

  24 - Picking Up the Pieces

  After the Easter Week Rising, thousands of people had been affected deeply in their daily lives, both materially and psychologically. After the Civil War, however, the situation was immeasurably worse. The heroism and dedication of the executed in 1916 had been moral weapons against the foe, but many of the events of the Civil War were causes of shame.

  It was a long time since Isabella’s dolman-wearing callers had visited Temple Villas to exchange gossipy titbits about their sons fighting in far-flung corners of the globe for their empire. What would Isabella have had to offer after the Civil War, apart from tea and cakes? Two sons-in-law executed by His Majesty’s government; two daughters married in Catholic churches; two in registry offices in America; one even married in Kilmainham Gaol; another daughter jailed after fighting with the working classes in the Royal College of Surgeons; two daughters jailed during the Civil War, the elder, Kate, held for being a menace to public safety. Fortunately, perhaps, Isabella’s hospitality had been curtailed because of Frederick’s illness, and, after his death, the house being obviously too big for her, she had arranged for its sale, with Kate’s help, for £900 and purchased a house at Lower Beechwood Avenue costing less than half that amount. She later moved to Cambridge Road, Rathmines.

  Grace did not stay with her mother again but elected, instead, to live in Mary Kelly’s house on the North Circular Road until Kate’s release. The sisters then resumed living together until Grace felt able to rent a place of her own. Likewise, when ‘John’ and Finian had returned from America in 1922, it was to Kate’s home they had gone. In fact, though Grace and Nellie lived in straitened circumstances, ‘John’ seemed to be in the worst financial plight. There was some correspondence with her husband, Arpad, but there is no suggestion that he ever helped her financially after they separated. ‘John’ plunged straight away into her republican journalism and in the 1920s wrote for An Phoblacht with the mostly controlled passion of good journalism. In 1927, in an article entitled ‘The Dark Days’, she examined how the events of 1916 had moulded Irish public opinion (including her own), and she eulogised the leaders, especially Clarke, Pearse and MacDonagh.[1] In a continuing series of articles, one in the 24 September issue of An Phoblacht of that same year, ‘John’ gloried in the fact that Ireland had shown India the way to oppose England’s enlisting campaigns. In yet another 1927 issue she told the story of Liam Mellows in America. In the 1930s, ardour undimmed, she covered such topics as the United Irishmen, Irish revolutionaries who served in the British army and Wolfe Tone’s rejection of sectarianism. In 1932, she wrote a gleeful article on how the WPDL had managed to get around all the proclamations against it and how they had still held their meetings in the ruins of Sackville Street, or wherever they could. In 1934, she published an article on ‘Tone and the Ascendancy’ which had been rejected by The Irish Press. A later article in An Phoblacht considered the origin of the phrase ‘the wearing of the green’, and elsewhere she wrote of Frongoch. For all her work with the WPDL, ‘John’, unlike her sisters, never spent a day in jail.

  Although old animosities die hard, and although none of Isabella’s daughters went to live with her, the advent of grandchildren in such a situation brings a healing grace. Finian, Maeve, Donagh and Barbara were brought to meet their grandmother, and Claude’s son, Eric, stayed with her for a while in Cambridge Road. Maeve never heard a cross word from her gran, but nevertheless got an impression of She Who Must Be Obeyed.[2]

  For all that, Isabella’s will, set down after Frederick’s death, makes poignant reading. She died on 15 January 1932.[3] Kate and Claude were executors, and Kate and Ada beneficiaries, as well as her sons, Claude, Liebert and Edward Cecil, the last two of whom had lost contact with the family. Gabriel is excluded because, Isabella specifically states, he had got his inheritance on going to America. Although her maid is remembered, as well as a couple of charities, there is the notable exclusion of ‘John’, Grace and Nellie. Even more revealing, perhaps, is the residual legatee, Liebert. Perhaps because he seems to have been less academic than his brothers, he had quickly dropped his solicitor’s apprenticeship for a hoped-for enrolment in the Merchant Navy. A mother often especially reaches out to the less talented of her children, and, apart from her financial stipulations, Isabella concluded her will by a clause that might be called wishful thinking: ‘If my son, Liebert, should return before I die I should wish him to mind my little dog as long as she lives. If my said son Liebert should not return before I die, I should wish my said dog to be put out of life by chloroform.’[4]

  When he was President of Ireland, Seán T. Ó Ceallaigh wrote to Máire Comerford explaining how he had become involved in arrangements for the convening of the First Dáil.[5]It had been decided to invite all elected representatives of whatever party to attend, and he was appointed chairman of the subcommittee put in charge of arrangements. That subcommittee included J. J. Walsh, TD, a lively GAA Corkman, who shared the dream of both Michael Davitt and Éamon de Valera of reviving the old Tailteann Games of ancient Ireland, which had first taken place in 632 bc and which, they all felt, would be an effective badge of nationhood. Davitt’s dream included not only sports events but also literary, artistic and industrial contributions. De Valera materialised the dream by voting an astonishing £10,000 in the First Dáil towards its realisation. Twice during the Civil War the games were postponed, but Walsh persevered and in 1924 they attracted, as they were meant to, people of Irish birth and descent from all over the world, as well as other Celtic peoples. He appointed Kate Gifford-Wilson as General Secretary because he had known her as Registrar of the First Dáil Loan, and her degree in languages and experience abroad in teaching made her an ideal appointee. The Handbook and Syllabus of the Games, published by Kenny’s Advertising Agency, is proof of her excellence. Competitors came from Australia, New Zealand, America, Canada, South Africa and Europe. Between 2 and 18 August, twenty-one sporting events, ranging from archery to yachting, had to be accommodated and experts appointed to adjudicate. There were also five cultural categories: arts and crafts, dancing, literature, music and national costume. Under these sections some of the prizewinners were John S. Keating, RHA; Letitia M. Hamilton, RHA; Harry Clarke (the stained-glass maestro) and Evelyn Gleeson, tapestry weaver.[6]

  Aonach Tailteann, as it was to be officially called, became an acclaimed success in every possible way – except financially. The efficiency of its organisation, relying to a great extent on the calibre of its general secretary, Kate Gifford-Wilson, was universally acknowledged. The games were held again in 1928 and 1932 but, despite much goodwill and genuine efforts to keep them going, they were discontinued.

  During those three resurrected years it was obvious that, with the four-year gaps between, the staff would not be fully occupied. However, Walsh had another job for Kate. His portfolios of Postmaster General and Minister for Posts and Telegraphs put him in charge of initiating the proposed broadcasti
ng service for the Irish Free State, and, though he was distinctly Gaelic-minded in his approach to what the cultural mode of the proposed station should be, he was not above conferring with Britain on its experiences of this new communications medium. During the preliminary preparations Kate was invaluable because she was capable of coping with both the work of assistant director and woman’s organiser, although she was paid only as a temporary clerk.

  The appointed director was Seamus Clandillon, a civil servant who hired Kate (no doubt on Walsh’s recommendation) and also his own daughter, both without authorisation from the Department of Finance. He was told that the appointments would not be ratified. The power of both Walsh, ‘Minister for Broadcasting’, and its first director, Clandillon, were thus negated, and Clandillon’s daughter and Kate were discharged at the behest of Ernest Blythe, Minister for Finance. Kate applied formally for the post of woman’s organiser but was unsuccessful.[7]