Speech by Sabina Higgins at the National Women’s Council of Ireland’s Soapbox 2016
Saturday, 12 March, 2016
Happy International Women’s Day!
Thanks to the National Women’s council for organising it again this year. It is indeed very suitable that on this very special centenary event we should be celebrating it with voices raised with a Choir, which was so enjoyable.
It is very appropriate that you should chosen St. Stephens Green for your 1916 -2016 Women’s soapbox as it honours the memory and revives the energy of the great revolutionary Countess Markievicz. She was a commandant in the Irish Citizen Army and was second in command to Michael Mallon here in this St. Stephens Green and the College of Surgeons in Surgeons Station in the 1916 raising. She was indeed a true revolutionary and a seasoned campaigner on speaker on soapboxes in the public space and in doors herself, at this stage. As a suffragists, socialist, trade unionist, socialist, and campaigner for the rights of workers. She had worked alongside Larkin and James Connolly for the rights of men and women workers to join the 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, rose Hackett, Delia Larkin, Helena Moloney, Eilizabeth O Farrell, Julia Grennan and others organised the soup kitchens at Liberty hall to feed the workers families. When the Lock Out was defeated and WW1 was threatening she and Connolly campaigned hoping that the trade union movement in Europe would join in solidarity and stop the dreadful war by competing Empires. Unfortunately, WW1 went ahead, Connolly and she decided the only hope for workers rights was by striking for Irish freedom in the hope of achieving the objectives of the Citizens Army constitution which included control of Irish resources and equality of opportunity etc etc. Many of the men who had been locked out in 1913 and couldn’t get back their jobs enlisted in the British Army in order that their families could survive on the dependents payments paid to the soldiers. Connolly and the citizens Army joined with Padriag Pearse and the volunteers. Many of the Citizens Army Women were joined in Cumann na mBan and were ‘OUT’ as it is termed in the raising.
As one of the leaders in the Rising Countess Markievicz was condemned to death like the signatories of the Proclamation but it was commuted to life in prison. She spent 14 months in jail in Redding and was doing hard labour and was released at Christmas 1917.
She renewed her conscription campaign and that it brought such numbers into the Irish Republican Army to fight the War of Independence. She was often on the run and was imprisoned 3 more times including 2 years of hard labour.
Elected to Parliament in 1918 for Mr. Griffith's party of Sinn Fein, which all involved in the Rising, like Collins and DeValera stood for election and won the seats formally won by John Redmond and The Irish Home Rule Party. She was the first member elected to the British Parliament though she did not take her seat. She with Count Plunkett, Collins, De Valera and the others, formed their own Irish Parliament, Dáil Éireann. She was the first woman Minister for Labour and Employment. She was on the run and then, after the ceasefire, and the debates on the treaty, we have a flavour of her in an extract from a debate of the Dáil on the motion put forward that as a proclamation of 1916 declared that men and women should have an equal footing in the franchise to elect the Government of the Republic that the vote should be extended to women between the ages of 21 and 30.
(Quote from Countess Markievicz’s speech at the debate in Dail Éireann on the proposal to extend the Franchise to Irish women between the ages of 21 and 30 on 2 March 1922 and which was defeated by47 votes to 38)
"..This just measure for women is one of the things I have worked for where ever I was since I was a young girl. Women voicing their opinions publicly in the ordinary and simple manner of registering their vote at the polling booth. That was my first bite, you may say, at the apple of freedom, and soon I got on to the other freedom, freedom to the nation, freedom to the workers. This question of votes for women, with the bigger thing, freedom for women and opening of the professions to women, has been one of the things that I have worked for and given my influence and time to procuring all my life whenever I got an opportunity. I have worked in Ireland, I have even worked in England, to help the women to obtain their freedom. I would work for it anywhere, as one of the crying wrongs of the world, that women, because of their sex, should be debarred from any position or any right that their brains entitle them a right to hold."
We see in this her commitment to women workers and internationalism.
This was the time a hundred years ago when the countries of Europe sent millions of young men to their deaths as they vied with each other to expand their own empires, after which those empires began to break up as Nation States, tried to gain their independence.
Now in this contemporary and globalised world of capitalism the empires of greed are not less powerful, but even more powerful and unaccountable. Constance Markievicz and the women of 1916 were fired by their passion to achieve the realisation of their different dreams. They had such commitment and energy for the fighting in 1916 that Helena Moloney described it as "their feeling exhaulted".
It is my hope that their stories, as we are only now coming to know, will fire us women of 2016 to meet the challenge of our time. Those are only too clear as we see the suffering of our sister women around the globe. Their poverty and exploitation, their gender inequality, gender violence, lack of empowerment of whom 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. 300 million people are hungry and suffer from malnutrition and are in danger of starvation.
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.
Will we do the old primitive response and give way to despair, turn away and ignore our sisters, or will we take action, and take hope?
There is indeed some reason for hope in the two great historic steps that were taken by the leaders of the world in 2015 and have set an agenda for all of the countries of the world to accept as their common agenda and purpose.
200 countries of the world signed up at the United Nations in New York to achieve the 17 goals and 169 targets of the Sustainable Development Goals. 163 countries came together in Paris in December and acknowledged that climate change was a reality and pledged the support of their governments to tackle climate change and implement programmes for climate change justice.