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Tag Archives: Elizabeth O’Farrell


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Death of Madeleine ffrench-Mullen, Revolutionary & Labour Activist

Madeleine ffrench-Mullen, Irish revolutionary and labour activist who takes part in the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, dies in Dublin on May 26, 1944.

Ffrench-Mullen is born on December 30, 1880, in Malta, where her father, St. Lawrence ffrench-Mullen, a Royal Navy surgeon, is stationed. She has two brothers, St. Lawrence Patrick Joseph (1890–1891) and Douglas (1893–1943).

Ffrench-Mullen’s interest in politics starts young. Her father is a committed Parnellite and their Dundrum home is a campaign headquarters. She is a radical feminist and republican during her life. Like many others of the time, she regards it as a woman’s right to vote. She joins the suffrage movement, and meets women with a similar worldview and values. The women’s suffrage movement is included in the Movements of Extremists reports of the Dublin Metropolitan Police. Ffrench-Mullen goes on to join Inghinidhe na hÉireann, a radical nationalist women’s group founded by Maud Gonne in 1900. The organisation develops into Cumann na mBan in 1913. Suffragist values are central to Cumann na mBan’s goal of standing side-by-side with men in the fight for the Irish Republic. Some members see this as women regaining the rights that had belonged to them in pre-invasion Gaelic civilisation. She is on the socialist wing of the moment, holding to the ideals of universal social equality of the syndicalist James Connolly and the Irish Citizen Army (ICA).

During the 1916 Easter Rising, ffrench-Mullen serves as a lieutenant in the Irish Citizen Army. She sees action with the St. Stephen’s Green and Royal College of Surgeons garrison. In St. Stephen’s Green she is in command of the 15 Citizen Army women who set up a medical station and field kitchen. While occupying St. Stephen’s Green, she and her comrades come under sustained heavy fire from the Shelbourne Hotel and buildings on the north side of the Green. After the surrender of the College of Surgeons garrison, ffrench-Mullen is one of the 77 women who had fought in the Rising who are imprisoned, among them her life partner Kathleen Lynn. While in captivity ffrench Mullen is moved three times, spending time in Richmond Barracks, Kilmainham Gaol and Mountjoy Prison. She is released on June 5, 1916.

Ffrench-Mullen meets Kathleen Lynn through Inghinidhe na h-Éireann. In 1915, she moves into Lynn’s home in Belgrave Road, Rathmines, where they live together for thirty years, until ffrench-Mullen’s death in 1944.

Ffrench-Mullen records in her prison diary in 1916 that she can face prison without fear once Lynn (whom she refers to as “the Doctor”) and she are together. Katherine Lynch of the Women’s Studies Centre at University College Dublin (UCD) describes them as partners, calling them part of a network of lesbians living in Dublin—which includes Helena Molony, Louie Bennett and Elizabeth O’Farrell—who meet through the suffrage movement and later become involved with the national and trade union movement. These women are featured, along with Eva Gore-Booth and others, in a 2023 TG4 documentary about “the radical queer women at the very heart of the Irish Revolution”: Croíthe Radacacha (Radical Hearts).

In 1919, Madeleine ffrench-Mullen and Kathleen Lynn establish Saint Ultan’s Children’s Hospital, also known as Teach Ultan, which is a female-run hospital for infants at 37 Charlemont Street, Dublin. The hospital focuses on children’s health and wellbeing, an area that is perceived at the time as women’s concern. In the aftermath of World War I many health problems have arisen including a rise in venereal diseases such as syphilis, carried from soldiers returning home from war. Many of Ireland’s infants of the time suffer from congenital syphilis (inherited disease from mother at birth), and this is a driving factor in the opening of St Ultan’s hospital. Tuberculosis is endemic in Ireland during its time as a British colony. Against steadfast opposition by the State and the Catholic Church, Lynn and ffrench-Mullen establish a vaccination project, vaccinating thousands of impoverished children who would have died of tuberculosis without their vaccines. Their success leads to the foundation of Ireland’s BCG vaccine programme, which has vaccinated all babies since the 1950s.

