Gender inequality and the Irish Revolution: the girls of Na Fianna Éireann, 1911–22

ABSTRACT

Girls have been overlooked or under-considered within the historiography of Na Fianna Éireann, the Irish nationalist youth organisation co-founded by Countess Markievicz in 1909 as an alternative to the Boy Scouts or the Boys’ Brigade. The purpose of this article is to shed light upon these girls and their activities, situating them within the wider context of the gendered nature of uniformed youth groups in the early twentieth century. In so doing, the article highlights the gender inequality at play within the Irish nationalist movement during the era of the Irish Revolution. Adolescent girls formed a controversial and marginal minority within the membership of the Fianna in the cities of Belfast and Waterford in the period 1911–18. The involvement of Belfast Fianna girls in such activities as military drill, camping and gun smuggling challenged the gender conventions of the time. Girls also provided support services to Fianna units during the period 1918–22. In both cases, these girls have received little recognition of their contributions or the risks they ran through real or perceived association with what had become an overtly republican youth group designed to mould a new generation of activists in the struggle for Irish independence.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender inequality
• uniformed youth groups
• girl scouts
• girl guides
• Na Fianna Éireann
• Countess Markievicz
• Irish nationalist movement
• Irish Revolution

Introduction

‘Had I been a boy I would not have been overlooked.’¹ That was how Ina Connolly, a member of the Irish nationalist youth group Na Fianna Éireann, accounted for her exclusion from the landing of arms and ammunition at Howth, Co. Dublin, on 26 July 1914. Male members of the Fianna played a prominent part during the Howth gunrunning, but females, including the organisation’s adult co-founder Constance Markievicz (née Gore-Booth), were not afforded the same opportunity. This example of gender inequality is emblematic of the position of girls within the Fianna in the period 1911–22.

Just as Ina Connolly and her sister Nora were ‘overlooked’ when the Fianna’s other co-founder Bulmer Hobson recruited male members to participate in the Howth gunrunning, the involvement of adolescent girls in Na Fianna Éireann has often been overlooked or under-considered within the history of this organisation. In the popular imagination Na Fianna Éireann tends to be associated with boys and/or their flamboyant frontwoman Countess Markievicz rather than girls. Such a perception is not surprising given that Markievicz initiated the establishment of this uniformed youth group in Dublin in 1909 as an Irish nationalist alternative to the British imperialism of Robert Baden-Powell’s Boy Scout movement and the Boys’ Brigade. Thus, boys were the target audience for Na Fianna Éireann from the organisation’s inception. The Fianna’s all-male, Dublin-based central leadership included many members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), a revolutionary secret society. These young men did not envision an equal place for girls in what they viewed as a physical force organisation for boys. Instead they favoured the formation of a separate nationalist youth group for girls.

Yet during Ireland’s revolutionary era, girls belonged to Fianna units in two cities: Belfast between 1911 and circa 1916 and Waterford between 1916 and 1918. These girls were a controversial presence within the organisation. Furthermore, adolescent girls also provided support services to Fianna units in the period 1918–22. In both cases, these girls have received little recognition of their contributions or the risks they ran through real or perceived association with what had become an overtly republican youth group designed to mould a new generation of activists in the struggle for Irish independence.

The first scholarly study of Na Fianna Éireann was John R. Watts’ doctoral thesis of 1981.² In more recent years, the Fianna have been the subject of several popular and scholarly works.³ This growth in the historiography of the Fianna is associated with the greater availability of primary source material resulting from the opening of the Bureau of Military History (BMH) collection in 2003 and the phased release of the Military Service Pensions Collection (MSPC) beginning in 2014. The BMH collected witness statements and other contemporary documents from participants in the events of the Irish Revolution, including former Fianna members,⁴ while the MSPC contains military service pension and medal applications from Fianna veterans as well as nominal rolls for Fianna units.⁵ Given that the vast majority of Fianna members were male, it is not surprising that boys have dominated the historiography of the youth organisation, with girls receiving relatively little attention.⁶ The purpose of this article is to illuminate the involvement of females in the Fianna by consolidating and expanding upon what little has been published to date. It will also situate Fianna girls within the wider context of the gendered nature of uniformed youth groups.

Uniformed youth groups

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the advent of uniformed youth groups as a form of youth culture. Such groups were part of the cult of discipline, training and manliness that grew out of the increasing anxiety and fear over escalating international tensions and violence that culminated in the First World War (1914–18) and other more localised conflicts.⁷ They were also a reaction to a widely perceived fin-de-siècle ‘decadence’. The establishment of uniformed youth groups addressed often gendered concerns about the health, education and moral welfare of the upcoming generation: would boys be able to defend their countries and would girls be up to the task of being good helpmates and mothers? The general template of the uniformed youth group was adapted to the perceived needs of different countries. In the United Kingdom and the British empire, organisations like the denominationally-based boys’ brigades, the Girls’ Brigade, the Boy Scouts and the Girl Guides sought to instil imperial patriotism and middle-class values of order, discipline and ‘character’ in the lower classes.⁸ Uniformed youth groups could also be training grounds for nationalist fundamentalism, as exemplified in both the Irish nationalist movement and Nazi Germany.⁹

The best known of these youth groups was the international Boy Scout movement founded by Robert Baden-Powell in 1908. A British army officer who specialised in reconnaissance and scouting, Baden-Powell started this movement in response to the interest that boys had shown in his 1899 army training manual Aids to Scouting. He was also inspired by the models of two other youth groups. One was the Boys’ Brigade launched in 1883 in Glasgow by William Alexander Smith,¹⁰ who used military drill and discipline as a way of providing guidance to the boys who attended his Scottish Free Church Sunday School.¹¹ Smith’s example also sparked the formation of the Church Lads’ Brigade for Anglicans, the Jewish Lads’ Brigade, and the Catholic Boys’ Brigade.¹² The other youth group that inspired Baden-Powell was American-based naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton’s Woodcraft movement, which promoted outdoor life and the lore of Native American tribes. Seton later subsumed his Woodcraft movement into the Boy Scouts of America, which he co-founded.¹³

The advent of uniformed youth groups raised the issue of whether girls could belong to the same groups as boys or whether separate, single sex organisations should be established. Thousands of girls took an early interest in Baden-Powell’s scouting movement. A large group ‘dressed in … homemade and borrowed uniforms … gate-crashed’ the first big Boy Scout rally at Crystal Palace in London in September 1909, fuelling public concern about girls becoming tomboys. Their presence also highlighted the perceived need for a separate scheme for girls.¹⁴ Baden-Powell was opposed to including girls in his scouting organisation because he thought they would inhibit boys from joining. Instead, his elder sister Agnes formed the Girl Guides in 1910, initially attracting about eight thousand girls.¹⁵ As Sarah Mills has noted, some of these early girl scouts ‘tried to retain some autonomy and identity […] within their newly prescribed organisation’. Some, for example, continued to wear their homemade khaki uniforms instead of the approved navy-blue guide uniform,¹⁶ the colour khaki having been deemed ‘too masculine and militaristic for girls’.¹⁷

When the Girl Guides were first established, the organisation’s primary goal was to create ‘good wives and mothers for the British Empire’, seeking to nurture femininity and domesticity in girls. Such a conservative goal may have contributed to the Girl Guides’ failure in their early years to expand as quickly as the scouting movement for boys.¹⁸ In response, Baden-Powell took over as chairman in 1915 and revamped the Girl Guides by developing a more efficient organisational structure and recruiting younger women into the movement, such as his wife Olave.¹⁹

Richard A. Voeltz has argued that the context of the First World War also helped to increase the popularity of the Girls Guides in Britain:

The new freedom associated with the war experience changed the common ways of thinking about what constituted appropriate behaviour outside the home for young women and girls, allowing the Guides to incorporate all the elements of the original scouting scheme … without fear of bruising their femininity.²⁰

As a result, Girl Guides could participate in signalling, drill and camping in the same manner as the Boy Scouts, as well as contribute to the war effort through more traditional feminine activities such as fundraising, knitting socks for soldiers and volunteering in hospitals.²¹

British uniformed youth groups soon established themselves in Ireland. The first Irish companies of Smith’s Boys’ Brigade were founded in Belfast in 1888 and Dublin in 1891,²² followed by the establishment of a branch of the Catholic Boys’ Brigade in Dublin in March 1894.²³ The Girls’ Brigade, which sought ‘the extension of Christ’s Kingdom among Girls’, operated in Ireland from 1893, providing a combination of ‘Bible class and physical training’.²⁴ Later, Boy Scout troops were formed in Bray, Co. Wicklow, Dublin city and county, and Belfast from early 1908.²⁵ Members of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, such as Reginald Brabazon, the 12th Earl of Meath, supported this new youth movement from the beginning, often providing leadership and camping facilities on their estates. ²⁶ Ireland’s first official Girl Guide company was started in Harold’s Cross in south Dublin in September 1911, and over the next four years it was joined by units elsewhere in Dublin as well as in other Irish cities and towns.²⁷

At the same time that British uniformed youth groups were attracting members in Ireland, some Irish nationalists were exploring ways to socialise and mobilise youths to prepare them for a future role within the Irish struggle for independence from Britain. One of the first initiatives of Inghinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Erin), the Irish nationalist women’s organisation founded in 1900, was to offer free evening classes in Irish language, literature, history, dancing and music for children over the age of nine, mainly in Dublin and Cork.²⁸ According to Helena Molony, her fellow members found the boys’ classes ‘hard to manage’ and so ‘abandoned’ them. Thus, the Inghinidhe were ‘delighted’ when Markievicz decided to form ‘a special movement for young boys’ along the lines of Baden-Powell’s boy scouts.²⁹ Evening classes might suit girls, but boys responded better to an activity that tapped into their love of ‘playing at soldiers’.³⁰

With the help of republican contacts and a schoolmaster with nationalist sympathies, Markievicz attracted her first boy recruits and dubbed them ‘The Red Branch Knights’. She realised that she needed to organise her boy scouts on a more official footing after she and Molony took six of the boys on a chaotic camping trip. She solicited the help of Bulmer Hobson, who had previous experience running a hurling and cultural club for boys called Na Fianna Éireann in Belfast.³¹ Together, Markievicz and Hobson formally established a new nationalist youth organisation, also called Na Fianna Éireann, in order to counteract the growing popularity and influence of the Boy Scout movement and the Boys’ Brigade in Ireland. The Fianna offered members a combination of military training, outdoor pursuits and Irish cultural activities.

