This presentation is by Anne Twomey of the Shandon Are History Group and will take place in Dance Cork Firkin Crane on Thursday 27th July at 7.15 pm.
Anne’s talk will be followed immediately by historian, Liz Gillis.
Some Background Notes.
The Blarney Street/Sundays Well district is a long established community on the north west of Cork City, bounded on the south by the River Lee and on the north by Blarney Street.
Three extraordinary women from this community who were born a little more than a kilometre from each other; sisters Lil and May Conlon who lived on Blarney Street and later at 92 Sundays Well Road and Margaret Buckley from 12 Winters Hill all contributed enormously to the Irish Revolution. Yet the advent of the Irish Civil War saw them take opposite sides in the savage political schism which followed. The subsequent lives of these women represent a local human microcosm of the bitter split among friends after the War of Independence and the different roads of life subsequently taken by each.
Anne Twomey will examine their journeys.
Margaret Buckley.
“If I were dealing with the Constitution I would have something to say about de Valera’s treating the women of the country as half-wits”
MARGARET BUCKLEY
Born on or around July 28th 1879, Margaret Goulding became a teacher and joined the various nationalist cultural organizations in Cork operating from An Dún, the cultural fulcrum (this building remains on Fr. Mathew Street, now stands sadly dilapidated) of the pre-revolutionary era in the early 1900s.
When she married Pat Buckley, who worked for the British Custom & Excise and Inland Revenue in Dublin, she left Cork in 1906. Pat Buckley died very young and Margaret became active as a union organiser in the Irish Women Workers Union, where she spent the next four decades. She joined Sinn Fein after the 1916 Rising and returned to Cork for a while to care for her dying father.
During the War of Independence, Margaret served in the Sinn Fein courts in Dublin. Like most Cumann Na mBan members, she opposed the Treaty. She was arrested and spent nine months in jail during the Civil War, when as officer commanding the women prisoners, she witnessed appalling brutality against women in the civil war jails of Kilmainham, Mountjoy and the North Dublin Union. She was eventually released from prison in October 1923.
Layer, in 1938 she published “The Jangle of the Keys” about her time in jail. Having spent time imprisoned in Mountjoy, her lively account of daily life in the North Dublin Union and Kilmainham jails, (republished by Sinn Fein in 2022) is at times tragic, brutal and depressing, yet her humanity, her humour and sense of fun along with her quiet solid leadership marks her out as a formidable, but fair woman who sailed a single minded path in life.
A tall woman with an impressive presence, Bean Uí Bhuachalla became a natural and respected leader. She continued working with Sinn Fein, eventually becoming its President from 1937 until 1950 and worked unceasingly in maintaining and consolidating what had by then become a very small, inward looking organisation.
Margaret’s approach was to keep active, to remain working in the trade union movement and in her political life, she was very efficient at the tasks and usual monotony of a political activist. Her greatest achievement was to ensure the very survival of the near moribund and divided Sinn Fein organisation during a difficult period in the 1940s. Eighty years later, with the Sinn Fein party, today on the verge of attaining political power both in the south and north of Ireland, perhaps the work and resilience of this revolutionary woman from Winter’s Hill in Cork may eventually be fully acknowledged, especially in her native city.
Margaret Buckley was listed as one of the plaintiffs in what has become known as the Sinn Fein funds case which meandered through the Irish courts during the 1940s. Sinn Fein had sought to recover approx. £22,000 (value in 1947) of funds held in trust which had been owned by Sinn Fein in 1922, prior to the Civil War. The case was lost as the court eventually decided that the reconstituted Sinn Fein of 1923 (post Civil War) was not a legal continuation of the 1922 pre Civil War, Sinn Fein. After legal fees and costs of the myriad of lawyers were paid out of the monies held, very little remained.
Throughout her life, Margaret remained very active in defence of social justice issues and exposing the poor working conditions and discrimination against women workers. Her blunt assessment of the 1937 Constitution was that it treated women as “half-wits” and in her ongoing and prolific writings as Margaret Lee and Maggie she severely criticised the treatment of women and worked to highlight the poor social conditions experienced by many ordinary people in the Republic.
Margaret died on 24th July 1962 and her wish was to be buried in St. Finbarr’s cemetery in Cork.
Lil and May Conlon.
May (Mary) was born on 26th April 1892, while Lil (Elizabeth) followed less than two years later on 29th March 1894. From an early age both sisters from a family of seven were very close and became active in nationalist circles in Cork. They were present in 1914 at the founding of Cork Cumann Na mBan (C Na mB) and later at the founding of the Shandon branch, which became one of the most active in Ireland. May, known as Bealtaine was appointed branch secretary and was described by her sister as having her finger “on the pulse of all national undertaking and activities throughout these tempestuous years.”
Unlike the wider national body, the C Na mB organisation in Cork voted to accept the Treaty, which had led to the foundation of the Irish Free State and campaigned actively in support of the Cork politicians who spoke in in favour of it. This split in Cork was particularly bitter and rancorous, with many of those women on opposite sides of the Civil War sadly remaining at loggerheads for the rest of their lives.
Lil and May always defended the women who took the pro-treaty side. Lil later worked as a civil servant in Dublin and was subsequently employed on the clerical staff at University College Cork, where her brother Sean taught Irish and served on the governing body of the college. Both continued to be active in Catholic Church support bodies, charity works and were firm supporters of the GAA in Cork.
Back in 2008, a phone call from a Conlon relation cleaning out the old family home in Sundays Well, to the Cork City Museum led to the discovery of a large cache of archives belonging to Lil Conlon, including leaflets, correspondence and the original drafts of her 1969 book, “Cumann Na mBan & the Woman of Ireland 1913-1925.”
She said that this book did not purport to be a history but “simply a pot-pourri of bitter sweet memories”.
This treasure trove of material is available to view online at
Having suffered from bad health for many years, May had passed away earlier in September 1946 aged just 54. Lil died at the North Infirmary Hospital on Thursday 27th October 1983 and both are buried in Kilcrea cemetery, near Ovens, County Cork.
