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In the aftermath of the 1916 Rising,
the British government executed 16 men.
Seven of them left behind wives and children,
many of them still very young.
And in the decade of centenaries, much has been said about these men.
But how many of us know about
the women and children that they left behind?
The women were Agnes Mallin, the wife of Michael Mallin.
Lily Connolly, the wife of James Connolly.
Grace Plunkett, wife of Joseph Mary Plunkett.
Grace's sister, Muriel MacDonagh, wife of Thomas MacDonagh.
Kathleen Clarke, wife of Tom Clarke.
Aine Ceannt, wife of Eamonn Ceannt.
And Maud Gonne, the wife of Jon MacBride.
These seven women were from a variety
of class, ideological and educational backgrounds
spanning the breadth of Irish society at the time.
And yet, they had several things in common.
They all lived through the hell of Easter Week
and were widowed at the same time, left to pick up the pieces.
In his last hour on Earth, Eamonn Ceannt wrote to his wife Aine,
to tell her, "Men and women will vie with one another
to shake your dear hand.
You will be, you are the wife of one of the leaders of the revolution."
But the reality for these women would be radically different.
Much about their stories isn't unusual.
Theirs is the social and political history of many women
as Ireland moved from revolution into the new Free State.
The widows of Easter 1916 didn't die for Ireland.
They had to keep on living for Ireland.
What would this new free Ireland be like for them, and for all women?
Would it actually have a real place for them in it?
In many respects, the 1916 Rising represented a high point
of the idea of equality for Irish women.
And nowhere is this more evident than in the proclamation of the republic.
A truly radical document that addressed Irishmen and Irishwomen.
Insisting on equality of the sexes, freedom of religious expression
and equal economic opportunity.
To quote it, "The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty,
equal rights and equal opportunities of all citizens."
This was the proclamation that these women's husbands
had given their lives for.
This and the republic that it declared Ireland to be
would become a touchstone for the widows for the rest of their lives.
Time and time again, they would hark back to it
and remind others of it too.
But following the executions,
the women also had other things on their minds.
Can you just tell me, Sinead, about the immediate aftermath?
They're still in this very fluid situation,
their husbands have been executed and many have small children.
I mean, it was absolute chaos.
I mean, Dublin is destroyed.
The gas to the city had been cut off.
There was that whole reaction to what had happened.
It all plunged into a public realm.
Their houses had been raided in most cases.
There's mass arrests.
(EARNER―BYRNE) Immediately after the Rising,
many of the widows were plunged into s struggle for survival.
All of them, with the exception of Grace Plunkett,
had small children to feed.
And only Maud Gonne had independent wealth to fall back upon.
The family of Lily Connolly, for example,
wife of executed leader James Connolly, was left destitute.
A letter survives written by Lily Connolly's daughter,
Nora Connolly, in which she recalls their circumstances at the time.
"We were in dire straits," she wrote.
"We had no money whatsoever and no means of getting any.
Daddy never had any money to spare.
The last few pounds he'd had in his wallet were taken from him
after his arrest."
You know, many of them didn't have the opportunity to earn money
because of the nature of Irish society at that time.
But even for those who did,
for example, Aine Ceannt, who ran a private fee-paying school,
she came back to her home after the Easter Rising,
her husband had been executed. She had dependents to look after,
including a child.
And that school had been ransacked and destroyed.
So her source of income was gone. Her husband was gone.
And she was left with no support in the immediate aftermath
to try and deal with that reality, with her own grief, her own loss,
and also, the lack of any financial support.
Widows, as with other single mothers,
had very little access to the workplace,
they had issues of childcare.
Many of them had to rely upon charity and philanthropy
as there wasn't any welfare.
(EARNER―BYRNE) Just how harsh life could be for widows at the time
and how limited their options sometimes were
is illustrated by the holdings found in the National Archives of Ireland.
The National Archive preserves the memory of the state.
So, we hold all of the records that relate to the modern Irish state
bin terms of government records from 1921 onwards.
But we also still do have holdings relating to the period
when Ireland was under British administration.
So, really the holdings tell a range of stories
in terms of the political stories, the social stories,
the economic stories, the cultural stories,
that shaped and framed the nation.
