Come Here To Me!

Saturday 9 April 2016

The Cabra 1916 Rising Committee and the East Wall History Group are co-organising a day of talks in City Hall with historians Brian Hanley, John Dorney, Hugo McGuinness, Stephen McCullagh and Maeve O’Leary. Entrance is free.

‘Rebellion : A Peoples History’ poster.

Saturday 23 April 2016
Republican Sinn Fein are hosting their main commemorative march. Assembling at 1.45pm at the Garden of Remembrence.

RSF poster

On Saturday at 3pm, the Seán Heuston 1916 Society are hosting a public meeting in the Teacher’s Club with Tommy McKearney (ex-hunger striker), Kieran Conway (author of Southside Provisional) and CHTM’s Donal Fallon.

Seán Heuston 1916 Society, Dublin public meeting

Sunday 24 April 2016

On the 100th anniversary of the Rising, the National Graves Association are hosting a Citizens Commemoration.
Assembling at the GPO from 12.30pm and then a march to Glasnevin Cemetery for the unveiling of a new monument at St. Paul’s Cemetery which marks the graves of a number of Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army killed during the Rising.

NGA poster

Assembling at Merrion Square at 2pm, the ‘Reclaim the Vision of 1916′ are organising a march and pageant.  Patrons of the organisation include Robert Ballagh, Jim Fitzpatrick, Betty Purcell and Tommy McKearney.

Reclaim the Vision of 1916 march.

Saturday 30th April

The Stoneybatter and Smithfield People’s History Project will unveil a plaque on North King Street to remember sixteen locals killed by the British Army. They are assembling at 2.30pm on Manor Street and will march the short distance to North King Street to unveil the plaque.

Saturday 14 May

On the 100th anniversary of the execution of James Connolly, Eirigi are holding their main centenary commemoration. Assembling at 2pm at the Wolfe Tone statue at Stephen’s Green and marching to the GPO.

Eirigi 2016 march

Benito Mussolini with a bandaged nose, after the 1926 shooting:

In April 1926, President W.T Cosgrave sent by telegram his best wishes to a recently wounded Benito Mussolini. Coming after an attempt on the life of the Fascist leader, Cosgrave wrote:

On behalf of the Government of the Irish Free State, I have the honour to congratulate Your Excellency, and the Italian people, on the providential escape of Your Excellency from the odious attempt on your person. Sincerely hoping that the wound is not serious, I send you my most earnest wishes for your speedy recover. The infamous attempt has caused much indignation here.

For Cosgrave, it was particularly important that the Free State send its best wishes, as it was an Irish assailant who made the attempt on Mussolini’s life. Ninety years ago this Thursday, Dublin born woman Violet Gibson fired a revolver shot in Rome that could have changed the course of human history. The story is well known today, and has been the subject of a book and an excellent RTE Radio documentary. This post is  primarily concerned only with how the event was reported at home.

The shooting of Mussolini in front of an adoring crowd was a dramatic event, and that drama was captured in contemporary press reports. The Irish Times reported that

The Italian Prime Minister, after opening the International Surgical Congress in the Capitol of Rome, was passing through a cheering crowd in the square to his motor care, when “an elderly woman in dark clothes” (afterwards identified as the Hon. Violet Gibson) dashed out and fired a small revolver almost point-blank in his face….

Signor Mussolini remained self-composed, reassured his entourage, and while pressing a handkerchief to the wound, gave orders that no reprisals were to be carried out against his assailant, who had been arrested. She was protected by police from the fury of the crowd, who tried to lynch her. She was carried to the police station by police and carabineers.

The shot Gibson fired grazed the nose of Mussolini, and while the press here condemned the “wicked and unprovoked attack”, in truth she did little damage to Mussolini beyond  his requiring a bandaged nose for a number of days. While a lucky escape, he did succeed in making political capital off the event, telling a gathering that he was prepared to “take his share of danger, and had no intention of shutting himself up, or of losing touch with the Fascist rank and file or the Italian people.” In the initial panic that followed the event, newspaper offices belonging to the political opposition were attacked in Rome and other cities, as many believed the assassination attempt to be the work of a communist agent in a country that was polarised by left-right division.The Popolo d’Italia went as far as to accuse Anti-Fascist sections of the foreign press of being in a large measure responsible for what Violet Gibson had done.

Violet Gibson after her arrest, April 1926.