Ffrench-Mullen dies at the age of 63 in a Dublin nursing home on May 26, 1944. She is interred with her parents as well as her younger brothers (whom she outlives) in the ffrench-Mullen family plot in Glasnevin Cemetery. Her funeral takes place on the same day as the 1944 Irish general election.


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De Valera’s 1937 Constitution

Éamon de Valera’s new constitution, with its assertions of Ireland as a sovereign 32-county state, and its definition of Catholic morality and “women’s place” is approved on January 14, 1937.

De Valera’s 1937 constitution (Bunreacht na hÉireann) evokes a passionate rebuke of the articles defining the role and rights of women. The aspirations of 1916 had been eroded to the extent that the rights of half of the State’s citizens were reduced and effectively became second-class citizens. In 1936, while formulating the new constitution, Éamon de Valera establishes a civil service committee to assist him. They are all men. He also takes extensive advice from the president of the Supreme Court and the High Court. Both again are men. Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, also heavily influences the final text. There are only three women TDs at the time and none of them say a word in the Dáil debates on the draft.

Women are told that marriage should be their highest aspiration, child rearing their only creative outlet, and that economic dependence their civic duty. That in its turn produces levels of misogyny, emotional sterility and civic immaturity.

Article 41.2.1 becomes famous as ‘a woman’s place is in the home’ statement: “the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.”

Many women protest in public and in private during the drafting of de Valera’s constitution. The Irish Women Workers Union, many of whose members had been involved in the 1916 Easter Rising, express outrage. A letter from the secretary to de Valera, quoting the clauses which refer to the position of women says, “it would hardly be possible to make a more deadly encroachment upon the liberty of the individual.” The constitution is accepted and a combination of revisionism and isolationism in the years that follow leave the majority of Ireland’s citizens ignorant of the legacy woman had been denied.

The fundamental principle of the 1916 proclamation, which guaranteed religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all citizens, echoed by the 1922 Constitution of the Irish Free State, guaranteeing those rights to every person “without distinction of sex,” had been changed.

As commander of the Boland’s Mill outpost in 1916, de Valera had been the only leader to refuse women’s participation in the Rising. As with many of the woman who fought in the Rising, in the same streets where Elizabeth O’Farrell walked through gunfire, now with Article 41 of the Constitution, de Valera closes the door on women’s progress in a more definitive way.


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Rebels Surrender Ends the 1916 Easter Rising

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The Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army rebels headquartered at the General Post Office (GPO) on Sackville Street, after days of shelling, are forced to abandon their headquarters when fire caused by the shells spreads to the GPO. James Connolly, Commandant of the Dublin Brigade, has been incapacitated by a bullet wound to the ankle and has passed command on to Patrick Pearse. Michael Joseph O’Rahilly, a founding member of the Irish Volunteers, is killed in a sortie from the GPO. The rebels tunnel through the walls of the neighbouring buildings in order to evacuate the Post Office without coming under fire and take up a new position at 16 Moore Street.

On Saturday, April 29, 1916, from the new headquarters on Moore Street, after realising that they will not break out of this position without further loss of civilian life, Pearse issues an order for all companies to surrender. Pearse surrenders unconditionally to Brigadier-General William Henry Muir Lowe (photo). The surrender document reads:

“In order to prevent the further slaughter of Dublin citizens, and in the hope of saving the lives of our followers now surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered, the members of the Provisional Government present at headquarters have agreed to an unconditional surrender, and the commandants of the various districts in the City and County will order their commands to lay down arms.”

The other posts surrender only after Pearse’s surrender order, carried by nurse Elizabeth O’Farrell, reaches them. Sporadic fighting, therefore, continues into Sunday, April 30, when word of the surrender is received by the other rebel garrisons. Command of British forces has passed from Lowe to General John Maxwell, who arrives in Dublin just in time to accept the surrender. Maxwell is made temporary military governor of Ireland.

The surrender signals the end of the 1916 Easter Rising, the most significant campaign in the struggle for Irish independence since the Irish Rebellion of 1798. The Rising leaves large parts of the city decimated and results in thousands of casualties. It is also, unambiguously, a spectacular military failure. And yet it is the spark that lights the fuse on the Irish War of Independence which, within five years, forces the British government to the negotiating table to discuss the terms of Irish independence.

