Kirby Mountain

April 9, 2016

More 1916 portraits by David Rooney

Winifred Carney.

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Francis Sheehy-Skeffington.

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Michael Collins.

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Éamon De Valera.

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Chronology of the 1916 Rising and associated events

From 1916 Portraits and Lives, edited by Lawrence William White and James Quinn

1907

NOVEMBER

Thomas J. Clarke returns to Ireland from America and helps to invigorate the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB)

1909

16 AUGUST

Constance Markievicz and Bulmer Hobson found Na Fianna Éireann

10 DECEMBER

H. H. Asquith, the Liberal prime minister, promises ‘self-government’ for Ireland

1910

JANUARY

UK general election: Liberal party fails to win an overall majority and requires the support of John Redmond’s 70-strong Irish Parliamentary Party to govern

26 JULY

James Connolly returns to Ireland from America

DECEMBER

Another UK general election; Liberals still the largest party with Irish Parliamentary Party holding the balance of power

1912

9 APRIL

At a unionist demonstration at Balmoral, near Belfast, Andrew Bonar Law, leader of the Conservative party, pledges the support of British unionists to Ulster unionist resistance to home rule

11 APRIL

Asquith introduces home rule bill in House of Commons

28 SEPTEMBER

Unionists throughout Ulster sign the Solemn League and Covenant to resist home rule

1913

16 JANUARY

Third reading of home rule bill carried in House of Commons

30 JANUARY

Home rule bill defeated in House of Lords

31 JANUARY

Ulster Volunteer Force founded

15 JULY

After passing in the Commons, home rule bill again defeated in the Lords

26 AUGUST

Tram workers of James Larkin’s Irish Transport and General Workers Union go on strike – a general lockout of union members follows

19 NOVEMBER

Irish Citizen Army founded by trade unionists in Dublin

25 NOVEMBER

Irish Volunteers formed at meeting in Dublin, presided over by Eoin MacNeill

1914

20 MARCH

‘Curragh mutiny’ – General Hubert Gough and most of his officers in the 3rd Cavalry Brigade announce their unwillingness to enforce home rule on Ulster

2 APRIL

Cumann na mBan founded as women’s auxiliary to Irish Volunteers

24–25 APRIL

Ulster Volunteer Force gun-running: large quantity of rifles landed at Larne, Donaghadee and Bangor

25 MAY

Home rule bill passes through Commons for third time

28 JUNE

Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife by a Slav nationalist in Sarajevo, Bosnia

10 JULY

Ulster unionist provisional government meets in Belfast

21–24 JULY

Government, nationalists and unionists fail to reach agreement on the status of Ulster at Buckingham Palace conference

26 JULY

Rifles for Irish Volunteers landed at Howth; British troops who failed to disarm Volunteers fire on a crowd at Bachelor’s Walk, Dublin, killing four and wounding thirty

1 AUGUST

More rifles for Irish Volunteers landed at Kilcoole, Co. Wicklow

4 AUGUST

UK declares war on Germany after German invasion of Belgium

9 SEPTEMBER

At a conference in Dublin, militant nationalists (mostly IRB) discuss mounting an insurrection during the war

18 SEPTEMBER

Government of Ireland act, 1914, suspends the introduction of home rule for the duration of the war

20 SEPTEMBER

At Woodenbridge, Co. Wicklow, John Redmond encourages Irish Volunteers to join the British army

24 SEPTEMBER

Eoin MacNeill and other Volunteer leaders repudiate Redmond’s leadership; Volunteers split, the majority forming Redmond’s ‘National Volunteers’

OCTOBER

Volunteer minority, still calling themselves the Irish Volunteers, re-organise with Eoin MacNeill as chief of staff, Patrick Pearse as director of military organisation, Joseph Mary Plunkett as director of military operations, and Thomas MacDonagh as director of training

Sir Roger Casement travels to Berlin to seek German help for an Irish insurrection against British rule

1915

MAY

IRB creates a military committee of Pearse, Plunkett and Éamonn Ceannt to begin planning for an armed insurrection

1 AUGUST

Pearse gives stirring graveside oration at the funeral of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa warning that ‘Ireland unfree shall never be at peace’ [link]

DECEMBER

IRB military council of Clarke, Seán Mac Diarmada, Pearse, Plunkett and Ceannt formed

1916

JANUARY

IRB supreme council gives approval for armed insurrection

19–22 JANUARY

James Connolly confers with IRB military council and is co-opted into their plans (Thomas MacDonagh co-opted in April)