So, really, Orlaith, before 1922 and the foundation of the Irish State
apart from charity, what would a widow rely on
in terms of relief or welfare?
Very little really. The workhouse.
(EARNER―BYRNE) At the time,
workhouses were the only official help available to the destitute.
In the workhouses, families were separated from each other,
and conditions were often grim.
As a result, only the most desperate,
those who had no other choice would go there.
We have ledgers here in the National Archives from the workhouses.
They clearly show that it's widows who are turning up.
In each line, you've got "widow, widow, widow, widow, widow."
Pretty bleak.
(EARNER-BYRNE) Many widows faced destitution and the workhouse
following the loss of their husbands who were often
the sole or main breadwinners.
The families of the men involved in 1916 were no exception
and an immediate charity drive was started to help them.
There's initially fundraising to provide assistance
for the widows of those killed in the Rising,
also for those who were jailed.
And this becomes the Irish National Aid and Volunteer Dependence Fund.
And it's really fronted and initially administered
by the widows, particularly Kathleen Clark
and Aine Ceannt.
They start fundraising, appealing to the people of Ireland
to raise money to support the prisoners and the families
of men who were killed during the Rising itself.
This rose into a really successful
charitable welfare-driven organisation
that raises money all over Ireland, across the Irish Diaspora,
and the money that's raised in Ireland
is dwarfed by huge amounts that come in from America, in particular.
And in that fundraising initiative,
is the story of the widows part of the propaganda used?
The widows are, sort of, front and centre, and the children,
in this propaganda to raise the money.
The story of the widows of 1916 and their children
became a powerful tool for raising public sympathy and money
for their families.
But it had another effect on them too.
The widows, despite their own intense personal grief
and financial struggles
had to get used to the glare of the public spotlight.
In the wake of the 1916 Rising and the execution of their husbands,
there was significant international and national interest
in them and their children.
Indeed, the nationalist movement had to exploit that interest
in order to both change the initially hostile reaction to the Rising
but also to bring in much needed funds
so that the movement could regroup and continue.
As a result, the women found themselves at the forefront
of the nationalist publicity effort.
Remember, this is during the First World War,
so, the British state has very heavy censorship.
You've got the Defence of the Realm Act, DORA,
so the newspapers are heavily censored.
You can do anything political in them.
What you can do is much more emotional.
And appealing to the emotions,
talking about the lives of the men or the lives of their widows.
An example of this is the 1916 Christmas edition
of the Catholic Bulletin,
that featured pictures of many of the 1916 widows and their children.
(WARD) The photographs, in particular,
that are included in the Catholic Bulletin
subvert the censorship
because people take the photos afterwards
and use them as part of the fundraising drive
and use them as pamphlets about the rising.
It must have been very tough to have been so much in the spotlight
at a time of such intense grief.
While many of the widows threw themselves wholeheartedly
into raising awareness of the cause their husbands had died for,
some of them reacted to the intense scrutiny in unexpected ways.
The American newspapers pick up the stories of the widows of 1916,
particularly the romantic story
of Grace Gifford and Joseph Plunkett.
Grace and Joe had been married in a last minute ceremony
in Kilmainham Gaol.
Within hours, he was executed and she never saw him again.
It was a story that gripped the public imagination.
An American newspaper reporter came to interview Grace,
the grieving widow and got a bit of a surprise.
If you can imagine walking through Ireland in this period
and you would see a lot of women wearing black
and what were known as "widow's weeds,"
which you wore for a period of time,
so it was a very public demonstration of your grief
and your widowhood.
And then when this American reporter, Irish-American reporter
Eileen Moore comes to interview her,
she's already telling her readers that
I was expecting to have this woman
who was going to sob her way through our meeting and interview
and out she emerges in this white outfit holding a kitten.
She's wearing all these rings on her fingers
and she's got bushy red hair and she's wearing the dress of the day
but she's just vibrant.
And she's an artist, she's trained with William Orpen
so she's very aware of what she looks like
and she's deliberately playing to the journalist who comes.
She doesn't want to be seen through this filter
because she's reacting, because she's already becoming
a caricature of herself.
Some of the widows were also uncomfortable
with the public spotlight.
