Unlikely Rebels (25 page)

The sketch's light-heartedness was remembered over the years by three of the Kelly family. A phone call to an Australian Kelly, Aoife Duffy (née Kelly), was successful: the long-lost picture had been found, and its copy, reproduced below, adds a very interesting example of Grace's sense of humour.

With the paints and brushes which young Eddie Kelly had brought to the jail, Grace painted on her cell wall a very beautiful image of the Madonna and Child. Unfortunately, the deterioration of the prison before its restoration did not spare this historic picture. I have a very vague memory of seeing it as a child when I played in the crumbling jail with the caretaker's daughter. There is a misted, distant sense of its being more ‘comfortable' than the usual images of the Virgin depicted in statues and ‘holy pictures' – those blue-eyed ladies with doll-like babies in their arms.

In a Kerry newspaper a picture appeared with the caption
Copy of the Original Kilmainham Madonna.
Miss Hannah O'Connor of Ballymullen had admired the Madonna on her fellow prisoner's wall in 1923. Grace thanked her and promised to do an exact copy in Hannah's autograph book. She drew a very beautiful and very Jewish Madonna for Hannah, signing it with her name and address. It is not an
exact
copy: the infant – and cloak – are different, but there is still a palpable warmth about it, a little reminiscent of certain Renaissance Madonnas and Russian icons.
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In the 1960s, Thomas Ryan, later President of the Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts, was asked to ‘retouch' the picture. At that stage, replastering, dampness and neglect had done their worst, and it is hardly fair to question, as has been done, Ryan's renovative work. He decided to change the Virgin's cloak from blue to red, and though she herself lacks the free-flowing gracefulness that characterised the original, the artist still avoided the relative lifelessness of the twentieth-century Italian madonnas.

As the men had done in Frongoch, the women imprisoned in Kilmainham also had classes – in language, history and dancing. Autograph books, a legacy of Frongoch, featured also in Kilmainham. Both Grace and Kate contributed. In some, Kate expressed determination for the cause; others she merely signed – bilingually, giving her prison number and her two prisons:

Cáit Bean Mich Liaim

(Catherine Gifford Wilson – 3102)

Kilmainham and NDU 29.viii.1923

In another of the autograph books, the NDU (
North Dublin Union), an institution to which they were transferred in 1923, is described as Tig na mBocht (the House of the Poor), which, of course, it had been before it was taken over by the British military in 1918, and there is later a brief reference to an incident in prison: Grace is described as trying to escape through barbed wire by throwing a blanket over it. It would not have been out of character.
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In May 1923, the women organised a special commemorative ceremony of Easter Week: they marched into the execution yard, Grace unfurled the tricolour, laid a wreath and spoke about her husband; Éamonn Ceannt's sister-in-law spoke of his part in the Rising; and, to conclude the sad little ceremony, the rosary was led by The O'Rahilly's sister-in-law. That emotional day concluded with a concert and included a recital of compositions by Plunkett and Pearse. It ended with the singing of ‘Amhrán na bhFiann', an enthusiastic translation of ‘The Soldier's Song' which became the Irish national anthem.

The pleasantries of Kilmainham Gaol helped, but the women were all to taste the darker side of imprisonment. The historian Dorothy Macardle was a prisoner there at the time and has left a vivid and disturbing picture of their efforts to stay in the prison to comfort two of the prisoners on hunger strike: Kate O'Callaghan (widow of Michael, Lord Mayor of Limerick) and Mary MacSwiney (sister of Terence, Lord Mayor of Cork) who had argued that the Treaty was ‘the one unforgivable crime that has ever been committed by representatives of the people of Ireland'.
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The women feared that the two hunger strikers would be force-fed if they were left as the only prisoners in the jail. Both women were quite ill, especially Kate O'Callaghan, and the other prisoners used to sing outside their cells every evening to cheer them up. The bulk of the women had already won some privileges by going on hunger strike, but this time the authorities seemed adamant: they wanted to isolate O'Callaghan and MacSwiney. At 3 p.m. one afternoon, the nineteenth day of the hunger strike, the Governor notified the objectors that the prisoners were to be removed to the NDU, the former poorhouse, that evening, leaving the two hunger strikers behind. The reaction was unanimous: the hunger strikers must first be released. At 9 p.m., Governor Begley sent word that eighty-one prisoners would be removed, if necessary by force. When asked if woman-beating was a soldier's work, he replied, unbelievably, ‘I have beaten my wife.'
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Then word came to the women of Kate O'Callaghan's release but not of Mary MacSwiney's. They decided on a sit-in on the top gallery of the compound, with instructions to resist but not attack and to avoid helping each other: passive but determined resistance was the idea, and no one was to cry out, to avoid upsetting the remaining hunger striker. They knelt and said the rosary.

After that they stood three deep and sang Mary MacSwiney's favourite songs, fastening the doors of the cells as they waited in darkness, only one lit window illuminating the huge place. At 10 p.m. their leaders were called to Mr O'Neill, Governor of the NDU. Much softer in his approach than the wife-beating Begley, he promised that if eighty-one would go quietly to the NDU, no others would be sent away before Miss MacSwiney and that if they failed to cooperate, their privileges would be withdrawn. They had ten minutes to decide. Their answer was no.

Next, a worried matron, carrying a lighted taper, came to tell them that it was not soldiers but the Criminal Investigation Division and military police who would eject them, both of whose members she described as ‘horrible men'. She was wasting her well-intentioned intervention, but she was right about the men, whose violent rush up the stairs brought down the first two girls, crushed and bruised. Dorothy Macardle's words describe what followed:

Our Commandant, Mrs Gordon, was the next to be attacked. It was hard not to go to her rescue. She clung to the iron bars, the men beat her hands with their clenched fists again and again; that failed to make her loose her hold, and they struck her twice in the chest; then one took her head and beat it against the iron bars. I think she was unconscious after that; I saw her dragged by the soldiers down the stairs, all across the compound and out at the gate.