3 APRIL

Pearse issues orders to Volunteers throughout Ireland for manoeuvres beginning on Easter Sunday (23 April)

20 APRIL

A trawler, the Aud, arrives in Tralee Bay with German arms for the Irish Volunteers and is arrested by a British patrol ship

21 APRIL

Sir Roger Casement lands from a German submarine at Banna Strand, Co. Kerry, and is arrested

22 APRIL

Eoin MacNeill, of the Irish Volunteers, learns of planned insurrection and countermands orders for Easter Sunday manoeuvres

23 APRIL

Military council meets at Liberty Hall and decides to go ahead with insurrection on Easter Monday (24 April); a revolutionary proclamation is signed by the seven members of the council

24 APRIL

GPO and several other buildings in Dublin seized by Irish Volunteers and Citizen Army

An attack on Dublin Castle by a Citizen Army unit is repulsed; the unit briefly holds City Hall until overwhelmed later that day

25 APRIL

British army reinforcements arrive in Dublin and surround insurgent positions; martial law declared in Dublin

Citizen Army force in St Stephen’s Green comes under heavy fire and withdraws to College of Surgeons

26 APRIL

Liberty Hall destroyed and GPO damaged by British shelling

Francis Sheehy-Skeffington and two other prisoners summarily executed at Portobello barracks on orders of Captain J. C. Bowen-Colthurst [link]

Wexford Volunteers take over Enniscorthy

Heavy fighting as British troops advance on insurgent positions around the Four Courts and the South Dublin Union

Unable to hold the Mendicity Institute on Usher’s Island, the small Volunteer garrison under Seán Heuston surrenders

26–27 APRIL

British army reinforcements advancing on Mount Street bridge suffer heavy casualties at the hands of Volunteers from Éamon de Valera’s 3rd battalion

28 APRIL

Volunteers in north County Dublin under Thomas Ashe and Richard Mulcahy seize Ashbourne Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) barracks and ambush an RIC patrol sent to re-take it

GPO on fire; insurgents evacuate building and set up their headquarters in 16 Moore Street

29 APRIL

Pearse and Connolly agree to unconditional surrender, and send orders to other insurgent posts to do likewise

30 APRIL

Final surrenders of rebel commandants in Dublin end the rising; 64 insurgents, 132 crown forces and about 230 civilians killed

2–9 MAY

Courts martial of 187 leading insurgents; 88 sentenced to death, with 73 commuted to various terms of imprisonment. Over 400 insurgents sent to Britain to be interned; over 3,000 other suspects also arrested, of whom about half are interned

2 MAY

Gun battle ensues between Kent family and RIC at Bawnard House, Castlelyons, near Fermoy, Co. Cork, when Kents resist arrest

3 MAY

Executions of Pearse, Clarke and MacDonagh

4–12 MAY

Executions of remaining insurgents; Connolly and Mac Diarmada the last to be shot

3 AUGUST

Found guilty of treason, Roger Casement is hanged in Pentonville jail, London

22 DECEMBER

Release from Frongoch camp and Reading jail of remaining untried Irish political prisoners; convicted insurgents remain imprisoned [their trades]

1917

16 JUNE

Remaining 120 Irish prisoners, including Eoin MacNeill, de Valera and Markievicz, released from British jails

25 SEPTEMBER

Thomas Ashe dies in Mountjoy jail after forced feeding

26 OCTOBER

De Valera elected president of Sinn Féin

1918

18 APRIL

A broad front of Irish nationalists oppose conscription at Mansion House conference

17–18 MAY

‘German plot’ arrests of Sinn Féin leaders

11 NOVEMBER

Great War ends

14–28 DECEMBER

General election: Sinn Féin wins 73 of 105 Irish seats [manifesto]

1919

21 JANUARY

First meeting of Dáil Éireann at Mansion House, Dublin, declares independence

Irish Volunteer attack on RIC at Soloheadbeg, Co. Tipperary kills two policemen and marks the beginning of the war of independence [link]

1920

23 DECEMBER

Government of Ireland Act, 1920, provides for two subordinate Irish parliaments, one for six Ulster counties, the other for the remainder of the country

1921

22 JUNE

George V opens Northern Ireland parliament in Belfast

9 JULY

Truce ends Irish war of independence

6 DECEMBER

Anglo–Irish treaty signed by British government and Sinn Féin delegates in London [link]

1922

7 JANUARY

Dáil Éireann approves Anglo–Irish treaty by 64 votes to 57 [Constans de Markievics against the treaty]