In the years after the Rising,
Lily Connolly tried to keep her life private,
leaving the public activism to her children,
especially Ina, Nora, and Roddy Connolly.
Maud Gonne was also often left out of the publicity around the widows,
but for very different reasons.
She was set apart from the other widows in so far as
she was not living with her husband at the time of the Easter Rising.
They had separated some 10-11 years previously
in acrimonious circumstances and she was living in France.
John MacBride, by the early 1900s, was a hero of the Boer War,
having commanded the Irish Brigade during the Boer War.
He after the war ended, couldn't get back to Ireland,
so he came to Paris which was a centre for exiles and Irish emigres
through the 19th century and into the 20th century.
And they met, Maud Gonne and John MacBride,
married in a whirlwind romance.
Things quickly went wrong.
And they were told by many of their friends,
Arthur Griffiths said, "Don't do this, please!" Yeah.
Maud Gonne sought a divorce from her husband
citing complaints of cruelty against her,
of physical abuse while she was pregnant, of drunkenness.
And as it turned out, there was an explosive allegation made
that John MacBride had sexually abused
her ten-year-old daughter, Iseult.
It wasn't clear at all that a divorce could be granted.
These people were not married under British law
or Irish law at the time.
The question of their citizenship was also quite complex.
John MacBride had been stripped of his citizenship
by having taken up arms against the Crown.
And in the end, they weren't able to be fully divorced
so it was a judicial separation, in the end.
Maud Gonne was afraid to go back to Ireland.
She was worried that her husband would reopen proceedings,
would take her son away,
and so, John MacBride's name in Maud Gonne's household
was a name to be scared of.
And then in 1916, after the Rising, all that changed completely.
John MacBride became a name to be honoured,
he was a martyr, he died for Ireland,
"He has given my son a name he can be proud of,"
that was something she wrote.
And she took the name back on. Yeah.
Embraced widow's weeds, wore black for the rest of her life.
Very... You know, full mourning for the rest of her life.
Despite fully embracing her dead husband's legacy,
a sense of moral taint clung to Maud Gonne MacBride,
a result of her attempt to divorce him.
This was an era where a woman could not claim either charitable help
or the moral high ground if she was seen
as anything other than respectable.
As a result, Maud was often not included in publicity
with the other widows.
.
The publicity generated by the widows and their children was crucial
in bringing public opinion around behind the 1916 Rising.
But women actually played a much bigger role
in sustaining the nationalist movement itself.
(BORGONOV) So, after the executions,
the movement has been essentially decapitated.
There's martial law and there's censorship.
Things are really in disarray.
The widows really step in.
Kathleen Clark had been really given a succession plan
by her husband who was head
of the Irish Republican Brotherhood military council.
She had a pot of around three or four thousand pounds,
and she really starts the ball rolling.
The key to all this was the Irish Volunteer Dependence Fund
was really the only public face
of what becomes the independence movement.
It really becomes a parish by parish national organisation
at a time when there is no Sinn Fein political party,
when there is no other ways
of getting involved in the independence movement.
And everywhere across the country
where you have these activists gathering
they eventually become the first branches of Sinn Fein.
They're predominantly led by women.
And the widows are really at the coalface of this organisation.
Which is really important because you've got a moment
where things could have died.
It could have been successful, the executions and imprisonments,
they could have decapitated this movement.
Do they bring in new people?
One thing that Kathleen Clark does is she hires an administrator.
And Aine Ceannt is also involved in this decision.
And the person they choose is Michael Collins.
Michael Collins had been released from prison at Christmas.
He has IRB backgrounds.
The decision to hire Michael Collins is really key
to his development as a national figure.
It's the first time he really lives and works in Dublin
and really gets access to this independence movement.
Had Kathleen Clark not wanted to hire him,
he would not have gotten that position
and we don't know how he would have ended up.
(EARNER-BYRNE) Kathleen was to pay a further personal price
for the huge workload she took on in the wake of the Rising.
Years later when she was asked what was the first thing you did
after the 1916 Rising,
Kathleen Clark answered simply, "I lost a child."
She already had three small boys by 1916
and in August of that year, quite late in her pregnancy,
she miscarried the child that she hadn't told her husband about.
