Constance Markievicz: The Countess of Irish Freedom

[SpabSFW]

http://www.thewildgeese.com/pages/ireland.html

Part 1: 'Something to Live For'


Constance Gore-Booth was born into a famous Anglo-Irish family on Feb. 4, 1868 at Buckingham Gate, London. Her father, Sir Henry Gore-Booth was an explorer and philanthropist with a large estate in Co. Sligo. The Gore-Booths were known as model landlords in Sligo. Perhaps being raised in this atmosphere of concern for the common man had something to do with the way Constance and her younger sister Eva would conduct their later lives. Moving in the circles of the Ascendancy and then comparing that to the lives of the poor dispossessed Irish families along the western coast must have affected them as well. Eva would become an advocate for labor and women's suffrage in England, and Constance would become the most famous women of the Irish revolutionary movement.

...

She and Casimir founded the United Arts Club in 1905 to help bring together people of the artistic renaissance then going on in Dublin, but she was not satisfied with this life. "Nature should provide me with something to live for, something to die for," she said. Then in 1906 a small incident, as so often happens in peoples lives, helped her find that "something" she was searching for, something that had been all around her whole life. In 1906 she rented a cottage in the Dublin hills. The previous tenant had been Pádraic Colum, a poet, and he left old copies of the revolutionary publications The Peasant and Sinn Féin there. Reading these, Constance knew she had found the cause to inspire her life.

In 1908 she became active in nationalist politics, joining Sinn Féin and Maud Gonne's women's group, Inghinidhe na hÉereann...

...

In 1911, now an executive member of both Inghinidhe and Sinn Féin, she would go to jail for the first time for her part in a demonstration against the visit of George V. Constance had also involved herself in the labor unrest of the time, running a soup kitchen during the lockout of union workers in 1913 and supporting labor leaders James Larkin and James Connolly. All this activity took a toll on her marriage, however, and Casimir left for the Balkans, where he served as a war correspondent and then joined the Imperial Russian cavalry during World War I.

...

As the war began, Constance was in the center of the pressure cooker of social and political upheaval that was building in Dublin. Home rule had been promised and then put on hold for the duration. Irish boys were dying in their thousands on the Western Front, and in England there was talk of conscripting Irishmen. The valve of the pressure cooker was capped now, but the pressure was building quickly, something had to give. On the 24th of April, 1916, it exploded in the streets of Dublin.


Part 2: 'Something to Die For'

Most women in the movement participated in the '16 Rising as nurses or by running messages through the streets between groups. Not Countess Markievicz. She had earlier joined Connolly's Citizen Army, and was second in command to Michael Mallin in St. Stephen's Green. She supervised the setting up of barricades as the rising began and was in the middle of the fighting all around the Green. At one point, when a young girl was wounded with several bullets and undergoing surgery, Markievicz left the room, returning in a minute to tell her, "Don't worry, Margaret, me dear, I got the wretched blighter for you." It was during the fighting, moved by the faith of many of the men around her and that faith's connection to the long struggle for Irish independence, that she first contemplated conversion to Catholicism.

Mallin and Markievicz and their men would hold on to Stephen's Green for six days, finally giving up when the British brought them a copy of Pearse's surrender order. The English officer who accepted their surrender was Capt. Wheeler. He was a distant relative of Markievicz and offered to drive her to jail. "No offence, old feller, but I much prefer to tag along with my own," she replied. As they were marched through the streets she came in for special ridicule from many Dubliners who had were upset with the rebels for the shut down of the city for a week.

They were taken to Dublin Castle and the Countess was then transported to Kilmainham jail. There she was the only one of 70 women prisoners who was put into solitary confinement. No doubt, she fully expected to be executed...

At her court martial she told the court, "I did what was right and I stand by it." Her conviction was assured, only her sentence was in doubt. She was sentenced to death, but General Maxwell commuted this to life in prison on "account of the prisoner's sex." Given a choice she would probably have been added to the list of those dying for the cause. She told the officer who brought her the news , ".... I do wish your lot had the decency to shoot me."

Constance was released from prison during the General Amnesty of 1917. Soon afterwards she kept her promise to herself and converted to Catholicism. The revolutionary fire within her had not been extinguished by the tragic events of 1916, and she continued the struggle. In 1918 she was jailed by the British during their bogus "German Plot," aimed at defeating the anti-conscription forces in Ireland.

While in prison in England, Countess Markievicz became the first woman elected to the British Parliament, running as a Sinn Féin candidate...

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When Countess Markievicz was taken to the Republican plot at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin for burial, it was said that as many as 300,000 people turned out on the streets to bid her goodbye. At the graveside, de Valera gave the eulogy.