The involvement of females in the Fianna was problematic from the organisation’s inception even though Markievicz and Molony had been instrumental in initiating the youth group. The inaugural public meeting of the Fianna was held on 16 August 1909 at 34 Lower Camden Street in Dublin, in a former theatrical hall rented by Markievicz. The mere presence of women at the meeting, coupled with Markievicz’s election as joint secretary with Pádraic Ó Riain, sparked controversy. She was taken aback when one of the bigger boys – probably fifteen-year-old Robert (Bob) Harding – stood up and called for Molony and herself to be ‘put out’ of the hall.³² Some of the boys were reluctant to accept a woman in office because they felt there was no place for a female in a boys’ organisation, especially one with a physical force orientation.³³ Ironically, Markievicz was the best qualified person in the room to teach them how to handle firearms.³⁴ According to Hobson, he often had to point out discreetly that the boys could not take her money and at the same time deny her membership or office. He noted that ‘this feeling against the presence of a woman in the organisation continued in varying degrees of intensity for many years and probably never completely disappeared’.³⁵

Molony later expressed concern that ‘a certain section’ was trying to give Hobson and the IRB the main credit for the foundation of the Fianna. She championed Markievicz’s vital role in the youth group’s formation (‘she was eighty per cent responsible for it’) and the importance of her ongoing contribution.³⁶ Molony viewed her friend’s female gender as essential for gaining the ‘consent and confidence’ of the parents of younger boys to allow them to attend Fianna route marches and camps on weekends: ‘No mother would let her ten-year old child out like that, unless she was sure that good care would be taken of him’.³⁷ Molony also highlighted the special connection between Markievicz and the younger boys: ‘She had a marvellous influence with the boys; she was like a boy among them […] They felt they were nearer to her than to their officers. They were not afraid of her.’³⁸ When John R. Watts interviewed former members of the Fianna for his doctoral thesis, he found that Markievicz’s ‘personal authority among the younger rank-and-file remained unrivalled’ while those who had been in leadership positions minimised her role as ‘little more than a figurehead’.³⁹ Younger boys appreciated Markievicz’s ‘maternal’ presence while the young men rebelled against it.

An Chéad Sluagh, the first troop of the Fianna, was born out of the inaugural meeting in August 1909. It met regularly in the Camden Street hall, where boys learned elementary drill, signalling, first aid, marksmanship, route marching, and scouting skills such as map reading, path-finding, and elementary astronomy. They also learned the Irish language and history from an Irish nationalist perspective, particularly the history of battles and insurrections, which gave them a reason for their own military training.⁴⁰

The Fianna soon expanded beyond Dublin and developed a formal organisational structure. It consisted of a president, two vice-presidents, an honorary secretary, an honorary assistant secretary, an honorary treasurer, an ard-fheis (annual congress), a Central Council, District Councils and sluaighte (troops). The ard-fheis, which met annually, was the ‘supreme governing and legislative body of the Fianna’. It included the Central Council and delegates from the various sluaighte and District Councils, which were formed in places such as Dublin and Belfast where there were three or more sluaighte. The Central Council was responsible for the general direction of Na Fianna Éireann and served as the governing body of the organisation when the ard-fheis was not sitting.⁴¹ Almost three months after the Fianna’s formation, unemployment forced Hobson to move back home to Belfast for a year. In his absence Markievicz was elected president, a position that she retained even after his return to Dublin in early 1911.⁴²

Fianna girls in Belfast

Belfast was the first location in Ireland to witness the formation of a girls’ unit of the Fianna. Margaret Ward, who pioneered historical research into women’s involvement in the Irish nationalist movement, has suggested that this was because the girls ‘refused to accept exclusion’.⁴³ For Ruth Taillon, the author of a book on the women of the 1916 Rising, a possible factor was the influence of labour leader James Connolly and his daughters Nora (1893–1981) and Ina (1896–1980), ‘who had their home in the city’ prior to his execution in 1916 for his leading role in the rebellion.⁴⁴ As a girls’ unit was already in existence before the Connolly family moved to Belfast, their influence was an important factor in its continuance rather than its formation. In addition, the relative isolation of northern nationalists perhaps contributed to a willingness to include young recruits of both genders.

There had been some talk of ‘taking the little cailín [girl] in hand too’ when a Belfast sluagh for boys was started in 1910,⁴⁵ but it was not until early 1911 that Annie O’Boyle (also known as Eithne Ní Baoghaill) organised a girls’ unit. She reported in March that it consisted of ‘25 most enthusiastic young girls all striving to follow in the footsteps of the Irish women of the past’.⁴⁶ She may have been one of the O’Boyle sisters associated with the Dungannon Club in Belfast. Their brother John was a member of the club, which was founded in 1905 by Hobson and Denis McCullough to promote the Sinn Féin (Ourselves) policy in Ulster and beyond.⁴⁷ By June 1911 the girls’ sluagh had grown to ‘sixty regular members’.⁴⁸ It was later named ‘Sluagh Ethne Cairbre (1st Girls Company)’ in honour of the late Belfast poet Ethna Carbery (the pseudonym of Anna Johnston), who had been one of the engines of the Irish literary revival in Ulster from the 1890s until her untimely death in 1902.⁴⁹ When Markievicz gave the oration at the annual Manchester Martyrs commemoration in November 1911 in Belfast, the girls presented an exhibition of drill that ‘received general approbation’.⁵⁰

In February 1912 Seosamh (Joe) Robinson organised a second Belfast girls’ troop, which initially had 25 members, including Ina Connolly as secretary. It was named the Betsy Gray Sluagh, after an Ulster heroine of the 1798 rebellion in Ireland.⁵¹ By September 1912 a third girls’ unit, Sluagh Dark Rosaleen, had formed, its title referencing the poetic name for Ireland used in James Clarence Mangan’s eponymous poem. However, it was decided that any girls’ sluagh in the city would instead become a company of the Betsy Gray Sluagh.⁵²

A newspaper report on the activities of the Fianna in Belfast asked, ‘why could not friends of the Fianna establish girls’ sluaighte in other parts of Ireland?’⁵³ Despite the correspondent’s encouraging attitude, the presence of girls within the Fianna did not meet general approval. Nora Connolly claimed that Hobson was not in favour of the girls’ sluagh.⁵⁴ Former Fianna member David McGuinness recalled that the Betsy Gray Sluagh also ‘met with considerable opposition from many of the Fianna boys’.⁵⁵ According to Markievicz, the girls’ unit faced ‘endless opposition’ before it became affiliated with the Belfast District Council.⁵⁶ Ernest Blythe, a member of the Dungannon Club which helped the Belfast Fianna, asserted that ‘the girls’ Sluagh was a terrible thorn in the side of the boys because its existence caused them to be nick-named “The Betsy Grays” up and down the Falls Road [in Belfast]; but they were never able to get it abolished’.⁵⁷ Some male members of the Fianna may have feared that belonging to an organisation that included girls might bruise their masculinity.

The most prominent members of the Betsy Gray Sluagh were Nora and Ina Connolly. ‘I joined the Fianna in Belfast in 1911, a short time after my family returned to Ireland from the United States,’ explained Ina.⁵⁸ Her elder sister Nora became the Betsy Gray Sluagh’s ‘Chief Officer’ (or captain).⁵⁹ Other Connolly siblings, such as Aideen and Roddy, also joined the Fianna in Belfast.⁶⁰ Over time the Betsy Gray Sluagh ‘attained a parade roll of sixty and a membership considerably higher’. The girls were ‘aged between fourteen and eighteen’, making their age profile slightly older than that of the boys in the Fianna whose age range was between eight and eighteen prior to the Irish War of Independence (1919–21).⁶¹ As in the case of the Fianna more generally, officers like Nora Connolly could be over eighteen.

Belfast Fianna members of both genders learned military drill, first aid, Irish history, the Irish language and Irish dancing. They also performed in plays and attended lectures by prominent nationalists. On weekends, members participated in route marches, camps and céilís (social gatherings).⁶² The girls and boys shared the same premises, initially meeting at St Mary’s Hall, but later shifted their headquarters to the Willowbank huts, a disused military camp in the Falls Road area that had been built to house soldiers who had been deployed in Belfast to keep the peace during riots.⁶³

Wearing a distinctive uniform was an important part of the youth group experience. Uniforms are symbolic of a group identity and can provide members with a sense of belonging, often evoking feelings of pride and prestige in the wearer. Many youth organisations first formed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries imitated the military in adopting uniforms as a way of promoting order and discipline among members. The Fianna were no different in this respect. Nora Connolly recalled that ‘The girls had the uniform, as well as the boys; we had green linen shirts instead of their hopsack ones.’⁶⁴ The girls also wore a navy blue skirt and a slouch hat.⁶⁵ The difference in shirt fabric and the wearing of a skirt feminised the standard Fianna uniform for boys, which consisted of an olive green double-breasted shirt and navy breeches or a green jersey, dark green kilt and saffron brat (cloak) fastened with a brooch at the left shoulder.⁶⁶

A photograph of six members of the Betsy Gray Sluagh in uniform exists because Lily Kempson, then aged seventeen, insisted on having ‘a picture to commemorate the day’ when she ‘took an oath of allegiance to the Irish Republic’. Kempson had gone to live with the Connollys in Belfast in 1914 in order to look for work. During the 1913 Lockout in Dublin, she lost her job at Jacob’s biscuit factory after she went on strike and was arrested for her involvement in labour protests and imprisoned in Mountjoy Gaol for two weeks. She and five girls, including Ina and Aideen Connolly, ‘who had also taken the oath [,] stopped by Reid’s photography studio and rounded up enough money for a small, negative-size print’. The image was one of the few possessions that Kempson brought with her when she later fled to the United States in the wake of the Easter Rising.⁶⁷

Controversy and gender inequality

The question of girls’ membership crystallised in 1912 at the annual Fianna ard-fheis in Dublin. A large Belfast contingent always attended the annual convention, which was usually held in July. The boys and girls travelled down to Dublin by boat (‘it was the cheapest way to travel, being a quarter of the railway fare’), ‘singing and dancing’ during the journey along the coast.⁶⁸ At the ard-fheis they would be entertained at a big céilí in the evening and spend the rest of the week camping at Markievicz’s cottage in Sandyford, Co. Dublin, near Three Rock Mountain.⁶⁹

The Betsy Gray Sluagh sent at least three elected delegates to the 1912 Fianna ard-fheis.⁷⁰ There, resolutions were carried by small majorities to admit girls to the organisation nationally and to instruct district councils to establish girls’ sluaighte. These resolutions generated a great deal of emotional discussion. Boys who were against the admission of girls argued that there should be a separate organisation founded for them. In the end the resolution to admit girls was carried by only one vote.⁷¹ Markievicz was the one who managed to carry the proposal to open the Fianna to her own gender.