She simply said, "I didn't want to add to his burden or worry."
It's interesting that that is what stayed with her,
it wasn't the fundraising that she threw herself into,
it wasn't the drive to survive.
It wasn't the role she played in the really important task
of rebuilding the nationalist movement,
it was the fact that she'd lost a child.
(EARNER―BYRNE) Someone else who may have lost a child
in the aftermath of the Rising was Grace Plunkett.
(O'KEEFFE) Grace Plunkett's sister-in-law alleged
that she suffered a miscarriage at Larkfield,
the Plunkett family home in Kimmage after the 1916 Rising.
Grace and Joe had only been married for a couple of hours
before he was executed.
There was no unsupervised opportunity
to consummate the marriage
so if she was pregnant, it was before the 1916 Rising,
and before they were married.
I don't think that it's possible to substantiate that rumour
that Grace was pregnant. The only source was Geraldine Plunkett.
I don't think there was very much love lost between those two women.
But if it was true, it would have had significant ramifications
for Grace's moral standing in the community.
It would have meant the relationship was consummated
before the wedding.
But it would have also meant that that marriage
had much greater significance for both of them.
It would have meant that it was vital for Grace to get married
before Joseph's execution
as unmarried mothers in those days were particularly vulnerable.
They often lost the support of their families,
their claim to being respectable and their social status,
making it even harder to survive on their own.
A last minute wedding in Kilmainham on the eve
of Joseph's execution could have been a way for Grace to avoid such a fate.
(SEAGULLS CRY)
In 1917, the National Aid Committee
paid for a holiday in Skerries for several of the 1916 widows
and their families.
Present were Agnes Mallin and her children,
Lily Connolly and her children, Aine Ceannt and her son,
Muriel MacDonagh and her daughter, as well as Grace Plunkett.
While there, tragedy struck Muriel.
(MCCOOLE) She went swimming.
Although Muriel is a really, really strong swimmer,
had won awards for long distance swimming,
the area of Skerries is notorious for currents
and she was trying to get out to the island,
she'd been told by others not to go to the island.
Grace raised the alarm very quickly because one of the children
Seamus Mallin had run back to the house.
So it was very immediate and they were very alarmed from the outset.
But unfortunately, when the boat went
there was no sign of her, and tragically,
her body was washed up the next morning
and obviously, she had drowned.
It all happened so quickly.
Even with all the families there,
it must have had such an impact on them all,
but most of all, of course, Barbara, her little daughter,
and Donagh, her son who was in hospital at the time.
What happened to them afterwards?
The story I recall first and foremost
is that Don was lifted up to the window in the hospital
and he remembers looking out of the window
and seeing horses with the black plumes dancing on their head.
Years later it came back to him
that he was watching his mother's funeral.
After the MacDonagh children were orphaned
due to the execution of their father
and the subsequent drowning of their mother
the National Aid Committee became involved in their welfare.
Largely as a result of something that Thomas MacDonagh
had written when he declared,
"My beloved Muriel and my beloved children,
my country then will treat them as wards. I hope."
The National Aid Committee was the same fundraising organisation
that was set up to look after the families of those who fought in 1916.
It decided to take a very literal approach to MacDonagh's words.
(MCCOOLE) In his last letter,
Thomas MacDonagh has used the term "wards of the nation."
And this phrase that he uses because he's using it the context
that he hasn't made much money and so he's making the case
for them to be looked after by the wider nationalist community.
But instead, the National Aid set up a committee
to look into who's going to look after these children.
The issue of who the MacDonagh children should live with
was complicated by religion.
Muriel's family was Protestant, while the MacDonaghs were Catholic.
At the time, sending Catholic children,
especially the children of a dead nationalist hero
to Protestant families was highly disapproved of.
And then it becomes a pull and push between both sides of the family.
And the children are moved from place to place, you know?
Their lives are turned upside-down
by almost the possession of them by the nation.
This was during a period when religion was assuming
an ever increasing importance.
This is illustrated by the fact
that every single one of the Easter widows
ended up Roman Catholic.
Four of the Easter widows were initially Protestant
and all four converted to Catholicism.
Maud Gonne MacBride converted in 1903,
just prior to her marriage to John MacBride.
