Clodagh Finn: The women who tried to tunnel out of the ‘Irish Bastille’

It wasn’t long before they identified a weak spot within the prison that was once dubbed “the Bastille of Ireland”, and went to work.

The wooden troughs lining an unused laundry near the exercise yard moved to the touch, which gave prisoners reason to be hopeful, even if the floor was lined with solid stone. To begin the work of tunnelling at all showed “optimism in excelsis”, to use Margaret Buckley’s wonderful phrase.

She and her fellow inmates, among the 4,000 or so women jailed during the Irish Civil War, were under no illusions. They had no tools of any sort and they would have to find a way to remove huge flagstones before scooping out a passage to the outside world.

All the same, even masterminding a daring plan generated a kind of optimism and boosted morale.

Regular timetable

To quote Margaret again: "A regular timetable was drawn up; there was to be no over-lapping; certain people were to work ‘on the tunnel’ at certain times; an ingenious code of tapping, which would have delighted the heart of a spiritualist, was evolved.”

The work was to be carried out while the women were in the exercise yard playing rounders (using the leg of a chair as a bat). The sound of them playing — which they did noisily — drowned out any suspicious sounds.

If someone was approaching the old laundry, the women sang Kevin Barry to warn the diggers. If the coast was clear, the strains of O’Donnell Abu rang out from the courtyard.

“All went merrily as wedding bells,” Margaret Buckley recounts in her fascinating memoir The Jangle of the Keys.

Work continued steadily for almost a month, despite the odd scare, until one morning the tunnel was discovered.

Margaret Buckley had not been involved in the digging as she had been elected OC, or Officer Commanding, to represent her fellow prisoners’ rights. Her position, however, meant that she was the first to hear of the discovery when the prison matron called to her cell early one morning to tell her of the “hole in the laundry”.

The fact the matron had downgraded the prisoners’ “tunnel” to ignominious “hole” was what irked Margaret most. “This was no ‘hole in the laundry’. This was the splendid achievement, the beginnings of a real live tunnel, of which no man might be ashamed; and this was accomplished by the women and girls of B Wing," she wrote.

Later, Margaret was taken to see the tunnel and was in awe of the progress made by “a score of liberty-loving women”.

They had dug out a waist-deep channel that went the full length of the laundry room, or nearly half the length of the exercise yard.

“There was no sign of the clay which had been dug out,” Margaret remarked. “It had been carted into an alcove behind, so as to be out of sight, and this, in itself, was no easy job.

The hole was covered up each night so that a casual inspection could reveal nothing."

The incident doesn’t seem to have been reported to the prison governor. There were no repercussions, in any event, and the women were philosophical when they heard the disappointing news. “Better luck next time,” they said.

The account of the daring escapade — incidentally, remnants of the tunnel survive — is one of many told with great humour by Margaret Buckley in her memoir, which was reissued by Sinn Féin last year.

Tunnelling stories are worth a retelling at any time, but I thought of Margaret Buckley this week following the election of fellow Corkwoman, Holly Cairns, as leader of the Social Democrats.

Margaret Buckley would go on to become the first female leader of a political party in Ireland, elected president of Sinn Féin in 1937. Even in those early days, she was disillusioned with how the women of Ireland, on all sides of the political divide, had been treated by the emerging state.

She, and many others, felt betrayed by Éamon de Valera’s Constitution, written in the same year, saying:

If I were dealing with the Constitution, I would have something to say about de Valera’s treating the women of this country as half-wits.”

Yet, she remained in politics all of her life and was an active trade unionist who campaigned for working women’s rights.

It is striking to read of her experience in jail and how, in March 1923, almost 100 anti-Treaty women went on hunger strike to protest at the sudden removal of their privileges. (They were restored in a matter of weeks.)

As has become clearer in recent years, there were tens of thousands of politically active women, as well as men, in the early 20th century, yet you wouldn’t think so given how few of them made it into political office.

Elizabeth O’Farrell, nurse and Cumann na mBan member, famously stood back out of the photograph when Patrick Pearse surrendered after the Easter Rising of 1916. She later said she regretted doing so when she saw how women and their contributions were overlooked in the new state.

If Margaret Buckley were alive today, she would certainly cheer on Holly Cairns.

I think she would admire the latter’s no-nonsense approach too. Cairns has been a blessed breath of fresh air in the fustiness of the Dáil chamber, and elsewhere, since she was elected in 2020.

Buckley might also be glad to see that Sinn Féin and Labour have female leaders too, but we’d have to tell her that we’ve lost a number too; Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand and Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland.

Also, last week, former Sinn Féin MEP Liadh Ní Riada said she was stepping down from “the vicious game” of politics. She spoke of the online abuse that was targeted not just at her, but at her family.

“Nothing is off the table. Your private life is no longer your own. I think that’s grossly unfair and it wouldn’t happen in any other position except politics. It’s open season,” she said.

On Wednesday, another female politician, Michelle Hall, Labour councillor and Mayor of Drogheda, spoke of the intimidation and constant slurs she faces online.

Our early female activists endured jail and hunger strikes, but today they face another kind of imprisonment — suspended in the stocks of a no-holds-barred social media.

Isn’t it time we tried to tunnel our way out of that stranglehold?