Two of Markievicz’s biographers (Jacqueline Van Voris and Lindie Naughton) have suggested that the Fianna circle of the IRB played an influential role in opposing the inclusion of girls in the Fianna, but, as John R. Watts has pointed out, ‘this is hard to prove’, given the secretive nature of the IRB.⁷² After Hobson had formed the all-male Fianna circle of the IRB (known as the John Mitchel Circle) in 1912, it became the practice to hold a meeting of the circle the night before the Fianna ard-fheis so that members from outside of Dublin who belonged to both organisations could be in attendance to decide on policy prior to the annual convention.⁷³ If the Fianna circle of the IRB had decided against the inclusion of girls, it was unable to ensure the compliance of a majority of delegates attending the 1912 ard-fheis.

The suffragist newspaper, Irish Citizen, reported that the feminist advance was soon flouted by ‘the newly-elected committee of the Fianna, which [endeavoured], by delay and obstruction, to thwart the expressed wishes of the congress which elected it’.⁷⁴ When the Fianna’s Central Council met on 28 July 1912, Pádraic Ó Riain, seconded by Con Colbert, raised the issue of the recent change made to the organisation’s constitution, asserting that it ‘was likely to act to the prejudice of the Fianna’, and called for a second vote on the matter because some troops were not represented at the convention. It was decided eight votes to three to hold a plebiscite. The hidden hand of the IRB is apparent in this decision as at least seven members of its Fianna circle, including Ó Riain and Colbert, attended this council meeting.⁷⁵

In the interim some girls in Dublin had shown an interest in joining the Fianna. Within a week of the ard-fheis, a preliminary meeting was held on 19 July 1912 in a hall at 2 St Joseph’s Avenue in Drumcondra to form the Ann Devlin Girl Scouts for girls aged fourteen and over. After a second meeting on 26 July, they sought affiliation with the Fianna, but were subsequently informed that a plebiscite would have to be held before a decision could be made on their admission.⁷⁶

A majority of sluaighte (12 to 5) voted in favour of changing the constitution back to its original ‘boys only’ condition. Six sluaighte in the Dublin area joined troops from elsewhere around the country to vote against the inclusion of girls in the organisation. Of the five sluaighte that supported female membership, three were listed as being based in Belfast, while two others had names associated with the northern province of Ulster.⁷⁷

With regard to this plebiscite result, Watts credited Belfast’s recognition of a place for girls in the Fianna to the city’s development of a ‘radical class consciousness’ arising from its ‘“British” industrial economy’ and the labour organisation of Jim Larkin and James Connolly: ‘support for the Fianna girls came naturally to the children of Connolly’s radical circle of socialist republicans’.⁷⁸ In contrast to the plebiscite result and Watts’ viewpoint, Ernest Blythe contended that ‘the Belfast boys tried to get rid of the girls’ branch every year at the organisation’s ard-fheis, and [that] it survived only because of the support of the other groups “who had no girls to annoy them”.’⁷⁹ Although the Belfast girls’ sluagh was barred from affiliating with the Central Council of the Fianna, representatives, such as the Connolly sisters, continued to attend the annual ard-fheis in 1913 and 1914.⁸⁰

The dominant attitude within the Fianna leadership was that girls could be helpers but not full members. This was the experience of Máire Moran in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford, when Liam Mellows stayed with her family while he and her brother Seán established the first Fianna unit in the town. ‘I was allowed to help with the organising, but Liam Mellows wouldn’t let a girl join,’ she recalled.⁸¹ He too was a member of the Fianna circle of the IRB.

When the Central Council of the Fianna held the plebiscite to return the organisation’s constitution to its original ‘boys only’ state, its members expressed their hope that a separate organisation for girls would soon be started and offered ‘to do their utmost to assist such an organisation when it is formed’.⁸² Having voted to open the Fianna to girls, Markievicz did not undertake the task of starting a separate organisation for them.⁸³ Her biographer Anne Haverty suggested that Markievicz ‘may have feared that girls’ sluas would divert her energies into a lonely and essentially irrelevant feminist battle while the nation was at stake’. Her temperament was also a factor.⁸⁴ Markievicz may have had little inclination to embark on such a venture because she reputedly ‘did not like girls’⁸⁵ and found it maddening ‘how the Fianna flirt and waste their time with “white muslin little girls” that sing and dance at concerts’.⁸⁶ Despite this, Markievicz was happy to host Belfast Fianna girls at her cottage after the annual ard-fheis each summer, perhaps because they were her sort of girls: she described Ina Connolly as ‘a splendid girl’.⁸⁷

The nascent Ann Devlin Girl Scouts who had sought affiliation with the Fianna soon found a welcome as an auxiliary to a new breakaway group of Na Fianna Éireann. The Fianna’s Central Council had received notice at its meeting on 28 July 1912 that the Dublin District Council had suspended Sluagh Michael Dwyer in Drumcondra and that this unit had decided to withdraw from the Fianna.⁸⁸ This led to the formation of the Irish National Guard (ING) in August 1912.⁸⁹ Members of the Ann Devlin Battalion of the Girls’ Auxiliary Corps of the ING learned physical drill, semaphore signalling and first aid and hosted a monthly scoraíocht (social evening).⁹⁰ They were soon joined by the Pamela Fitzgerald and Sarah Curran Battalions.⁹¹ All three Dublin units were named after women who had been associated with the United Irishmen Robert Emmet and Lord Edward Fitzgerald – Devlin a loyal employee and Curran and Fitzgerald their romantic partners.

It seems likely that these Girls’ Auxiliary Corps formed the basis for what was later known as the Irish National Girl Scouts, whose establishment was reported to have arisen out of the Dublin Fianna’s refusal to accept female members.⁹² Founding member May Kelly recalled that the Irish Nationalist Girl Scouts were first formed in 1912 with the help of fellow Drumcondra resident Seamus McGowan.⁹³ Kelly, who was then a schoolgirl in her early teens,⁹⁴ was among the girls whom John Kenny remembered as fellow ING members.⁹⁵ A member of the ING’s Central Committee, McGowan had previously been involved in organising Fianna troops on the north side of Dublin.⁹⁶ The Irish National Girl Scouts changed their name to the Clan na Gael (Family of the Gaels) Girl Scouts in 1915 when they became an auxiliary to the Hibernian Rifles, the militia of the Irish-American Alliance. This was the more radical, less sectarian section of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, a Catholic political association. Clan na Gael offered girls training in military drill, signalling, first aid and the Irish language as well as a camogie club and social evenings.⁹⁷

Even with an alternative organisation in place, girls still continued to express an interest in joining the Fianna. Envious of her brothers’ involvement in the Dublin Fianna, Molly Reynolds approached Hobson in early 1913 about starting a Fianna section for girls. Her father John Richard Reynolds, a book-keeper / accountant, was then sharing office space with Hobson, who worked as a writer and editor, and Molly often spent time at the office practising her typing skills. Hobson apparently replied that if Molly started a girls’ troop, ‘they would give me all the assistance I needed’. However, she lacked ‘the self-confidence and initiative’ to take up the task, ‘and so the matter was dropped’. After Hobson alerted her to the formation of Cumann na mBan (League of Women) in 1914, she joined this female auxiliary to the Irish Volunteers at the age of about seventeen.⁹⁸ The Volunteers’ unwillingness to accept female members and the subsequent formation of a separate organisation for women echoes the Fianna example.

With regard to the Fianna and girls, the Dublin District Council decided at a meeting on 22 January 1915 to create an honorary membership category ‘to facilitate people, men and girls mostly, not being eligible to become active members of the Dublin Battalions’. For a subscription fee of three pence per month, these honorary members received a membership card and a badge.⁹⁹ The Dublin Fianna’s decision to allow girls to become honorary rather than active members arose from ‘a fund-raising scheme’ rather than a genuine willingness to open the organisation to girls in the city.¹⁰⁰

It was also the case that although the boys and girls who joined the Fianna and other Irish nationalist youth groups engaged in many of the same activities, there was division over what constituted acceptable forms of active military service for males and females. This was exemplified during the Howth gunrunning on 26 July 1914, when the Fianna assisted the Irish Volunteers, a nationalist paramilitary organisation, in landing a consignment of 1,500 rifles and 45,000 rounds of ammunition, with only boys over twelve being mobilised.¹⁰¹ Ina and Nora Connolly and some fellow Fianna members were camping at Markievicz’s cottage on the weekend in question. The boys had headed off early on the Sunday morning ‘saying they had been invited out and no girls were welcome’. While the adolescent boys were helping to unload the cargo of the yacht Asgard, filling their trek-cart with ammunition and taking it back to Dublin, the girls spent the day with Markievicz ‘listening to all her stories’. Ina recalled: ‘Little did we realise the important happenings that were taking place, to hear that guns were being run in at Howth and us sitting looking pretty on the mountains only a few miles away nearly broke our hearts.’¹⁰² Ina did not join the Fianna to sit pretty; she wanted to be in on the action too. Ina ‘was overcome with joy and disappointment at the one time’ when the boys arrived back from Howth and she found out that the girls had been excluded from such an exciting event: ‘It really looked as if we were not trusted. We, who had been called upon at all times and under any circumstances, turned up when we were wanted. This nearly broke my heart. […] My sister took me by the arm and led me away from the boys, telling me not to show my feeling so plainly.’¹⁰³