And she wrote to WB Yeats about that time describing herself
as an "Irishwoman."
She said, "I want to look at the truth through the same prism
as my country people. I wanted to convert to Catholicism."
In the case of Grace Gifford,
from the unionist/loyalist Gifford family,
her conversion happened just prior to her wedding
to Joe Plunkett in 1916.
Lily Connolly converted to Catholicism in August 1916.
In her case, she was fulfilling the deathbed wish of her husband.
The last of the widows who converted to Catholicism was Muriel MacDonagh.
In her case it was May 1917,
poignantly, the first anniversary of her husband's execution.
In many ways, they were embracing the faith of their executed husbands
but more than that, it underlined the increasing association,
intertwining of nationalism and Catholicism around this time.
(EARNER―BYRNE) In 1917, things changed for many of the women
involved in the nationalist movement, including some of the 1916 widows.
Many of the men who had been imprisoned in England
after the Rising began to return home changing the status quo.
So while the Proclamation in 1916 had the promise of equality,
and gender equality for women and men in it,
after many of the men begin returning home in 1917,
it becomes apparent to a lot of the women
that they're going to have to advocate for themselves.
The men of the political movement are coming back
and the women are fighting really hard to say
we're also part of the political movement.
(MCAULIFFE) In the General Election of 1918,
the first election with women voters,
albeit over 30 with certain property qualifications,
Kathleen Clark really wanted to run as a Sinn Fein candidate.
But she is stymied by the men.
The men wanted to put in the men that are still in prison
and the male heroes of 1916 into those seats
and Kathleen was side-lined.
And you begin to see this is happening again and again
that side-lining of the women.
And so even a widow, like Kathleen Clark
has to battle for her position.
(EARNER-BYRNE) This pushing out of women from the public sphere
was a theme that would continue into the new Irish Free State.
But first, Ireland had to win her independence from Britain.
In 1919, the War of Independence broke out in Ireland.
The Republican forces were determined to carry on what was begun in 1916
and strike a decisive blow against the British Crown forces in Ireland.
During the War of Independence what happened to these families,
to the women, to Kathleen Clark and her children
and the other widows during this period?
How active were they and how difficult was that period for them?
It's women who've come from a more political background
that are the ones that have become more involved.
Like Kathleen Clark, who's a justice
in the Republican Court, for example.
She's also a member of the second Dail.
You've got Aine Ceannt living with her sister Lily.
Their house in Oakley Road must have put up half the men,
the prominent men in the movement, they gave safe houses all the time.
And they, of course, are well known for having done that.
Grace Plunkett is much more somebody
who hasn't been particularly active, but what she is
is a very skilled artist and cartoonist.
And that's her talent, and that's what she's used
during the War of Independence to great effect.
In terms of propaganda.
As part of the propaganda movement.
Lily Connolly is elected in the local government elections in 1920
and becomes a local government councillor for a period of time,
but really, is never involved in the movement.
She's got young children to look after,
and I think a lot of her time is based on survival.
She gets money and hopes to set up a boarding house
in order to keep her and her family.
And that's really important.
That's quite a common thing for widows, boarding houses.
It's something that you can do where you live
and look after your children.
A major feature of the War of Independence
were violent raids by the British Crown forces
on the homes of women and children.
The first thing the family would hear
would be a loud bang on the door
and that would quickly be followed by armed men entering the home
pushing and physically assaulting the people inside,
who invariably were women and children.
Smashing up the house. Highly personalised attacks.
Mementoes of their husbands being taken.
So every time the loud bang came on the door,
there was of course the anxiety, there was of course the worry.
Is that the time you're going to get killed yourself
and your children left without you, having already lost their father.
The Crown forces knew who they were raiding.
They knew these were the widows of the Easter Rising's leaders.
And that was played out in the way in which these attacks happened.
(COLEMAN) The home of Eamonn Ceannt's widow
was raided by the Auxiliaries in February 1921.
They took away Sinn Fein flags,
they took away what they described as seditious literature.
They also took away what were described in a report
as musical pipes. I take that to be Eamonn Ceannt's uilleann pipes.
