In September 1922, amid the Irish Civil War, Sinn Féin leader Éamon de Valera bared his soul to his confidante, the Cork Sinn Féin TD Mary MacSwiney.
He told her he was struggling because “Reason rather than faith has been my master ... I have felt for some time that this doctrine of mine ill fitted me to be leader of the republican party”. MacSwiney retorted that “Faith and Unreason are not synonymous terms. I plead guilty to the former. I resent the latter.” She praised those who understood “the Spiritual and psychological aspects of the struggle ... men who BELIEVED in the Republic ... Theirs was the Faith that moves mountains.”
MacSwiney was a titan of that school of faith and this book does justice to the depth of her belief. As a TD, suffragette, educator and tireless republican activist, she was a lot more than the sister of Terence MacSwiney, the Lord Mayor of Cork who died in October 1920 after a 74-day hunger strike in Brixton prison, though Lane underlines the centrality of that event to Mary’s life, career and ultimate disillusionment with her peers.
Her uncompromising stance led to her being caricatured as unhinged by her erstwhile comrades. This was unsurprising given the prevailing cultural ethos and fear of loud, assertive and politically charged women; what this book provides, in admirable detail, is a layered overview of what drove her and the perception of her.
The book draws on a wealth of valuable source material, including MacSwiney’s collection of papers in the UCD archives. Born in London in 1872 to an English mother, a teacher, and a Cork father, Mary was the eldest of seven children. The family returned to Cork in 1879 where her father started a tobacco business that failed. Education for members of this tight-knit family was a priority (Mary received a BA from UCC in 1912) as was cultural nationalism and for Mary, the Munster Women’s Franchise League. She became a teacher in St Angela’s Ursuline College but was dismissed from that position in April 1916 due to her central position in Cork’s Cumann na mBan (CnB).
Terence was one of the founders of the Cork branch of the Irish Volunteers, but Cork’s failure to rise in 1916 in tandem with Dublin was to remain a sore point and some of Mary’s snobberies were reflected in her comment to Cork CnB members that it was only “the scum of Dublin, Larkin’s crowd” who fought, an early indication of her penchant for invective.
Nonetheless, she threw herself into prisoner welfare work and opened her own school, St Ita’s in Cork, to “eradicate the slave mind from Ireland”. While deeply committed to Catholicism, she was prepared to challenge religious authority. Her fractiousness was also reflected in post-1916 splits in CnB, some of whose members in Cork saw her as overbearing, one contemporary recalling her being “very annoyed at her wishes being questioned”.
As a republican activist during that period, she was heavily influenced by Terence and it was his hunger strike during the War of Independence that led to the life she had lived until then being “viscerally sundered”, a trauma illuminated in powerful detail. Lane draws on the memoirs of Mary’s sister and fellow activist Annie, who recalled of Brixton prison, “none of us will ever forget the horror of that place”.
This was political and personal for Mary and in London, she displayed the vigorous energy, resilience, talent for propaganda and rhetoric and disregard for barriers that were the hallmark of her career. She harried officialdom - prison governors, politicians, medical officers and churchmen - and good use is made of British Home Office files to document Terence’s demise (in his coffin his body appeared “like that of a child of twelve”) and capture her wrath.
If he were let die, Mary told the home secretary, “we shall hold you personally responsible for murder”. One medical officer found her to be “troublesome ... unpleasant and disorderly.” She was successful in ensuring Terence’s hunger strike “reached the world” and this was not unrelated to the shame still felt about Cork’s passivity in 1916. Her profile and volubility stood in contrast to Terence’s wife Muriel, who struggled with her mental health, and who Mary believed “had not the inner stoicism of the MacSwineys”.
With the death of Terence, unwillingness to compromise and determination to honour and vindicate his sacrifice defined Mary to an overwhelming degree and the emotional weight of the loss was channelled into spreading the republican gospel. She criss-crossed the United States from December 1920 to August 1921, where she had a powerful impact and honed her speaking skills, taking precedence over Muriel, who also travelled. There is fascinating detail here on the scale of this tour of 58 cities involving more than 300 meetings, fundraising, confronting infighting among Irish-American groups and the struggle to get access to senior American politicians (“Americans like to be flattered and I don’t flatter them,” she wrote). She was also elected a Sinn Féin TD in her absence.
