Speech at a Garden Party Celebrating the Suffragettes
Áras an Uachtaráin, Wednesday 27 June 2018
A chairde,
Tá áthas orm féin agus ar Saidhbhín fáilte a fhearadh romhaibh go hÁras an Uachtaráin. Tá áthas orainn go raibh sibh in ann a bheith linn le haghaidh tráthnóna aoibhnis, cairdis agus comhráite spreagthacha.
Dear friends,
You are all so welcome here this afternoon to Áras an Uachtaráin to one of the annual series of summer garden parties held by the President of Ireland since the establishment of this office. Dr. Duglás de hÍde held the first one in 1939. In this, the centenary year of the first great victory for women’s suffrage on these islands, the theme that we gather today to celebrate is the courage of those remarkable women of a century ago who dedicated their efforts to the cause of equality for women.
We are in the middle of what has been termed the Decade of Centenaries, the commemoration of those formative years of the early twentieth century which led ultimately to the establishment of an independent Irish state.
This has provided an opportunity to review what we mean by commemoration, what we choose to commemorate and those whom we wish to place or recall from collective memory. I have, as President, and with others, to engage with the challenges as to commemorating, in an ethical way. The centenary has also provided opportunities for inclusion. For far too long the historical contribution of Irish women to the struggle for emancipation, independence, and equality has been overlooked, even eschewed, in our public history. We need only think of the public spaces of our towns and cities, of our monuments and streets – they have for a very long time been places in which the actions and thoughts of men, in a certain pose, usually in heroic pose, and on occasion embellished with sword or gun and an accommodating steed have been valorised.
As President, I welcomed the opportunity to acknowledge publicly the contribution of that revolutionary generation of Irish women of one hundred years ago, not only to our long and unremitting struggle for national freedom, but to the other great battles of their time. They were a generation impatient for change in an era in which a patriarchal vision of society prevailed, one based on exclusions of people on the basis of their gender, race and class.
One of the most important changes in recent published work is the contribution of women to our historiography in all its areas, not solely in women’s contribution, but as there had been such a vacuum its effect there has been of enormous significance. If the River Nile had existed before been given a name by the British explorers, neither were women discovered at the end of the 19th century. I often think of women’s experience of the Famine and the emigrations which followed.
That generation of women we celebrate today had been endowed with an extraordinary political inheritance in the form of the Ladies’ Land League, which took over the leadership and organisation of the Land War in its darkest hour.
Jenny Wyse Power, a member of both the Ladies’ Land League and the suffragette movement, described the League as the ‘first national organisation of Irishwomen’ led and organised by women.
The Ladies Land League founded over 500 branches, addressed mass meetings, opposed evictions and provided temporary shelter for those who were evicted. All of this was accomplished at considerable risk to themselves and in the face of the condemnation of polite society and the clergy – after all Archbishop Croke stood alone as the only member of the hierarchy to support them.
Led by Anna Parnell, The Ladies Land League was disbanded through the influence and direction of her brother Charles, not because it had failed, but because on the ground it was too successful, because it alone was willing to, and capable of, defying the wishes of the parliamentary voices, which were led by Anna’s brother the ‘Uncrowned King of Ireland’. When it came to methods of resistance to eviction, and response to eviction, their views were not reconcilable, and indeed no doubt it was with suffering for family members that no reconciliation, became possible, or was achieved.
That great tradition of militant women could be drawn on by a generation that stood at the intersection of what Constance Markievicz called ‘the three great movements’ of thought and action which sought to transform Ireland in the early years of the twentieth century: the national movement, the women’s movement and the labour movement.
For many who took part, these diverse movements were part of one single struggle for what Constance Markievicz called ‘the extension of human liberty’.
At first, the Suffragette Movement and Branches faced the very same kind of dismissal, and it is not unjust to describe so much of it as a sneering disregard that the Ladies’ Land League has endured. The attitude of far too many may be summed up in an extract an edition of the British weekly magazine Vanity Fair from 1896 describing the establishment of a suffrage organisation by Eva and Constance Gore-Booth in Sligo.
