The first specifically nationalist women’s organisation, Inghinidhe na hÉireann, was founded in 1900. The more enduring Cumann na mBan followed in 1914. The Gaelic League and Sinn Féin accepted both men and women on a basis of equality.
Women were not recruited into the Irish Volunteers, but Cumann na mBan functioned as a kind of autonomous auxiliary. The Irish Citizens Army did have female members and even had two women officers: Dr. Kathleen Lynn, who was Chief Medical Officer, and Countess Markievicz.
In the subsequent struggle women took part in various capacities. Women were put up as election candidates, but almost always unfortunately because they were related to male heroes who had been killed. Thus Mary MacSwiney probably owed her prominence in Republican politics to the fact that she was the sister of Terence MacSwiney; even though she was herself a person of real ability.
By the middle of 1923 a reactionary neo-colonial regime was firmly in control in the 26-counties. There were some unusual features: a new army and a new unarmed police force, but other-wise the regime was largely a continuation of the colonial past.
The legal system remained unchanged, the currency was under Bank of England control and there was no land redistribution or any major reform of that sort. The defeated Republican element refused to accept the legitimacy of the new ‘Irish Free State’ and would not participate in its politics.
After a few years de Valera, then the undisputed leader of Irish Republicanism, broke away and founded Fianna Fáil with the intention of taking the oath to the monarch and entering Leinster House. About two thirds of the men in Sinn Féin followed him but only about a third of the women. Cumann na mBan rejected the departure outright.
But there were many other women Republican activists: James Connolly’s daughter Nora, Maud Gonne, Dr Ada English of Ballinasloe, Hannah Sheehy-Skeffington and others. (Countess Markievicz had gone into Fianna Fáil, but had died soon afterwards.)
In 1932 Nora Connolly-O’Brien published an article “Women in Ireland. Their Part in the Revolutionary Struggle” (In An Phoblacht on 25th June 1932) Much of the article is given over to an account of her father’s efforts to involve women in various progressive activities, followed by some comments on the role of women in 1916 and afterwards. She then continues:
“There is no townland that has not its tale to tell, nor a city that has not a hundred tales of girls dropping their everyday tasks and setting on a deed of high endeavour, recking nothing of its dangers, accomplishing it, and calmly returning once more to their everyday tasks.
“It is regrettable that Irishwomen should have that ability to return to the everyday task [in] that having won the right to share in the dangers of war, they should have relinquished their right to share in the dangers of peace.
“Progressive and revolutionary women have no voice in the council of the revolutionary movement. Revolutionary women are to-day showing once more that “damnable patience” and are content to be the drudges of the movement.”
The 1922 Irish Free State Constitution had given men and women ‘equal rights’, but this was soon amended to read ‘equal political rights’. Under the British legislation inherited by the state women did not have equal rights with men in ordinary life. For example under the Guardianship of Infants Act of 1886 a husband was the sole guardian of the children of a marriage, and could leave his wife at any time and take their children with him. There was no principle of equal pay for equal work: women were always paid less, and often very much less, than men.
The 1937 Constitution contains guarantees of gender equality but also clearly visualises women as home-minders rather than wage-earners. It contains a lot of high-sounding stuff like “The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.” Of course the State never showed the slightest intention of ‘endeavouring to ensure’ anything of the sort: even the Children’s Allowance was paid to the husband.
There was always a small number of women active in politics at the local or national level; usually the widows, sisters or daughters of deceased male politicians.
A lot of personal criticism has been directed at de Valera over the treatment of women by the Saorstát. While it seems clear that Dev, who was abandoned by his own mother as an infant, was firmly of the opinion that a woman’s place was in the home it must also be said that most of the legislation disadvantageous to women was either imposed by Britain under direct rule or else was imitated from legislation introduced in Britain after 1922.
In a few of these countries there have been revolutions led by people of a more or less Marxist way of thinking, and most the others have experienced uprisings of one sort or another.
Information on the status of women in Latin American countries tends to be elusive and contradictory: what is available is all second hand, having been processed by European or North American feminists who undoubtedly have axes of their own to grind.
It is clear that in the two countries in which there have been successful armed revolutions, Cuba and Nicaragua, women played a notable part in struggle but were not given any more than a token role in the post-revolutionary regime and the interests of women were not given much priority. As in Ireland, the few women that remained in public life have been mostly the widows or sisters of revolutionary martyrs. In some parts of Latin America the mothers of persons murdered by dictatorships have emerged as a significant political force.
However, it is in general clear that once the revolution has been accomplished then for the women it is ‘back to the washing-board’.
The Roman attitude towards women, while not being perfect by any means, was and remains very much superior to that of any other type of society. In the Roman system women have rights and a degree of equality: elsewhere universally women are property.
In both Latin America and Ireland the Roman tradition is the basis for the status of women in society, but it can be argued that it both cases this is an overlay on a previous structure that has not entirely disappeared.