14 JANUARY

Irish Free State provisional government elected by protreaty representatives; Michael Collins elected chairman

28 JUNE

Free State troops attack antitreaty forces in Four Courts, beginning the civil war

20 JULY

Limerick and Waterford taken by Free State troops (Cork taken 11 August)

12 AUGUST

Arthur Griffith, president of Dáil Éireann, dies of cerebral haemorrhage

22 AUGUST

Michael Collins killed in ambush at Béal na Bláth, Co. Cork

17 NOVEMBER

First of 77 executions of anti-treatyites by Free State government (last on 2 May 1923) [link]

6 DECEMBER

Formal establishment of Irish Free State with W. T. Cosgrave as president of the executive council

1923

24 MAY

De Valera orders anti-treatyites to cease armed operations, ending the civil war

April 7, 2016

Changing Everything

Steven Gorelick writes at Counterpunch:

Among climate change activists, solutions usually center on a transition to renewable energy. There may be differences over whether this would be best accomplished by a carbon tax, bigger subsidies for wind and solar power, divestment from fossil fuel companies, massive demonstrations, legislative fiat or some other strategy, but the goal is generally the same: replace dirty fossil fuels with clean renewable energy. Such a transition is often given a significance that goes well beyond its immediate impact on greenhouse gas emissions: it would somehow make our exploitative relationship to Nature more environmentally sound, our relationship to each other more socially equitable. In part this is because the fossil fuel corporations – symbolized by the remorseless Koch brothers – will be a relic of the past, replaced by ‘green’ corporations and entrepreneurs that display none of their predecessors’ ruthlessness and greed.

Maybe, but I have my doubts. Here in Vermont, for example, a renewable energy conference last year was titled, “Creating Prosperity and Opportunity Confronting Climate Change”. The event attracted venture capitalists, asset management companies, lawyers that represent renewable energy developers, and even a “brandthropologist” offering advice on “how to evolve Brand Vermont” in light of the climate crisis. The keynote speaker was Jigar Shah, author of Creating Climate Wealth, who pumped up the assembled crowd by telling them that switching to renewables “represents the largest wealth creation opportunity of our generation.” He added that government has a role in making that opportunity real: “policies that incentivize resource efficiency can mean scalable profits for businesses.” If Shah is correct, the profit motive – in less polite company it might be called ‘greed’ – will still be around in a renewable energy future.

But at least the renewable energy corporations will be far more socially responsible than their fossil fuel predecessors. Not if you ask the Zapotec communities in Mexico’s Oaxaca state, who will tell you that a renewable energy corporation can be just as ruthless as a fossil fuel one. Oaxaca is already home to 21 wind projects and 1,600 massive turbines, with more planned. While the indigenous population must live with the wind turbines on their communal lands, the electricity goes to distant urban areas and industries. Local people say they have been intimidated and deceived by the wind corporations: according to one indigenous leader, “They threaten us, they insult us, they spy on us, they block our roads. We don’t want any more wind turbines.” People have filed grievances with the government (which has actively promoted the wind projects) and have physically blocked access to development sites.

It seems that a transition to renewable energy might not be as transformative as some people hope. Or to put it more bluntly, renewable energy changes nothing about corporate capitalism.

Which brings me to the new film, This Changes Everything, based on Naomi Klein’s best-selling book and directed by her husband, Avi Lewis. I saw the film recently at a screening hosted by local climate activists and renewable energy developers, and was at first hopeful that the film would go even further than the book in, as Klein puts it, “connecting the dots between the carbon in the air and the economic system that put it there.”

But by film’s end one is left with the impression that a transition from fossil fuels to renewables is pretty much all that’s needed – not only to address climate change but to transform the economy and solve all the other problems we face. As the camera tracks skyward to reveal banks of solar panels in China or soars above 450-foot tall wind turbines in Germany, the message seems to be that fully committing to these technologies will change everything. This is surprising, since Klein’s book flatly contradicts this way of thinking:

“Over the past decade,” she wrote, “many boosters of green capitalism have tried to gloss over the clashes between market logic and ecological limits by touting the wonders of green tech…. They paint a picture of a world that can function pretty much as it does now, but in which our power will come from renewable energy and all of our various gadgets and vehicles will become so much more energy-efficient that we can consume away without worrying about the impact.” Instead, she says, we need “consume less, right away. [But] Policies based on encouraging people to consume less are far more difficult for our current political class to embrace than policies that are about encouraging people to consume green. Consuming green just means substituting one power source for another, or one model of consumer goods for a more efficient one. The reason we have placed all of our eggs in the green tech and green efficiency basket is precisely because these changes are safely within market logic.”