Constance Markievicz was a woman who was both born to and then married into wealth and privilege. Most people like her live a life insulated from the trials and tribulations of the common man, but the Countess intentionally risked her life for those common people. During the Treaty debates, when few were considering them, she spoke up for those common people, and the affect that the treaty would have on them. Playwright Sean O'Casey, who quit Connolly's Citizen Army in a dispute with Markievicz, once said of her: "One thing she had in abundance -- physical courage, with that she was clothed as with a garment." ...

[SpabSFW]

http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art...rticle_id=7768

Constance Markievicz


Constance Markievicz

Moira Nolan opens our series on women who fought back with a portrait of Irish revolutionary Constance Markievicz

Like most people educated in Britain, I was taught that the Tory ruling class that had opposed votes for women so vehemently nevertheless produced the first woman MP in 1919 — Nancy Astor.

When I was told this I challenged my teacher, arguing that Constance Markievicz was elected as Sinn Fein MP for St Patrick’s Dublin in 1918. I was told she did not count, because she never took her seat in Westminster.

Of course, nobody ever explained why Constance Markievicz refused to take her seat.

Along with 72 other Sinn Fein MPs elected in Irish seats that year, Markievicz refused to recognise the right of Westminster to rule over Ireland.

She viewed her election as part of the powerful campaign to overturn 400 years of British occupation.

Markievicz was a revolutionary socialist and leading figure in the Irish Republican movement during the critical years of the early 20th century.

She was an unlikely revolutionary, born Lady Constance Gore-Booth into a class of aristocratic British landlords determined to keep Ireland firmly under their rule.

But a combination of her personal experience of oppression and her revulsion at contemporary political events led Markievicz away from her background and into the movement for change.

Her constant frustration at the restrictions placed on women in Victorian society led her to join the women’s suffrage movement.

And her anger at the brutality of British imperialism during the Boer War in South Africa led her to define herself as Irish and join Sinn Fein at the age of 40 in 1908.

Markievicz — now married to a Polish count involved in the revival of Gaelic culture — began to see how the struggle for women’s equality had to be connected to the movement for Irish independence. “There can be no free women in an enslaved nation,” she declared.

Markievicz worked closely with James Connolly, a dynamic socialist thinker and leader of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU).

This experience helped clarify her ideas about how the various causes she championed – especially equality for women and justice for Dublin’s poor — could be linked through the wider struggle for socialism.

Connolly and Markievicz both understood how national liberation could only be fully achieved in Ireland through working class struggle.

Markievicz’s work in helping to organise the ITGWU earned her honorary membership of the union — and at least one severe beating at the hands of the Dublin police, when she helped protect ITGWU activists during the 1913 Dublin lockout.

But the union was starved into submission after Irish and British bosses combined to break its campaign to improve pay and conditions. This strengthened the hand of anti-socialist elements in the national liberation movement.

Nevertheless Markievicz and others still tried to maintain a separate workers’ organisation in that struggle, mindful that otherwise the Irish Republic would only offer limited gains to ordinary people.

Connolly’s Irish Citizen Army was the only armed organisation that allowed women to fight as equals alongside men in the 1916 Easter Rising. Markievicz served as second-in-command throughout the battle at St Stephen’s Green in the centre of Dublin.

Most of the rising’s leaders were executed by the British. Markievicz escaped the death penalty because she was a woman.

Instead she served the first of numerous prison sentences in her struggle to free Ireland. Thousands turned out to greet her return to Dublin from an English jail.

The harsh repression that followed 1916 only served to build sympathy for the Republican cause. A widescale guerilla campaign developed that led to the compromise of an Irish Free State with six counties left under British control.

Markievicz spoke against the acceptance of the Free State, not least because the very bosses who had attacked Dublin’s workers in 1913 supported it wholeheartedly.

Even after the defeat of Republicans in the bloody civil war that followed, Markievicz’s last campaigns were against the repressive measures brought in during the “carnival of reaction” of partition.

Despite the relative weakness of socialists within the Irish movement, and her own conversion to a form of Catholic nationalism, Markievicz continued to campaign for workers’ rights till the bitter end.


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[Cd.]

I know about her. She played a vital role in the Easter Week Rebellion.

Spab, have you read Rebels The Irish Rising of 1916, by Peter DeRosa? I think you would really like it.

[SpabSFW]

Thanks for the heads up, Crimmerz.... I haven't collected to read yet for the Rising, but I have long intended to. It will have to be after Christmas, though.

I will snag it off Amazon when I have the loose funds.