Due to unforeseen circumstances, historian Luke Dineen cannot attend the forthcoming festival.
On Saturday evening 27th July 2024 at the Shandon Maldron Hotel at 4:30 pm, local historian Gerard O’Rourke will instead give a talk about his recently published book “Land War to Civil War 1900-1924Donoughmore to Cork and Beyond”.
Gerard O’Rourke.
His book chronicles the growth of nationalism in the period which saw an increasing rise of social, political and cultural awareness in the parish of Donoughmore, which in many ways represents a microcosm of the wider changes transforming the political landscape across the Ireland of the time.
From the visits of Michael Davitt of the Land League and William O’Brien MP to the parish to the dangerous heroics of native daughters Nora and Sheila Wallace during the War of Independence in Cork city, Gerard explores the impacts, local, national and international on the parish. Though these exploits and many others, Gerard O’Rourke provide a vivid account of the political awakening gaining momentum in his parish. This is local history at its best!
Thursday 25th July 2024 at 2.30 pm at the Maldron Hotel Shandon.
Adrian Kane
Adrian Kane first became active in trade unions in his early twenties while working for Bord na Móna. He has worked for SIPTU as a full time union official since 1995. Adrian is a graduate of the National College of Industrial Relations. He also attended University College Dublin and Keele University where he studied Employment Law and European Industrial Relations. He is the author of a recent book “Trade Unions” published by Cork University Press.
“Trade Unions”, Adrian’s analysis of internal trade union politics casts a sometimes critical eye over how trade unions structures are organised. As he has spent nearly 30 years operating in the front lines of industrial relations he is in a strong position to present his case. He also focuses on the vital debate as to how the trade union movement should operate in the ever changing world of work in the new digital economy. He will pose the question as to how trade unions are going to attract workers to become union members especially in the gig and digital economies. Adrian outlines the changes to the culture structures that might be required to join and discusses the possibilities and opportunities for an enhanced role for the trade union movement in the future world of work.
Trade Unions by Adrian Kane, Published by Cork University Press.
All are welcome to attend the meeting and take part in the discussion.
Historian Anne Twomey of the Shandon Area History Group will discuss the contribution of Margaret Goulding Buckley to the fight for Independence and her lifelong activism in representing women workers in the Irish Women Workers Union (IWWU) and her role as President of Sinn Fein.
Anne Twomey.
Anne will speak at the Dance Cork Firkin Theatre on Thursday 25th July.
Anne describes the career of this extraordinary Cork woman:
Margaret Goulding Buckley
“Margaret Goulding Buckley was a woman of many parts: teacher, trade unionist, civil war internee, journalist, political commentator and author, and the first female leader of an Irish political party.
Born in Cork on July 28th, 1879, Margaret lived her early years on Winter’s Hill near Sunday’s Well. Her nationalism was honed in her home where her parents were ardent Parnellites. In common with many young nationalists of her day, Margaret developed a keen interest in the cultural revival movement in the early 1900s. In 1901 she joined Terence MacSwiney’s Celtic Literary Society in Cork and took part in numerous shows and plays in the City’s operatic & dramatic societies. In 1903 Margaret cut her political teeth when she protested against the Royal visit to Cork by King Edward VII & Queen Alexandra.
Around this time she was also a founding member of An Dún in Queen Street, a theatre and meeting hall that became central to Nationalist political gatherings in Cork City. Margaret was also a founding member of the Cork branch of Inghinidhe na hÉireann ( Daughters of Ireland) a precursor of Cumann na mBan. Margaret also trained and practised as a teacher on the Northside of Cork City.
1906 was a turning point in her personal life as she married Patrick Buckley from the Marsh area of Cork city. Patrick worked in the British Civil Service in Dublin where he was employed by the Inland Revenue & Customs.
Margaret and Patrick set up home in Howth in Co. Dublin but her politics became more radical and republican. She was also drawn into the Trade Union movement around the Dublin Lockout 1913. Around this time Patrick’s health deteriorated due to TB .Following the death of Patrick, Margaret moved to Marguerite Road in Glasnevin, and lived there for the rest of her life.
Patrick’s death devastated her and she threw herself into political and social issues. She came to the attention of the Dublin female activists in Inghinidhe na hEireann and later was involved in the founding of Cumann na mBan in Dublin. Margaret also joined Sinn Fein in its infancy. Margaret was involved in the reorganising of Sinn Fein from 1917 to 1919. She was an active member of the Sinn Fein Courts in Dublin, earning praise from Austin Stack for her administration of the court.