Overall, Klein’s book is far better at “connecting the dots” than the film. The book explains how free trade treaties have led to a huge spike in emissions, and Klein argues that these agreements need to be renegotiated in ways that will curb both emissions and corporate power. Among other things, she says, “long-haul transport will need to be rationed, reserved for those cases where goods cannot be produced locally.” She explicitly calls for “sensible relocalization” of the economy, as well as reduced consumption and “managed degrowth” in the rich countries of the North – notions likely to curdle the blood of capitalists everywhere. She endorses government incentives for local and seasonal food, as well as land management policies that discourage sprawl and encourage low-energy, local forms of agriculture.

I don’t buy everything about Klein’s arguments: they rest heavily on unquestioned assumptions about the course of ‘development’ in the global South, and focus too much on scaling up government and not enough on scaling down business. The “everything” that will change sometimes seems limited to the ideological pendulum: after decades of pointing towards the neoliberal, free-market right, she believes it must swing back to the left because climate change demands a huge expansion of government planning and support.

Nonetheless, many of the specific steps outlined in the book do have the potential to shift our economic system in important ways. Those steps, however, are given no space at all in the film. The focus is almost entirely on transitioning to renewables, which turns the film into what is essentially an informercial for industrial wind and solar.

The film starts well, debunking the notion that climate change is a product of human nature – of our innate greed and short-sightedness. Instead, Klein says, the problem lies in a “story” we’ve told ourselves for the past 400 years: that Nature is ours to tame, conquer, and extract riches from. In that way, Klein says, “Mother Nature became the mother lode.”

After a gut-wrenching segment on the environmental disaster known as the Alberta tar sands, the film centers on examples of “Blockadia” – a term coined by activists to describe local direct action against extractive industries. There is the Cree community in Alberta fighting the expansion of tar sands development; villagers in India blocking construction of a coal-fired power plant that would eliminate traditional fishing livelihoods; a community on Greece’s Halkidiki Peninsula battling their government and the police to stop an open pit gold mine that would destroy a cherished mountain; and a small-scale goat farmer in Montana joining hands with the local Cheyenne community to oppose a bevy of fossil fuel projects, including a tar sands pipeline, a shale oil project, and a new coal mine.

Klein implies that climate change underlies and connects these geographically diverse protests. But that’s partly an artifact of the examples Klein chose, and partly a misreading of the protestors’ motives: what has really driven these communities to resist is not climate change, but a deeply-felt desire to maintain their traditional way of life and to protect land that is sacred to them. A woman in Halkidiki expresses it this way: “we are one with this mountain; we won’t survive without it.” At its heart, the threat that all of these communities face doesn’t stem from fossil fuels, but from a voracious economic system that will sacrifice them and the land they cherish for the sake of profit and growth.

The choice of Halkidiki as an example actually undermines Klein’s construct, since the proposed mine has nothing directly to do with fossil fuels. It does, however, have everything to do with a global economy that runs on growth, corporate profit, and – as Greece knows only too well – debt. So it is with all the other examples in the film.

Klein’s narrative would have been derailed if she profiled the indigenous Zapotec communities of Oaxaca as a Blockadia example: they fit the bill in every respect other than the fact that it’s renewable energy corporations, not fossil fuel corporations, they are trying to block. Similarly, Klein’s argument would have suffered if she visited villagers in India who are threatened not by a coal-fired power plant, but by one of India’s regulation-free corporate enclaves known as “special economic zones”. These, too, have sparked protests and police violence against villagers: in Nandigram in West Bengal, 14 villagers were killed trying to keep their way of life from being eliminated, their lands turned into another outpost of an expanding global economy.

And while the tar sands region is undeniably an ecological disaster, it bears many similarities to the huge toxic lake on what was once pastureland in Baotou, on the edge of China’s Gobi Desert. The area is the source of nearly two-thirds of the world’s rare earth metals – used in almost every high-tech gadget (as well as in the magnets needed for electric cars and industrial wind turbines). The mine tailings and effluent from the many factories processing these metals have created an environmental disaster of truly monumental proportions: the BBC describes it as “the worst place on earth”. A significant shrinking of global consumer demand would help reduce Baotou’s toxic lake, but it’s hard to see how a shift to renewable energy would.

