Clodagh Finn: Recovering the voices of rebel women from muffled silence

But then Kathleen O’Connell, of 62 Main Street, Ballydehob, was well-accustomed to raids. In an earlier sweep, she managed to stuff a sheaf of documents into a schoolboy’s bag which she put on her back and hid under a coat.

As she said herself: “Even though constantly raided, I prevented even the smallest document being captured.”

This time, though, a lady searcher — one of the Women’s Auxiliary Service recruited, as the name suggests, to help search women — was on the way. Kathleen spotted her and knew she had to take quick-thinking, if drastic, action. It was not the first time. The same kind of steel-nerved composure allowed her to spirit weapons out of her house during an earlier raid.

On another occasion, when the whole village of Ballydehob was surrounded, she got through a blockade with two loaded revolvers, a holster and clips of bullets hidden in a large hand-basket under bread and a head of cabbage

“They would have shot me probably if they had discovered [the ammunition],” she wrote.

And yet when writer and theatre director Karen Minihan went to Ballydehob to find out more, nobody remembered Kathleen O’Connell or her role as captain of the Ballydehob branch of Cumann na mBan and, by 1921, treasurer of Schull District Council.

There was no trace of this woman who had cycled miles between Bantry, Ballydehob and Skibbereen to carry dispatches. During the War of Independence, she raised funds for the volunteers, allowed her home to be used as a battalion headquarters, took charge of arms and ammunition and, at one point, acted as battalion adjutant, a role held by very few women.

During the Civil War, she was even denounced from the pulpit by the parish priest for “aiding the rebels”, yet that did not stop her. In August 1922, she went to the Cumann na mBan convention in Dublin — at her own expense — where she received firearms training and helped to organise collections of the “Dáil Eireann loan”.

Like so many other women, she paid a heavy price for her activism. She said herself she had sacrificed a school career, having abandoned her studies in Dublin to join the fight for independence. When it was all over, she felt she had no other choice but to emigrate to the US. She left in 1925 and returned at some point later, but found herself in dire financial circumstances.

We know all of that because it is spelled out in her application for a military pension in 1937. In the early years of the State, her contribution was not only remembered but recognised by several public figures, who said she was one of the most valuable officers in Cumann na mBan.

Not that the State put a value on that. On July 4, 1939, Kathleen O’Connell was awarded a Grade E pension, the lowest of five categories established under the Military Service Pension Act 1934.

Six short years later, she was dead. Think of her this Wednesday, on the 79th anniversary of her death. Maybe by the time her 80th anniversary comes around next December, there will be a wall plaque in situ to remember this extraordinary, ordinary woman whose untold story is one of several resurrected thanks to Karen Minihan’s sleuthing work.

The Schull-based writer and artist first started to research her story — and those of many other women — when she realised the complicated legacy of the violent birth of the State still resonated in modern Irish society.

To illustrate her point, she gives the example of a friend, from a Protestant family, who still had to appease her grandmother when she decided to marry a Catholic. Her grandmother’s father had been killed by the IRA in 1921.

Karen recalls another story of a neighbour who called to see an elderly grandaunt in Ballydehob beautifully turned out, as she thought, in her peaked cap, black polo neck, dark boots and tweed jacket. When her grandaunt opened the door, she went pale and stumbled sideways into the wall, caught entirely off guard by the echo of the Black and Tans uniform on her doorstep.

The memory of that time might be embedded in our collective consciousness, but the full story of those who experienced it is not. When Karen Minihan put out a call for stories to help fill in the many blanks, she was amazed by what she found.

Those stories became a book, Extraordinary, Ordinary Women. A second volume followed, along with performances, and now two documentaries directed by Ciara Buckley, of Wombat Media, whose own grandaunts, Tess and Mary Buckley of Gortbreac, Castlehaven, feature in the second book.

All of this work is not only eye-opening, but it represents a powerful act of un-erasure; that seems like the appropriate word because these women’s contributions were actively effaced when the story of the foundation of the State was being written.

But there’s more to it than that. Karen explains: “You had these women of ferocious courage and kindness who were caring and loving. On the other side of that, you had people being killed and there is the legacy of that. I wanted to put all of that out there and say, ‘Okay, so what do you think? How can we come to a resolution of it?’”

More Extraordinary, Ordinary Women was launched at the beginning of the year. Now, at the other end of the year — and the country — Dr Margaret Ward’s exceptional work in recovering the voices of women revolutionaries continues with the launch of Rebel Women.

For the first time, she tells the stories of nationalist women active in areas where you might not expect to find them, in this case, the Cumann na mBan members of Belfast and the Glens of Antrim between 1914 and 1924.

As Dr Síobhra Aiken, another illuminator of women’s obscured experiences, writes in the foreword: “This study seeks to recover the voices of women whose struggles have been, in the words of the American poet Adrienne Rich, ‘muffled in silence over and over’.”

Telling those stories, she adds, is important not just in itself but because a better understanding of women’s activism in the past might help navigate the way to a fairer, more inclusive future.

She is so right. Going back to reclaim the other half of the story will help us to forge a better path ahead.

• The documentaries ‘Extraordinary, Ordinary Women’ and ‘More Extraordinary, Ordinary Women’ are screening on Thursday, December 12, at 8pm in Ahamilla GAA Club,  Clonakilty.