Almost immediately, the Irish media were reporting that Gibson was a troubled individual, The Irish Times stating that the “the attempted assassination of Signor Mussolini by an Irishwoman…seems to be more tragic from the side of the assailant than that of the Italian Duce. The Hon. Violet Gibson is a lady of eccentric temperament.” Rather than being the communist hit-woman some had speculated her to be, Gibson emerged in the pages of the national media as the daughter of Edward Gibson, the 1^st Baron of Ashbourne. Her father had served as Lord Chancellor of Ireland, and she herself had been presented as a Debutante to Queen Victoria, and was raised in the comfortable surroundings of a Georgian Dublin square. Her brother, the present Lord Ashbourne at the time of the shooting, was described in the press as  “an ardent supporter of the Gaelic revival movement and a fluent speaker of the Irish language”, and he was in Dublin attending a Gaelic League conference when he heard the news from Rome.  It emerged that Violet had tried to kill herself in a convent in Rome a year before shooting Mussolini, claiming that “I tried to die for the glory of God.” A sister was asked to comment on why she had taken the drastic course of action she did:

Why then did she try to kill Mussolini? Was it that she considered him to be the enemy of Catholicism, or was it for another cause? I, who know her best, can offer no answer to that, for who shall analyse or anticipate the actions of one who is mentally afflicted?

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Fenian Street Plaque, photographed today.

At present, the city is undoubtedly witnessing with a very real housing crisis. It is by no means the first.

In 1963, over a period of only weeks, four lives were lost in Dublin when tenements came crashing down to the ground in Bolton Street and Fenian Street. On both sides of the Liffey, it became apparent many working class Dubliners were still living in accommodation that was unfit for human habitation. We’ve looked at this crisis on the blog before. It was fifty years on from the Church Street tenement collapses of 1913, an eerie reminder that for many, life had changed little. When a tenement collapsed on Fenian Street, two passing children were killed. In our 2013 post we noted:

There were scenes of anguish on the streets at the time, with the Irish Press writing that “Hundreds of Dubliners, many visibly crying, crowded the narrow streets leading to the scene of the collapse as firemen and Gardaí frantically shoveled bricks, rubble and mortar aside to reach the victims.” The two young girls, described by their loved ones as inseparable, were returning home from buying sweets at a corner shop. One man, Andrew Dent, jumped for his life from the collapsing tenement.

The plaque on a housing scheme on Fenian Street today is a simple reminder of this tragic event, naming young Linda Byrne and Marion Vardy, and noting that after this tragedy, “the project of clearing inner city tenements began in earnest. Within a decade the population of Westland Row Parish had fallen from 20,000 to less than 6,000.”This image from the Irish Photo Archive gives a sense of the destruction on the street following the tragedy.

I have often missed it passing by, though the plaque is relatively new, not appearing in this 2014 Google Street View image (the plaque is located more or less immediately behind the parking signage today):

Several newspapers today have picked up on the fact that the remembrance wall unveiled yesterday in Glasnevin Cemetery includes an incorrect Irish language spelling, with ‘Éirí Amach’ becoming ‘Eírí Amach’. You can watch RTE’s coverage of the unveiling of the wall here:

Glasnevin have been quick to state that this will be amended, but there’s another problem with the wall. While the incorrect inclusion of Volunteer Andrew Cunningham as a civilian casualty has gone largely unnoticed, it is a mistake that goes beyond a fada.

Andrew Cunningham, listed as a ‘civilian’.

Andrew Cunningham was from Pigeon House Road in Ringsend. A member of the Irish Volunteers from the time of the inception of the nationalist organisation, he was a silk weaver by trade. Cunningham was shot on the Ringsend Road on 1 May, which is after the surrender of P.H Pearse and the rebel forces, but sporadic shooting remained a problem in parts of Dublin. Very little is known of Cunningham with regards a biographical sketch; Ray Bateson notes in history Deansgrange Cemetery & the Easter Rising that his death left a widow, Kathleen, and two children living at 11 York Terrace.

He was only 26 years old at the time of his death, a reminder of the youth of many of the participants in the Easter Rising. His brother, Michael Patrick Cunningham (born in 1888) was also a silk weaver and an active member of the Irish Volunteers, and took part in the Rising too. My thanks to Damien McDonald for the comment below this post, which notes that “he fought with the Roe’s Distillery Garrison, which occupied a building on the other side of James’s Street from the South Dublin Union.”

