seamus dubhghaill

Promoting Irish Culture and History from Little Rock, Arkansas, USA

Category Archives: Human Rights


by Leave a comment

Death of Austin Currie, Northern Irish Civil Rights Activist & Politician

Joseph Austin Currie, a prominent Northern Irish civil rights activist and politician, dies on November 9, 2021, at his residence in Derrymullen, County Kildare. He is the co-founder of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), and later a Fine Gael Teachta Dála (TD) in the Republic of Ireland, known for his advocacy against discrimination and for children’s rights.

Currie is born on October 11, 1939, in Coalisland, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, the eldest of eleven children in a Catholic family. He attends St. Patrick’s Academy, Dungannon and later graduates in modern history and politics from Queen’s University Belfast (QUB). His upbringing in a working class Catholic family amidst systemic discrimination deeply influences his later activism.

Currie becomes a key figure in Northern Ireland’s civil rights movement. On June 20, 1968, he famously occupies a council house in Caledon, County Tyrone, in protest of housing discrimination that favors Protestants over Catholic families. This act of civil disobedience helps catalyze the first major civil rights marches in Northern Ireland, including the August 24, 1968, Dungannon march, and highlights systemic inequalities in housing and public services.

At age 24, Currie was elected as a Nationalist Party MP for East Tyrone in the Parliament of Northern Ireland in 1964, becoming one of its youngest members. He retains this seat in subsequent elections until the suspension of the Parliament in 1972. In 1970, he co-founds the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) with figures like John Hume and Gerry Fitt, promoting constitutional nationalism, social democracy, and cross-community cooperation. He serves as SDLP Chief Whip and briefly as Minister for Housing, Local Government, and Planning in the short-lived 1974 Northern Ireland Executive, which collapses amid unionist opposition and a strike by the Ulster Workers’ Council. Despite numerous attacks on his home and assaults on his family during the Troubles, he maintains a commitment to non-violent politics and cross-community dialogue.

After relocating to County Kildare due to the threats and violence in Northern Ireland, Currie joins the Fine Gael party in 1989. He is elected as Teachta Dála (TD) for Dublin West, serving from 1989 to 2002. In 1990, he runs for the Irish presidency, receiving approximately 17% of first-preference votes and being eliminated in the first count, leading to Mary Robinson winning as Ireland’s first female president. From 1994 to 1997, he is appointed Minister of State responsible for Children’s Rights, becoming the first Irish government minister with dedicated responsibilities for children.

Currie marries Annita Lynch in 1968, with whom he has five children, including Emer Currie, who is elected to the Dáil in the same constituency in 2024. He endures multiple threats and attacks during the Troubles, reflecting his dedication to confronting sectarian violence and discrimination. He continues to campaign for civil rights and justice for victims of the Troubles even after retiring from electoral politics in 2002. He publishes an autobiography, All Hell Will Break Loose, in 2004, detailing his political life and experiences.

Currie dies on November 9, 2021, at his residence in Derrymullen, County Kildare, at the age of 82. He is buried at St. Malachy Church Graveyard in Dungannon, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. He is remembered as a courageous advocate for civil rights, a co-founder of the SDLP, and a pioneering politician in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.


by Leave a comment

Birth of Margaret Cousins, Educationist, Suffragist & Theosophist

Margaret Elizabeth Cousins (née Gillespie), an Irish-Indian educationist, suffragist, and Theosophist who plays a pivotal role in advancing women’s rights in Ireland and India, is born in Boyle, County Roscommon, on November 7, 1878.

Cousins, also known as Gretta Cousins, is born into a Protestant and Unionist family. She is the eldest of fifteen children of Joseph Gillespie, a petty session clerk, and Margaret Annie Gillespie (née Shera). She excels academically, earning a scholarship to Victoria High School for Girls in Derry. In 1898, she moved to Dublin and studies music at the Royal Irish Academy of Music before attending the Royal University of Ireland, graduating with a BMus in 1902. She marries poet and literary critic James Cousins on April 9, 1903, and maintains her independence by continuing to work as a music teacher.

Cousins is deeply involved in the Irish women’s suffrage movement. She co-founds the Irish Women’s Franchise League with Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington in 1908, serving as its first treasurer, and actively participates in protests, including the Parliament of Women in 1910 and demonstrations against the Second Home Rule Bill in 1913, which leads to her imprisonment in Tullamore Jail. She is also a committed vegetarian and engages with the Irish Vegetarian Society, promoting social reform and ethical living.