By 1916 Margaret had joined the Irish Women Workers Union with responsibility for domestic workers where she became active in fighting for good wages and fair conditions as a quid pro quo for good service, in an area of employment that was notorious for its exploitation and servile conditions imposed on mainly female employees. Margaret became Secretary to the Irish Branch of the Women’s Federation.
Over the years she built up great trust among female trade union activists and became very effective in negotiating, recruiting and organising for the IWWU. In 1920 Margaret opened an office of the IWWU in North Great George’s Street.
She wrote extensively on the organising of Domestic Servants and worked valiantly to remove the “skivvy” and “ slave labour” image associated with the job. She sought for mutual respect between “Mistress” and “worker”, declaring that
“This is as it should be, it is only an accident, or perhaps the result of a system which makes one woman a mistress and the other a maid”
Her interest in how women were treated in the state developed during the treaty and Civil War where she was deeply concerned about prison conditions for women and set up the Womens Prisoner Defence League in 1922. Margaret campaigned against the Treaty and allowed her home and trade union office to be used by the anti treaty side. Eventually she was arrested and spent time in 3 different jails,
Mountjoy, Kilmainham and the North Dublin Union. Her eye witness accounts and her own experiences of female imprisonment form the basis of her book The Jangle of the Keys, published in the 1930s. The book highlights the tough regime faced by female prisoners during the Civil War and she outlines the level of physical and verbal abuse faced by the women. She helped expose a darker side to the Civil War that went largely undocumented until the recent decade of commemorations.
During the 1920s and 1930s Margaret remained active in trade union politics and in Sinn Fein. She also supported herself through her journalism where she wrote under the pen name Margaret Lee, in a nod to her home county!. Her many articles were used to hold the Free State government to account for poor social legislation, workers employment rights, employers abuse of the Social Insurance Schemes, bad agricultural practices, emigration. Though she remained friendly with De Valera, she refused to leave Sinn Fein and join Fianna Fail, unwilling to accept the oath as an empty formula to enter the Dail.
Margaret clashed with DeValera and the 1930s Fianna Fail Government over employment legislation that she saw would be prejudicial to women in the workplace, making them second class citizens to males when it came to payment, social insurance, equal job opportunities. Similarly in 1937 she reacted negatively to Bunreacht na hEireann ,DeValera’s constitution, saying it treated Irish women as “half-wits” and campaigned against its adoption as the new constitution of the state.
Politically wise, Margaret was appointed President of Sinn Fein in 1937, the first female to lead a political party in Ireland. She remained leader until 1949. Her role was really to maintain the party’s existence in the new state, given that its membership had gone to Fianna Fail by the 1930s in great numbers. Its continued abstentionist policy towards the new Dail made Sinn Fein a marginal party with limited resources to survive; nevertheless Margaret’s leadership steadied the ship and ensured its continued existence albeit on the fringes of Irish politics for as long as its abstentionist policy applied.
Margaret retired from politics in 1950 and from her trade union activities in 1958.She was, in many respects, an undaunted spirit working tirelessly for Irish working women’s rights in a country that owed its independence to women like her and yet they had been completely ignored in the social fabric that shaped the new independent state.
It would be others through the 1970s and future decades that would advance her fight to the next level. Margaret Goulding Buckley died in Dublin in 1962. She requested that she be laid to rest in her home by the Lee. Her wish was granted and Margaret was buried in St Finbarr’s Cemetery with full honours rendered by Sinn Fein.”.
Anne Twomey appears with historian Liz Gillis on Thursday evening 25th July at the Dance Cork Firkin Crane. The meeting begins at 7pm. Anne is a member of the Shandon Area History Group. Anne’s book, Ordinary Women in Extraordinary Times contributed hugely to our understanding to the active role of women in Cork during the War of Independence.
Liz Gillis and Anne Twomey
Now that the Decade of Centenaries is over, (it ceased in 1923), the question of what became of the revolutionary women on both sides of the Civil War upon the formation of the Irish Free State. Both speakers will discuss.
She Carried Out All the Duties Given to Her in a Most Efficient Manner – Women in the Irish Revolution.”
As we approach the end of the Decade of Centenaries, Liz Gillis who is a prolific writer on the revolutionary years 1913-1923 will address the treatment of activist women during and after the period. Originally from Dublin’s Liberties, which she loves and promotes, Liz has highlighted the role of women during that era and has argued that they were fighting not just for freedom but also for real freedom with social justice at its very core.
Liz Gillis
From Cumann Na mBan to the labour based Irish Citizen Army and onwards to the “Invisible army” of the Irish Republican Army, many of the women were often the public face of the resistance as the men risked immediate death if exposed. Conversely with the arrival of the new State, the men became more prominent and conservative in the Church dominated post Civil War politics of the era, while many of the radical women were rendered powerless and became invisible for decades.