Nora’s accounts of the incident do not reflect this same sense of disappointment. She recorded that the next day Joe Robinson, a Fianna officer, arrived in a taxi with about twenty rifles and asked the girls to help hide the rifles in Markievicz’s cottage. When a neighbour warned them that a retired police sergeant lived down the road, Nora feared that it was too dangerous to store the rifles there and went to talk to Liam Mellows at the Volunteer office in Dublin to get advice about what to do. He instructed two men to accompany Nora in a taxi to collect the rifles. To allay suspicion, the Fianna girls sat on the rifles in the taxi as they were transported back to Dublin.¹⁰⁴ The Connolly sisters were later delighted to smuggle Howth rifles to Belfast, a task that was deemed more suitable for girls. Ironically, they may have transported the rifles in a car driven by Bob Harding, the Fianna member who had objected to the presence of women at the inaugural meeting of the youth group in 1909.¹⁰⁵ Upon bringing their cargo safely home to Belfast, the sisters quickly learned how to handle a gun.¹⁰⁶ Markievicz’s biographer Anne Haverty summed up the gendered division of labour of the Howth gunrunning and its aftermath: ‘Girls were expected to hide guns and mind them and to be happy to risk the consequences – and yet to share in none of the glory.’¹⁰⁷

The end of the Betsy Gray Sluagh

It is unclear how long the Betsy Gray Sluagh remained in operation. Watts recorded that it ‘continued to meet until the spring of 1916’ while Eamon Murphy suggests that it lasted until about 1915 when the majority of its members joined the Belfast branch of Cumann na mBan.¹⁰⁸ Nora Connolly played a prominent role in both groups.¹⁰⁹

Nora and Ina Connolly were among the six Belfast Cumann na mBan members who served during the Easter Rising.¹¹⁰ These six young women accompanied the northern contingent of the Irish Volunteers who assembled in Coalisland, Co. Tyrone, on Saturday, 22 April 1916, planning to link up with rebel forces in Connacht prior to the outbreak of the rebellion. Upon receipt of Volunteer leader Eoin MacNeill’s order countermanding the rebels’ plans, the six decided to take the midnight train from Dungannon to Dublin where they reported to James Connolly at Liberty Hall. Connolly sent the Belfast girls in pairs to local hotels to see a specific member of the IRB’s Military Council to inform him of the position in Tyrone. The leaders held a meeting on Sunday morning at which they decided to postpone the rising until Easter Monday. The next day the girls were sent back to Tyrone to deliver the news that the rebellion was underway. They were disappointed to discover that the northern Volunteers had dispersed.¹¹¹

Another former member of the Betsy Gray Sluagh, Lily Kempson, served during the Easter Rising with the labour-oriented Irish Citizen Army (ICA), which included females as members. She and Markievicz were among the party that Commandant Michael Mallin sent to take over the Royal College of Surgeons on the afternoon of Easter Monday 1916.¹¹² Before her death in 1996 at the age of 99, Kempson was believed to be the last surviving participant in the Easter Rising.¹¹³

The Betsy Gray Sluagh did not function after the rebellion. As noted earlier, the unit may have collapsed because the Belfast branch of Cumann na mBan had absorbed its membership. Alternatively, the rebellion could have been the more decisive factor in its demise. Parents may have been reluctant to allow their children to remain in the Fianna because many former and serving members of the youth group had participated in the Easter Rising; eight of these adolescent boys and young men were killed during the rebellion itself while two others, Con Colbert and Sean Heuston, were executed for their leading roles in the insurrection.¹¹⁴ Membership in the Derry sluagh of the Fianna ‘greatly decreased’ because ‘the boys’ parents refused to let them attend after the news of the Rising’.¹¹⁵ At a time when many adults were uneasy about the militant activities of Fianna boys, it is likely that the involvement of girls in similar activities was deemed even more problematic and less likely to receive parental approval in Belfast where Irish nationalists – particularly republicans – were a minority. Thus, it is not surprising that girls were no longer admitted to the Belfast Fianna after the rebellion.¹¹⁶

Fianna girls in Waterford

Belfast was not the only city where girls joined the Fianna during the revolutionary era, though it has often been credited as such.¹¹⁷ In late 1916 some younger members of Cumann na mBan in the city of Waterford decided to decamp to the Fianna. As highlighted by the research of Leeann Lane, the diary of Rosamond Jacob, a novelist and political and feminist activist, is an essential source for excavating a skeletal history of the Fianna girls of Waterford.¹¹⁸ In July 1916 a Mrs Roche, an organiser of a local branch of the Irish Volunteers Dependants’ Fund, decided to establish a branch of Cumann na mBan in the city. ‘The girls were all under 18, I should say, which didn’t give me much hope of the enterprise,’ Jacob reported after attending the first meeting at Mrs Roche’s home on Parnell Street. ‘Mrs R evidently intends to boss the girls like a mother’.¹¹⁹ It would prove a prescient prediction.

Jacob’s diary portrays Mrs Roche as having a genius for rubbing people up the wrong way. The girls’ later defection to the Fianna was facilitated by Cumann na mBan and the Fianna both meeting in the Volunteer Hall on Thomas Street while the Fianna’s hall on Thomas’s Hill was being repaired in the autumn of 1916. During this time of shared premises, the Volunteer Hall reverberated with the sounds of military drill, war pipes, dancing and song.¹²⁰ Mrs Roche soon fell out with the Fianna Officer Commanding (O/C) Tom McDonald.¹²¹ On 26 September 1916, Jacob wrote that

Mrs Roche had a long dispute with MacDonald on account of the Fianna telling her eldest son not to frequent the rooms, & she wouldn’t have boys she suspected of having a hand in that to drill the girls. M’Donald naturally objected to her autocratic manner, & I did my best to apologise to him, but the band was playing at the time, & no one could hear themselves speak. It was horrid altogether.¹²²

Not surprisingly, the girls were more interested in maintaining a connection with the Fianna boys than Mrs Roche. In October 1916 Jacob recorded

all the little girls had resigned [from Cumann na mBan] & decided to join the Fianna instead – thinking I suppose that they’d get dancing and drill every night with no work and no Mrs Roche to order them about. I wish them luck.¹²³

These girls became known as the ‘ladies’ auxiliary’.¹²⁴ In January 1918 the girls invited Jacob to become their honorary president and preside over their committee meetings.¹²⁵ Jacob accepted the invitation, but was dismissive of the ambiguous position that the girls seemingly accepted within the Fianna: ‘I found that Fianna Council governs girls as well as boys, without the girls having any representation on it – they let themselves be called a ladies’ auxiliary, so what can they expect.’¹²⁶ She may have been referring to the Fianna’s Central Council, which provided national governance, rather than the local committee in Waterford. A newspaper report of a special general meeting of the Waterford Fianna had referred to the election of ‘three ladies from the Auxiliary’ to the organisation’s committee for 1917.¹²⁷

The ladies’ auxiliary held a general meeting on 11 January 1918 that was attended by about twelve to fourteen girls who were probably about sixteen to eighteen years of age. Ellie Robinson and a Miss Browne were the only ones Jacob remembered from the ill-fated Cumann na mBan branch. Jacob deemed the secretary Angela Quinn and treasurer K. Dalton ‘nice girls’. The group’s activities included learning military drill, signalling, first aid and the Irish language.¹²⁸ Fianna O/C Tom McDonald recruited two Fianna girls, K. Dalton and Maggie Myler, to study and teach first aid to the boys.¹²⁹ Former Waterford Fianna member Moses Roche recalled receiving first aid training from female members of the youth group.¹³⁰ Another former member, Patrick Hearne, linked the addition of first aid to the Waterford Fianna’s training programme in 1918 to the threat of conscription, which compelled ‘many young lads and girls’ to join nationalist organisations ‘to fight against it’.¹³¹ Jacob also delivered Irish history lectures to the girls on topics such as St Brighid, the Nine Years’ War and the Flight of the Earls.¹³² In the warmer months she took the girl scouts for walks to Dunkitt in Kilkenny and Kilbarry in Waterford.¹³³

In February 1918, Fianna headquarters in Dublin informed the Waterford girls that they should join the Clan na Gael Girl Scouts instead.¹³⁴ Jacob liaised with the organisation’s leader May Kelly and military advisor Michael Chadwick in Dublin to get information about shifting the Waterford group’s allegiance to Clan na Gael.¹³⁵ In March 1918 over afternoon tea, Jacob hosted a committee meeting with Angela Quinn, K. Dalton and Maggie Myler and showed them the Clan na Gael constitution. ‘Its [sic] too military for me altogether, but I failed to get it into their heads that I don’t mean to be a military commander,’ recorded Jacob.¹³⁶

Jacob grew increasingly frustrated with the girls. She was disappointed by their inattentiveness during her lecture on Gaelic chieftain Red Hugh O’Donnell’s captivity and escape in the period 1587–91: ‘[I] asked them a few questions on it. It really seemed as if they had hardly listened to a word […] It was very discouraging; I thought I had made it all so plain & simple.’¹³⁷ She also found the girls’ personality conflicts annoying: ‘Angela Quinn wanted to resign because she said she seemed to be an eyesore to some of the girls, but I got her to say she [would] reconsider it. Girls are the devil.’¹³⁸ Jacob had a chance to share her feelings of frustration when she met with Chadwick in Dublin. ‘He sympathised with me as to the touchiness & tale bearing of the girls, [he] seems to know very well what it is,’ she wrote.¹³⁹

Jacob’s diary indicates that the girls ‘gossiped about’ the general election in December 1918, in which Dr Vincent White unsuccessfully ran on a Sinn Féin ticket,¹⁴⁰ but she did not mention whether the girls took an active part in campaigning. Fianna boys in Waterford supported White’s campaign by distributing election literature and posters and painting slogans on walls and footpaths. Their brass and reed band also played at election meetings.¹⁴¹ It may have been too dangerous for girls to participate as the Fianna boys helping with the campaign were often ‘attacked and beaten up by the Ballybricken pig-buyer element’.¹⁴² In 1918 the majority of voters in Waterford city bucked the electoral trend toward support for Sinn Féin and instead remained loyal to the Redmond family and the constitutional nationalist Irish Parliamentary Party.