But it must have been quite emotionally traumatic for her
to have these belongings, these, I suppose,
relics she had of her husband taken from her
by the Crown forces for no reason.
What did they think these were? Some sort of weapon or something?
Even women like Agnes Mallin who isn't involved
is raided several times.
And the fact that she has the memorabilia
from Michael Mallin's time in the British Army
like his ceremonial sword.
Things that they're trying to hide, things they don't want taken away
because they're keepsakes and mementoes,
so just because you're not involved doesn't mean...
You're not targeted. ...you're not going to be harassed.
Because you're a name.
You know for the widows who had young teenage sons
there was, of course, the danger that they would be killed.
People had been killed during raids on multiple occasions.
Sometimes, ten times in the one week, there would be violent raids
on these homes.
So it was this almost inexorable punishment for the widows
of the Easter Rising leaders and their families
that really continued throughout the whole War of Independence.
.
(EARNER-BYRNE) The War of Independence ended
with an offer of a treaty by the British in December 1921.
This treaty offered Ireland the status of self-governing dominion
but not a full republic as declared in 1916.
Immediately, this treaty caused outrage among many nationalists
including the widows of 1916.
The attitude of the widows of 1916 was one of horror and rejection
and disbelief. They had fought so hard to get so far
and now, as far as they were concerned,
their leaders, who were all men, were selling them out.
I think that they were very much dedicated to upholding the ideas
of the Easter Rising and the Proclamation.
All of their husbands had gone out to fight for those ideals.
Many of them had been executed
after putting their names onto the proclamation
which promised full sovereign independence
and equality, basically, across religion and gender lines.
And so I think that they took those ideals very seriously.
All of the women say that they were not fighting for dominion status
they weren't fighting to be part of the British empire.
They were fighting for a republic
that was going to give them equal rights,
equal opportunities, equal suffrage
and that was what was so important to them.
Pro-treaty political leaders, basically, tried to pigeonhole
the women as hysterical, as bloodthirsty,
as demanding vengeance.
Essentially being irrational, that's how they explain it.
Here's a quote from PS O'Hegarty who's a real prominent supporter
of the pro-treaty side. He said,
"They have become practically unsexed,
their mothers' milk blackened to make gunpowder.
Their minds working on nothing save hate and blood."
Wow. So it really gives you a flavour of this visceral reaction
to the women and this idea that somehow it's their gender
which is irrational.
But what's actually going on, do you think there?
What they're doing is they're taking their status as widows
and basically saying that they can't possibly be rational
because of this loss they've suffered.
It's a real neat political trick
to take your opponent's greatest strength
and turn it into their greatest weakness.
(EARNER-BYRNE) Civil war broke out in 1922
between the pro-treaty Free State forces
and anti-treaty Republicans.
All the widows of the men executed in 1916
took the anti-treaty Republican side.
And immediately began to pay the price for it.
(O'KEEFFE) Maud Gonne MacBride, Kathleen Clark
and Grace Plunkett were all arrested at various stages in 1923.
Maud Gonne famously went on a 20-day hunger strike.
And Grace Plunkett, who was arrested in February 1923,
was lodged in Kilmainham Gaol,
the very place where she'd been married seven years before,
the very place her husband had faced an execution squad.
Many of the children of the 1916 widows were by this stage
old enough to take part in the anti-treaty side
against the Free State.
They too were arrested at a time when the Free State
was starting to execute prisoners
in reprisal for attacks on their forces.
Seamus Mallin is the son of Michael Mallin.
He's the son of Agnes Mallin.
He's arrested.
Sean MacBride is the son of Major John MacBride,
the son of Maud Gonne. He's arrested.
Ina Connolly, Nora Connolly, Roddy Connolly,
the children of James Connolly and Lily Connolly, they're arrested.
And all of those people are subject to potential execution.
We know that Sean MacBride could have been executed
but for a decision by the Free State that it would backfire on them
to execute the son of an Easter Rising leader.
The same with Seamus Mallin.
But that didn't do anything to allay the fears
of their mothers during that time.
So there's a tremendous irony in the experience
of the widows of 1916 across the entire revolutionary period
because all of the widows of the 1916 leaders
take an anti-treaty position.
It is remarkable how quick the pivot comes
and they now become enemies of the state.