The 1916 Proclamation declaring an Irish Republic addressed to the people of Ireland (Ireland is described as “she”), is directed to “Irishmen and Irishwomen” and includes direct reference to Irish women in two later sections. The use of the pronoun “her” in reference to Ireland as feminine appears on ten occasions in the first two paragraphs of the Proclamation. The signatories certainly intended that Irish women should play an equal role in the Irish Republic.
Ms. Gillis’s book Women of the Irish Revolution, published in 2014, exposed the faces, achievements and sacrifices and treatment of hundreds of these invisible women who served in the engine rooms of the revolution. The book contains a unique set of photographs which provide a human face to many of those heroes for the first time. The publication along with others which highlighted the essential work of the women made an enormous contribution to the belated, if often grudging State acknowledgement in recent years of their pivotal importance during the period. The new Free State meted out cruel and harsher treatment to them than the British forces had attempted during the War of Independence and over subsequent decades failed to provide pensions to many of the women activists. Even today there is very little recognition of the contribution made by these women in for example public space names or monuments by national or local government.
Women of the Irish Revolution.
“They were the wives, mothers, sisters and girlfriends of the men who fought and died for Irish freedom and their story is one that needs to be told”
“Women of the Irish Revolution” Published by Mercier Press Cork 2014.
Liz is the author of several books and has championed the contribution of women for many years. She previously worked as a researcher for the RTE History Show and lectures at the Champlain College, Dublin. She has appeared in many RTE documentaries in relation to the revolutionary period and has recently authored The Hales Brothers and the Irish Revolution.
Liz will speak to the topic “She Carried Out All the Duties Given to Her in a Most Efficient Manner – Women in the Irish Revolution.”
Venue: Dance Cork Firkin Crane. Thursday evening 27th July 2023.
On Thursday 28th July at 4pm, the unusual story of Tom Hickey, the Dubliner and friend of Mother Jones who tried to convert Texas to socialism, will be told by Professor Peter Buckingham at the Maldron Hotel Shandon. All are welcome.
Tom Hickey came to the United States from Ireland in 1892, became a machinist, and soon joined the Knights of Labor and the Socialist Labor Party. His party boss, Daniel De Leon, recognized the potential in this Irishman and even made him an “enforcer” against those who questioned the boss’s authority. The enforcer, though, eventually found himself forced out and moved west to start a new life. Ultimately, Hickey landed in Texas and saw an opportunity to use syndicalism as an organizing tool to build a state socialist party.
Tom Aloysius Hickey.
He did just that. Within a few years, Hickey transformed the faction-ridden Socialist Party of America in Texas into a force strong enough to threaten the Republican Party at the ballot box. He gained a large following thanks to a unique mixture of evangelical rhetoric and militant industrial unionism. He enlisted the help of many party comrades, including Mother Jones.
Biographer Peter H. Buckingham points out that Hickey failed to deliver his people into the Promised Land. Violence, poll taxes, voter suppression, and other forces made voting for socialist candidates problematic; the Democratic Party soon co-opted the more appealing elements of socialism into watered-down, reformist planks for the Texan voter. By the time Hickey died of throat cancer in the mid-1920s, his moment in the spotlight had passed.
“Red Tom” Hickey is an important contribution to Irish, Texas and American history, capturing a time that Buckingham argues was the second sustained crisis in American history: a democratic society wrestling with the effects of industrial capitalism.
After presenting an overview of the life and times of Thomas Aloysius Joseph Hickey, Buckingham will examine the special bond that developed between Mother Jones and Red Tom. When no one else would dare to cross Party Secretary, Mahlon Barnes, she revealed his sexism and greed as only Mother could, thereby saving Hickey from scandal and expulsion.
The Rebel Newspaper in Texas, edited by Tom Hickey.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PETER H. BUCKINGHAM is Professor of History Emeritus at Linfield University in McMinnville, Oregon, USA, and the author of several books, including Rebel against Injustice: The Life of Frank P. O’Hare and America Sees Red: Anti-Communism in America, 1870s to 1980s. He resides in McMinnville.
Note:
The Rebel Newspaper.
University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UT San Antonio Libraries Special Collections.
The Rebel masthead
The great appear great to us only because we are on our knees
Cork Community Television, Sunday 28th November at 7:00 pm.
We are proud to present Dr. Sean Pettit’s lecture entitled “The Cork City of Mary Harris” which he gave to the 2016 Spirit of Mother Jones festival. Sean was a much loved and respected teacher and UCC lecturer who became widely known as a writer, broadcaster and a man with an intimate knowledge of the people and streets of Cork.