In 1915, Cousins and her husband move to India, where she continues her activism. She becomes the first non-Indian member of the Indian Women’s University at Poona (present-day Pune) and co-founds the Women’s Indian Association (WIA) in 1917 with Annie Besant and Dorothy Jinarajadasa, advocating for women’s education and empowerment.

Cousins also plays a key role in preserving the tune of the Indian National Anthem, Jana Gana Mana, and is part of the Flag Presentation Committee that presents the National Flag to the Constituent Assembly of India in 1947. She later founds the All India Women’s Conference (AIWC), further cementing her legacy in advancing women’s rights in India.

A stroke leaves Cousins paralysed from 1943 onward. She receives financial support from the Madras government, and later Jawaharlal Nehru, in recognition of her services to India. She dies at the age of 75 on March 1, 1954, in Adyar, Chennai.

Cousins’ work bridges Irish and Indian social reform movements, combining her interests in education, feminism, and Theosophy. She is recognized for her contributions to women’s rights and education, and her efforts leave a lasting impact on both countries. Her manuscripts are dispersed in various collections across the world.


by Leave a comment

March Marks First Major Civil Rights Demonstration in Northern Ireland

A nonviolent three‑mile march takes place in County Tyrone on August 24, 1968, marking the first major civil rights demonstration in Northern Ireland. Organised by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) and supported by the Campaign for Social Justice, the march begins in Coalisland and ends in Dungannon.

The protest is a direct response to the Caledon Protest just two months earlier, when Member of the Parliament of Northern Ireland Austin Currie “squats” in a house allocated by the Dungannon Rural District Council to a single, childless Protestant woman employed by a Unionist politician. The house has been given ahead of older married Catholic families with children, highlighting systemic housing discrimination. NICRA’s broader goals include ending gerrymandering, securing a universal franchise, and repealing discriminatory laws.

Around 2,000 people participate in the march, including men, women, and children, carrying banners and holding signs. The march is modeled on civil rights marches in the United States, using nonviolent direct action such as marches and sit‑ins. The atmosphere is initially described as a “holiday” by some participants, with a festive mood until police intervention.

As the march approaches Dungannon’s Market Square, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) orders a ban on entry and a meeting there. Behind the RUC line are 1,500 loyalists armed with cudgels and staves. The anti-civil rights countermarch has been organized by the Ulster Protestant Volunteers (UPV) with the help of the Rev. Ian Paisley. Confronted with this massive force, the civil rights marchers merely sit down and listen to a number of speeches, while Paisley and his followers sing sectarian songs and shout abuse from behind the RUC barricades. Police separate the two groups, preventing direct confrontation. On this day, the civil rights marchers escape harm but very soon all that would change.

Paisley rapidly makes a name for himself among hard-line loyalist groups. He later helps form a loyalist paramilitary group, the Ulster Defense Association (UDA). In the near future, his followers use their cudgels and staves in the streets of the six counties in an attempt to physically beat back the rising tide of the civil rights movement. The cycle of violence in the six counties rapidly spins out of control, and Paisley is one of the individuals driving the surge of violence.

While the march is peaceful and well‑attended, it does not immediately lead to policy changes. It, however, is a pivotal moment in the Northern Ireland civil rights movement, raising national attention to housing discrimination and galvanising further protests, including a later demonstration at Derry Guildhall.

This event is remembered as a symbol of early, nonviolent resistance in Northern Ireland’s struggle for civil and political equality.

(Pictured: The first civil rights procession from Coalisland to Dungannon on August 24, 1968. Photo credit: Belfast Telegraph)


by 2 Comments

Birth of Anna Haslam, Campaigner for Women’s Rights

Anna Maria Haslam (née Fisher), a suffragist and a major figure in the 19th and early 20th century women’s movement in Ireland, is born in Youghal, County Cork, on April 6, 1829.

Fisher is the sixteenth of seventeen children to Jane and Abraham Fisher. The Fishers are a Quaker family with a business in Youghal. They are noted for their charitable works, especially during the Great Famine.

Fisher helps in soup kitchens and becomes involved in setting up cottage industries for local girls in lace-making, crocheting and knitting. She is brought up believing in equality for men and women and also supporting the campaign against slavery and for temperance and pacifism. She attends Quaker boarding schools, Newtown School in County Waterford and Castlegate School in York, England, which later becomes The Mount School, York. She then becomes a teaching assistant in Ackworth School, Yorkshire. She meets Thomas Haslam who is teaching there and who is from Mountmellick, County Laois. He is born into a Quaker family in 1825. He is a feminist theorist and from 1868 he write about many topics concerning female rights and issues such as prostitution, birth control and women’s suffrage.

