Times have changed. During Bill Clinton’s presidency the festivities to celebrate Ireland’s national saint “paralysed political Washington for two days”. An invitation to the St Patrick’s Day lunch in 2000 became “one of the hottest tickets in town” – and that was just at the British embassy, where portraits of kings and queens caused more than one relative attached to the Emerald Isle to spin in the grave. “To secure invitations to the events there would be a sudden inflation in the number of Americans laying claim to Irish ancestry,” Christopher Meyer writes in his memoir, DC Confidential. The former British ambassador remembered a dominant “green” tone in Washington around St Patrick’s Day – shamrocks, Irish dancing, and John Hume singing Danny Boy in the White House.
Before the days when beaming presidents received a crystal bowl of shamrock, another prominent Irish political campaigner toured North America. In 1938 Hanna Sheehy Skeffington returned to Dublin after her most recent visit to compare the “advanced” position of women in US public life with their “backward” situation in Ireland.
Less impressed with Quebec, she found that “largely due to reactionary French and clerical influences” women there were denied the vote in provincial elections, although they could vote in a federal election.
In addition to Eleanor Roosevelt, Sheehy Skeffington met a number of prominent women during her coast to coast tour, including three Congresswomen. In Washington DC she addressed fellow feminists in the National Women’s Party, and broadcast to millions of Americans on the topical issues back home.
Roosevelt made an impression from the beginning in the White House because she made it known that she did not stand for “elegance” – maybe “swelligance” – but wanted to identify with ordinary folks and be perceived as “plain, ordinary, Mrs Roosevelt”. She went on to be anything but ordinary. During her 12 years as the First Lady, she hosted women-only press conferences and became a controversial figure as a liberal, particularly in advocating equal rights for women and racial minorities. From 1936 she wrote a daily syndicated newspaper column, My Day. In 1939, when the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow Marian Anderson perform in Constitution Hall, Roosevelt arranged a concert by the African American opera star at the nearby Lincoln Memorial. As many as 75,000 people attended this outdoor event, which marked a symbolic moment in the evolution of the American civil rights campaign. During Franklin D Roosevelt’s presidency Eleanor travelled across the US, visiting New Deal relief projects and monitoring living and working conditions. Sheehy Skeffington saw much to admire in Eleanor’s advocacy and in “FDR’s” New Deal.
A journalist herself, Sheehy Skeffington arguably made one of the most forceful criticisms of Éamon de Valera’s constitution as it related to women – they were being asked “to vote away their liberty”. Speaking before the July 1937 referendum, she argued that women needed their own political party to safeguard their interests, and, on this occasion, her audience decided that its slogan should be “equal pay for equal work”. The police force constituted just one obvious area of discrimination against women in Ireland. Ironically, perhaps – not being a stranger to police cells in her earlier activist years – Sheehy Skeffington was among the female campaigners who argued that women should be allowed to join the Garda.
In the 1930s she came to the fore on another legal issue when she proved to be ahead of her time in seeking the abolition of capital punishment. Another good cause, she did have more than her fair share. She stated in a radio debate in 1936 that if she were a jury member – she could not do so in the Irish State because of her gender – she would always vote “not guilty” as long as hanging remained the penalty. For her, the fact that the state had to import an “English hangman” to execute offenders – the same man who had hanged Kevin Barry in 1920 – was shameful. And she believed that the Irish public agreed with her in abhorring what she described as “the whole horror” of the death sentence.
Brendan Behan, a guest of the State in more than one jurisdiction, became the best-known Irish opponent of capital punishment. His play, The Quare Fellow, based on the hanging of Bernard Kirwan in Mountjoy jail in 1943, when Behan was an IRA prisoner there, is a harrowing indictment of the death penalty. The Quare Fellow became a hit in 1956 when it opened in Stratford East in London. Behan invited the hangman, Albert Pierrepoint, to the opening night, but he declined. A drunken television interview on the BBC – a world first – then catapulted Behan to world stardom.
Four years later, the toast of the town in New York, he declared, to all and sundry, that he backed his “fellow countryman”, John F Kennedy, for president. The always-political Behan explained: “I’m for Kennedy, because he’s of the Roosevelt party and Roosevelt was a great man.” Kennedy repaid the debt and asked Behan to attend his inauguration, sending a written invitation to “Mr & Mrs Behan, Dublin, Ireland”.