Finding a room to hold meetings proved a major issue after Fianna headquarters told the Waterford girls to join Clan na Gael. Initially, the girls were permitted to gather in the Fianna hall once a week during the summer and autumn of 1918 to give them time to find a new place to hold their meetings.¹⁴³ In late 1918 the Waterford girl scouts began to share a meeting room with Cumann na mBan on the upper floor of Gill’s, ‘an old store off Patrick St’, which had been offered to them by a Mrs Power.¹⁴⁴ Unfortunately, Mr Power found the girls too noisy and stopped allowing them to use the room for their meetings. On 29 January 1919, Jacob recorded that ‘there seems no other room to be had’.¹⁴⁵ She blamed the problem on the girls’ ‘own frivolous ways & the men’s passion for card-playing & instinct for having everything for themselves & the meekness of the leading women’.¹⁴⁶ It is unclear whether the failure to secure a new meeting room brought the ladies’ auxiliary to an end. In any case, the Waterford girl scouts lost their president and main commentator after Jacob moved to Dublin in the wake of her mother’s death in March 1919.¹⁴⁷

Jacob’s negative portrayal of the Waterford Fianna girls as frivolous and fractious probably says as much as about her own personality as it does about the typically teenage demeanour of the girls themselves. It certainly contrasts with the portrait of Belfast Fianna girls engaging in a balance of nationalist work and play that the Connolly sisters later presented as adults. Thus far, searches in the MSPC for female activists with the names of the girls mentioned by Jacob have not yielded results, which might suggest that these Waterford girls did not transfer to Cumann na mBan or assist male comrades in the Fianna or the Irish Volunteers during the Irish War of Independence.

Girls as supporters of Fianna units

It is also evident that elsewhere in Ireland adolescent girls provided support services to Fianna units but without the benefit of full membership. Dorothy Hannafin recorded that she was attached to the Kerry No. 1 Brigade of Na Fianna Éireann in Tralee during the period 1918–22 when she was in her teens.¹⁴⁸ She got involved through the conduit of her older brother Patrick (Percy) Hannafin, who was the brigade’s Intelligence Officer.¹⁴⁹ He later died as the result of a gunshot wound to the head sustained during an encounter with the Black and Tans (British ex-soldiers recruited to the Royal Irish Constabulary to combat the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in 1920–21) in January 1922 during the Truce.¹⁵⁰ In her application for a military service pension, Hannafin claimed that she had engaged in such activities as election work, typing orders, posting IRA propaganda, dispatch carrying, intelligence work and transfer of arms and ammunition.¹⁵¹ During the Irish Civil War (1922–23) she was arrested in April 1923 while in possession of republican ‘propaganda’ and imprisoned in Tralee and the North Dublin Union until her release in October of that year.¹⁵² Revolutionary activism was a family tradition; Hannafin’s other siblings Michael and Jerry served in the IRA and Mary Frances in Cumann na mBan.¹⁵³

Another similar example is Mollie Myles, a Cumann na mBan member whose older brother William ‘Billy’ Myles, Jr, was Vice O/C of the Tralee Battalion of the Fianna; he was later killed during the Civil War.¹⁵⁴ Mollie reported that she not only received bombs, ammunition and hand grenades from British military personnel which she handed over to the Fianna, but also typed correspondence for the brigade’s headquarters in Tralee in 1921–22.¹⁵⁵ The Myles siblings were both in their later teens at the time.¹⁵⁶ Mollie’s receipt of weapons may have been facilitated by the influence of their father William. He was a carpenter who worked at Ballymullen barracks and gave the Fianna ‘revolvers, ammunition and bombs’, which he had obtained from the soldiers there.¹⁵⁷ The Tralee Battalion was recognised by Fianna headquarters as one of the most outstanding Fianna battalions during the War of Independence. During the Truce Eamon de Valera presented the battalion with a silver cup and six of its officers, including Billy Myles, with inscribed watches to mark their notable service.¹⁵⁸ Such recognition was not extended to the battalion’s female assistants.

Newspaper coverage of a forced hair cutting incident that took place in Galway in October 1921 during the Truce suggests that girls with a perceived connection to the Fianna could be subjected to forms of gender violence. Elisabeth Jean Wood has defined this as ‘violence that occurs because of the victim’s gender without the kinds of sexual contact included in sexual violence’.¹⁵⁹ Mary Duggan was on her way to work shortly after 7 am when she was assaulted by two men. One wearing a red mask cut off about 12 in. of her hair with scissors, while another undisguised man held a revolver to her and threatened to shoot if she shouted. She noticed a black uniform under the armed man’s overcoat, possibly that of a Black and Tan. Duggan had been held up a few days before by two men who demanded to know where she was going and informed her that she and her mistress should beware. Reports of the incident published in the Freeman’s Journal and the Irish Times stated that Duggan was ‘a member of the Fianna’.¹⁶⁰ The Connacht Tribune quoted Duggan: ‘I do not know what all this is for, unless it is because I am a native Irish speaker, and wear the Fianna ring.’¹⁶¹ Given Fianna headquarters’ negative attitude regarding female membership, this reference to a ‘Fianna ring’ could suggest a typographical error with Duggan actually referring to the ring-shaped Fáinne pin worn by Irish speakers to show their willingness to converse in Irish. In any case, the newspaper coverage of the incident implies that a link to the Fianna, whether real or perceived, could spark an assault during the later stages of the Irish Revolution.

After the Irish Revolution

The Irish state recognised the military contribution of some former members of Irish nationalist youth groups to the struggle for independence in the form of military service pensions and medals.¹⁶² Male members of the Fianna who had later served with the National Army, and thus fought on the pro-Treaty side during the Civil War, were eligible to apply for a service pension under the 1924 Military Service Pensions Act (MSPA). Other Fianna members, as well as women who had served with Cumann na mBan, the ICA or the Clan na Gael Girl Scouts (due to their affiliation with the Hibernian Rifles), had to wait until the 1934 MSPA for recognition of their service in the form of pensions. Although both Na Fianna Éireann and Cumann na mBan were limited under the 1934 legislation ‘to the two lowest possible ranks for pension purposes – D and E’, the ability of male Fianna members to later transfer to the ICA, the Irish Volunteers / IRA and the National Army meant that they had the opportunity to serve in ways that could incur greater risks, and thus received greater recognition and financial compensation by the state.¹⁶³ Marie Coleman has noted that ‘those who participated in the Rising in Dublin – both men and women – had a much easier time securing service pensions’, adding that it was much harder for Cumann na mBan veterans to get credit for their activities during the War of Independence and Civil War.¹⁶⁴ The same appears to be true in relation to the Fianna.¹⁶⁵

The digitised files from the MSPC are an invaluable source for researching the service and later lives of lesser-known revolutionaries, including female activists and former members of Irish nationalist youth groups.¹⁶⁶ Nora and Ina Connolly and Lily Kempson, for example, were awarded military service pensions for their contributions with Cumann na mBan and the ICA respectively, but did not claim for their earlier service with the Fianna, presumably because it predated the Easter Rising. Ina was the only one of the three who mentioned her past Fianna membership when applying for a pension.¹⁶⁷

Pension applications also uncover the support services that females provided for the Fianna. Dorothy Hannafin and Máire Norton (née Mollie Myles), for example, indicated in their applications that they had played a support role for Fianna units. Hannafin, however, was informed that the legislation did not appear to apply in her case. Her failure to provide supporting evidence for her service with the Fianna unit in Tralee probably contributed to the rejection of her application. She stated that she was unable to produce references to attest to her active service because Humphrey Murphy, one of the officers for whom she had worked, had died and others had taken ‘a “hands off” attitude in regard to Pensions Benefit’.¹⁶⁸ Her residence in the United States would have compounded the problem of gathering evidence. The application of Cumann na mBan member Máire Norton (née Mollie Myles), who had also assisted the Fianna and Humphrey Murphy in Tralee, was looked upon more favourably, even though she provided no letters of reference. She too lived abroad, in England. After a seven-year waiting period, she was awarded a service pension in 1942.¹⁶⁹ Individuals like Hannafin who applied solely on the basis of service with a youth group may have found it more difficult to secure a pension or even a medal.

Girl scouts remained a marginal minority within the Republican movement in the years after the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. The Clan na Gael Girl Scouts continued to function as an independent female equivalent of the Fianna in the years during and after the Irish Revolution.¹⁷⁰ Another Fianna counterpart for girls emerged circa 1931–33 when Cumann na mBan established Cumann na gCailíní, or the Irish National Girl Scouts, in order to instil a Republican ethos in girls between the ages of eight and sixteen, with the long-term goal of attracting new recruits to the ranks of their adult organisation.¹⁷¹

It was not until the late 1960s that girls again joined the Fianna, this time in the context of the outbreak of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. An initiative was undertaken, without the permission of the Fianna leadership, to establish a girls’ unit in Dundalk, Co. Louth, in 1968. Although there had been some discussion of admitting girls prior to this, the formation of the Dundalk branch was a fait accompli, in much the same way the foundation of the Belfast girls’ sluagh had been in 1911. Girls became official members of the Fianna from 1969.¹⁷² A statement from the leadership of the Republican movement published in the 1988 Fianna Éireann Handbook hailed the opening of the organisation to young women and girls as one of the most welcome and progressive moves within the Fianna, remarking that ‘there could not be a more appropriate memorial to your founder, Constance Markievicz’.¹⁷³ Although Markievicz had voted in support of girls’ inclusion in the Fianna, she had been unable (or unwilling) to overcome the opposition of the Fianna’s central male leadership who ensured the marginalisation and later exclusion of girls.