Fisher and Haslam marry on March 20, 1854, in Cork Registry Office. Their marriage is mainly celibate as a result of them not wanting to have children. In later writings Thomas argues in favour of chastity for men. The couple shares a belief in equality for men and women and he supports her campaigns.

Both of the Haslams are expelled from the Society of Friends due to their interests in social reform but both maintain links with the community. Thomas is said to have been disowned for harbouring ideas contrary to Quaker teachings. In 1868, he publishes a pamphlet called “The Marriage Problem,” in which he raises and supports the idea of family limitation and outlines a number of contraceptive methods including the safe period. He dies on January 30, 1917, in his ninety-second year.

Haslam is best remembered today for her work for votes for women. She is a pioneer in every 19th century Irish feminist campaign and fights for votes for women from the year 1866. In 1872, she organises the “General Meeting of the members and friends of the Irish Society for Women’s Suffrage” in Blackrock, Dublin, which is chaired by George Owens and attended by MPs Maurice Brooks (a Home Ruler) and William Johnston (a northern Orangeman) and by the future Liberal Unionist Party MP Thomas Spring Rice, 2nd Baron Monteagle of Brandon. The Haslams are founding members of the Dublin Women’s Suffrage Association (DWSA) in 1876. This marks the start of a remarkable campaign in Dublin for votes for women. Haslam, along with the writing of her husband, continues the campaign and in 1896 women in Ireland win the right to be elected as Poor Law Guardians, members of the official bodies which administer the Poor Law. Ireland’s early women’s rights activists have a close relationship with their English correlatives and share the same discrimination in education, employment, sexual freedom and political participation. The DWSA organises the introduction of a private member’s bill to remove disqualification “by sex or marriage” for election or serving as a poor law guardian. The bill passes in 1896 and the association immediately writes to the newspapers and publishes leaflets explaining the process on how to register to vote and stand for election and encouraged qualified women to go forward as candidate.

By 1900, there are nearly 100 women guardians. Haslam then leads a campaign to encourage qualified women to stand for election in 1898. Women win eligibility to vote in local government elections, and to stand for elections as rural and urban district councillors. In 1913, she steps down as secretary of the Association and is elected life-president.

One of Haslam’s longest campaigns, working alongside the Belfast suffragist Isabella Tod, is for repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864. The acts allow for state regulation of prostitutes in areas in which the army is stationed. The act permits compulsory internment of women for up to three months, which is later extended to one year. Medical treatment is also enforced on the women. The act seeks only to reduce the spread of sexually transmitted diseases among the military. She opposes the act as she feels it legitimises prostitution, commoditises women and undermines family life. It is finally repealed following eighteen years of campaigning.

Haslam is involved in the 1866 petition and gathers 1,499 signatures to extend suffrage to women as well as men. In 1867, male suffrage is extended but it is not until 1911 that the Suffrage movement achieves the significant victory of securing the right of women to stand for election as local councillors.

In 1918, a woman of almost ninety, Haslam goes to the polls “surrounded by flowers and flags,” with women who unite in her honour to celebrate the victory of the vote. This display of unity by activist women from all shades of political opinion acknowledge her role in the fight for the right to vote. The same year in which she dies, in 1922, the Irish Free State extends the vote to all men and women over the age of 21.

Haslam dies on November 28, 1922, at her home in Carlton Terrace, Dublin, of “cardiac dropsy” at the age of 93. She is buried next to her husband in the Quaker burying ground at the Friends Burial Ground in Temple Hill, Blackrock, Dublin.

A memorial seat to Anna and Thomas Haslam is erected in 1923 in St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin, with the inscription “in honour of their long years of public service chiefly devoted to the enfranchisement of women.” 

Haslam’s name and picture, as well as those of 58 other women’s suffrage supporters, are on the plinth of the statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square, London, unveiled in 2018.


by Leave a comment

Birth of Margaret Dockrell, Suffragist, Philanthropist & Councillor

Margaret Sarah Dockrell (née Shannon), Irish suffragist, philanthropist, and councillor, is born on March 18, 1849, at 18 Charlotte Street, Dublin.