Constance was President, Eva the Secretary. It is reprinted in Dr. Sonja Tiernan’s wonderful edition of The Political Writings of Eva Gore-Booth:
“The New Woman is still with us and shows herself where least expected. In the far-away regions of County Sligo, among the wives and daughters of the farmers and fishermen, the three pretty daughters of Sir Henry Gore-Booth are creating a little excitement (not to say amusement) for the emancipation of their sex. Miss [I should note that this is spelt Miss!] Gore-Booth and her sisters, supported by a few devoted yokels, have been holding a few meetings in connection with the Woman’s Suffrage (or, shall I say, ‘The Revolt of the Daughters?’) movement. Their speeches are eloquent (un)conventional, and (non)convincing.
They are given to striking out a line for themselves, in more senses than one; for Miss Gore Booth has already distinguished herself a lady steeplechaser, and public oratory is their newest toy. The sisters make a pretty picture on the platform; but it is not women of their type who need to assert themselves over Man. & Co., However, it amuses them – and others and I doubt if the tyrant has much to fear from their little arrows.”
The author of that piece may have been given some thought for reflection in recent years to learn how these ‘little arrows’ had, with considerable effect, lodged, hit their mark, and with what results. The resurgence of women’s activism on these islands encompassed all of the emancipatory movements of that time.
Indeed, Eva Gore-Booth is remarkable in the regard of combining all of those projects of equality in her own work. She campaigned with Esther Roper on labour rights, gender equality, pacifism, spiritual freedom, as well as with her sister Constance on Irish nationalism. Among all of the issues that combined efforts, the resurgence of the women’s movement centred on that most foundational and fundamental of political rights, the right to vote.
This was a universal demand, one that could unite and summon women and men of all faiths and creeds to its banner.
The suffrage movement on our own island in its early impulse owed much to the tireless efforts of Isabella Todd, a Belfast-based Presbyterian and Anna Haslam, a Quaker and businesswomen from Cork, both of whom never wavered in their support for the Union between Britain and Ireland. They began their efforts in the 1870s. Then by 1911, Louie Bennet and Helen Chenevix would found the Irish Women’s Suffrage Federation to co-ordinate what had become, by then, a constellation of suffrage societies across our island.
They were joined by organisations of Irishwomen for whom the campaign for women’s suffrage was part of the wider campaign of which Constance Markievicz spoke.
Inghinidhe na hÉireann was founded by Maud Gonne, whose portrait now sits in the Council of State room in Áras an Uachtaráin, in 1900 as an explicit successor to the Ladies’ Land League, campaigning not only for the right to vote but for an independent Irish state. It established the first political journal for women, Bean na hÉireann, edited by Helena Moloney. The Irish Women’s Workers Union, organised in 1911 by Delia Larkin and Rosie Hackett, demanded equality not only at the ballot-box, but in the workplace.
Two weeks ago, I had the honour of unveiling a plaque to commemorate Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, the founder, with Margaret Cousins, of the most radical of the suffrage organisations, the Irish Women’s Franchise League.
It was inspired by the militancy of the Women’s Social and Political Union in Britain, those who would become known as suffragettes. The WSPU and the Pankhursts, in particular Christabel, had, in turn, looked for their own inspiration to the campaigns for female suffrage and workers’ rights carried out in Manchester by Eva Gore-Booth and Esther Roper, reflecting as it does yet another error in the cynical prognostications of the journalists of Vanity Fair.
The Irish Women’s Franchise League began a radical campaign of civil disobedience in 1912 after the Irish Parliamentary Party, led by an anti-suffragist, voted against the Parliamentary Franchise (Women) Bill, fearful that the British Prime Minister, another anti-suffragist, would derail Home Rule if they did not accede to his wishes.
