Who remembers their Junior/Inter cert history? I’ve been thinking about it this week. Not because it was always on during the second week of the exams. No, not that. It was the place in the syllabus that they put Countess Markievicz and Maud Gonne. They were the poster girls of our glorious revolution and the Great Countess is rightly feted as the first woman MP.
Markievicz was on my mind all last week as we were re-told the horrors of the tragedy of mother and baby homes. Was this supposed to be part of the Ireland she envisioned? I think not.
Fast forward to the 4th Dáil (that’s the one straight after the Civil War) and I counted just two female TDs with neither having a seat on the Council that ran our embryonic state. In the Jazz Age, all the pictures show a solid set of men in their finest Victorian-era Sunday suits. The revolutionary zeal of the Countess and the ethereal Maud Gonne had left the stage. It would be another 90 years until we got to hear about Rosie Hackett.
Three women. Markievicz and Hackett could have been role models for a whole generation of young women who grew up in the shadow of the revolution.
Gonne was reduced to the role of an extra seen as muse to a poet and mother of Seán, a man who was key to founding Amnesty International but who failed to see human rights, like charity, starts at home. For younger readers, he actually opposed the introduction of divorce to Ireland. Google his name and Late Late Divorce debate.
The comely maiden superseded the working girl. Pastoral virginity looked down on urban womanhood.
It is a story we have heard so often before. Last week I spoke about how, for the first time ever, I felt a stranger in my own country as even more tales of mother and baby homes circulated. Disabled me was sickened but I’m also part of the generation who will have to celebrate this nation’s 100th birthday in less than 8 years’ time.
How should we celebrate?
By the time 2022 roles around we would have had at least two female Presidents, a plethora of women Tánaistí and who knows maybe a Taoiseach? We have women in leadership roles. We will have true marriage equality. There may be some high profile disabled people hanging around the place.
But as I write, casual racism, homophophic attacks still occur and try getting around Dublin if you have any kind of impairment.
We’ve heard a great deal of noise about the need for some form of commemoration to those shunned by our early state. Bricks, mortar and gold plaques have their place but we can do more. We can learn from the past and build a truely inclusive society that deserves the title of Republic.