Shannon is the eldest child of solicitor George William Shannon and Emily Shannon (née Goodman). She has two sisters and two brothers. She attends Alexandra College, and later lectures for women at Trinity College Dublin (TCD). On July 27, 1875, she marries Maurice Dockrell, eldest son of Thomas Dockrell, a well known Dublin merchant, and Anne Morgan Dockrell (née Brooks). The couple has seven children, one daughter and six sons. She goes on to become a director and member of the board of her husband’s family company: Messrs Thomas Dockrell & Sons & Co. Ltd.[1]

Dockrell is an active member of the committee of the Dublin Women’s Suffrage and Local Government Association, later known as the Irish Women’s Suffrage and Local Government Association (IWSLGA), founded in 1876 to promote women’s suffrage by democratic methods. She attends international women’s suffrage conferences in Stockholm in 1911 and Budapest in 1913. She is also a committee member of the London Women’s Suffrage Society, speaking on the role of women in local government at the International Congress of Women in London in 1899. The Irish Citizen lists her as a suitable woman candidate to run for the senate seat proposed by the Home rule bill in 1912.

Dockell is a member of the National Union of Women Workers, sitting as a member of its public services committee. Like many of her contemporaries, she believes that women are best placed to address issues around health, societal moral well-being, and housing. From 1898, the Local Government (Ireland) Act, allows women to be candidates for local government elections. Dockrell first runs as a candidate in the Urban District Council (UDC) of the Monkstown ward of Blackrock, Dublin in the 1898 local elections, where she is returned as the third of nine elected, becoming one of only four women councillors elected in Ireland.

Dockrell describes herself as a unionist and a Protestant, sitting as a council on the Blackrock UDC until her death. She is the only woman councillor on that UDC until 1925 and the election of Ellen O’Neill. She is also the first woman chair of a UDC when she is elected to the position in 1906.

Despite the political and societal turmoil of the early 20th century in Ireland and the establishment of the Irish Free State, Dockrell continues in her commitment to local politics. This includes being the first woman to be elected to a Dublin county council in 1920. Despite remaining a committed unionist, she works with the Free State government. Following her husband’s knighthood, she is also known as Lady Dockrell.

Dockrell dies on June 29, 1926, at her home “Camolin”, Eaton Square, Monkstown. She is buried in Dean’s Grange Cemetery. Her son, Henry Morgan Dockrell is also a politician, and another son, George, was an Olympic swimmer, who competes at the 1908 Summer Olympics in London. Her granddaughter, Marguerite Dockrell, Henry’s daughter, also represents Ireland as a swimmer at the 1928 Summer Olympics in Amsterdam.


by Leave a comment

Founding of the Dublin Women’s Suffrage Association

The Dublin Women’s Suffrage Association (DSWA), later the Irish Women’s Suffrage and Local Government Association (IWSLGA), a women’s suffrage organisation based in Dublin from 1876 to 1919, is founded on January 26, 1876. The organization also campaigns for a greater role for women in local government and public affairs.

The association grows from a committee established by Anna Haslam and her husband, Thomas Haslam, after a meeting on 21 February 21, 1872, chaired by the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Sir George Bolster Owens, and addressed by Belfast suffragist Isabella Tod.

The DSWA is formally founded at a meeting on January 26, 1876, in the Exhibition Palace, Earlsfort Terrace (now the National Concert Hall). After the Poor Law Guardians (Ireland) (Women) Act 1896 allows women to be elected to the boards of guardians of poor law unions, it renames itself the Dublin Women’s Suffrage and Poor Law Guardians’ Association. After the Local Government (Ireland) Act 1898 allows women to serve on local councils, it becomes the Dublin Women’s Suffrage and Local Government Association. It establishes branches outside Dublin in the 1890s and becomes the IWSLGA in 1901.

In 1919, after the Representation of the People Act 1918 provides full franchise at local elections and partial franchise at parliamentary elections, the IWSLGA merges with the Irish Women’s Association of Citizenship to become the Irish Women Citizens’ and Local Government Association, later renamed the Irish Women’s Citizens Association, which in 1949 merges into the Irish Housewives Association.

