Speech by Sabina Higgins opening the Exhibition “Rotunda: Birth of a Nation”
Rotunda Hospital, Dublin, Sunday, 6th March, 2016
It is my great pleasure to be here with you all this afternoon. May I thank the Commemorative Committee of the Rotunda Maternity Hospital for inviting me to launch this important exhibition - The Rotunda: The Birth of a Nation.
This is a rare opportunity for people to discover this beautiful pillar room at the Rotunda – a hidden space at the heart of Dublin for a story that has been kept untold for too long. This story is that of the great contribution that Irish women made to the Easter Rising of 1916 and to the Irish revolutionary movement at large.
The role of new archival sources in detailing the role of women
Indeed, without a focus on women, one only gets half the story of what happened in Dublin, Galway and Enniscorthy and elsewhere during that fateful Easter Week, a hundred years ago. Thanks to the recent release of archival material – in particular Military archives’ material – and thanks to the work of so many dedicated historians, we now know the names of those hundreds of women who participated in the revolutionary effort.
We know that they came from all across the country and from all social classes. Some had university degrees; others were teenagers from working-class families. They were suffragists, nationalists, socialists – sometimes all that at once. All these women, with their different aspirations for the future of Ireland, came together to pursue what they shared – a dream of independence.
These women related their experience in so many diaries, letters, memoirs, and in the witness statements collected by the Bureau of Military History in the late 1940s. Taken together, these voices weave a narrative that is so much richer than any purely military account of Ireland’s struggle for independence.
The texts, photographs, letters, books and other artefacts on display in this exhibition offer a precious link to this past. They also provide an open window on the socio-economic conditions in Dublin at the turn of the last century, on the progress of medical care in those defining decades, and, of course, on the role that women played in that progress.
The Rotunda and the Easter Rising
The history of the Rotunda Hospital is connected in several unexpected ways to Ireland’s historic struggle for national independence:
It is at a massive public meeting in the Rotunda Rink that the Irish Volunteers were called into being on 25th November 2013.
During the Rising, the Rotunda’s position at the top of O’Connell Street gave it, of course, a unique view of the events unfolding at the GPO. Mary O’Shea, who was a midwife at this hospital, related in her memoir how she saw several people getting shot as they were trying to cross O’Connell Street, how snipers were at work from the top of the houses of Parnell Square, and how, after the surrender, she and other nurses witnessed the prisoners being collected on the lawn in front of the hospital, and then marched away to prison.
Infamous scenes unrolled on this oval patch of green outside the hospital, where the prisoner-Volunteers were made to lie down. According to one witness:
“Anybody who put his foot out of line got a whack of a rifle butt. We were kept there all night and a British officer amused himself by taking out some of the leaders. He took out poor old Tom Clarke and, with the nurses looking out of the windows of the hospital, he stripped him to the buff and made all sorts of disparaging remarks about him.”
(Excerpt from Curious Journey: An Oral History of Ireland’s Unfinished Revolution by Kenneth Griffith and Timothy O’Grady, Mercier Press, 1982)
After the Rising, as their new office in the GPO was destroyed, the postal staff went to work in a temporary office next door. This was, as you know, the midst of WWI, and Postmasters and their staff made sure that payments due to many women, whose husbands were fighting on the Western Front, would be paid despite all the disruption to postal business.
Intertwining of life and death
This exhibition captures in a very striking manner the intertwining of life and death in Dublin during those heady days of Easter Week 1916.
The battle was raging all around; the streets were blocked and dangerous, but women in labour still made their way, most of them on foot, to the Rotunda Hospital. Indeed any woman who has ever been in labour will understand those women’s unflinching determination! And the midwives, nurses and doctors carried on their work here right through Easter Week. Thus, while death was taking its toll around the city, babies were being born in the Rotunda.
In a strange way, this entanglement of death and birth (even rebirth) captures the atmosphere of the Rising, which was experienced by many who participated in it as a sacrifice for the sake of future generations.
It also captures the experience of some of the women of 1916. As you may know, three of the wives of the leaders who were executed immediately after the Rising, were pregnant: Grace Plunkett, Agnes Mallin and Kathleen Clarke.
Kathleen Clarke, who subsequently became a board member of the Rotunda Maternity Hospital, related how, during her final interview with her husband, Tom Clarke, in Kilmainham Gaol, she refrained from telling him that they were expecting a baby:
“A baby was coming to us, but he did not know. I had not told him before the Rising, fearing to add to his anxieties, and considered if I would tell him then, but left without doing so; I was not sure how it would affect him.”
A few weeks later, Kathleen Clarke had a miscarriage and a near-death experience.
Nancy O’Rahilly, wife of the O’Rahilly, who was killed during the fighting, was also pregnant, as was Phyllis Morkan, wife of Volunteer Eamon Morkan, who did not see his baby son until he returned home from Reading Gaol. Sinéad de Valera was pregnant with the future archaeologist Rúaidhrí; and Una Brennan, wife of Robert, was pregnant with the future New Yorker writer Maeve. Both Una Brennan and Phyllis Morkan, although pregnant, were “out” during the Rising.
All these human stories make up the hidden narrative of the 1916 Easter Rising.
5 women – 5 stories that reveal on the complexity and nuances of the period
The five women who are the protagonists of this exhibition – Albinia Brodrick, Kathleen Lynn, Brigid Lyons Thornton, Mary O’Shea and Dorothy Stopford Price – dedicated their lives to the welfare of the most vulnerable in Irish society. All five distinguished themselves by their sharp social awareness, and two of them – namely Kathleen Lynn and Brigid Lyons – took a direct part in the Rising. The former was Chief Medical Officer to the Irish Citizen Army and second-in-command of the City Hall garrison; the latter, a medical student at the time, served in the Four Courts garrison.