Martial law, which was declared in Dublin by British authorities, remains in effect in Ireland through the fall of 1916.

The 1916 Easter Rising results in at least 485 deaths, according to the Glasnevin Trust. More than 2,600 are wounded, including at least 2,200 civilians and rebels, at least 370 British soldiers, and 29 policemen. The vast majority of the Irish casualties are buried in Glasnevin Cemetery in the aftermath of the fighting. British families come to Dublin Castle in May 1916 to reclaim the bodies of British soldiers and funerals are arranged. Soldiers whose bodies are not claimed are given military funerals in Grangegorman Military Cemetery.


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The Founding of Cumann na mBan

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Cumann na mBan, an Irish republican women’s paramilitary organisation, is formed in Dublin on April 2, 1914.

In 1913, a number of women decide to hold a meeting in Wynn’s Hotel, Dublin, for the purpose of discussing the possibility of forming an organisation for women who would work in conjunction with the recently formed Irish Volunteers. A meeting led by Kathleen Lane-O’Kelly on April 2, 1914, marks the foundation of Cumann na mBan. Branches, which pledge to the Constitution of the organisation, are formed throughout the country and are directed by the Provisional Committee.

The primary aims of Cumann na mBan, as stated in its constitution, are to “advance the cause of Irish liberty and to organize Irishwomen in the furtherance of this object,” to “assist in arming and equipping a body of Irish men for the defence of Ireland” and to “form a fund for these purposes, to be called ‘The Defence of Ireland Fund.'”

Recruits come from diverse backgrounds, mainly white-collar workers and professional women, but with a significant proportion also from the working class. In September 1914, the Irish Volunteers split over John Redmond‘s appeal for its members to enlist in the British Army. The majority of Cumann na mBan members support the 10,000 to 14,000 volunteers who rejected this call and who retain the original name, the Irish Volunteers.

On April 23, 1916, when the Military Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood finalises arrangements for the Easter Rising, it integrates Cumann na mBan, along with the Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army, into the “Army of the Irish Republic.”

On the day of the Rising, Cumann na mBan members arrive armed with both a Webley revolver and a typewriter, entering the General Post Office (GPO) on O’Connell Street in Dublin with their male counterparts. By nightfall, women insurgents are established in all the major rebel strongholds throughout the city. The majority of the women work as Red Cross workers, are couriers, or procure rations for the men. Members also gather intelligence on scouting expeditions, carry despatches, and transfer arms from dumps across the city to insurgent strongholds. A number of Cumann na mBan members die during the Rising.

At the Four Courts, they help to organise the evacuation of buildings at the time of surrender and destroy incriminating papers. On April 29, the leaders at the GPO decide to negotiate surrender. Patrick Pearse, the overall Commandant-General, asks Cumann na mBan member Elizabeth O’Farrell to act as a go-between. Under British military supervision she brings Pearse’s surrender order to the rebel units still fighting in Dublin. Over 70 women, including many of the leading figures in Cumann na mBan, are arrested after the insurrection, and many of the women who are captured fighting are imprisoned in Kilmainham Gaol. All but twelve are released by May 8, 1916.

Revitalized after the Rising and led by Countess Markievicz, Cumann na mBan takes a leading role in popularising the memory of the 1916 leaders, organising prisoner relief agencies, opposing conscription, and canvassing for Sinn Féin in the 1918 general election, in which Markievicz is elected Teachta Dála.

Cumann na mBan supports the Provisional wing in the 1969-1970 split in the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Sinn Féin. In Northern Ireland, Cumann na mBan is integrated into the mainstream IRA during the conflict, although they continue to exist as a separate organisation in the Republic of Ireland. In 1986, Cumann na mBan opposes the decision by the IRA and Sinn Féin to drop the policy of abstentionism and aligns itself with Republican Sinn Féin and the Continuity IRA.

In 2014, Cumann na mBan celebrates the Centenary of its foundation in Wynn’s Hotel, Dublin, the site of their founding in 1914. The U.K. Home Office in March 2015 lists Cumann na mBan as a group linked to Northern Ireland related terrorism. However, it is not so listed in 2008 by the U.S. State Department.