The association confines itself to constitutional, nonsectarian and peaceful methods, and attracts support from both unionist and nationalist suffragists. Its tactics include making friends in parliament, hosting meetings with important speakers, and issuing pamphlets and periodicals. Its first secretaries are Anna Haslam and Miss McDowell. Haslam serves as secretary until 1913. In regards to membership, Haslam suggests an annual subscription of one shilling per annum as membership in the association. Other goals include appointing women to positions “such as rate collectors and sanitary inspectors, while always pursuing the association’s main objective of the parliamentary vote.” Prominent members of the association in the 20th century are Lady Margaret Dockrell, Mary Hayden, and Bridget Dudley Edwards (mother of Robert Dudley Edwards). Prominent supporters include Charles Cameron, Sir Andrew Reed, Willie Redmond MP, and William Field MP. Following the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919, Lady Dockrell is one of the first women appointed Justice of the Peace.

(Pictured: Anna Haslam, co-founder of the DWSA along with her husband, Thomas)


by Leave a comment

Death of Richard Robert Madden, Abolitionist & United Irishmen Historian

Richard Robert Madden, Irish doctor, writer, abolitionist and historian of the United Irishmen, dies at his home in Booterstown, a coastal suburb of Dublin, on February 5, 1886. He takes an active role in trying to impose anti-slavery rules in Jamaica on behalf of the British government.

Madden is born at Wormwood Gate, Dublin, on August 22, 1798, to Edward Madden, a silk manufacturer, and his wife Elizabeth (née Corey). His father marries twice and fathers twenty-one children.

Madden attends private schools and is found a medical apprenticeship in Athboy, County Meath. He studies medicine in Paris, Italy, and St. George’s Hospital, London. While in Naples he becomes acquainted with Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington, and her circle. From 1824 to 1827 he is in the Levant as a journalist and later publishes accounts of his travels.

In 1828, Madden marries Harriet Elmslie, daughter of John Elmslie of Jamaica, a slave-owner. He then practises medicine in Mayfair, London, for the next five years.

Madden becomes a recruit to the abolitionist cause. The transatlantic slave trade has been illegal in the British Empire since 1807, but slavery itself remains legal.

From 1833, Madden is employed in the British civil service, first as a justice of the peace in Jamaica, where he is one of six Special Magistrates sent to oversee the eventual liberation of Jamaica’s slave population, according to the terms of the Slavery Abolition Act 1833. From 1835 he is Superintendent of the freed Africans in Havana, Cuba. In 1839 he leaves Cuba for New York, where he provides important evidence for the defense of the former slaves who had taken over the slave ship La Amistad.

In 1840 Madden becomes Her Majesty’s Special Commissioner of Inquiry into the British Settlements on the West Coast of Africa. His task is to investigate how the slave trade is continuing to operate on the west coast of Africa, despite the shipping of African slaves across the Atlantic Ocean now being illegal. He finds that London-based merchants (including Whig MP Matthew Forster) are actively helping the slave traders, and that crudely disguised forms of slavery exist in all the coast settlements. He particularly condemns the actions of George Maclean, the Governor of Gold Coast.

In 1847 Madden becomes the Colonial Secretary of Western Australia and arrives in the colony in 1848. After receiving news of their oldest son’s death back in Ireland, he and Harriet return to Dublin in 1849. In 1850 he is named secretary of the Office for Loan Funds in Dublin.

Madden also campaigns against slavery in Cuba, speaking to the General Anti-Slavery Convention in London on the topic of slavery in Cuba.

Madden dies at his home in Booterstown, just south of Dublin, on February 5, 1886, and is interred in Donnybrook Cemetery.

Besides several travel diaries (Travels in Turkey, Egypt etc. in 1824–27, 1829, and others (1833)), his works include the historically significant book The United Irishmen, their lives and times (1842-1860, 11 Vols.), which contains numerous details on the Irish Rebellion of 1798, including testimonies collected from veteran rebels and from family members of deceased United Irishmen.


by Leave a comment

Death of Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, Union Organizer & Activist

Mary G. Harris Jones, known as Mother Jones, an Irish-born American schoolteacher and dressmaker who becomes a prominent union organiser, community organiser, and activist, dies in Silver Spring, Maryland, on November 30, 1930. She is once deemed “the most dangerous woman in America” because of her union activities.

