Speech by Sabina Higgins at the Lá na mBan Commemoration
Mansion House, Dublin, 9 June 2018
A Chairde, (Comrádaithe) Sisters, Comrades of the Women’s Workers Union of Ireland (WWUI), Cumann na mBan and Women of Ireland are proud of our gathering here today at City Hall, the seat of Local Government, to give public witness to our pledge that we will reject and oppose, with everything in our power/our lives themselves, if necessary any attempt to force Ireland by Conscription to take part in this bloody Imperial war. It has plunged the world into the horrors of war and its price is the slaughter of a generation of men, of the young. In its depravity this war has brought untold suffering on the populations of much of the world.
How dare the British Government decide that, having wasted the lives of its own that they would send our youth to battle fields where millions have been slaughtered. So many have suffered terrible deaths, and others maiming, for four terrible years in the rat invested trenches across Europe. Irish men have already been involved. We all know Irish men who were criminally ordered to certain death in Gallipoli in 1914 at the outset of the war and we are aware of the Irish men who suffered terribly and the many who lost their lives in the horrors of the battlefields of the Somme.
Four years later it still goes on, young men being used as war fodder. We know these who suffered and are still suffering from being wounded and maimed for life. We can’t even begin to imagine conditions in the rat invested freezing wet trenches, that the soldier’s themselves had to dig. The unimaginable craziness and cruelty of it all cries out for an end to war and for Peace.
It was the greed to expand their Empires, without a thought or care for the devastation of peoples and countries that has brought the war upon us. It is the same greed that led them to invade our own country 800 years ago and through the use of force take our land, our cultures and our power. Every time we Irish tried to assert our rights against this by rebellion we were brutally subdued. We were banished, excluded, colonized and humiliated. Our culture and our language and all we held dear was taken from us. From this greed came the plantations, and worst of all the subjection to the famine when millions of people starved to death while the grain was taken out of the country to England.
We know what war means, and what suffering and depravity those empires have let loose. As always, the workers and the poor have suffered most. Not alone had our men to join the British Army - many of them forced to by economic circumstance and poverty and being deprived of work after the Lockout and to be sent to the battlefields and the trenches of Europe, but the suffering was endured here at home through all the shortages of food, and the rising prices that is bringing more poverty and sickness and disease.
Our anger, our fury and helplessness can know no bounds as we are forced to stand by and be anguished by it all. That is why today is such a great day, we are doing something about our anguish. We are taking a stand. We are all assembled here to demonstrate and sign together our pledge against forced conscription. The British Government can take notice that they will not succeed in enforcing conscription in Ireland. We have suffered enough of their injustices for 800 years and their foolishness is very great in thinking that we will send the youth of Ireland to the battle fields of Europe to die as fodder for their immoral imperial war of vanity and greed. We Will Not be sending our young or those of any age.
Who are we here today? We are 2400 members of the Women’s Workers Union of Ireland and 700 members of Cumann na mBan and other progressive organisations who understand how important it is to take a stand against the waste of human life that war is. It is we women that are charged with delivering the strong message (on behalf of the workers and activists in other associations). Neither are we willing to leave aside all of our campaigns for women’s emancipation and equality. It is to these campaigns that we will give our energies rather than facilitating the tasks of war. It is through women’s efforts and particularly the suffrage movement that the extension of the franchise was won, a victory that has given entitlement to women over 30 with property to vote in general elections. Our energies must be used to obtain for the younger women and all those women with no property this citizen’s right to participate in society, by casting their vote. There are many other inequalities which we must fight against. We must continue our campaign for the right to equal pay for equal work and the right to decent housing, health, education and an end to poverty. It is to all of these campaigns we will give our energies.
The success of the general strike shows what a powerful instrument the strike is, the unity of workers delivers its message to the powerful. It was that solidarity that galvanised the Irish public to oppose conscription. It is a power that will be available to us in the future for our campaigns for women’s and worker’s rights. The Labour convention backing a call for the Trade Unions to call a general strike resulted in success. It was this action of a country wide general strike and demonstrations on 23rd April that best demonstrated the strength and fullness of Ireland’s opposition to conscription, and gave it its reality.
There were many who supported the war for their own honourable reasons but who are now aghast at the suggestion that there should be a forcible coercion of the youth of Ireland by conscription to participate in this war. All nationalist opinion and even the Parliamentary Party who at the outset of the war called on Ireland to participate in the hopes of the promised Home Rule, are now angered at the suggestion and are solidly behind the resistance. National opinion is united in its opposition to conscription and even the church has now joined its opposition. The British Government should take heed of the hundreds of thousands of Irish who are opposed of this intolerable imposition and will in no way accept it.
Today we, 2,400 Women from the Women’s Workers Union of Ireland (WWUI) who have marched from Great Denmark Street and 700 Women from Cumann na mBan and other progressive activists publicly demonstrate our resolve to oppose by every means in our power this imposition and to sign our special women’s pledge.
This is it Loud and Clear-
‘A Solemn Pledge from the Women of Ireland’
“Because the enforcement of conscription on any people without their consent is tyranny, we are resolved to resist the conscription of Irishmen. We will not fill the places of men deprived of their work through refusing enforced military service. We will do all in our power to help the families of men who suffer through refusing enforced military service”.