The pressure to admit girls to the Fianna in the late 1960s presaged a ‘second wave’ of girls in Britain asserting their desire to join the Baden-Powell scouting movement from 1975 onward. Here too this desire was initially asserted at the local level, first in Newcastle, with persistent girl scouts exerting pressure over time on the national body. This resulted in a policy change in 1990 that allowed scout groups in the UK the option of offering mixed-sex scouting. In 2007 the acceptance of girls became compulsory.¹⁷⁴ In the Republic of Ireland girls first joined a scout troop in 1980 when a mixed group was formed at Sallynoggin Senior College in Dublin. The coeducational context of the school, rather than girls’ insistence on inclusion, was more decisive in this case.¹⁷⁵

Conclusion

This article has sought to shed light on the girls who have been overlooked or under-considered in the historiography of Na Fianna Éireann. In so doing, it has highlighted the gender inequality at play within the Irish nationalist movement during the era of the Irish Revolution. Adolescent girls formed a controversial and marginal minority within the membership of Na Fianna Éireann in Belfast and Waterford in the period 1911–18. In both cases the formation of Fianna units for girls resulted from local initiative and did not have official sanction from Fianna headquarters in Dublin. Although they were excluded from the Howth gunrunning, Fianna girls undertook most of the same activities as their male counterparts, thus challenging the gender conventions of the early twentieth century. Belfast Fianna girls had the opportunity to participate in such unconventional activities as camping, military drill and gun smuggling even prior to the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914. In contrast, members of Baden-Powell’s Girl Guides would have to wait until the changed circumstances of that war for participation in camping and drill to be viewed as acceptable female pursuits. The Betsy Gray Sluagh of the Fianna, like the Clan na Gael Girl Scouts, served as a training and recruiting ground for future members of the adult paramilitary organisations Cumann na mBan and the ICA. Serving and former members of both youth organisations also participated in the Easter Rising of 1916. During the later stages of the Irish Revolution, adolescent girls also provided support services to Fianna units. Although some girls insisted on their inclusion in the Fianna in the period 1911–18, they were unable to achieve an equal or sustained position within the organisation due to the opposition of the Fianna’s central male leadership, the seeming ambivalence of Markievicz and Hobson, and local circumstances. The prospect of opening up the Fianna as well as Baden-Powell’s scouting organisation to girls did not re-emerge until the final decades of the twentieth century within the wider social context of women and girls achieving greater equality of opportunity. Thus, it is not surprising that the girls of Na Fianna Éireann have received so little recognition for their involvement in the organisation and its contributions to the Irish Revolution.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marnie Hay

Marnie Hay is a lecturer in History in the School of History and Geography at Dublin City University. She is the author of two monographs, Na Fianna Éireann and the Irish Revolution, 1909–23: Scouting for Rebels (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019 & 2021) and Bulmer Hobson and the Nationalist Movement in Twentieth-Century Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009).

Notes

1 Ina Connolly Heron, witness statement, January 25, 1954, 90, WS 919, Bureau of Military History (BMH), Military Archives of Ireland (MAI).

2 John Watts, ‘Na Fianna Éireann: A Case Study of a Political Youth Organisation’ (PhD diss., University of Glasgow, 1981).

3 For example, see Marnie Hay, Na Fianna Éireann and the Irish Revolution, 1909–23: Scouting for Rebels (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019 and 2021), Damian Lawlor, Na Fianna Éireann and the Irish Revolution, 1909 to 1923 (Rhode, Co. Offaly: Caoillte Books, 2009), and J. Anthony Gaughan, Scouting in Ireland (Dublin: Kingdom Books, 2006), 33–77. In 2014 Eamon Murphy, a relative of Fianna officer Eamon Martin, began to document the history of the Fianna in the period 1909–23 through a series of illustrated blog entries; see https://fiannaeireannhistory.wordpress.com.

4 See https://www.militaryarchives.ie/collections/online-collections/bureau-of-military-history-1913-1921/

5 See https://www.militaryarchives.ie/collections/online-collections/military-service-pensions-collection-1916-1923

6 Fianna girls have tended to be mentioned in brief in works dealing with Na Fianna Éireann. For instance, see Watts, ‘Fianna Éireann’, 44–47, 295–8; Hay, Fianna Éireann, 40, 45–6, 48–9, 64, 74–5, 112–3, 153, 191; Eamon Murphy, ‘Fianna Eireann’s Betsy Gray Sluagh’, April 15, 2016, https://fiannaeireannhistory.wordpress.com/2016/04/15/the-betsy-gray-sluagh/ (accessed October 21, 2022).

7 David Fitzpatrick, ‘Militarism in Ireland, 1900–1922’, in A Military History of Ireland, eds. Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffrey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 382–3.

8 John Springhall, Coming of Age: Adolescence in Britain, 1860–1960 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1986), 64. Also see Michelle Smith, ‘Be(ing) Prepared: Girl Guides, Colonial Life, and National Strength’, Limina: A Journal of Historical and Cultural Studies 12 (2006): 1–11, https://www.archive.limina.arts.uwa.edu.au/_data/page/186589/smith.pdf (accessed May 3, 2021).

9 Andrew Donson, ‘Why Did German Youth Become Fascists? Nationalist Males Born 1900 to 1908 in War and Revolution’, Social History 31, no. 3 (2006): 353; Hay, Fianna Éireann, 11.

10 Richard A. Smith, ‘Robert Baden-Powell’, in The Oxford Companion to British History, ed. John Cannon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 72; Robert A. Smith, ‘Boy Scouts’ and ‘Boys’ Brigade’, in ibid., 119.

11 Smith, ‘Boys’ Brigade’, 119.

12 Paul Wilkinson, ‘English Youth Movements, 1908–30’, Journal of Contemporary History 4, no. 2 (1969): 6. Also see Richard A. Voeltz, ‘“ … A Good Jew and a Good Englishman,”: The Jewish Lads’ Brigade, 1894–1922’, Journal of Contemporary History 23, no. 1 (1988): 119–27.

13 Brian Morris, ‘Ernest Thompson Seton and the Origin of the Woodcraft Movement’, Journal of Contemporary History 5, no. 2 (1970): 185, 187–8.

14 Sarah Mills, ‘Scouting for Girls? Gender and the Scout Movement in Britain’, Gender, Place & Culture 18, no. 4 (2011): 545–6.

15 Richard A. Smith, ‘Girl Guides’, in Oxford Companion, 417.

16 Mills, ‘Scouting for Girls?’, 547.

17 Mary Ann Chacko, ‘Freedoms in the Khaki: Gendering a “Gender-Neutral” Uniform’, Gender and Education 33, no. 1 (2021): 86. For discussion of the symbolism inherent in guide and scout uniforms, see Tammy M. Proctor, ‘(Uni)Forming Youth: Girl Guides and Boy Scouts in Britain, 1908–39’, History Workshop Journal 45 (Spring 1998): 103–34.

18 Richard A. Voeltz, ‘The Antidote to “Khaki Fever”? The Expansion of the British Girl Guides during the First World War’, Journal of Contemporary History 27, no. 4 (Oct. 1992): 627.

19 Smith, ‘Girl Guides’, 417; Voeltz, ‘Antidote to “Khaki Fever”?’, 627.

20 Voeltz, ‘Antidote to “Khaki Fever”?’, 629.

21 Ibid., 629–30.

22 Donald M. McFarlan, First for Boys: The Story of the Boys’ Brigade, 1883–1983, 14, 19–20, http//www.boys-brigade.org.uk/first-for-boys.htm (accessed May 15, 2014).

23 Gaughan, Scouting in Ireland, 81.

24 Gillian Finan, A Hundred Years A-Growing: A History of the Irish Girl Guides (Dublin: Liberties Press, 2010), 34.

25 Gaughan, Scouting in Ireland, 5–8.

26 Ibid, 8.

27 Finan, Irish Girl Guides, 35.

28 ‘Editorial Notes’, Bean na hÉireann, June 1909, 8.

29 Helena Molony, witness statement, May 19, 1950, 55, WS 391, BMH, MAI. Hereafter second and subsequent citations of an individual’s BMH witness statement will be shortened to their surname followed by the relevant page and WS numbers.

30 Molony, 56, WS 391.

31 Constance de Markievicz, ‘How the Fianna was Started’, Nodlaig na bhFiann, December 1914, 2; Molony, 55–6, WS 391; Hay, Fianna Éireann, 22–6.

32 Markievicz, ‘How the Fianna was Started’, 3; Seamus Mac Caisin, witness statement, June 8, 1947, 3, WS 8, BMH, MAI. In the 1911 census Harding was listed as a seventeen-year-old painter’s messenger who lived on Redmond’s Hill, which was close to the Fianna hall on Camden Street: http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/pages/1911/Dublin/Mansion_House/Redmond_s_Hill__West_Side/74721/ (accessed June 2, 2023).

33 Mac Caisin, 3, WS 8; Anne Marreco, The Rebel Countess: The Life and Times of Constance Markieviz (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967), 117; Jacqueline Van Voris, Constance de Markievicz in the Cause of Ireland (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1967), 70.

34 Marreco, Rebel Countess, 118.

35 Bulmer Hobson, witness statement, October 15, 1947, 3, WS 31, BMH, MAI.

36 Molony, 59, 54, WS 391. Molony’s concerns were legitimate. For example, see Mac Caisin’s witness statement in which he gave Hobson credit for the Fianna’s foundation and diminished Markievicz’s contribution (1, WS 8).

37 Molony, 57, WS 391.

38 Ibid., 58–9.

39 Watts, ‘Fianna Éireann’, 216.

40 Eamon Martin, witness statement, October 1, 1951, 3–4, WS 591, BMH, MAI.

41 Na Fianna Éireann, The Constitution of Na Fianna Eireann as Amended by the Ard-Fheis, 1912 (Dublin: Na Fianna Éireann, 1912), 2; [Pádraic Ó Riain, ed.,] Fianna Handbook (Dublin: Central Council of Na Fianna Éireann, 1914), 15.

42 Bulmer Hobson, Ireland Yesterday and Tomorrow (Tralee: Anvil Books, 1968), 17.

43 Margaret Ward, Unmanageable Revolutionaries: Women and Irish Nationalism (London: Pluto Press, 1995), 104.

44 Ruth Taillon, When History was Made: The Women of 1916 (Belfast: Beyond the Pale Publications, 1996), 12. For profiles of the Connolly sisters, see Dictionary of Irish Biography, s.v. ‘O’Brien, Nora Connolly’, https://www.dib.ie/biography/obrien-nora-connolly-a6489 (accessed July 26, 2022); Sinéad McCoole, No Ordinary Women: Irish Feminist Activists in the Revolutionary Years, 1900–1923 (Dublin: O’Brien Press, 2015), 157–9, 187–9.

45 C. Ua S. [Cathal O’Shannon], ‘Volunteers’ Branch,’ Bean na hÉireann, March 1910, 8.

46 ‘Fianna na hÉireann’, Bean na hÉireann, March 1911, 7. Pádraig Mac Fhloinn noted that Annie O’Boyle formed the first Belfast sluagh of the youth group and described her as ‘a young woman who worked devotedly and untiringly for the cause of Irish freedom’; see ‘The history and tradition of Fianna Éireann’ in Fianna Éireann Handbook (Dublin: Fianna Éireann, 1988), 9.