Volunteer Andrew Cunningham, died 1 May 1916. (My thanks to Jason Walsh McLean)

Part of a list of those ‘killed in action, 1916’ contained within Bureau of Military History Witness Statement #1686

Cunningham’s service was referenced in an edition of the Catholic Bulletin published in 1916, and in the Wolfe Tone Annual on the thirtieth-anniversary of the rebellion. Buried in Deansgrange Cemetery, a simple grave marker of a cross decorated by Easter Lilies was replaced in 2013 by the National Graves Association.

NGA grave to Cunningham in Deansgrange Cemetery. (My thanks to Jason Walsh McLean)

The unveiling of the Glasnevin wall has proven hugely controversial in recent weeks.  Artist Robert Ballagh, part of the Reclaim 1916 group, has been a vocal opponent of the wall since plans of it were first announced some time ago. Some relatives have criticised the wall, while others support it.

Glasnevin will remain an important centre of commemoration in the years ahead and throughout the Decade of Centenaries. In 2015, there was some controversy at the centenary of the funeral of veteran Fenian O’Donovan Rossa, with some taking issue with the speech delivered by John Green of the Glasnevin Trust. To quote from the blog of journalist and broadcaster Jude Collins:

Glasnevin Trust Chairman John Green delivered an oration on Rossa. There was no mention of his IRB exploits or the involvement of the IRB preparation for the funeral. He made an assertion that Rossa, as he lay on his death bed, dementia riddled, supported Home Rule and John Redmond – in effect Constitutional Nationalism / politics. How wrong and historically inaccurate.

After the commemoration I spoke with Dr Shane Kenna, biographer of Rossa. He was appalled that the state hijacked the event to suggest Rossa died a constitutionalist. He didn’t. This allegation was proven fictitious as constitutional Nationalists tried to claim Rossa’s legacy, particularly at a time when their support for an unpopular war was doing them considerable damage. Rossa’s wife Mary Jane agreed the allegation was fabricated, yet the State commemoration decided to go with it! Why? Well, to call Rossa anything else would be dangerous ground for them, handing the political initiative to others.

Regardless, on the subject of Glasnevin, it is worth highlighting that the 24 April will see the unveiling of the recently restored 1916 Plot memorial in the St. Paul’s Section of Glasnevin Cemetery.

Frank Ryan, editor of IRA newspaper An Phoblacht, unveils the first memorial at the 1916 Plot at St. Paul’s section, Glasnevin. 1929.

A memorial was first unveiled at the site of the 1916 Plot in 1929 by the National Graves Association, with Frank Ryan delivering the oration.A new memorial replaced it in 1966 for the Golden Jubilee of the Rising, but in recent years it has weathered badly and required restoration.  Among the Volunteers and ICA dead in the 1916 plot is Charles D’Arcy, a fifteen year old member of the Irish Citizen Army who was shot in the vicinity of City Hall early in the rebellion.

We wish the NGA every success with the unveiling of the restored 1916 Plot, which is a fitting memorial to those buried there.

Restoration work underway on the 1916 Plot at St Paul’s, Glasnevin (Image Credit: National Graves Association)

Francis Sheehy Skeffington by Luke Fallon (on wood)

Francis Sheehy Skeffington (1878-1916), murdered on 26 April 1916, is numbered among the almost three hundred civilian casualties of the Easter Rising.  Yet, like the cartoonist Ernest Kavanagh who is also on that list, he had a rebel heart.

Having gone into Dublin to attempt to establish a Citizen Patrol to counter the problem of looting and arson, he was picked up on Portobello Bridge by Captain Bowen-Colthurst,  used as a human shield during raids in the district, and eventually shot without trial in Portobello Barracks. A plaque there remembers him today.

Among other things, Skeffy  (as he was known) was a vocal and prominent supporter of the Irish Women’s Franchise League and feminism in the broadest sense, editing the progressive newspaper The Irish Citizen.  A committed pacifist, he rejected the use of political violence and militarism, but he was also a  republican in his own right. In an open letter to Thomas MacDonagh of the Irish Volunteers, who was also a keen supporter of women’s rights, Skeffy made it clear that while opposing their militarist language, “I am personally in full sympathy with the fundamental objects of the Irish Volunteers”.  He had also supported the workers’ militia the Irish Citizen Army at the time of its foundation, in the hope it would be a purely defensive organisation.

