Diarmaid Ferriter: Patricia Hoey was the first of many Women of Honour

Patricia Hoey was a woman of honour in the defence forces, a century before they were labelled that way. A native of Dublin, she was a journalist, business administrator and nationalist in the early 20th century, and also became a committed suffragette, believing the causes of Irish home rule and women’s suffrage were two sides of the same coin. She was part of a delegation that met John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, in 1911, failing to secure his support for a suffrage bill in the House of Commons; another delegation she joined was similarly rebuffed by British prime minister Herbert Asquith.

Radicalised by such betrayals, Hoey was involved in the 1916 Rising as a member of Cumann na mBan, where she fought in the Imperial Hotel on Sackville Street. Active in Sinn Féin during its post-1916 surge, she worked as a confidential secretary for the party’s founder, Arthur Griffith, and endured house raids and imprisonment in Mountjoy. She was also involved in the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations as an adviser on the Ulster question. In favour of the Treaty, Hoey enlisted in the National Army as assistant military censor under Piaras Béaslaí's staff.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, when seeking a military service pension based on her army service, Hoey had no shortage of glowing references. As historian Peter Hart was later to record, revolutionary republicanism “is likely the most female-dependent major movement in modern Irish history” and some men were willing to acknowledge that. Béaslaí, writing in 1927, suggested that during the Civil War, Hoey “performed exactly the same duties as the male officers, three of whom were captains... she was in fact in a position of higher trust and authority than most of them.” But in seeking validation of that, Hoey was repeatedly humiliated, rejected and derided to the point where it was formally recorded on her pension application “Total Service for Pension: Nil.”

Hoey had been well connected in London before the revolution; she had managed the International Business Exhibition held in London in 1909 and claimed she had turned down a permanent British civil service position as it would have involved renouncing Sinn Féin. After the Civil War, she was reliant on “any casual work I can get” and was suffering ill health and “nerves” since her imprisonment in Mountjoy: “I have never been strong since I was in prison.”

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Her military service cost her a house, her livelihood and friends and in decrying the refusal to grant her a pension she told the government “you have done me a great injustice... no other woman in Ireland could have done the work because not one woman in a thousand had my knowledge of military matters... censorship work for the army is military service.” Her appeal was rejected and in January 1928 she lamented that her case was a “question of a pension [for] an unknown and unimportant citizen”. She died two years later, aged 47, from pulmonary tuberculosis; her funeral was attended by government minister Richard Mulcahy, an ironic presence given the cruelty she was subjected to by the state he represented.

Many of the male champions of independence seemed to regard women’s contributions as useful only during a period of exceptional upheaval and apt to be downgraded as peripheral in official narratives

It is worth highlighting Hoey’s experiences in a week where there has been such a damning declaration of a deep-rooted and sustained misogyny in the Irish Defence Forces. The statutory inquiry that will follow needs to do justice to the historical context that generated and promoted such a culture. Hoey’s experiences made it clear that while women were encouraged to make their sacrifices during the revolutionary decade, many of the male champions of independence seemed to regard their contributions as useful only during a period of exceptional upheaval and apt to be downgraded as peripheral in official narratives and for the purposes of material and status recognition.

Abject humiliation

The Civil War exacerbated the idea that the women were betraying their gender and it is unsurprising that the subsequent testimony of some of the women communicated not only a sense of betrayal but abject humiliation.

She finished her book at a time when the abortion amendment campaign was in full swing, ‘conducted with all the hysterical fervour that religious fanatics are capable of mobilising’

The paternalism and hostility worked its way in to every facet of Irish society. When one of the pioneers of Irish women’s history, Margaret Ward, published her seminal book, Unmanageable Revolutionaries: Women and Irish Nationalism, in 1983, two years after Irish women cadets were accepted in to the Irish Army, she noted that there had been no meaningful republican strategy for the liberation of women as part of the revolution’s legacy.

[ Women of Honour: We need a statutory inquiry like no other ]

[ Women of Honour: 12 damning findings from review of Defence Forces allegations ]

She finished her book at a time when the abortion amendment campaign was in full swing, “conducted with all the hysterical fervour that religious fanatics are capable of mobilising”. The Catholic Bishops insisted regarding the unborn that “the most defenceless and voiceless in our midst are entitled to the fullest constitutional protection”. Living women, however, including those in the army, were not afforded any protection.