It’s not every day that the events of almost a century ago make the front page of The Irish Times, but today a participant in the Easter Rising had the honour. Margaret Skinnider, an Irish Citizen Army participant in the rebellion, featured in the paper today as she was denied a pension in the years following the rebellion, on the basis that as a woman she could not qualify as a ‘soldier’, as the term was “applicable to soldiers as generally understood in the masculine sense”. The pension applications of participants in the revolutionary period have only just been released online, and are truly a treasure trove of information you can expect to hear a lot more about here over the coming months!
Image of Margaret Skinnider taken from ‘Doing My Bit For Ireland’ (New York,1917)
Skinnider led a long and colourful life, living until the early 1970s. Born in Coatbridge in Scotland, she is today buried on Irish soil, within the republican plot of Glasnevin. In 1917 she published her memories of the Easter Rising in one of the earliest publications to deal with the uprising, entitled Doing My Bit For Ireland. This book is out of print for many years now, but has been digitised, and given that Skinnider is in the news today I thought the link worth posting here. You can read Skinnider’s account of the rebellion here.
‘Doing My Bit For Ireland’, published in New York, 1917.
In her introduction, written in the United States, she noted:
When the revolt of a people that feels itself oppressed is successful, it is written down in history as a “revolution” as in this country in 1776. When it fails, it is called an “insurrection” as in Ireland in 1916. Those who conquer usually write the history of the conquest. For that reason the story of the “Dublin Insurrection” may become legendary in Ireland, where it passes from mouth to mouth, and may remain quite unknown throughout the rest of the world, unless those of us who were in it and yet escaped execution, imprisonment, or deportation, write truthfully of our personal part in the rising of Easter week.
Perhaps Skinnider’s memoirs, as a historical source of merit, are due a modern reprint.
Click on the book for more.
You can download Doing My Bit for Ireland from archive.org, if you’d like to read more.
Does anyone happen to know the source of the image of Margaret Skinnider dressed as a boy from her autobiography? Was it from her personal collection, and if so, where is that collection located now? Does it belong to any museums or archives, or is it with her surviving family?