On 16 May 1916, a Suffragist memorial meeting in London was held to remember Skeffy,  under the auspices of the United Suffragists. It was addressed by George Lansbury, the political and social campaigner who would later lead the Labour Party in the 1930s. There were cries of “shame!” in the hall at various times, and Lansbury outlined his great admiration for the murdered activist.  The table in the hall was “draped in the purple, white and orange of the Union”, and a memorial wreath at the top of the room remembered Skeffy and his work for change.

His widow, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, remained strongly committed to republican, feminist and socialist ideals throughout the rest of her life, while she also sought justice for her husbands murder, which was never forthcoming. Like Francis, she was a journalist, co-editing the IRA-aligned newspaper An Phoblacht for a period in the 1930s with Frank Ryan.

The inside of a published collection of work by both Francis and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington.

To mark the centenary of his passing, we link here to two interesting works, digitised  by the University of California Libraries.

Available to read in full here, these two works are deserving of attention. Firstly, we have ‘A Forgotten Small Nationality: Ireland and the War’, published by Francis in February 1916 in Century Magazine. In it, he pours scorn on the idea that the conflict raging across Europe was a war for the freedom of small nations, and also highlights the hypocrisy  and inconsistencies in government attitudes towards the UVF and the Irish Volunteers arming themselves. He condemns the parliamentary leader  John Redmond for having “the incredible audacity to commit the Irish people to the support of this war.”

Following on from it, ‘British Militarism as I  Have Known It’ is  a digest of a lecture Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington delivered in the United States following the Rising:

F. Sheehy-Skeffington was an anti-militarist, a fighting pacifist. A man gentle and kindly  even to his bitterest opponents, who always ranged himself on the side of the weak against the strong, whether the struggle was one  of class, sex or race domination. Together with his strong fighting spirit, he had a marvelous and unextinguishable good humour, a keen joy in life, a great faith in humanity and a hope in the progress towards good.

In the folklore of the Easter Rising, the Helga is said to have brought about the destruction of the city, raining incendiary shells down on the rebels from her fine vantage point on the River Liffey. In reality, there were no incendiary shells (they hadn’t been utilised anywhere by April 1916), and the Helga fired only forty shells during the course of the rebellion. Still, when coupled with the use of eighteen-pounder guns on the streets, she no doubt had an impact. The majority of her shells were fired at Liberty Hall, which unbeknownst to the Helga was empty.

By empty, I mean ‘almost empty’; the caretaker Peter Ennis was on the premises, and thankfully escaped with his life. Frank Robbins, ICA member and author of a memoir of the revolutionary period, remembered that “Ennis told me that when the first shell hit the building he thought that the whole place was collapsing around him.”

Much of the damage done to the centre of Dublin over Easter Week was the end product of intense fires, something that was well-detailed by Captain Thomas P. Purcell of the Dublin Fire Brigade.  His map, showing the destruction of the O’Connell Street area of the city, was included in a CHTM post on the looters of 1916 before. Looters burning buildings, such as Lawrence’s toy shop, were undoubtedly a factor in the carnage, but so too was the use of heavy artillery on the streets.

The Helga in happier times, photographed in 1908.

The Helga was not only utilised against the rebel forces in Dublin in 1916, she was herself a product of the city. Built on the docks of the Liffey for the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction in 1908, she was rushed into military service with the outbreak of the First World War.  As Lar Joye of the National Museum has detailed, “like much of the British government’s response to the 1916 Rising, the Helga was rushed into service to make up for the British Army’s lack of artillery.” The presence of the Helga on the River Liffey was commented on by many Volunteers in their statements to the Bureau of Military History, and no doubt the sound of her firing shells was terrifying. Domhnall Ó Buachalla remembered being engaged in a firefight from the Dublin Bread Company on O’Connell Street, one of the architectural losses of the Rising, and that:

I engaged some soldiers on the roof of Trinity College and, while I drew back from the loophole in the barricaded window from which firing, a bullet came through and grazed my hair. I could see Liberty Hall from the window and observed the effect of the shelling by the British war vessel – the Helga – and saw some of the walls crumble and fall.