Jones is the daughter of Richard Harris, a Roman Catholic tenant farmer and railway labourer, and Ellen (née Cotter) Harris. She is baptised on August 1, 1837, in Cork, County Cork. Her exact date of birth is uncertain. She and her family are victims of the Great Famine, as are many other Irish families of the time. The famine forces more than a million families, including the Harrises, to immigrate to North America when she is ten years old. She lives in the United States and Canada, where she attends and later teaches in a Roman Catholic normal school in Toronto. In the United States she teaches in a convent school in Monroe, Michigan and works as a seamstress. In 1861 she marries George Jones, an iron-moulder and labour union member in Memphis, Tennessee. After the death of her husband and their four children in a yellow fever epidemic in 1867, she relocates to Chicago, Illinois, where she becomes involved with an early industrial union, the Knights of Labor. Her seamstress shop is destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

In the 1890s Jones becomes known as ‘Mother’ Jones and begins a long association with socialist causes and the United Mine Workers of America. She attends the founding convention of Social Democracy of America, later known as the Cooperative Brotherhood, in 1897 and in the same year organises support and publicity for striking bituminous coal miners in West Virginia, including a children’s march and parades of farmers delivering food to the miners’ camp. These types of defiant mass action become her trademark. Notable activities include organising women in support of an 1899 anthracite coal strike in eastern Pennsylvania, directing strikes of young women working in textile mills, a 1903 ‘children’s crusade’ against child labour which includes a ninety-mile march from Philadelphia to New York City, participating in 1905 in the founding convention of the Industrial Workers of the World, a radical labour union committed to the organisation of unskilled workers, campaigning for the release of Mexican revolutionaries imprisoned in American jails, and testifying in 1915 in congressional hearings against the abuse of corporate power by Rockefeller interests.

Jones reportedly meets with James Connolly, Irish socialist and labour organiser, in New York City in 1910. She is arrested for the first time for violating a federal injunction during a miners’ strike in West Virginia in 1902. In 1904, during a Colorado miners’ campaign, she has to avoid the authorities to escape possible deportation. During a 1914 strike in Ludlow, Colorado, she is imprisoned without trial for nine weeks. In 1919 she is arrested in Pennsylvania during a steelworkers’ strike for defending freedom of speech and the right of workers to organise unions. She remains active in the labour movement and radical causes into her nineties.

During her later years, Jones lives with her friends Walter and Lillie May Burgess on their farm in what is now Adelphi, Maryland. She celebrates her self-proclaimed 100th birthday there on May 1, 1930, and is filmed making a statement for a newsreel.

Jones dies on November 30, 1930, at the Burgess farm then in Silver Spring, Maryland, though now part of Adelphi. There is a funeral Mass at St. Gabriel’s Catholic Church in Washington, D.C. She is buried in the Union Miners Cemetery in Mount Olive, Illinois, alongside miners who died in the 1898 Battle of Virden.

In 1932, about 15,000 Illinois mine workers gather in Mount Olive to protest against the United Mine Workers, which soon becomes the Progressive Mine Workers of America. Convinced that they have acted in the spirit of Mother Jones, the miners decide to place a proper headstone on her grave. By 1936, the miners have saved up more than $16,000 and are able to purchase “eighty tons of Minnesota pink granite, with bronze statues of two miners flanking a twenty-foot shaft featuring a bas-relief of Mother Jones at its center.” On October 11, 1936, also known as Miners’ Day, an estimated 50,000 people arrive at Mother Jones’s grave to see the new gravestone and memorial. Since then, October 11 is not only known as Miners’ Day but is also referred to and celebrated in Mount Olive as “Mother Jones’s Day.”

The farm where she died begins to advertise itself as the “Mother Jones Rest Home” in 1932, before being sold to a Baptist church in 1956. The site is now marked with a Maryland Historical Trust marker, and a nearby elementary school is named in her honor.


by Leave a comment

Irish National Land League Outlawed by the British Government

The Irish National Land League, also known as the Land League, is outlawed by the British government on October 20, 1881. From the start, the League is a thorn in the side of the government of British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone.

The Irish National Land League is an Irish political organisation of the late 19th century which organises tenant farmers in their resistance to exactions of landowners. Its primary aim is to abolish landlordism in Ireland and enable tenant farmers to own the land they work on. The period of the Land League’s agitation is known as the Land War.

The Irish National Land League is founded at the Imperial Hotel in Castlebar, County Mayo, on October 21, 1879. At that meeting Charles Stewart Parnell, the prominent Home Rule Member of Parliament, is elected president of the league. Andrew Kettle, Michael Davitt and Thomas Brennan are appointed as honorary secretaries. This unites practically in a single organisation all the different strands of land agitation and tenant rights movements on the nationalist side of the increasingly frozen sectarian-political divide in Ireland. 

