Horror of seeing brother die on hunger strike hardened Mary MacSwiney against Treaty

She was aware of the growing mood of frustration within the chamber, but she defied the irritation of her audience: "I care not and apologise not if I take more of your time than you are willing to give".

There were those who praised her. Sean O’Kelly declared that her address "not only vindicates the far-flung movement for women’s rights but places Miss MacSwiney in the highest ranks of the greatest orators of our race".

Mary MacSwiney watched as her brother starved to death over a 74-day period in 1920. Terence MacSwiney was 5 feet, nine-and-a-half inches tall and he weighed 136 pounds on arrival in Brixton prison; in his coffin his body appeared "like that of a child of twelve". 

MacSwiney’s emotional responses to the horror she witnessed caused discomfort. Bearing witness to the death of her brother explains why she was never easy to listen to. She was considered too extreme by several and was often subject to ridicule. 

Ernest Blythe recalled that following her speech on 21 December she "wound up pointing her finger directly at me and saying, 'If anyone here has a contrary opinion, let him speak now or be forever silent'. I only laughed at her."

There was a gendered dimension to the derision and scorn that MacSwiney experienced. The perception of her political extremism was heightened by the fact that she was a woman. 

The MacSwiney family agony

Mary MacSwiney was not, however, merely a cipher for the extreme element within republicanism during the Treaty debates. Notwithstanding de Burca’s statement that MacSwiney never once mentioned the name of Terence MacSwiney, she was a woman who had suffered ultimate loss and witnessed, in the words of her sister Annie, scenes that were "agonising beyond anything I could describe". Her brother’s political life and death reverberated through her speech even if his name was not explicitly uttered.

MacSwiney’s anguish was palpably on show when she appealed to the House "against the sneers" of Arthur Griffith at the length of her speech, claiming her right to "speak for the honour of my nation" on the basis of what she "went through for seventy-four days at Brixton". Mary MacSwiney’s unrelenting opposition to the Treaty has to be put in the context of what she described in a letter to de Valera as the ‘agony’ of her family "this time twelve months". 

They had to "face and count the cost daily and hourly. There was time for searching analysis – time to explore every avenue of compromise and having rejected them, time to pray that sacrifice might give strength to all others to endure to the end and give our Cause final triumph". 

Her brother’s agony would never, as MacSwiney wrote to de Valera, "have been endured to the end for anything less than absolute and entire Separation"; this determined her response to the Treaty. 

However, it is important to also underscore that Mary MacSwiney was a firm republican in her own right. As de Burca noted, those listening to her speech on the Treaty "wondered whether she was the teacher or the disciple of Terence MacSwiney".

In her speech, she noted that she, and all "belonging to me … absolutely refused to join Sinn Féin until Sinn Féin became Republican".

Writing of the hunger strike in the Gormanstown camp in October 1923, Seán Prendergast referred to the "poor emaciated frames that were once strong bodies, once healthy active human beings". 

The effect on those family members and others watching cannot be underestimated. On September 11, 1920, Dr Griffiths noted that the "bony prominence" of Terence’s body was "becoming dry and rough from pressure". 

In an attempt to alleviate the pain, he was put on an air bed. As Prendergast wrote of the Gormanstown strike, "the painful scenes that we witnessed then were enough to affect one’s nerves". Prendergast wrote of the "dread shadow of death" that "hung close to many participants" after the strikers passed 15 days. 

If Prendergast was at the "limit of … endurance" at 15 days, the distress experienced by the MacSwiney family must have been so much the greater as Terence neared 70 days without food. His medical notes show that, understandably, he suffered from irritability. 

On September 22, Dr Griffiths noted that he was "depressed and irritable". Two days later he wrote that he was "becoming sulky and unpleasant in his manner". Dr Griffiths continued to record Terence MacSwiney’s growing depression while he noted that the family was also "extremely irritable". 

The hunger strike of Terence MacSwiney can be described as a familial act, as his wife and siblings bore witness and, in the context of the latter, encouraged him to persevere to the end. In the last week of his hunger strike Terence MacSwiney’s family watched as he became "quite unlike himself".

A "good death"

As Terence MacSwiney’s health continued to deteriorate, Mary MacSwiney’s days in London were busy. Her role was not that of a passive and worried sister sitting by her brother as he lay on his prison bed. 

Prison visits were combined with visits to government officials and embassies; she lobbied trade union officials and the medical officers in Brixton. This cannot have been anything other than tiring and stressful, particularly as the days passed and Terence inched closer to death.

While Art O’Brien had the political contacts and presence in London, it was Mary MacSwiney who spearheaded the campaign to support Terence and garner maximum publicity with a view to affecting his release. 

Her refusal to adopt a supplicatory position in her dealings with prison staff, the medical officers who attended her brother and government officials such as Sir Ernley Blackwell and Sir Edward Shortt meant that she came across as a difficult woman who did not know her place. She was, of course, a sister who was fighting for the life of a beloved brother.

Mary MacSwiney’s mind narrowed itself around the trauma of her brother’s hunger strike and her need to ensure that his sacrifice continued to be viewed as a "good death". 

This became an idée fixe. She engaged in a repetition compulsion; her need to repeat and find meaning in ‘the tale’ of Brixton 1920 meant that her response to the Treaty was pre-determined. Her brother’s motive was not, she declared to Fr Bernard Vaughan, "self-murder: 

He will do more by his single death to destroy the evil thing which is the British Government in Ireland, than if he led a whole army into battle and lost the lives of his men as well as his own....To die for a greater principle is a noble death … 

Following her brother’s death, MacSwiney sought to promote a political and moral culture in Ireland that validated and memorialised the self-sacrifice of her brother, her own suffering and that of the wider MacSwiney family. 

The appropriate way to record and remember his traumatic death was the establishment of that for which he had died – a separatist republic.

She would be, she declared in the Dáil on December 21, the "first and most deliberate and irreconcilable rebel" if the country "should be so false to itself as to adopt the so-called Treaty".

Certainly, MacSwiney sounded a note of fanaticism. If England "exterminates the men, the women will take their places, and, if she exterminates the women, the children are rising fast".

Her speech also hinged on principle. She denounced those who argued that they would accept the Treaty but would not take the oath. This, she argued, was "cowardice", a defilement of the "noble and spiritual ideal" of the republic. 

A person could not, she stated, be "at the same time faithful and unfaithful". She referred "to the honour of our people". Her constituents knew, she declared, what she "stood for" when she was elected. She had "not changed" nor would she.

On September 11, Dr Griffiths noted that Terence MacSwiney was "very bitter and says he is being as surely murdered by the Government as if he were shot by bandits at the roadside". 

Mary MacSwiney’s uncompromising stance in the Treaty debates was informed by the horror of watching her brother die on hunger strike, and the trauma which resulted from it. 

She witnessed an intimate act of self-sacrifice which bound her to a belief that her task was to continue her brother’s fidelity to a separatist republic for which he had given his life. 

When MacSwiney declared in the Dáil that Ireland had "stood on a noble and spiritual ideal for the last three years" she was referring to the sacrifices of men such as her brother. 

Betrayal of the republic, for her, would have meant betrayal of a brother she loved and admired, and it would have been almost impossible for her to think and feel in any other way.

• Leeann Lane is a lecturer in the School of History and Geography at Dublin City University.