Both Old Irish and Amerindian societies were what anthropologists call Homeric. In Homeric societies men hunt, fish and fight while women work. Women are owned: they are either traded for or abducted and polygamy is practised. Children too are property: boys become men through some initiation process and their name changes. This type of society survived in Ireland up until the seventeenth century and only very slowly died away: aspects of it still survive in a debased form in the itinerant community.
In both Ireland and Latin America the old warrior societies were defeated and disarmed, and decayed into a tenant peasantry under often cruel exploitation by their conquerors.
In such societies a type of gender equality tends to develop through the division of labour: normally everything inside the house is under the woman’s control, everything outside (crops, animals) under the man’s. However the man is always boss. Urbanisation in such societies is actually to the disadvantage of women, the male is the wage-earner and controls the family finances and the women becomes, as James Connolly memorably put it “the slave of the slave”.
The following case was recorded in Guatemala. In the remote Maya-speaking district of San Antonio Polop missionaries introduced pedal-looms and taught the women to use them and also helped set up a weaving co-operative to market the cloth they produced. This proved a run-away success and brought the families much-needed income. But what happened next was that the men took over the weaving work and the co-op, using the profits to buy themselves watches, radios, Hondas and whatever. The women were sent back to the kitchen and casual labour from other areas hired to do the farm work.
The Proclamation of 1916 was addressed to ‘Irishmen and Irishwomen’ and the Democratic Programme at least implicitly promised gender equality. In the First Dáil Countess Markievicz was Minister for Labour, only the second female government minister in the world. The counter-revolution of 1922 of course largely negated the gains made since 1916, but not entirely. For example Tom Clarke’s widow Kathleen became Mayor of Dublin over half a century ago.
Of course, it is also true that in recent years two women have achieved the 26-county presidency. However this is an indication of the low esteem in which that post - traditionally used as a retirement post for elderly politicians - is held, rather than an indication of an improvement in the status of women.
It is sometimes asserted that women would have done better under continued British rule. Fortunately there is no need to speculate as in a part of Ireland British rule did continue. There, women were virtually excluded from public affairs: though perhaps rather they should be given the benefit of the doubt and assumed to have remained aloof, as in the rest of Ireland. Whatever the reason, women have taken almost no part in the politics of the Orange State.
Otherwise, it resembled more closely the Egypt of King Farouk and Nahas Pasha, and the Iraq of King Feisal and Nuri as-Said. England bullied Egypt into client status in order to control the Suez Canal, and Iraq so as to exploit the Mosul oil-fields. Those countries resented English domination but were obliged to submit to it, and to allow semi-colonial exploitation of their economies and the establishment of military bases on their territories. In both countries there were elements that co-operated with the British to their own sectional advantage and other elements basically rebellious but still having to dance to England’s tune. So it was in the Saorstát, where Fianna Fáil collaborated with London unwillingly and most of the other parties willingly: but in the end all collaborated.
It is reflected too in uniforms: the uniforms worn by military personnel, by Civil Defence, even by traffic wardens. As for the police force, it is nominally unarmed but about 25% of it is plain-clothes and armed with Uzis. The Uzi is an Ingram-type machine pistol manufactured in Israel, probably out of re-cycled sardine cans or the like: it is a scatter-fire weapon favoured by security forces in countries where if a few by-standers are mown down then it is of no consequence. The Gardai also have stocks of CS-gas and plastic bullets, though these have only rarely been deployed.
It is often claimed that the State originates in the 1916 Rising and subsequent struggle for freedom. This is of course nonsense. The Free State destroyed and replaced the Republic declared in 1916 and is a continuation of the previous colonial regime by other means. It was established by an act passed at Westminster and it inherited the administrative machinery (and most of the personnel) of Dublin Castle. The State has continued to be ruled by a system of laws devised for a totally different society. British war memorials and the graves of Black-and-Tans are maintained by the Office of Public Works: Republican graves and memorials at private expense.
Between about 1955 and 1965 the British Empire simply melted away. The enormity of this loss was concealed from the Irish public, was never mentioned in the media, and as far as possible the scalar relationship between the Saorstát and England was regarded as unchanged. This was a situation that the rulers of the Saorstát were familiar with and in which they had made a comfortable niche for themselves, and they were unwilling to adjust to the way things had changed.
Then the economist Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber published his influential Le Défi Américaine (‘The Threat From America’) in which he claimed that the United States, because of its vast resources and large internal market, was in a position to dominate the world’s economy and with the ending of the colonial era the only hope Europe’s former imperial powers had was to pool their residual resources.