The government had introduced the Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act 1870, the first Land Act, which proves largely ineffective. It is followed by further marginally more effective Irish Land Acts of 1880 and 1881. These establish the Irish Land Commission that starts to reduce some rents. The passage of the second Land Act in 1881 fails to mollify many of the leaders of the Land League, mainly due to the fact that close to 300,000 tenants behind in their rents are excluded from its benefits. Parnell together with all of his party lieutenants, including Father Eugene Sheehy, known as “the Land League priest,” go into a bitter verbal offensive.

William Ewart Gladstone has them arrested and imprisoned in Kilmainham Gaol in October 1881 under the Irish Coercion Act for “sabotaging the Land Act,” from where the No Rent Manifesto is issued, calling for a national tenant farmer rent strike until “constitutional liberties” are restored, and the prisoners freed. It has a modest success In Ireland and mobilizes financial and political support from the Irish diaspora. Many other leaders of the League, including Michael Davitt, whose name is added to the bottom of the document by others, and other moderate elements in Ireland oppose this move.

Perhaps sensing weakness in the League organization, the government outlaws the League on October 20, 1881, but the work of the League is then continued by the Ladies’ Land League, which had been founded earlier by Parnell’s sister Anna. In 1882, Parnell is released from jail after reaching a written compact with the government, which extends the benefits of the Land Act to those excluded earlier, while Parnell pledges to help end land-agitation violence in Ireland and cooperate with Gladstone’s Liberal party.

In October 1882, Parnell forms the Irish National League, replacing the Land League. The Land League passes into history, but it has helped show Irish peasants that if they all stand together there is strength in numbers.

(Pictured: Irish land League poster dating from the 1880s)


by Leave a comment

Death of May Tennant, Civil Servant & Trade Unionist

Margaret Edith (May) Tennant (née Abraham), CH, civil servant, trade unionist, factory inspector, and campaigner, dies at Great Maytham, near Rolvenden, Kent, England, on July 11, 1946.

Abraham is born on April 5, 1869, in Rathgar, County Dublin. She works to improve conditions for industrial workers and is also involved in women’s health and education. She is one of the first people to be appointed to the Order of the Companions of Honour in 1917.

Abraham is educated at home. Following her father’s death in 1887, she decides to move to London in search of employment. In London she becomes secretary to Emilia, Lady Dilke, who is a leader of the Women’s Trade Union League, an organisation of which she becomes treasurer. She supports the London Dock Strike of 1889 and helps organise laundresses.

In 1891, Abraham is appointed to the Royal Commission on Labour, set up to investigate the poor conditions faced by industrial workers, as one of four women assistant commissioners.

H. H. Asquith decides to appoint women factory inspectors in 1893, and Abraham is one of his first choices, soon superintending a team of five women inspectors. In this position, she is known for her good humour which helps relations with factory managers. In 1895, she joins the Departmental Committee on Dangerous Trades. She writes a book on factory legislation in 1896, The Laws Relating to Factories and Workshops, Including Laundries and Docks.

In 1896, Abraham marries Harold Tennant, brother-in-law of and parliamentary secretary to Asquith, and chairman of the Departmental Committee on Dangerous Trades. She resigns in 1897 shortly before the birth of her first son, to devote herself to her family. She goes on to have five children. Her eldest son, Henry, is killed in battle in 1917 during World War I.

Despite her new family life, Tennant does not give up her work entirely, remaining on the Committee on Dangerous Trades. In 1899, she becomes chairman of the Industrial Law Indemnity Fund, which provides compensation to victimised workers. She is on the Royal Commission on Divorce in 1909 and is a founder and treasurer of the Central Committee for Women’s Employment.

During World War I, Tennant takes on more work. She works initially for the War Office as welfare advisor, then briefly in the Women’s Department of the National Service Department, before moving to the Ministry of Munitions. After the war, she reduces her workload, but still serves on committees on maternal mortality and maternal health. She is also a governor of Bedford College in London, an institution founded for the education of women that is part of the University of London. From 1941 she is closely involved in campaigning for the Royal Air Force Benevolent Fund.

Tennant and her husband purchase and rebuild a country house, Great Maytham, at Rolvenden, Kent, a property whose old walled garden had earlier been the inspiration for The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. She develops expertise as a gardener, becoming prominent in the Royal Horticultural Society. After her husband’s death in 1935, she moves to a smaller house named Cornhill at Great Maytham, where she dies July 11, 1946. Some of her correspondence is in the British Library, London.