Sean Pettit and Richard T. Cooke.
His publication This City of Cork1700-1900 (1977) is long regarded as a classic. He believed that the best way to appreciate and experience the City was to go out and about on the streets. In his introduction he argued that “the main emphasis is on the people who made it, and on how they lived”. He did not neglect giving a raw and realistic account of the sick, the poor and the social problems through history in the City especially in the context of the Famine era into which Mary Harris was born in 1837.
Sean with Richard T. Cooke, and Ann Piggott of the Cork Mother Jones Committee at the 2016 Festival.
Dr. Pettit with the aid of his large collection of photographs and prints captivated the vast attendance on that lovely Friday afternoon in July 2016 on the north side of Cork city. Sadly Sean passed away suddenly just a few months later on November 23rd 2016.
Left: Dr. Sean Pettit with Aruba, and Richard. Right: Dr. Sean Pettit’s leading a walking tour.
The introduction to “The Cork City of Mary Harris” will be given by his good friend Richard T Cooke. Richard is a founding member of the Cork Mother Jones Committee, himself a writer, singer and broadcaster and the author of many publications including My Home By The Lee (1999).
Left: Sean with friends at Shandon. Right: Sean and Richard at the English Market.
Dr. Sean Pettit……..An Extraordinary Teacher will be shown on Cork Community Television, livestream on www.corkcommunitytv.ie or Virgin Media 803 on Sunday evening 28th November at 7:00 pm as part of the Spirit of Mother Jones Festival 2021.
Peadar King is a journalist and documentary film maker and is well known as the producer of the documentary series for RTE “What in the World”. His latest book published recently by Liffey Press, War, Suffering and the Struggle for Human Rightsis a powerful indictment of war and chronicles human rights abuses in times of conflict. Peadar interviews people from war zones whose descriptions of the impact of war and the horrible devastation which follows are heart breaking.
He states that “all wars are based on lies” and uses the Irish phrase “Chroi Bhriste” to describe the unspeakable horror endured by those who suffer.
The very human accounts in this book of the results of war are taken from interviews with the ordinary people and they paint in graphic detail the indiscriminate destruction of bombs on people and their communities.
Have we become inured to war? We can now watch versions of wars on our TVs and computers, but to many it’s more virtual clickbait with neither the impacts, the questions, context nor explanation sought nor provided.
Yet, Europe, the UK, the USA, Russia and China supply 75% of all weapons used in these wars which are fought over power, resources and oil and in the near future…. fresh water supplies!
“And The World Turns Away” features a discussion with Peadar King and will be shown during the Spirit of Mother Jones Festival.
This was a dismissive comment originally made to a founder of Cumann na mBan In Cork, Lil Conlon.
Years later, the comment also annoyed members of the Shandon Area History Group.
The result was Ordinary Women in Extraordinary Timespublished in 2019 by the Shandon Area History Group.
This ground breaking publication reveals some of the hidden pages of the story of eleven Cork women who took part in the War of Independence and Civil War in Cork. Varying from the internationally recognised Mary MacSwiney to the almost invisible Wallace sisters, the stories of these ordinary women remained largely untold until now.
“Ordinary Women in Extraordinary Times” by Shandon Area History Group
Nora O’Sullivan
The Wallace Sisters
Anne Twomey
Cork Cumann na mBan
Peg Duggan
Emma Hourigan
As part of the forthcoming Spirit of Mother Jones Festival, a documentary called “What did the Women do Anyway?” featuring a discussion with historian Anne Twomey of the Shandon Area History Group about these remarkable women will be shown as part of the festival’s contribution to the Cork Commemoration 1920-1923.
Filmed by Frameworks Films one can hear of the story of the Wallace Sisters, of the opera singer Kate ‘Birdy’ Conway the issue of violence against women, the failure to acknowledge the womens selfless contribution to the War of Independence and the ongoing efforts to ensure the role of other women such as Muriel Murphy and Nora O’Brein are recognised.
Back in 1949, Tom Barry in his Guerrilla Days in Irelandstated that the women “were a splendid body of young women and their value to the IRA was well appreciated by the enemy” . One may well ask were these women ever really appreciated by the IRA or the leaders of the new Irish State?
The discussion with Anne Twomey, What Did the Women Do Anywaywill be available online during the forthcoming 2020 Spirit of Mother Jones Festival (27th-30th November). Links and the full programme of events will appear on www.motherjonescork.com. and Facebook.