The eventual result was the Treaty of Rome, under which France, West Germany, the Benelux countries and Italy agreed to merge their economies gradually. Italy, riddled with corruption and slowly sinking towards Third World status, was at first the main beneficiary of this ‘Common Market’. England, still clinging to the fiction of the ‘British Commonwealth’ (which by this time was made up largely of contemptible neo-colonial kleptocracies) tried to set up a rival organization, the ‘European Free Trade Area’. This was a failure and Westminster’s politicians had to swallow their pride and apply to join the Common Market. They told their electorate they were going to join so that they could take over and show those Continentals how to run things. De Gaulle vetoed their application and for as long as he was in power in France they were left whimpering on the doorstep, with the Saorstát half-hidden behind. De Gaulle called, even offered to admit the Saorstát separately: this was of course declined.
The Common Market is intended to evolve into a super-power, strong enough to compete economically and militarily with the biggest in the world. At each stage of development the name changed (European Coal and Iron Community, Common Market, European Economic Community, currently European Community) and the rules too changed.
There is a ‘European Parliament’ that sits in Strasbourg but it is a talking-shop. The real power is vested in a gigantic non-accountable bureaucracy based in Brussels. This bureaucracy is evolving in accordance with Parkinson’s Second Law (Work expands to fill the time available) and is beavering away devising ‘the Regulations of the European Commission’ which consist of rules governing every aspect of life in the member states, which are legally enforcable and which now occupy more than 80 metres of shelf space. Buried in there are rules about how far apart leeks are to be planted and how wide chicken runs are to be and what temperature cheese is to be stored at and so on ad infinutum.
The only result of such elephantiasis of regulations is that the rules are blatantly flouted and cheating the system is a Europe-wide activity.
The ‘Common Agricultural Policy’ has had the most impact on life in the Saorstát. The ultimate objective of the CAP is to eliminate all small farms as ‘uneconomic’ and develop gigantic agribusinesses employing very few people. The original author of the CAP (Mansholt) has recently spoken out from retirement regretting his part in the destruction of so many rural communities and admitting that he was mistaken: but he created a juggernaut that cannot be controlled now.
To the Eurocrats the Saorstát is a liability, and taking it on was part of the price they have had to pay to expand their empire. There are reasons for thinking that it is viewed as a possible source of cannon fodder for the resource-wars of the coming century: this would explain the current adulation of those who served in the British armed forces, taking part in acts of war against third parties with whom Ireland had no quarrel. A further indicator is the recent decision of the Department of Defence to purchace Armoured Personnel Carriers. The APC, deployed first (with little success) in Vietnam and Afganistan, is purely a weapon of colonial warfare.
But old habits die hard. Leinster House politicians continue their supine relationship with London. In recent years the annual ‘Poppy Day’ ceremonies have been given media prominence in order to glorify the British Army, and grovelling to British ‘royals’ is becoming more frequent and blatant. There has been very heavy pressure on the GAA to admit RUC and British Army members. A type of neo-unionism has begun to emerge among the Dublin intelligensia, and is making increasingly impudent demands.
In a bizarre incident, in 1995 An Post brought out a set of postage stamps commemorating the ‘Wild Geese’, the Irish soldiers-of-fortune who enlisted abroad to escape the Penal Laws. The then head of government, John Bruton, ordered An Post to bring out another stamp honouring the British Army’s Royal Dublin Fusileers: a regiment recruited largely from the Dublin criminal underworld.
As always happens when there is a Republican uprising, since 1970 emigration declined and people began to return from abroad: often bringing useful skills. As a result, the economy has begun to grow. Yet it remains a typical neo-colonial economy in a typical neo-colonial society. The Saorstát is unique in Europe (if one excludes such micro-states as Monaco and Luxemburg) in that if one goes into a newsagents or bookshop or library the the vast majority of the publications on display will have been published outside the state. In the media the state’s currency is daily described as having ‘risen against sterling’ or ‘fallen against sterling’ while in fact it is sterling that fluctuates in value while the Saortat’s currency, linked to the German mark, is stable.
Another feature is the ‘top-to-bottom ratio’. This is the ratio of the average incomes of the richest 10% and poorest 10% of the population. In a developed country this is usually of the order of three to one. In the Saorstát it is about five to one: more typical of a colonial economy.
In Irish history the sequence of tragedy then farce is frequently observable, and is more noticable because there is often even a physical resemblance between the individuals involved: O’Connell then O’Duffy, de Valera then Mac Giolla, Redmond then Hume. In the stagnant closed world of neo-colonial politics tragedy and farce alternate in perpetuity. As the philosopher Santayana said: Those who will not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
A century ago, commenting on the ‘Home Rule’ campaign, James Connolly foresaw where that road led, and gave an accurate picture of a neo-colonial Irish state that has actually come about pretty much as he predicted. He said that if the Irish Party got its wish to hoist an Irish flag over Dublin Castle and paint the pillar-boxes green then unless they set about re-structuring society England would still be able to rule at second hand.
And indeed the pillar-boxes in the Saorstát are painted green: but often they bear the monogram of an English monarch, and the green paint is only a layer over the red paint underneath. A very suitable symbol for a neo-colonial state.
(Concluded)