It’s possible Ó Buachalla was referring to the building beside the trade union hall,  Northumberland House, which was destroyed by the Helga‘s shelling. Liberty Hall itself, despite damage to the buildings exterior, emerged from the Easter Rising relatively fortunately. The project to repair the building was overseen by Commandant James O’Neill of the Irish Citizen Army,  who worked in the construction industry.  By the first anniversary of the insurrection, repair work was still on-going on the premises. An excellent recent article from Michael Barry examines the impact, or lack thereof in places, of the shelling of Liberty Hall from the other side of the Loopline Bridge,  where the Helga was positioned in front of the Custom House.

This image from the National Library of Ireland shows the exterior damage to Liberty Hall, and the ruins of its neighbouring building, Northumberland House. (NLI)

Two years after the Rising, the Helga was used as a rescue ship  when the RMS Leinster was torpedoed by a German U-Boat. Peculiarly, given her history of service at Easter Week, she was taken over  by the new Free State post-independence as a patrol vessel, and renamed the Muirchú, becoming one of the first ships of a new Irish Navy. She was utilised against republican forces in Munster during the Civil War, when the tactic of landing men by sea provided the Free State with a way of circumventing republican ambush points.

In 1947, the Helga was making headlines again. It was reported that the Government were offering her for sale by tender, as:

…now that we have acquired a number of fast armed corvettes, presumably we can protect our fisheries more efficiently and the Helga, a comparatively slow and antiqued warship, is no longer as valuable to us as it was.

Sunday Independent, 16 March 1947.

The Hammond Lane Metal Company on Pearse Street purchased the ship, and the Irish Press reported in May 47 that she was to be taken to Dublin from Cork “to be broken up for scrap at the purchasers’ Ringsend ship-breaking yard.”

She never made it to Ringsend.  It was reported on 9 May that the ship sank “yesterday morning some eight miles south of the Coningbeg Lightship off the Wexford coast. The crew of ten and three passengers were taken off by a Welsh fishing trawler and later landed at Milford Haven in Wales.”

Newspaper coverage of her final voyage.

Just what went wrong on her final voyage? The Irish Press reported that “It is believed that the vibration of her engines, following a long lie-up at Hawlbowline Dockyard, Cork, until she was bought by the Hammond Lane Foundry recently for breaking up, dislodged her plates and she sprang a leak.” One of those on the ship was Brian Inglis, a journalist with The Irish Times. He would detail the panic in getting off the ship in the pages of the newspaper, remembering that the oars were “old and rotten and one was snapped in two”

Captain David Thompson, who had been on-board the Helga in 1916, was asked for comment by a newspaper when news of the ship sinking became known. He was reluctant to talk about its role in 1916, beyond saying that “it was a thing that should never have been done, especially to call on a local ship and crew.”

While her story began in Dublin in 1908, and she will forever be associated with the Rising in the capital, it ends off the coast of Wexford. She was, to quote one newspaper, spared the ignominy of the breaker’s yard in her old age.

Earlier today, I watched a very impressive Easter march through the city from Kilmainham Gaol to Arbour Hill, commemorating the executed leaders of the 1916 Rising.  It seems in spite of the onslaught of Geldof and Bruton (we’ve had enough of both, thanks), plenty of people still think the 1916 Rising is something we should take pride in, and I share their sentiment wholeheartedly. The turnout included many families and children, which was wonderful to see, and a variety of banners including trade unionists from the United States.

If there’s always a cloud willing to rain on the finest of parades, the honour in this case goes to the Ancient Order of Hibernians, who paraded through the streets behind the flag of the Vatican.  While the vast majority of the participants of the 1916 Rising were Catholic, and while this was undeniably a factor in shaping the political conscientious and ideology of many of the rebels, the Rising was not an exclusively Catholic affair. Indeed, from its early planning to the event itself, there were many Protestants in the ranks of the rebel forces. This article looks at a few of these Protestant rebels briefly, and also the reactionary role of the Hibernians in the Ireland of a century ago. Terence MacSweeney, the Lord Mayor of Cork who died on hunger strike during the War of Independence, denounced ‘Hibernianism’ as a divisive sectarian ideology, writing that “English politicians to serve the end of dividing Ireland have worked on religious feelings in the north with the aim of destroying Irish unity…Hibernianism created an unnatural atmosphere of sectarian rivalry in Ireland.”