One of the values of this book is the extensive documenting of her relationship with de Valera; their letters reveal an intimacy but also her frustration at her lack of involvement in the moves towards a ceasefire and negotiation. She told him in July 1921 she was “longing for a peep at the inside negotiations”, but the Anglo-Irish Treaty, negotiated without de Valera, shattered, in her words, “the cause for which Brixton was endured”.
Mary became the most vociferous opponent of the Treaty. She spoke for more than 2½ hours against it during the Dáil debates. Her speech was, as Lane notes, fanatical; if all the Irish were exterminated, she declared, “the blades of grass dyed with their blood, will rise, like the dragons’ teeth of old, into armed men”. Her words rested on the assertion that Terence’s deathbed scene was “the like of which has never been known in the world before”. She did not care if her constituents were pro-Treaty because she would only adhere to, as she told CnB members, “the sacred question of principle”. This was also a period that marked a ferocious reaction to her from men such as Dublin TD Batt O’Connor, who decried women “frothing to the mouth like angry cats”.
For Mary, the Civil War was about reclaiming “the worth and meaning of her brother’s sacrifice”; she was arrested four times and endured two gruelling hunger strikes - the first lasted 24 days - during which she lambasted the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin for the refusal to allow her receive communion. She compared herself to Joan of Arc, and in parallel, spent much time pleading with de Valera to “stand firm” and “not break our hearts”.
Her criticisms of Treaty supporters, and indeed its opponents, whom she regarded as not firm enough, became increasingly severe. WT Cosgrave’s assertion that her “ambition is, I believe, to be Queen of Ireland” is seen by Lane as a sexist slur, but it was hardly an unreasonable claim given Mary’s language and dismissal of democracy (“we shall win out, even if only a few are faithful”). She was well able to dish out the insults herself, declaring proudly she was “the most extreme of the extreme”.
This is an intense, revealing, well-researched and often compelling biography. Lane, author of previous biographies of Dorothy Macardle and Rosamond Jacob, has made a profound contribution to our understanding of the republican women of that generation and their intimate and public lives.
This book is, however, somewhat undermined by poor editing, repetition and unnecessary didactic interventions about gender and trauma themes. Readers are well able to see, in the copious contemporary correspondence and commentary the author uncovers, the forces that were at work in relation to how politicised, campaigning women were viewed. They do not need it constantly pointed out to them; likewise, the narrative of Terence’s agonising death is gripping and tragic enough without the need for heavy-handed authorial interjections to remind us how it traumatised his family; again, that is painfully apparent in the quoted accounts and their own words.
Mary’s mindset led to increasing resentment against her, including from many women; Macardle criticised her “sense of our moral inferiority”. Loyal to the second Dáil elected in 1921, and anti-Treaty Sinn Féin, she lost her Dáil seat in 1927. There was an inevitable parting of the ways with de Valera, and eventual resignation from senior positions in both CnB and Sinn Féin for their members’ perceived compromises in tolerating certain dealings with the Free State she regarded as illegitimate.
She was still desperately pleading with de Valera in 1936, when he was ensconced in power with the Fianna Fáil party she scorned, to “come back to the Republic before it was too late”. But the response from de Valera was a refusal to engage in a “futile controversy on matters of past history”. Mary never relented; her constant focus on that history made her increasingly politically marginalised, but this book makes us understand why she would not compromise.
- Diarmaid Ferriter is Professor of Modern Irish History at UCD. His most recent book is The Revelation of Ireland 1995-2020 (Profile Books).
Further reading
Margaret Ward’s groundbreaking Unmanageable Revolutionaries: Women and Irish Nationalism (Pluto, 1983), quotes the memorable summing up by Sheila Humphreys of the bleak new Free State dawn for women republican activists: “We felt the Irish public had forgotten us. The tinted trappings of our fight were hanging like rags about us.”
The long-neglected memoir of another anti-Treaty republican, Máire Comerford’s On Dangerous Ground (Lilliput, 2021) was edited by Hilary Dully to preserve the “authenticity of Máire’s voice in the telling of her story”. At the outset of the Civil War Máire wrote, “I was in a place where there was no need for argument, and among people whose unanimity was like a distilled spirit of highest concentration.”
Síobhra Aiken’s Spiritual Wounds (Irish Academic Press, 2022) is also strong on trauma and argues strongly that “The many voices that broke the silence can no longer be overlooked. Civil wars engender vibrant bodies of competing discourses.”