The men seemed skilled; they had many methods. Some twisted the girls' arms, some bent back their thumbs; one who seized Iseult Stuart kicked her on the stairs with his knee. Brigid O'Mullane, Sheila Hartnett, Roisín Ryan and Melina Phelan were kicked by a Criminal Investigation Department man who used his feet. Florence MacDermott was disabled by a blow on the ankle with a revolver; Annie McKeown, one of the smallest and youngest, was pulled downstairs and kicked, perhaps accidentally, on the head. One girl had her finger bitten. Sheila Bowen fell with a heart attack. Lily Dunn and May O'Toole, who have been very ill, fainted; they do not know where they were struck. There was one man with a blackened face. When my own turn came, after I had been dragged from the railings, a great hand closed on my face, blinding and stifling me, and thrust me back down to the ground among trampling feet. I heard someone who saw it scream and wondered how Miss MacSwiney would bear the noise. After that I remember being carried by two or three men and flung down in the surgery to be searched. Mrs Wilson and Mrs Gordon were there, their faces bleeding. One of the women searchers was screaming at them like a drunkard in Camden Street on a Saturday night; she struck Mrs Gordon in the face. In spite of a few violent efforts to pinion us they did not persist in searching us. They had had their lesson in Mountjoy. They contented themselves with removing watches, fountain pens and brooches, kicking Peg Flanagan and beating Kathleen O'Carroll on the head with her shoe.

I stood in the passage then, waiting for the girls to be flung out, one by one. None were frightened or overcome, but many were half-fainting. Lena O'Doherty had been struck on the mouth; one man had thrust a finger down Moira Broderick's throat. Many of the men were smoking all the time. Some soldiers who were on guard there looked wretched; the wardresses were bringing us cups of water; they were crying. The prison doctor seemed amused at the spectacle until the women were finally thrown into the waiting lorry, the whole procedure having taken five hours.
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The Mrs Wilson whose face was bleeding was, of course, Kate, the eldest Gifford daughter.

It was an ugly business, but just as ugly, in a different sense, was the observation of Kevin O'Higgins. He was Minister for Home Affairs at the time and referred contemptuously to the Kilmainham Gaol disturbances as being caused by ‘hysterical young women who ought to be playing five-fingered exercises or helping their mothers with the brasses'. He conveniently forgot the huge input of the Easter Week women, from Countess Markievicz's command at the Royal College of Surgeons to the lone figure of Nurse O'Farrell carrying her improvised white flag of surrender through streets where she could have met her end at any moment. O'Higgins is said to have been the last minister to sign the execution order for the four republicans shot in Mountjoy in 1922, perhaps reluctantly because one of them, Rory O'Connor, had been best man at his wedding.

O'Higgins himself did not die immediately when shot by republicans after the Civil War had ended, and Roger Gannon, son of Bill Gannon, one of the three assassins of O'Higgins in 1927, approached his daughter Una O'Higgins O'Malley with an account of the shooting given to him by his father during his last illness.
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The story was that O'Higgins had told his attackers that he understood why they had shot him, that he forgave them, but that this had to be the last killing.

Doubts have been expressed about the authenticity of this account, but Roger Gannon's disclosure emerged as a result of a commemorative mass, publicly announced for ‘Kevin O'Higgins, Tim Coughlan, Archie Doyle and Bill Gannon'. Its bonding of the assassinated and the assassins touched a chord and prompted Roger Gannon to pass on his story, and the account indicates magnanimity in O'Higgins, despite the four executions and despite his contemptuous dismissal of the role of republican women in the War of Independence.

The jailed women at Kilmainham, including Isabella's imprisoned daughters, Kate and Grace, were all duly bundled into the NDU from the lorries that had taken them from Kilmainham Gaol. Documents held there indicate a difference made between the sisters. The records are as follows:

Philipsburgh Ave. Fairview – PLUNKETT, MRS GRACE; date of arrival 6/2/23. Also brought to NDU. Release date 13/8/23.

Prisoner number 3101.

Philipsburgh Ave. Fairview – WILSON, MRS CATHERINE; date of arrival 6/2/23. Also brought to NDU. Release date 28/9/23.

Released from NDU, number 3102.
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These dates show that Grace was imprisoned for almost seven months. There is no indication why Kate was detained in prison for almost seven weeks longer than Grace, who, in fact, on being told of her forthcoming release, informed the authorities that she refused to go without her sister. They told her that she could either go quietly or be removed by force. No doubt Kate counselled her to go. Perhaps Grace's presence was an embarrassment to the Free State, her being the widow of a signatory of the Proclamation. Whatever the reason, her sister's detention order makes strange reading:

This most gracious lady a danger to public safety? One wonders from where did
this
Kate emerge. The faces of all who knew her lit up at the mention of her name: soft-voiced gentleness, kindness and academic ability were the images conveyed – the paragon of the Gifford family, one of the Giffords whom Countess Plunkett and her daughter Geraldine found charming, the chosen executrix for both her parents' wills, the respected language teacher, the mother figure for her junior siblings, the lady who was to leave behind her a legacy of loving memories –
this
Kate Gifford-Wilson was considered by the Free State to be a danger to public safety. What on earth did her mother think of her solid Kate being described as a danger to the state? Of the six unlikely rebels whom Isabella had bred and nurtured, this lady was surely the most unlikely to be such a danger.