Only days before the vote, a mass meeting of all the suffrage societies in Ireland was held to demand the inclusion of women’s suffrage in the Home Rule Bill. Those who spoke from the platform included Kathleen Lynn, Jennie Wyse-Power, Constance Markievicz, and Delia Larkin. Messages of support were received from feminists such as Helena Moloney, Louie Bennet, James Connolly and George Russell.
The vote against the extensions of the suffrage was a stunning blow. Despite the many sympathetic Irish Party MPs, that for which the MPs selected seemed to presage a Home Rule shorn of all its progressive promise, to be a patriarchal Home Rule Ireland, an Ireland in which women could not vote in parliamentary elections, stand for Parliament or exercise the most basic economic and social rights.
These campaigns were in the public space. We must recall that women were often attacked while campaigning, and that they endured violence and the threats of violence. After 1912, suffrage rallies could often only proceed with security provided by the workers of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union.
Thirty-five suffragettes were convicted of breaking the law in relation to Public Order between June 1912 and August 1914. They were held in Mountjoy and Tullamore Jail, in sometimes very difficult conditions, where they employed the hunger strike to seek the status of political prisoner. Indeed, reform of prison conditions would be a theme embraced in later years as well by many of those incarcerated in this period.
As to the vote, their bravery, and the activism, of the women’s movement in seeking the extension of the franchise to all people, ensured that the movement that arose from the ashes of 1916 was committed to universal suffrage.
It is a testament then to the devotion, courage and energy of Irish Women’s Franchise League, and of the Irish Women’s Suffrage Federation, the Irish Women Workers’ Union, Inghinidhe na hÉireann and Cumann na mBan that the Irish Free State would extend the right to vote to, in the words of the Constitution of the Free State, to ‘every person without distinction of sex’ over the age of 21 in 1923.
Formal political equality was not matched by a real or inclusive political equality, neither was it matched by real economic, social or civic equality. Campaigns for equality were, and are, necessary rights have never fallen from the sky. The experience of women in the Sinn Fein movement in 1918 and 1919 was instructive. They had to fight every step of the way to be given a voice, and this was in a political movement that considered itself the most progressive in the country.
In spite of all of the promise of the Easter Proclamation and the Democratic Programme of the First Dáil Éireann, women had to endure a difficult and long march for equality – equality in all its forms, economic, social, cultural and civic equality – one marked by many setbacks and defeats, but also by many wonderful and hard-fought victories. These revolutionary women are testament to the fact that anger our temporary gestures while necessary at so many times are never sufficient – that politics matters. Thus, they never gave up.
So, let us pay tribute now, 100 years later, to the struggle of those women who one hundred years ago sought to shape a truly just, inclusive and sustainable republic of equal citizens. In our century, there are new challenges to be faced and new rights to be won.
If we, as citizens of a Republic we wish to be meaningful in the best sense of that term, can call up and demonstrate the same indomitable spirit, the same bravery, the same compassion, I am confident that we can continue the work they began so many years ago.
May I conclude by thanking our MC, Caitriona Crowe, who has played such a pivotal role in our national commemorations, and who has been such a powerful activist in her own right. For the music we have all enjoyed this afternoon – our thanks to – the Denis Scully Duo (at the Plough & Stars); The Havana Club Trio (on the lawn); Karen Coleman, the Garda Ladies Choir and the marvellous Eddi Reader who travelled from Scotland to be with us today – with musicians – Alan Kelly and Innes White.
For the quality of the superb sound, may I thank Dee Rogers and his team.
A big thank you, also, to the staff here at the Áras, to our friends in St. John of God’s, the Civil Defence, the Gardaí, our volunteers from Gaisce and the tour guides and all who have worked so hard to make today an occasion of friendship and joy.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh uile as ucht a bheith linn tráthnóna. Bainigí sult as an chuid eile den lá. Enjoy the rest of your time here and thank you for coming.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir.