Too often, climate change has been used as a Trojan horse to enable corporate interests to despoil local environments or override the concerns of local communities. Klein acknowledges this in her book: by viewing climate change only on a global scale, she writes, we end up ignoring “people with attachments to particular pieces of land with very different ideas about what constitutes a ‘solution’. This chronic forgetfulness is the thread that unites so many fateful policy errors of recent years … [including] when policymakers ram through industrial-scale wind farms and sprawling… solar arrays without local participation or consent.” But this warning is conspicuously absent from the film.

Klein’s premise is that climate change is the one issue that can unite people globally for economic change, but there’s a more strategic way to look at it. What we face is not only a climate crisis but literally hundreds of potentially devastating crises: there’s the widening gap between rich and poor, islands of plastic in the oceans, depleted topsoil and groundwater, a rise in fundamentalism and terror, growing piles of toxic and nuclear waste, the gutting of local communities and economies, the erosion of democracy, the epidemic of depression, and many more. Few of these can be easily linked to climate change, but all of them can be traced back to the global economy.

This point is made by Helena Norberg-Hodge, founder of Local Futures, who explains how a scaling-down of the corporate-led global economy and a strengthening of diverse, localized economies would simultaneously address all of the most serious problems we face – including climate change. For this reason, what Norberg-Hodge calls ‘big picture activism’ has the potential to unite climate change activists, small farmers, peace advocates, environmentalists, social justice groups, labor unions, indigenous rights activists, main street business owners, and many more under a single banner. If all these groups connect the dots to see the corporate-led economy as a root cause of the problems they face, it could give rise to a global movement powerful enough to halt the corporate juggernaut.

And that really could change everything.

Also see: : Oaxaca on this blog, and “Exploitation and destruction: some things to know about industrial wind power”

March 26, 2016

The Rebel

I am come of the seed of the people, the people that sorrow,

That have no treasure but hope,.

No riches laid up but a memory

Of an Ancient glory.

My mother bore me in bondage, in bondage my mother was born,

I am of the blood of serfs;

The children with whom I have played, the men and women with whom I have eaten,

Have had masters over them, have been under the lash of masters,

And, though gentle, have served churls;

The hands that have touched mine, the dear hands whose touch is familiar to me,

Have worn shameful manacles, have been bitten at the wrist by manacles,

Have grown hard with the manacles and the task-work of strangers,

I am flesh of the flesh of these lowly, I am bone of their bone,

I that have never submitted;

I that have a soul greater than the souls of my people’s masters,

I that have vision and prophecy and the gift of fiery speech,

I that have spoken with God on the top of His holy hill.

And because I am of the people, I understand the people,

I am sorrowful with their sorrow, I am hungry with their desire:

My heart has been heavy with the grief of mothers,

My eyes have been wet with the tears of children,

I have yearned with old wistful men,

And laughed or cursed with young men;

Their shame is my shame, and I have reddened for it,

Reddened for that they have served, they who should be free,

Reddened for that they have gone in want, while others have been full,

Reddened for that they have walked in fear of lawyers and of their jailors

With their writs of summons and their handcuffs,

Men mean and cruel!

I could have borne stripes on my body rather than this shame of my people.

And now I speak, being full of vision;

I speak to my people, and I speak in my people’s name to the masters ofmy people.

I say to my people that they are holy, that they are august, despite their chains.

That they are greater than those that hold them, and stronger and purer,

That they have but need of courage, and to call on the name of their God,

God the unforgctting, the dear God that loves the peoples

For whom He died naked, suffering shame.

And I say to my people’s masters: Beware,

Beware of the thing that is coming, beware of the risen people.

Who shall take what ye would not give. Did ye think to conquer the people,

Or that Law is stronger than life and than men’s desire to be free?

We will try it out with you, ye that have harried and held.

Ye that have bullied and bribed, tyrants, hypocrites, liars!

—Pádraig Pearse

The Fool

Since the wise men have not spoken, I speak that am only a fool;

A fool that hath loved his folly,

Yea, more than the wise men their books or their counting houses, or their quiet homes,

Or their fame in men’s mouths;

A fool that in all his days hath done never a prudent thing,

Never hath counted the cost, nor recked if another reaped

The fruit of his mighty sowing, content to scatter the seed;

A fool that is unrepentant, and that soon at the end of all

Shall laugh in his lonely heart as the ripe ears fall to the reaping-hooks

And the poor are filled that were empty,

Tho’ he go hungry.