One of the very last articles published in James Connolly’s newspaper, The Workers’ Republic, was entitled ‘Hands Across The Boyne’, and was penned by the Protestant Irish Citizen Army member Seamus McGowan. Writing an appeal to “an Irish working class Unionist”, he argued that men and women of all creeds experienced the same exploitation from their employers:

The one employer exploited us both, and robbed us of the profits of our labour. He may have been a Catholic or a Protestant, a Nationalist or a Unionist, yet it made little difference to either of us. We had to work for a living and very often on his terms….The only course then for us to adopt was to realise the fact that by the unchanging and unchangeable laws of God, of Nature and of Nations, we were brothers, children of the same mother, begotten in the same way.

McGowan joined the Irish Citizen Army in 1914, and as Jimmy Wren notes in his recent history of the GPO Garrison in 1916, “as sergeant and assistant quartermaster, he was in charge of bomb making in Liberty Hall, where large quantities of homemade bombs were made and stored.” McGowan remained a committed ICA man in the years that followed. He was involved in a very daring raid of the American transport vessel the Defiance in 1918. As recounted in R.M Fox’s history of the ICA:

Dublin dockers at work loading up the boat wondered at the extraordinary precautions taken. By each gangway was an armed guard of United States Marines. Other guards were placed in position by the deck and the hold. No man could get off the ship without a permit, and he had to run the gauntlet of the guards. The dockers looked round and discovered the hold contained piled up cases of revolvers, rifles and ammunition that were being shipped from England back to America. The Citizen Army was instantly on the alert. Seamus McGowan, the arms expert, was smuggled in as a docker, to arrange about getting some of this stuff ashore.

McGowan later took part in the occupation of Findlater’s Stores during the Civil War, fighting on the Republican side alongside other ICA comrades (it should be noted that a significant number of ICA men also joined the Army of the new Free State).He was later central to unsuccessful attempts to revitalise the Citizen Army in the 1930s.

McGowan is buried in the Protestant cemetery in Drumcondra, where his grave is decorated with the Starry Plough, the symbol of his beloved Citizen Army:

The grave of Seamus McGowan, thanks to http://www.findagrave.com.

The Norgrove Family, also active within the ranks of the ICA,  were quite remarkable owing to their contribution to the rebellion in terms of numbers; five members of this one family participated in the rebellion. The Norgrove family made headlines in 2011 when ammunition was discovered under the floorboards of 15 Strandville Avenue,off the North Strand.

Annie and Emily Norgrove were part of the City Hall Garrison in the early stages of the insurrection, while there were also members of the family at the General Post Office. Fred Norgrove, a young member of the Citizen Army Boy Scouts, was sent home from the GPO by James Connolly on account of his age, though his father Alfred wasn’t quite as fortunate, and was later interned in Frongoch for his activities. Fred Norgrove later served as Church of Ireland warden in St. Canice’s Parish, Finglas and St. Matthew’s of Irishtown. Like with Seamus McGowan, several members of the Norgrove family took an active role in the fighting of the Civil War in Dublin, and remained committed to the Citizen Army.

Norgrove family census from 15 Strandville Avenue, 1911 Census (National Archives of Ireland)

The centenary of the Rising has witnessed an enormous emerging field of studies on the role of women in the rebellion, and much of the popular commemorative events and media output has focused on this aspect of the Rising. One figure who is receiving long-overdue recognition is Kathleen Lynn,  Chief Medical Officer to the Citizen Army. Born in Cong, Mayo in 1874, Lynn was the daughter of a Church of Ireland clergymen.

In the recent study We Were There: 77 Women of the Easter Rising, Lynn’s impressive medical career is detailed; she was refused a post at the Adelaide Hospital on account of her gender,but did become the first female resident of Dublin’s Royal Victoria Eye and Ear Hospital in 1910.An active suffrage campaigner, she was also resolute in her nationalism and her feminism. It was through her involvement in radical nationalist circles that she met her partner, Madeline ffrench-Mullen, remembering that:

After the Citizen Army was founded in 1913, I attended Liberty Hall and gave lectures in first aid and I also lectured to Cumann na mBan in 6 Harcourt St after its establishment. It was there I met Ms ffrench-Mullen, who became my closest friend. She lived with me for 30 years – until her death. She and I, with the help of others – mostly republicans – founded St Ultan’s Hospital – Teach Ultain – for infants in 1919.

Kathleen Lynn and Madeline ffrench-Mullen, beside Countess Markievicz in Liberty Hall, 1917 (National Library of Ireland)

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