The trajectories of these 5 women are fascinating also in what they reveal of the complexity of the founding events of our state – the wider context in which the Rising unfolded; the complicated identities, feelings of loyalty and motivations of those who took part in it.
The wider context, that of the devastation of WWI, is brought home to us by the words of Mary O’Shea (who would later become a leading light in the ICA – not the Irish Citizen Army, but the more peaceful Irish Countrywomen’s Association). In her memoir, Mary wrote:
“Here was I doing night duty as part of my training in the Rotunda Hospital. I had spent two years in France, saw the start of the 1914-18 War, enough to put me off wars forever. It was with great joy I returned to Ireland to peace, quiet and happiness.”
Equally tragic and devastating was the tearing apart of Irish society during the Civil War of 1922-23, when the Treaty issue turned former friends and members of the same family, against one another. Brigid Lyons, for example, who had qualified as a doctor in 1922 and was the first female army officer in the Free State, was also, during the Civil War, the medical officer in charge of Kilmainham Gaol. There she looked after the anti-Treaty female prisoners, many of whom were her former friends (alongside whom she had been held in the very same prison just a few years earlier...)
Less tragically, Dorothy Stopford’s experience of the Rising evokes for us, as her biographer put it, the memory of “a friendship with possibilities that were not realised”. Indeed Dorothy, then a medical student at Trinity, had been invited by her close friend, the undersecretary for Ireland, Sir Matthew Nathan (a 54-year old bachelor) to visit him over the Easter holiday and stay in the undersecretary’s lodge in the Phoenix Park. As you would expect, Sir Matthew had to leave abruptly for the Castle on Monday morning, and was confined in it during the entire week. He telephoned daily while Dorothy passed the time taking short walks and reading Sherlock Holmes.
This story reveals the complex loyalties, cultural identities and interpersonal networks that underpin the revolutionary period. Indeed it was her aunt, Alice Stopford Green, the same who had helped fund the 1914 gun-running, who introduced Dorothy to Sir Matthew. Dorothy, whose maternal grandfather, Evory Kennedy, had been master of the Rotunda, later joined Cumann na mBan and went “on the district” with the Rotunda as part of her medical training.
Dorothy Stopford Price also played a prominent role in another important medical endeavour of the time – namely Saint Ultan’s Hospital for Sick Infants which was established in 1919 by Dr Kathleen Lynn and her life-long friend, Madeleine fFrench-Mullen.
Kathleen Lynn: doctor, suffragist, nationalist and labour activist
Kathleen Lynn is truly of the great female figures of Ireland’s past - a great doctor, a great feminist and suffragist, and a great labour activist. May I recall for you just a few of the achievements of this woman who belongs to the first generation of Irish women doctors.
Although the daughter of a Church of Ireland clergyman, Kathleen Lynn graduated from the Catholic University Medical School in 1899, at a time when Trinity College did not admit women students.
After graduation, she (unusually) went on to study in the United States, where a pioneering generation of women doctors were then making their mark in institutions that they had established themselves and which were under their control (as a mechanism for overcoming gender discrimination).
Upon her return, Kathleen became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons but failed, because of her sex, to secure a position in the Adelaide Hospital. Therefore she worked with the Rotunda and Sir Patrick Dun’s Hospital, which were more accommodating.
During the 1913 Dublin lock-out, Kathleen Lynn worked in Liberty Hall and in the soup kitchens, an experience that made her acutely aware of the lives and medical needs of destitute families.
The establishing of St Ultan’s Hospital, in 1919, was quite revolutionary in many ways. St Ultan's provided personal care for the infants of Dublin's poorest families in an era when the care of infants was not given a high priority by the medical profession, and when there was an acute shortage of paediatric beds. The hospital's 52 beds - or cots - accounted for a quarter of beds available for sick children in Dublin at the time.
St Ultan did not just provide medical care for sick children; it also offered a supportive environment for their mothers. In fact, one of the aims of the hospital was to be “a university for mothers”, and the staff strongly encouraged mothers to attend lectures at the hospital – a tradition, I am pleased to note, this hospital, the Rotunda, is reviving, with a very interesting programme of public lectures offered throughout this month.
In 1928, for example, Dr Lynn gave a talk on breast-feeding, pointing out that ‘breast milk is the baby’s birthright’. Kathleen Lynn’s interest in education and a child-centred approach to medicine was furthered when, in 1934, Dr Maria Montessori (Italy’s first female medical graduate – these were years of pioneering women) visited St Ultan’s.
St Ultan's also offered Lynn and her fellow women doctors a place where they could shape their own medical careers, and make a distinctive contribution. The hospital was managed entirely by female doctors (although males were employed for specialities). Many of the most prominent Irish female doctors of the period worked there, amongst them Dr Dorothy Stopford-Price, who was the first person to introduce the BCG vaccination for TB, in 1937, and was nominated for the World Health Organisation Leon Bernard prize for her contribution to social medicine.
Conclusion: revolutionaries that continue to inspire us
All these women we are celebrating today were true revolutionaries, in the full sense of the term – women who took an active part in the great events of their time, and who applied their energy, knowledge and skills to building a more just, a more equal and a more caring Ireland.
The Rotunda hospital which has been providing care to women and their families for more than 250 years is an appropriate place indeed for such a celebration. May I thank you, once again, for inviting me to join you on this very special day, and may I extend my very best wishes to all the staff of this great maternity hospital – the midwives, the doctors, the maternity care assistants, the nurses, the cooks, the cleaners, and the administrative staff, without forgetting, of course, the two librarians and the small group of volunteers who are the good fairies behind this exhibition.
May the courage, the idealism and the great achievements of the women of 1916 continue to be a wellspring of inspiration for all of you in your future endeavours.