They become enemies of the state that, in many ways,
was born out of the sacrifices of their husbands.
They become enemies of the state that continues to invoke
the names and the memories of their husbands
while viciously attacking their widows.
(EARNER-BYRNE) The Civil War ended in 1923
with the Free State forces winning.
However, they now faced the challenge of building a new state.
The new Irish state like many others struggled with a real increase
in widows and orphans after almost a decade of conflict.
Indeed, many Irish contemporaries saw how the state
was going to treat widows as a test of what kind of country it was to be.
As one official commented towards the end of the 1920,
it was a real source of shame to see Irish widows
parading their poverty. Forced to beg from charities
and various sources to scrape together an income.
We know that widows were the single biggest category in need
in the new Irish state.
But we also know that the assistance they received
was rarely enough and often ungenerously given.
The evidence for the new Free State's first attempts
to deal with the problem are found
in the Military Service Pensions collection
in the Military Archives in Dublin.
The Military Service Pension collection is an archive
of interrelated administrative file series
recognising the service of those who fought
during the Irish Revolutionary period.
It is the biggest collection in existence
covering that period of time.
Starting in 1923, the Irish Free State enacted a series of legislation
that granted pensions to certain people who were wounded
and the dependents of people who were killed during the Irish Revolution.
Qualifying for a pension was often quite difficult.
The difficulty in getting pensions is really set
by the restrictive nature of the legislation.
There's not a lot of money to go around.
You know, the Irish Free State starts poor.
You can see that had a pension been given to everyone,
the spending would have been completely out of control.
We were, and I quote here, these are not my words,
"If we were to give a pension to everyone who served a cup of tea
during the War of Independence it would be untenable."
So they are restricted.
Many applicants had to go through a difficult process
to prove their military service, their financial circumstances,
and that they were who they said they were.
There were often long delays
before an application was rejected or approved.
For the widows of the dead in 1916,
they are set apart from the very beginning.
Yet there are still delays, there are still frustrations.
We have a letter on the James Connolly file
from General Mulcahy who was then minister for defence,
basically, why is it taking so long?
And I quote, "It shouldn't take one day
to verify that James Connolly died in 1916.
And it shouldn't take one day to verify that Lily Connolly
is his widow." What's the wait?
So the frustration is there also on their side.
But it is a lot more straightforward.
The pension process was more complicated for Agnes Mallin.
Even though her husband Michael Mallin was executed
in the aftermath of the 1916 Rising,
he hadn't actually signed the Proclamation.
As a result, Agnes and her family were treated differently
to the widows and families of those who did sign
and she got less money as a result.
The signatories were ones who were singled out
as being the widows of the nation, if you like,
and the ones who got more compensation
for the death of their husbands.
So it wasn't really based necessarily on need,
but on the, kind of, status.
Agnes Mallin had a really difficult time.
She had very little money.
Later on, she does work, you know, she works as a night nurse,
she works as a school truancy officer
but she's always, throughout her later life,
in difficulty for money.
While we know quite a lot about what happened to Lily, Grace, Aine,
and the other widows
because they were the widows of the men executed
after the 1916 Rising,
what about the thousands of other women
who became widows during this period?
What were their experiences, losing their breadwinner
and possibly having small children to raise.
The widows ran the risk if they asked for help
of having their children taken into care
and possibly sent to an industrial school.
In the end, we can't know about all these stories
but the stories of the 1916 widows give us at least an insight
into the human dimension of bereavement during the early decades
of the 20th century.
(SOMBRE MUSIC)
During its early years, the new Free State
had to grapple with a lot of instability.
It needed to restore order as quickly as possible
and it also need to assert what its new identity was going to be.
In terms of morality, for example, and behaviour,
what sort of sense do you get about what people were expecting
or hoping for from the Free State?
The Free State had to reassure the conservative elements in society,
the church, the morality you've traditionally upheld
is our morality, we're determined to do the same
we'll be a lot better than the Brits ever were at this.
Like any nationality, the Irish people thought they were better
than anybody else, and certainly better than the English.
And the English, you know, had this Anglo-Saxon materialism.
And they were very corrupt, they had very low morals.