47 Liam Gaynor, witness statement, circa October 21, 1948, 2, 4, WS 183, BMH, MAI; Cathal O’Shannon, ‘Memories of 50 years ago’ [Evening Press, July 20, 1956], P120/37/15, Denis McCullough Papers, University College Dublin Archives (UCDA). A women’s division of the Belfast Dungannon Club named Cumann na Cailíní (League of Girls) was formed in 1907.

48 ‘Na Fianna Eireann’, Dublin Evening Telegraph, June 3, 1911, 2. I am grateful to Luca Bertolani Azeredo for highlighting the importance of this newspaper as a source.

49 Pádraic Ó Riain, ‘Na Fianna Éireann’, Irish Freedom, December 1911, 6 (version edited by Patrick McCartan).

50 Ibid.

51 ‘Ulster National Scouts’, Dublin Evening Telegraph, March 2, 1912, 7; ‘Sluagh Betsey [sic] Gray (2nd Girls’ Company, Belfast)’, Dublin Evening Telegraph, March 23, 1912, 3.

52 ‘Na Fianna Eireann’, Dublin Evening Telegraph, September 21, 1912, 7.

53 Fionn, ‘With the Belfast Sluaighte’, Dublin Evening Telegraph, December 2, 1911, 3.

54 Watts, ‘Fianna Éireann’, 58.

55 David McGuinness, witness statement, July 28, 1950, 2, WS 417, BMH, MAI.

56 Quoted in McCoole, No Ordinary Women, 26.

57 Ernest Blythe, witness statement, April 12, 1954, 5, WS 939, BMH, MAI.

58 Statement of Ina Connolly (Mrs Archie Heron), October 21, 1938, MSP34REF21565, Military Service Pensions Collection (MSPC), MAI.

59 Nora Connolly O’Brien, witness statement, July 21, 1949, 4, WS 286, BMH, MAI.

60 Charlie McGuire, Roddy Connolly and the Struggle for Socialism in Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press), 10–11.

61 Nora Connolly O’Brien reported this in an interview with Watts, ‘Fianna Éireann’, 44.

62 Connolly Heron, 74, 87, WS 919.

63 Ibid., 74.

64 Connolly O’Brien, 4–5, WS 286.

65 Watts, ‘Fianna Éireann’, 44.

66 Na Fianna Éireann, Constitution of Na Fianna Eireann, 1912, 6.

67 ‘Lily Kempson McAlerney and the 1916 Easter Rising’, http://lily1916.com/biography (accessed March 22, 2023). This website was created by her great-grandson Casey McNerthney. The other girls in the photograph have been identified as Ina Connolly, Marie McKeown, Aideen Ward (née Connolly), Kitty Sheils and Alice Kavanagh. See Murphy, ‘Fianna Eireann’s Betsy Gray Sluagh’.

68 Connolly Heron, WS 919, 80. See also Nora Connolly O’Brien, James Connolly: Portrait of a Rebel Father (Dublin: Four Masters, 1975), 177–8.

69 Connolly Heron, 87, WS 919.

70 McGuinness, 2, WS 417. He identified the delegates as Ina Connolly, Kate O’Kane and Rose Leckey. Nora Connolly would have attended as well.

71 Pádraic Ó Riain, ‘Na Fianna Éireann’, Irish Freedom, August 1912, 6.

72 Van Voris, Constance de Markievicz, 94; Lindie Naughton, Markievicz: A Most Outrageous Rebel (Newbridge, Co. Kildare: Merrion Press, 2016), 104; Watts, ‘Fianna Éireann’, 45.

73 Hobson, 3, WS 31; Martin, 10, WS 591.

74 ‘Girl Scouts’, Irish Citizen, August 10, 1912, 90.

75 ‘Na Fianna Eireann’, Dublin Evening Telegraph, August 3, 1912, 7. The other known IRB members at the meeting were Hobson, Michael Lonergan, Frank Reynolds, Seamus Mac Caisin and Patrick Ward. It is likely that Markievicz and the two attendees from Belfast voted against the motion.

76 ‘Na Fianna Eireann’, Dublin Evening Telegraph, August 10, 1912, 3.

77 ‘Na Fianna Éireann’, Irish Freedom, September 1912, 6. Sluaighte against inclusion of girls: An Cead Sluagh (1st Dublin Co.), Sluagh Emmet (3^rd Dublin Co.), Sluagh Wolfe Tone (5^th Dublin Co.), Sluagh Patrick Sarsfield (6^th Dublin Co.), Sluagh Fiach Mac Aodha (Baile Breach), Sluagh Lord Edward (Limerick), An Cead Sluagh Corcaighe, Sluagh Leo Cathasaigh (Athlone), Sluagh Wolfe Tone (1st Kerry Co., Listowel), Sluagh Vinegar Hill (Enniscorthy), Sluagh John Mitchel (Derry), and Sluagh Finegal (Lusk). Sluaighte in favour of the girls: Sluagh Willie Nelson (Belfast), Sluagh Henry Munroe (Belfast), Sluagh H.J. McCracken, Sluagh Seáin Uí Néill, and Sluagh Betsy Gray (Belfast).

78 Watts, ‘Fianna Éireann’, 47.

79 Ernest Blythe, Trasna na Bóinne (Dublin: Sairséal agus Dill, 1957), 177–8, quoted in Aodán Mac Póilin, ‘Irish Language Writing in Belfast after 1900’, in The Cities of Belfast, eds. Nicholas Allen and Aaron Kelly (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), 136.

80 Connolly O’Brien, James Connolly, 177; Watts, ‘Fianna Éireann’, 44.

81 Máire Fitzpatrick (née Moran), witness statement, January 25, 1956, 2, WS 1,344, BMH, MAI.

82 ‘Na Fianna Éireann’, Irish Freedom, September 1912, 6.

83 Molony, 58, WS 391.

84 Anne Haverty, Constance Markievicz: An Independent Life (London: Pandora, 1988), 87–8.

85 Molony, 58, WS 391.

86 Rosamond Jacob, diary entry, September 18, 1911, MS 32,582/22, Rosamond Jacob (RJ) Papers, National Library of Ireland (NLI). I would like to thank Sylvie Kleinman for bringing this diary entry to my attention.

87 Constance Markievicz to Eva Gore-Booth, September 21, 1917, in Constance de Markievicz, Prison Letters of Countess Markievicz (New York: Kraus Reprint, 1970), 174–5.

88 ‘Na Fianna Eireann’, Dublin Evening Telegraph, August 3, 1912, 7.

89 ‘Irish National Guard’, Dublin Evening Telegraph, August 24, 1912, 3. In a witness statement former ING member John Kenny described it as ‘an off-shoot of the Fianna’ (November 6, 1957, 1, WS 1,693, BMH, MAI). Accounts vary regarding whether the split was over the importation of the Fianna hat from England or the relative age at which arms training was provided (Hay, Fianna Éireann, 44).

90 ‘Irish National Guard’, Dublin Evening Telegraph, August 24, 1912, 3; ‘Irish National Guards, Girls’ Auxiliary Corps. Ann Devlin Battalion’, Dublin Evening Telegraph, August 31, 1912, 3.

91 ‘Irish National Guard’, Dublin Evening Telegraph, October 19, 1912, 7.

92 Mary McLoughlin, witness statement, circa February 1954, 1, WS 934, BMH, MAI.

93 Mary (May) Chadwick (née Kelly), sworn statement made before the Advisory Committee, February 23, 1937, 1, MSP34REF20098, MSPC, MAI. In contrast to the evidence in her statement, the years 1910 and 1911 have been cited as the group’s starting date. See Francis McKay, ‘Clann na nGaedheal’, Irish Press, May 3, 1966, 11; Joseph E.A. Connell, Jr, ‘Inghinidhe na hÉireann / Daughters of Ireland, Clan na nGaedheal / Girl Scouts of Ireland’, History Ireland 19, no. 5 (September/October 1911): 66; McCoole, No Ordinary Women, 37; Ann Matthews, Renegades: Irish Republican Women, 1900–1922 (Cork: Mercier Press, 2010), 109; Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc, ‘A Short History of the Hibernian Rifles, 1912–1916’, March 31, 2013, https://www.theirishstory.com/2013/03/31/a-short-history-of-the-hibernian-rifles-1912-1916/#.Ys2FxHbMK3A (accessed July 12, 2022).

94 May Kelly was listed as a twelve-year-old scholar in the 1911 Irish census: http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/pages/1911/Dublin/Drumcondra/Elizabeth_Street/24932/ (accessed July 12, 2022). Although May’s year of birth is noted as 1901 on the Life Certificate in her military service pension file, her birth year is listed as 1899 on a website recording the site of her grave in Deansgrange Cemetery in Dublin: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/172922171/mary-chadwick (accessed July 20, 2022). The latter year correlates with the age noted on her family’s census return. She died on March 31, 1964.

95 Kenny, 1, WS 1,693.

96 ‘Irish National Guard’, Dublin Evening Telegraph, August 31, 1912, 3; Seamus Kavanagh, witness statement, September 9, 1957, 5, WS 1,670, BMH, MAI.

97 ‘Irish National Girl Scouts’, The Hibernian, July 17, 1915, 2.

98 Molly Reynolds, witness statement, February 3, 1949, 1–2, WS 195, BMH, MAI.

99 Fianna, February 1915, 1.

100 Watts, ‘Fianna Éireann’, 98.

101 Robert Holland, witness statement, July 18, 1949, 3, WS 280, BMH, MAI.

102 Connolly Heron, 90, WS 919.

103 Ibid.

104 Connolly O’Brien, James Connolly, 182–4.

105 Connolly Heron, 90–2, WS 919. Ina identified the driver as Harding while Nora referred to him as Broderick in James Connolly (185).

106 Margaret Ward linked the proficiency in marksmanship of Belfast Cumann na mBan members to the Connolly sisters and their previous involvement with the Fianna (Unmanageable Revolutionaries, 104–6).

