Full of Grace – Frank McNally on Dublin’s latter-day love affair with Grace Gifford-Plunkett

Perhaps not since the last great Marian year – 1954 – has Dublin been as full of Grace as it is currently.

The Grace in this case is a woman who was born with the surname Gifford but became Plunkett in one of the 20th century’s more famous marriages. And although her life ended in relative obscurity just after the last Marian year, she seems to be everywhere these days.

In the National Gallery, for example, Gifford-Plunkett is now a star of the exhibition Rollers Skates and Ruins, which tells the story of Ireland’s revolution through six artists of the period.

Over at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, meanwhile, she is the poster girl for a show called Championing Irish Art. But at nearby Kilmainham, being a former inmate of that facility, she will also be appearing shortly as part of an exhibition on “Women Prisoners of the Irish Civil War”.

The chimes they are a-changing – Frank McNally on the joys of listening to church bells at night

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Jumping off the page – Lara Marlowe at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair

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Egg on face – Alison Healy on the Warwick Egg Incident

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Murder Most Confusing – Frank McNally on Flann O’Brien’s murder weapon, Henry Marsh’s finger, and a relocated Joycean plaque

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Then, while covering the short distance between IMMA and the old prison, visitors may notice in passing that yet another portrait of her adorns one of those otherwise nondescript roadside electrical boxes, painted as part of a street art scheme.

It’s tempting to include part-time Dubliner Rod Stewart in the tale of Gifford-Plunkett’s current ubiquity, albeit that his upcoming Irish shows are in Cork.

Those will surely involve the ballad Grace, which he recorded a few years ago and now sings regularly in concert. Stewart’s fondness for the song has extended to him visiting Glasnevin Cemetery to pay respects to Gifford and her short-lived husband.

Doing so last year, he also dropped in to the venerable Gravediggers Pub next door. But I know for a fact he didn’t sing Grace there. One of the proprietors, my friend Anthony Kavanagh, assures me that the premises’ long-standing ban on singing was neither lifted nor tested on the occasion.

If there is a Mary to be hailed for Dublin’s current plenitude of Grace, by the way, it must be the art collector Mary McKenna, as was. Born in Monaghan, she moved to London early in life and there in 1970 married Alan Hobart, himself the son of an Irishwoman, Helen “Shamrock” Thorpe.

Together in 1975, they founded Pyms Gallery in Chelsea, specialising in Irish art at a time when, thanks to the Troubles and to quote Myles na gCopaleen, it was neither profitable nor popular.

It had become both by the time the gallery closed in 2013. And when Alan Hobart died in 2021, his life-long love of Ireland culminated with burial in Mary’s native Scotstown. Their art collection, including William Orpen’s portrait of Gifford, now forms the basis of the IMMA show.

Getting back to the ballad Grace, it is – like too many songs of the revolution (although written only in the 1980s) – a bit on the pious side. Some might even say mawkish. It ignores the playful aspect of the subject’s personality, from which most of her cartoons emerged, along with the “roller skates” reference in the NGI exhibition.

The latter arose from a letter Gifford-Plunkett wrote in Kilmainham to the same William Orpen, urging him to “send skates at once”. Like her husband Joseph Mary Plunkett (see Irishman’s Diary, April 15th, 2015), she was an ardent roller-skater, hence the “staggering request” to Orpen for a pair she could use during exercise periods.

The lyrics of “Grace” do little justice even to the tragedy of the short-lived marriage which, like life in general, was messier and more complicated than any ballad.

Despite her conversion to Catholicism, Gifford was never accepted by her parents-in-law, and later had to take legal proceedings for support, which they settled out of court. Furthermore, according to her equally hostile sister-in-law, Geraldine Plunkett, Gifford was pregnant at the time of the wedding and “Joe” was probably not the father.

In any case, the pregnancy ended in miscarriage, the immediate aftermath of which was recorded with brutal detail by the same Geraldine, who professed uncertainty “whether Grace had induced it or not” but was either way relieved.

In contrast with her current profile, the later years of Gifford Plunkett’s life were led well out of the limelight. Her poverty was alleviated by a State pension from 1932 and the Plunkett settlement. But in the words of Roy Foster (from Vivid Faces: the Revolutionary Generation in Ireland 1890 – 1923), she was one of the “living ghosts” that continued to flit around post-revolution Dublin.

She rented a series of small flats around O’Connell Street, supported her modest lifestyle with political cartoons or work for advertising agencies, and hung around with equally hard-up actors and artists.

This was probably not what she had in mind when joking to Orpen at the start of the Kilmainham Gaol letter (now featured in the NGI show): “You always prophecied [sic] my political opinions would bring me to a bad end – & here it is!”