Their nationalist leanings, long evident in the books and publications they sold promoting Irish culture, language and sport made the shop a natural hub for Volunteers.
Another formidable pair of sisters, Nora and Sheila Wallace’s St Augustine Street (then Brunswick Street) newsagents was a headquarters for IRA intelligence throughout 1920. The shop’s proximity to two crown forces barracks was no deterrent to this remarkable duo.
Their nationalist leanings, long evident in the books and publications they sold promoting Irish culture, language and sport, made the shop a natural hub for Volunteers, Cumann na mBan members and figures like Tomás MacCurtain and Terence MacSwiney.
Held in high esteem by like-minded locals and members of the Republican movement, Florrie O’Donoghue, head of intelligence, Cork No 1 Brigade, soon recruited the shopkeepers as secret agents.
They engaged in intelligence collection, information dispatch and peppered the city with ‘safe’ post boxes via which sensitive intel could be exchanged.
Used to military raids and high-stakes situations, the Wallaces also kept cool heads in running their shop while hosting brigade meetings in their back kitchen.
Adept at delaying Crown forces’ queries at the shop counter while anyone in the back escaped, the sisters were indispensable.
So much so, they were both inducted as IRA members which was almost unheard of for women at the time.
Sheila conducted the entire covert dispatch operation for the Cork No 1 Brigade and was appointed brigade communications officer, the only woman with such a title.
Nora was an accomplished intelligence gatherer and a long-standing ally of Tomás MacCurtain.
MacCurtain’s very last task on what turned out to be the night he was killed, was to hold a meeting with IRA officers in the kitchen at at their house.
Ambushes, strategies, prison breaks and even tentative plans to secure Terence MacSwiney’s release from prison, were all plotted from the back of the sisters’ small shop.
Throughout all of their high-risk activities, it’s said that nobody was ever arrested at the premises nor were the sisters themselves ever betrayed.