It was on a wild, stormy night in the village of Falcaragh [sic] in
Donegal. There was a
sudden clatter of hoofs, and cries and lights; the two long police cars carrying prisoners
and a mounted escort of constabulary drew up near the inn where I was staying. Young and
curious, and fresh from school in France,
I made my way to the cars through a crowd of
women with shawls round their heads, some of them wailing. There were six prisoners
handcuffed together in pairs. Several only spoke Irish, but I gathered they had been taken
for defending the little farms of their fathers away on the hills beyond Gweedore, from
which the landlord was evicting them. They were being taken to Derry Gaol.
The people
around seemed dazed. The priest came up and spoke encouragement in Irish. The police pushed
him roughly aside. Then, suddenly mastering shyness, I waved my handkerchief and called
for cheers, as the cars and escort clattered away. A year later, but for the zeal and
watchful care of the people, I too would have found myself whirled away into the stormy
darkness to Derry gaol on a police car for having helped other boys and girls in
Donegal
to defend other little cabins on the hills from the Irish evictors and the British soldiers.
As it was, I was hurried to some place on the railway, where I and Deputy Pat O'Brien -
'Pat the Builder' as he was called from the number of Land League huts he helped to erect -
were hoisted into the train and taken away to Dublin. But I found there were others in the
gaols with life sentences - boys taken in round ups after some bailiff, or emergency man,
or landlord, or police inspector had got his deserts.
The sufferings of the long-sentenced men became to me an obsession. They must be helped,
they must be free once more 'to walk the hills, the bogs and the rushes.'
Then I found there were other men, unconnected with the agrarian struggle, under the title
of 'Treason-felony prisoners'. These had all life sentences and were mostly confined in
England. I went to John O'Leary, the old Fenian chief, whose fine eagle face and grey beard
made him appear an ideal leader. He had himself been many years in an English gaol and
many years in exile. But O'Leary would never speak of his imprisonment, and used to speak
contemptuously of William O'Brien MP for his refusal to wear prison clothes. O' Leary's
reply in prison to a visiting Justice, who asked if he had any complaints - 'I am not here
to make complaints' - may be dignified, but it renders the gaolers' task too easy.
Never be a good prisoner, for good prisoners are forgotten, and, if they have long
sentences, become absolutely stupid and dead. Among the treason-felony prisoners, some like
John Daly, James Egan and Tom Clarke, who were often in the punishment cells - came out of
that hell of Portland with minds keen and ready for the joys and sorrows and battles of
Irish life. But others, who were never on the punishment list, came out broken men, unfit
for life; in Portland five out of seventeen lost their reason.
O'Leary, when I first met him on my return from France, received me with great kindness as
a disciple, and took trouble to teach me Irish history and recommend me books to read. But
he was angry with me because of my share in the agrarian movement, of which he disapproved.
Nor was he more sympathetic when I announced my intentions of working for the release of
treason-felony prisoners. 'Dynamitards' O'Leary said, 'are all mad or bad or both.' Yet that man was the leader of
the physical force party, and lauded the rifle and the sword.
With some help and a little diplomacy of my own, I obtained from an unsuspicious Home
Secretary a permit to visit eight of the seventeen Irish treason-felony prisoners in
Portland, three of whom had never received a visit from a friend during the ten years of
their captivity. I shall never forget that visit. On the way I saw gangs of convicts
chained like beasts of burden to great carts of stones from the quarries. At the gates my
visit caused a flutter among the officials. A fashionably-dressed young girl was hardly the
sort of visitor they were accustomed to escort into the 'cage'.
The prisoners did not know me, and I think some distrusted me at first, and thought me a
spy sent by the English Government to obtain information. A strange thing happened, which I
have never been able to explain. Like one in a dream, I rose and told O'Callaghan, who had
lost an eye in prison and was clinging to the iron bars of the cage while the warder tried
to prevent him telling the circumstances, to say no more, for I knew all he could tell me.
I begged him to endure a little longer, and promised that he should be free in less than
six months. I was still in the same dream when the next prisoner came in; I told him he
would be free in eighteen months, and to the next I said he would be released in a year.
All the way back to London I was appalled at what I had done, and asked myself why I had
done it. Yet each of those men was released in that order, and at the time I had foretold.
In London I went to see T.P O'Connor and asked his help. To my astonishment he refused.
Those prisoners must not be mentioned; it would embarrass the Liberal Home Rule Government.
I got up and told him I would never speak to him again, and would now appeal to the
English and to the French press.
In a year over a thousand articles and notes appeared in the French papers. Mr Asquith
sent for John Redmond and lectured him roundly. 'But I have nothing to do with it!' Redmond
pleaded truthfully enough. 'But you can stop it,' urged Asquith. 'Nothing but the release
of the prisoners will stop Maud Gonne,' was Redmond's reply.
I remember a strange amnesty meeting in Tipperary during the Parnell split, where John
Dillon and John Redmond both spoke. At the banquet that followed I sat between the two,
and they spoke to me, but not to each other! Later on, after my Sinn Fein lectures, they
would speak to each other, but neither of them would speak to me!
I learned what prison was from the inside first at Arbour Hill military prison, where I
was the solitary woman prisoner. And then in Holloway Gaol, where Constance de Markievicz,
Mrs Tom Clarke, and I were shut up without charge or trial. I was only released when three
doctors had certified that I had not long to live, and Mrs Clarke when she was in a nearly
dying condition.
Under the Free State there are more political prisoners than ever in Ireland. Last summer
the number officially admitted was 14,000, varying in age from children of 14 to old men of
70. My own son was among them until after 16 months of hideous captivity he escaped while
being transferred from Mountjoy to Kilmainham, and is now 'on the run'.
I have not visited any of those prisoners, for no visits are permitted, relatives of dying
men being admitted only when the prisoner is unconscious; and of the 100 men executed as
reprisal victims or for the possession of arms, not one was allowed a last farewell even to
his mother, who learned of his death from the papers after the event.
There are still some 1,200 prisoners in Free State gaols and 400 in Orange gaols. Every day
we hear that sentences of 10, 15, 20 years, pronounced by secret courts martial, are being
notified to these interned prisoners.
With hundreds of other mothers I have kept vigil days and nights outside the walls of
Mountjoy reciting the Rosary; our bodies trembled with cold, our hearts quivered at the
sound of shots inside the gaol, accompanied by the drunken laughter and shouts of the
guards, till it was almost a relief when the guns were turned on us, as sometimes happened.
The rulers of the Free State allowed me to see the inside of both Mountjoy and Kilmainham
as a prisoner. From Mountjoy I released myself by the threat and from Kilmainham by 18 days
of hunger-strike.
In Kilmainham I met the families of most of the men executed by General Maxwell in Easter
Week 1916 - James Connolly's daughter, Joseph Plunkett's widow, Eamon Ceannt's
sister-in-law, the O'Rahilly's two sisters, as well as Terence MacSwiney's sister. The
narrow yard where we exercised led onto another yard where our husbands, fathers and
brothers had died under English bullets. Standing at the iron-barred gate which separated
the yards some of the girl prisoners said they could see the stain of their blood on the
wall, but if these dark marks were bloodstains, I think they had been renewed in the blood
of the later victims of the cause of Irish independence.
The anniversary of the Proclamation of the Republic occurred while I was in Kilmainham,
and the women prisoners obtained permission to enter that execution yard and place a wreath
on the ground where our men had fallen. I was too weak then to leave my bed, but in a
dream I listened to the voice of Nora Connolly reading the declaration of the Republic,
and I knew that till the Republic is established Ireland cannot fulfil her destiny.
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