Sabina Higgins lays a wreath at the grave of Countess Markievicz
Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, Saturday 26th March, 2016
Dear Sisters and brothers, comrades, I feel proud and privileged to have the honour of being invited to lay a wreath today on the grave of Countess Constance Markicvicz here, in Glasnevin Cemetery, which holds the graves of so many great Irish revolutionaries.
One hundred years ago the great revolutionary Countess Constance Markicvicz was a Commandant in the Irish Citizen Army and Second in Command to Michael Mallin in Stephen’s Green and the College of Surgeons in the foundational event of our State – the 1916 Rising. She was indeed a true revolutionary and seasoned activist, campaigner and public speaker. She was a suffragist, feminist, socialist, trade unionist and campaigner for the rights of workers and, very importantly, an internationalist. Her’s was a radical life in the fullest sense. She responded with her convictions to the circumstances of her time at a time when Dublin had some of the worst slums in the world with families of 10 children sharing a tenement house with 10 other families.
She worked along-side Jim Larkin and James Connolly for the rights of men and women workers to join the trade union of their choice.
In the Lock Out of 1913 when the workers were locked out by William Martin Murphy and the 400 employers, for 6 months, and the men’s families were starving, she with other Citizen Army women like Dr. Kathleen Lynn, Rosie Hackett, Delia Larkin, Helena Moloney, Eilizabeth O Farrell, Julia Grennan and many others organised the soup kitchens at Liberty Hall to feed the workers families. It was during the Lock Out that the Irish Citizen Army was founded to enable the workers to defend themselves against scab labour and the batons of the Polis.
When the workers were defeated in the Lock Out and WW1 was threatening she and Connolly campaigned for a break with Empire, hoping that the trade union movement across Europe would join in solidarity and stop the dreadful war being contrived by competing Empires, being inflicted on the people, knowing as they did how wars consume the lives of workers and their families. Unfortunately, WW1 went ahead and millions were slaughtered.
Countess Markievicz was a great admirer and supporter of James Connolly. She agreed with him that the best hope now for workers rights was by striking for Irish freedom in the hope of achieving the objectives of the Citizens Army’s Constitution, the first principal of which was the “avowal that the ownership of Ireland moral and material, is vested of right in the people of Ireland, and included the principles of equal rights and opportunities for the Irish people”.
Connolly and Markievicz and the Citizens Army joined with Padriag Pearse and the Volunteers in the Insurrection. The Irish Citizens Army Women and other women of Cumann na mBan were ‘OUT’ as it is termed in the Rising. They were activists, combatants, in every sense.
The Proclamation of the Irish Republic was read outside the GPO.
As one of the leaders in the Rising Countess Markievicz was, like the signatories of the Proclamation, condemned to death but this was commuted to life imprisonment. She spent 14 months in jail then, and was imprisoned on 3 other occasions, including 2 years of hard labour.
It is my hope that drawing from the endurance and the vision of Countess Markievicz and her sister, Eva Gorth Booth, and the other women of 1916, whose stories we are only now coming to know, that we will be inspired and that their example will fire with enthusiasm us women of 2016 to meet the challenges of our time.
Now, 100 years later, in this contemporary and globalised world of a new form of a capitalism, that seeks to undermine democracy itself, the Empires of greed are even more powerful and unaccountable.
The challenges are only too clear as we see the suffering of our sister women around the globe. Women’s poverty and their exploitation, gender inequality, gender violence, and women’s lack of empowerment actually threatens the very survival of life on the planet.
The problems of Climate Change, Desertification and Conflict has resulted in misery across the globe. Nearly a billion people are hungry and suffer from malnutrition and are in danger of starvation.
None of this is inevitable and undoing it is the challenge of our times.
At the present time, there are 6 million displaced persons and refugees traversing the globe. As always, women suffer most, as gender violence increases with poverty, with conflict, and in the refugee camps.
Now a century later Ireland is proud to play a valued part among the nations of the world. Let us now taken energy and inspiration from Constance Markievicz and join hands together, in hope, with our sisters and brothers across the globe, to end global poverty, hunger and inequality. Let us achieve the internationally agreed 2016 United Nations objectives of Climate Change Justice and the Sustainable Development Goals. We must all become activists.
We, gathered here today, to honour and thank her, Countess Constance Markievicz for her life!