Our thanks to the Shandon Area History group for their assistance and for photos. Check out their Facebook page to obtain a copy of the book, Ordinary Women in Extraordinary Times.
This publication is a rarity. Working-class women who fight for social justice seldom get an opportunity to tell their own story in their own voices. Social, trade union and labour history is sometimes interpreted by those far removed from the day-to-day lives and experience of those directly involved. The contributions of working class women remains unacknowledged and invisible when it comes to the absence of their names and images on the public monuments and street names of our cities and towns.
Anne Scargill and Betty Cook did not come together until the beginning of the British Miners’ Strike in 1984/85 when they both joined “The Women Against Pit Closures Movement”. What followed was a roller coaster of practical action including feeding their striking neighbours and taking direct action to protect their communities.
However, it also led to a personal journey for each of them. Both were married with families at the beginning of the strike but through the tumult of the mining war in the North of England, alongside a passion to stand against exploitation of people, they achieved their own personal independence and freedom in spite of the disastrous outcome of the Miners’ Strike. In the midst of defeat, Anne and Betty emerged with the power to act as they had discovered their own voices.
The accounts of their early lives in Barnsley and Brick Lane are told in raw unvarnished personal accounts, without self pity, without preaching or seeking acceptance…… life was tough in the coal fields. Yet they tell their stories with gritty humour, compassion and fierce direct humanity in spite of personal tragedy and upheaval in their lives. The chapter: “Rent A Mob, Rent a Gob” leaves one angry and yet uplifted.
Today they look back on a life of standing firm against the exploitation of workers and they do so with a sense of pride. Both remain committed to the struggle. Betty recently retired from a call-centre at the age of 81, however, she is worried that ” a lot of working-class people are against one another”, while Anne says that “anybody who needs help on a picket line only has to pick up the phone and I’ll be there”.
Their trip to the women miners reunion in Appalachia 2013, organised by Marat Moore (friend of the Spirit of Mother Jones Festival, Guest Speaker at 2012 Festival) led to the founding of The Daughters of Mother Jones group in the UK and inspired their interest in Mother Jones. Few will forget Anne and Betty’s powerful rendition of Mal Finch’s song “Women of the Working Class” at the Cork Spirit of Mother Jones festival in 2014.
In these dark times for working people with ongoing political upheaval and Covid-19 lockdowns, “Anne & Betty United by the Struggle” illuminates and shines warmly through adversity, hard times and the necessity to keep fighting against injustice.
Professor Elliott J. Gorn will tell the story of Emmett Till at the Firkin Crane Theatre on Saturday afternoon 3rd August at 3pm.
Let the People See.
Emmett Till
14 year old Emmett Till from Chicago visited some of his family in Mississippi in August 1955.
He allegedly whistled at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant who was working behind the counter of a country store in Money, Mississippi on 24th August. Emmett was kidnapped by Mrs Bryant’s husband Roy and half brother J.W. “Big” Milam a few days later. They beat him and then shot him.
Emmett’s tortured body was found in the Taallahatchie River on Wednesday August 31st, with a cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire.
Instead of quietly burying the remains, Emmett’s mother Mamie Till-Mobley decided to have an open casket at the funeral in Chicago.
She proclaimed “Let the people see what they did to my boy.”
The mutilated face of Emmett Till
A hundred thousand people did see his face as they filed past the casket and millions saw the photos in the African-American press.
The burial aroused a storm of wider media interest and the story was featured extensively all over America. Yet just a month later the all-white jury found the killers of Emmett Till not guilty of murder in spite of strong evidence presented.
Prof. Elliott Gorn’s book
African Americans were shocked and horrified while many white Americans were forced to question the systematic racism which infected American society. The lynching of Emmett Till became a defining moment for many African Americans from Muhammad Ali to Rosa Parks. On 1st December 1955, Parks refused to give up her seat at the front of the bus in Montgomery. A few days earlier she had attended a meeting where the Emmett Till case was discussed.
The Till murder sparked a generation to create the greatest mass mobilisation of the twentieth- century in the American civil rights movement.
The lynching of young Emmet Till forces everyone to look hard at the realities of racism today as racially motivated violence continues despite the haunting image of young Till and the determination of his brave mother Mamie to let the people see!
Elliott J. Gorn
Author Elliott J. Gorn will talk of the short life and death of Emmett Till at the Firkin Crane Theatre on Saturday 3rd August at 3pm.
Elliott’s book, The Story of Emmett Till……Let the People See is published by Oxford University Press 2018. He is also the author of Mother Jones – The Most Dangerous Woman in America and will speak about Mother Jones on Wednesday evening at 8pm at the Firkin Crane Theatre. All welcome.