I have squandered the splendid years that the Lord God gave to my youth

In attempting impossible things, deeming them alone worth the toil.

Was it folly or grace? Not men shall iudge me, but God.

I have squandered the splendid years:

Lord, if I had the years I would squander them over again,

Aye, fling them from me!

For this I have heard in my heart, that a man shall scatter, not hoard,

Shall do the deed of to-day, nor take thought of to-morrow’s teen,

Shall not bargain or huxter with God; or was it a jest of Christ’s

And is this my sin before men, to have taken Him at His word?

The lawyers have sat in council, the men with the keen, long faces,

And said, “This man is a fool,” and others have said, “He blasphemeth;”

And the wise have pitied the fool that hath striven to give a life

In the world of time and space among the bulks of actual things,

To a dream that was dreamed in the heart, and that only the heart could hold.

O wise men, riddle me this: what if the dream come true?

What if the dream come true? and if millions unborn shall dwell

In the house that I shaped in my heart, the noble house of my thought?

Lord, I have staked my soul, I have staked the lives of my kin

On the truth of Thy dreadful word. Do not remember my failures,

But remember this my faith.

And so I speak.

Yea, ere my hot youth pass, I speak to my people and say:

Ye shall be foolish as I; ye shall scatter, not save;

Ye shall venture your all, lest ye lose what is more than all;

Ye shall call for a miracle, taking Christ at His word.

And for this I will answer, O people, answer here and hereafter,

O people that I have loved shall we not answer together?

—Pádraig Pearse

March 12, 2016

6 Women: 1916 Uprising portraits by David Rooney

Kathleen Lynn (1874–1955), a clergyman's daughter from Co. Mayo, was a medical doctor devoted to services for the poor, a woman's suffragist and separatist. Chief medical officer of the Irish Citizen Army, during the Easter Rising she supervised a first-aid station in Dublin City Hall until t he garrison's surrender. In 1919 she established St Ultan's Hospital for Infants, and in the 1930s pioneered BCG inoculations against tuberculosis.
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Constance Markievicz (1868–1927) was born in London, the daughter of Sir Henry Gore-Booth of Lissadell, Co. Sligo. Breaking with her Ascendancy background, she joined Sinn Féin and Inghinidhe na hÉireann, and co-founded Na Fianna Éireann in 1909. During Easter week she served as second-in-command of the Irish Citizen Army garrison in the College of Surgeons. Her death sentence was commuted and she was released from prison in June 1917. The first woman to be elected a Westminster MP in 1918, she was minister for labour in the Dáil cabinet (1919–21).
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Helena Molony (1883–1967) was a grocer's daughter from Dublin's north city-centre market district. Active in the feminist and separatist movements, she was an Abbey Theatre actress, trade union official, secretary of the Irish Citizen Army women's group, and manager of the Liberty Hall women workers' co·operative which made uniforms and equipment in preparation for the Easter Rising. She served in the ICA City Hall garrison that surrendered on the evening of Easter Monday, and was interned in England until December 1916.
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Elizabeth O'Farrell (1884–1957) was born in Dublin and worked as a midwife at Holles Street hospital. A committed trade unionist, she was also involved in nationalist and suffragist organisations. She served in the GPO during Easter week. delivering Pearse's offer of surrender to British forces, and his surrender order to other insurgent garrisons. After the Easter Rising, she remained a dedicated republican activist.
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Mary Perolz.jpg

Mary Perolz (1874–1950) was born in Market Alley, Limerick city and raised in Tralee and Cork city, where her father worked on the Cork Examiner. Prominent in Cumann na mBan and the Irish Citizen Army, she was dispatched as a courier carrying the remobilisation orders from Patrick Pearse to the Cork city Volunteers. Elected acting president for the Irish Women Workers' Union in 1917. she remained an outspoken champion of the rights of women in industry and the labour movement.
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Margaret Skinnider (1893–1971) was a Glasgow-born mathematics teacher of Co. Monaghan extraction. Joining the lrish Citizen Army on a Dublin visit, she returned to assist in preparations for the Easter Rising. During Easter week she cycled around Dublin carrying dispatches and also took sniper duty in military uniform in the College of Surgeons. Critically wounded in a sortie, she was the most serious female casualty among the rebels, and recovered after seven weeks in hospital.
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Illustrations by David Rooney, from 1916: Portraits and Lives (Royal Irish Academy).

Also see: “Eight Women of the Easter Rising” by Sadhbh Walshe, New York Times, March 16, 2016