107 Haverty, Constance Markievicz, 124.

108 Watts, ‘Fianna Éireann’, 46, 58; Murphy, ‘Betsy Gray Sluagh’.

109 Connolly O’Brien, 6–7, WS 286; Denis McCullough, witness statement, December 11, 1953, 8, WS 915, BMH, MAI.

110 See military service pension applications for Nora Connolly-O’Brien, MSP34REF59637, MSPC, MAI, and Ina Connolly-Heron, MSP34REF21565, ibid. The others were Elizabeth and Nell Corr, Kathleen O’Kelly (née Murphy), and Éilis Woods (née Allen).

111 Nora Connolly O’Brien, 25–43, WS 286; Kathleen O’Kelly (née Murphy), witness statement, October 15, 1948, 2–6, WS 180, BMH, MAI; Elizabeth and Nell Corr, witness statement, October 14–15, 1948, 2–8, WS 179, ibid; Betsy Gray [probably Elizabeth Corr], ‘A Memory of Easter Week’, The Capuchin Annual, 1948, 281–5.

112 Frank Robbins, witness statement, September 10, 1951, 62, 87, WS 585, BMH, MAI. See also Lily McAlerney (née Kempson), pension file, MSP34REF28861, MSPC, MAI.

113 ‘Remembering Lily Kempson, the longest surviving rebel from the 1916 Easter Rising’, Irish Central, April 30, 2023, https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/lily-kempson-1916-rebel (accessed June 5, 2023).

114 Na Fianna Éireann Roll of Honour, https://fiannaeireann.com/nfe-roll-of-honour/ (accessed June 28, 2023).

115 Liam A. Brady, witness statement, May 1, 1952, 89, WS 676, BMH, MAI.

116 Margaret Ward, ‘Fianna Éireann’, in The Encyclopedia of Ireland, ed. Brian Lalor (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2003), 386.

117 Taillon stated that ‘Belfast was the only area in which Fianna Éireann had a section for girls’ (Women of 1916, 12). Watts did not seem to be aware of the Fianna girls in Waterford either.

118 See Leeann Lane, Rosamond Jacob: Third Person Singular (Dublin: UCD Press, 2010), 122–4.

119 Rosamond Jacob, diary entry, July 6, 1916, MS 32,582 /30, RJ Papers, NLI. Hereafter all citations from Jacob’s diary will be shortened to her surname, the date of the diary entry and the relevant manuscript number. Based on background details included in Jacob’s diary entries, Mrs Roche was probably Mary Josephine Roche, a mother of four who was married to Waterford-born printer linotypist Patrick Joseph Roche. The family is listed in the 1911 Irish census as living in Thurles: http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/pages/1911/Tipperary/Thurles_Urban/Thurles_Urban_District/828911/ (accessed June 23, 2021).

120 Jacob, September 12, 1916, MS 32,582/30; October 22, 1917, MS 32,582/32.

121 Jacob, September 12, 19 and 21, 1916, MS 32,582/30.

122 Jacob, September 26, 1916, MS 32,582/30.

123 Jacob, October 10, 1916, MS 32,582/30.

124 Moses Roche, witness statement, March 17, 1955, 2, WS 1,129, BMH, MAI; ‘National Boy Scouts’, Waterford News and Star, March 30, 1917, 13. Patrick Hearne referred to it as ‘a girls’ unit’ in his witness statement (August 18, 1958, 9, WS 1,742).

125 Jacob, January 11, 1918, MS 32,582/33; Lane, Rosamond Jacob, 123.

126 Jacob, January 11, 1918, MS 32,582/33.

127 ‘National Boy Scouts’, Waterford News and Star, March 30, 1917, 13.

128 Jacob, January 11, 1918, MS 32,582/33. Mary Joe Mountain replaced Angela Quinn as secretary in September 1918 when Quinn moved to London. See diary entry for September 10, 1918, MS 32,582/34. Mountain would have been about eighteen years of age if she is the same Mary J. Mountain who was listed as an eleven-year old scholar in the 1911 census: http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/pages/1911/Waterford/Waterford_No__3_Urban/Grady_s_Yard/672225/ (accessed May 31, 2023). A search of the 1911 census for Waterford city did not conclusively identify other members named by Jacob, but there were some possibilities of girls (Margaret Myler, Kathleen Norah Dalton or Kate Dalton, and Ellen Robinson), who were then aged nine to ten years which would make them sixteen to seventeen in 1918.

129 Jacob, January 21, February 6, 1918, MS 32,582/33.

130 Roche, 2, WS 1,129.

131 Hearne, 7, WS 1,742.

132 Jacob, February 13, April 8 and May 9, 1918, MS 32,582/33.

133 Jacob, April 8, July 23, 1918, MS 32,582/33.

134 Jacob, February 27, 1918, MS 32,582/33; Lane, Rosamond Jacob, 123.

135 Jacob, February 27, 1918, MS 32,582/33; August 23, 1918, MS 32,582/34.

136 Jacob, March 26, 1918, MS 32,582/33.

137 Jacob, June 3, 1918, MS 32,582/33.

138 Jacob, July 30, 1918, MS 32,582/33.

139 Jacob, August 23, 1918, MS 32,582/34.

140 Jacob, March 26, 1918, MS 32,582/33; December 19, 1918, MS 32,582/35.

141 Roche, 3–4, WS 1,129; Hearne, 7, WS 1,742.

142 Roche, 4, WS 1,129. Ballybricken was ‘the centre of [Waterford] city’s important livestock and bacon-curing industries’ (Lane, Rosamond Jacob, 94–5).

143 Jacob, April 8, 1918, MS 32,582/33.

144 Jacob, September 12, October 1, 1918, MS 32,582/34.

145 Jacob, January 29, 1919, MS 32,582/35.

146 Jacob, January 26, 1919, MS 32,582/35, quoted in Lane, Rosamond Jacob, 124.

147 Death notice for Henrietta Harvey Jacob, Waterford News and Star, March 21, 1919, 1.

148 Dorothy Hannafin, application for a service certificate, June 1, 1935, 4–7, MSP34REF16986, MSPC, MAI. Given that Hannafin was listed as age seven in the 1911 Irish census, she was probably aged between fourteen and nineteen during the years of her claimed service. See http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/pages/1911/Kerry/Tralee_Urban__part_of_/Nelson_Street/282220/ (accessed June 15, 2023).

149 Michael O’Leary, witness statement, May 17, 1955, 4, WS 1,167, BMH, MAI; Thomas O’Connor, witness statement, June 15, 1955, 1, WS 1,189, ibid.

150 Her mother was eventually awarded a partial dependant’s allowance due to Percy’s death. See Patrick John (Percy) Hannafin, pension file, DP4142, MSPC, MAI.

151 Dorothy Hannafin, application for a service certificate, June 1, 1935, 4–7, and supporting statement, MSP34REF16986.

152 Dorothy Hannafin, application for a service certificate, June 1, 1935, 8, MSP34REF16986. Ann Matthews documents Hannafin’s internment in Dissidents: Irish Republican Women, 1923–1941 (Cork: Mercier Press, 2012), 268.

153 Dorothy’s elder siblings were awarded military service pensions upon appeal.

154 O’Connor, 1, 4, WS 1,189; O’Leary, 10, WS 1,167. O’Leary also refers to Billy Myles as the Kerry Brigade’s Quartermaster (3). Billy Myles was shot dead by National Army forces on October 20, 1922, at Tonevane, Curraheen, Co. Kerry, while on active duty during the Civil War. See pension file for William Myles, DP8427, MSPC, MAI.

155 Máire (Mollie) Agnes Norton (née Myles), statement of major and minor activities during each period for which services claimed, 2, MSP34REF50746, MSPC, MAI.

156 Mary Agnes Myles and her brother William are listed as ages six and eight respectively in their family’s 1911 census return, making them about sixteen and eighteen in 1921: http://census.nationalarchives.ie/pages/1911/Kerry/Tralee_Urban__part_of_/Moyderwell/282134/ (accessed March 20, 2023).

157 O’Connor, 4, WS 1,189.

158 O’Leary, 30, WS 1,167.

159 Quoted in Marie Coleman, ‘Violence against Women during the Irish War of Independence, 1919–21’, in Years of Turbulence: The Irish Revolution and its Aftermath, eds. Diarmaid Ferriter and Susannah Riordan (Dublin: UCD Press, 2015), 141.

160 ‘Early morning hold-up – Galway girl’s hair cut by man with red mask’, Freeman’s Journal, October 12, 1921, 3; ‘Man with a red mask – Galway girl’s hair cut’, Irish Times, October 12, 1921, 5. The reports in these two newspapers are very similar, though the Irish Times refers to Duggan as age seventeen while the Freeman’s Journal indicates that 17 was her house number on Eyre Street. I would like to thank Mary McAuliffe for alerting me to this incident.

161 ‘The red mask – Breeches of the Truce reported in City and County’, Connacht Tribune, October 15, 1921, 5.

162 Medals were awarded to military service pension recipients automatically and to individuals whose service was not of a pensionable standard.

163 Marie Coleman, ‘Compensating Irish Female Revolutionaries, 1916–1923’, Women’s History Review 26, no. 6 (2017): 924.

164 Ibid., 926.

165 Hay, Fianna Éireann, 215.

166 See Marnie Hay, ‘Using the Military Service Pension Collection to Uncover a Revolutionary Youth and its Aftermath’, in ‘A Very Hard Struggle’: Lives in the Military Service Pensions Collection, eds. Anne Dolan and Catriona Crowe (Dublin: Department of Defence, Ireland, 2023), 228–39.

167 Statement of Ina Connolly (Mrs Archie Heron), 1, MSP34REF21565. See also the pension files for Nora Connolly-O’Brien, MSP34REF59637, and Lily McAlerney (née Kempson), MSP34REF28861.

168 Dorothy Hannafin to the Office of the Referee, April 6, 1936, MSP34REF16986.

169 See Máire (Mollie) Agnes Norton (née Myles), pension file, MSP34REF50746.

170 McKay, ‘Clann na nGaedheal’, 11; Matthews, Dissidents, 53, 62, 254.

171 See Constitution of Cumann na gCailíní in Cumann na mBan Convention Document, P48a/23, Mary McSwiney Papers, UCDA, reprinted in Matthews, Dissidents, 297–8.

172 Watts, ‘Fianna Éireann’, 295–6.

173 Fianna Éireann Handbook (1988), 1–2.

174 Mills, ‘Scouting for Girls?’, 547–50.

175 Gaughan, Scouting in Ireland, 27.