One of the ways the new Free State differentiated itself
was by leaning more into Catholic ideology.
This impacted in several ways.
Increasingly, nationalist and Catholic identities
were becoming one and the same thing.
And central to maintaining this identity
was a particular idea of the family.
(BUCKLEY) The new Irish Free State was very much centred on the family.
And there was a particular type of family
where there's a male breadwinner
and women are primarily within the home.
And the way that that is endorsed is through legislation
which is really influenced by Catholic social teaching.
So divorce is made illegal, even though it had not really
been an option for many women and men prior to that.
Women's bodies and their reproductive rights
are being curtailed.
Laws are used to ban the sale of contraceptives.
What this is doing is curtailing women and it's putting forward
a very idealised version of the Irish family.
And so, the Free State that is setup is very conservative,
social values are predicated on class and middle-class values.
For the widows of 1916,
and for all of the political women who had campaigned
through cultural nationalism, feminism, militant nationalism,
this Free State is not the state they wanted.
This is not the state they had fought for.
In many ways, the state that came into being
was a huge disappointment to them.
But a lot of them realised that they have to continue fighting
and they do that differently.
They do it as social activism, they do it through local politics.
They do it through campaigns on healthcare,
on social housing.
And then you have women like Kathleen Clark
who do it through national politics.
Firstly as a TD, and then in the Senate.
And she consistently is a voice
harking back to the Proclamation of 1916.
And I think for a lot of the women, we come back to that again and again
and that promise of equality,
that promise of a republic of equality.
Despite the efforts to push them out of the public sphere,
and relegate all women to the home,
many women campaigned on, especially in the area of social care.
Some of their efforts paid off,
and in 1935, the Irish government finally enacted legislation
designed to provide financial assistance to all qualifying widows.
So, Orlaith, we have the 1935 Pension Act there
introduced by the Widows and Orphans of Ireland.
What difference did it make to them? Was it a very generous scheme?
It wasn't a very generous scheme, it was 10 shillings a week,
but in a way, it was, for many women,
a liberation from, you know, the hard slog that it was
when they had to go from charity to charity, small job to small job
to small job.
It created a foundation whereby it was never going to be enough,
and I think it was such, that it would never be enough
and they'd have to supplement their income.
But in a way, it created some kind of a solid basis
whereby they could ensure
that there was food on the table for their children.
This, in many ways, is the culmination of those female voices
and those female activists after the revolutionary period
who continued to be activists, albeit in the realm of social care
and social reform.
This Act is the state's demonstration
of its recognition of what went before
but also of its responsibility to what will come afterwards
in terms of supporting the most vulnerable
but in particular, our widows and orphans in Irish society.
The executed leaders of the Easter Rising
will always be icons of modern Irish history.
But for the widows of the Easter Rising,
their execution was slow.
Their execution went on for years.
And they carried with them through all of that
their own personal grief and loss,
their responsibility as lone parents,
their responsibility for their own political commitment
which was really important to them, and then,
this additional responsibility of being almost surrogates
for the symbolic presence of their husbands.
These women's names should be as recognisable as their husbands'.
Lily Connolly, Kathleen Clark,
Maud Gonne, Agnes Mallin, Aine Ceannt,
Muriel MacDonagh and Grace Plunkett.
They are hugely important figures in Irish history in their own right.
As the role of women in the Irish Free State
became increasingly contested,
the not insignificant contribution of the Easter widows
and other women like them was airbrushed out of history.
The official record recording only the activities of their husbands
and the other men who fought in the Rising.
The new Ireland that their husbands' deaths helped to create
turned out to not really have a place for the widows of 1916 after all.
It didn't really have a place for any other women either.
The promise of equality as enshrined in the 1916 Proclamation
became an ongoing and unfinished project
that still continues to this day.
When reflecting on her parents' role in history,
Agnes Mallin's daughter once wrote,
"I've often thought it was my mother who was the heroic one."
A different definition of heroic than that we've come to associate
with the 1916 Rising, but every bit as true
when we consider the lives that these women lived,
their sacrifices, resilience and courage.
Perhaps it was every bit as brave for the widows
to keep on living for Ireland as it was for the men to die for it.
Subtitles by Iyuno-SDI Group