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Centre for Irish Studies Newsletter

 Nuachtlitir Ionad an Léinn Éireannaigh                       Issue 10                Summer 2011

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Irish Studies Public Lecture Series 2010-11 

Spring Lecture, 29 March 2011

 

The Original Hanna and her Sisters

The second public lecture as part of the Irish Studies Public Lecture Series, 2010-11 took place on Tuesday 29 March, in the Joseph Larmor Lecture Theatre, NUI Galway. The lecture, Hanna and Her Sisters: The lives of Hanna Sheehy Skeffington and Margaret Sheehy Culhane Casey, as told by their grand-daughters, was a joint presentation delivered by Dr Micheline Sheehy Skeffington (NUI Galway) and Professor Dara Culhane (Simon Fraser University, Canada), both of whom are grand-daughters of the Sheehy sisters, Hanna and Margaret.

In her opening remarks to the audience, the chair of the evening Dr Mary Clancy noted ’the importance of the personal and political lives of Hanna and Margaret Sheehy, as they show in fascinating detail how early twentieth century Ireland tried to construct itself, in private and in public, as it strived to determine and to define a democratic, progressive national state’. Dr Clancy outlined the socio-cultural context of the Sheehy family and the role of women in early decades of the last century.  

                     

                                     From left:  Dr Micheline Sheehy-Skeffington, Dr Mary Clancy and Professor Dara Culhane

Dr Sheehy Skeffington delivered the first half of the lecture, and gave an account on aspects of Hanna Sheehy Skeffington’s life, using both family archives and other material sources. Sheehy Skeffington (1877-1946) was a pioneering thinker and campaigner over the course of her life. She was a defining feminist, socialist, secular, republican and pacifist activist, who travelled internationally to protest and to campaign.

While studying in the then Royal University in Dublin, Hanna became very aware of the lack of power given to women, specifically in relation to voting rights in this period. Joining various campaigns for votes for women, in 1908 she co-founded the Irish Women’s Franchise League with Margaret Cousins. She was imprisoned for suffrage activities and when her husband, Francis Sheehy Skeffington, was killed in 1916, she was elected to tour the US to expose the truth behind his death and the campaign for Irish freedom. She returned in 1918 to serve on the Sinn Féin Executive Committee. Hanna was also elected to local councils and remained a keen critic and opponent of inequality and discrimination in the post-suffrage Irish state.

The second half of the lecture was delivered by Professor Culhane, and was largely based on a reading of Margaret Sheehy Culhane Casey’s letters to her sister, Hanna. An actress and elocutionist, Margaret lived in Montreal, Canada from 1922-1939. Her letters home offer insights into Margaret herself, her life in Ireland and in Canada, and into the relationship between these two sisters. Professor Culhane was recently a visiting scholar at the Centre for Irish Studies, and is currently working on a book-length memoir project on the history of her grandmother Margaret.

The joint lecture was an occasion and an opportunity to learn more about the role of women and the founding of the Irish Free State, while also listening to personal testimony and to moving extracts from the sisters’ letters that spanned over several decades, many of which are now housed in the National Library of Ireland. The audience gained an insight into the private lives of two women in the context of what would become a very public, national narrative of Irish history in the early decades of the last century. For the people of Galway who turned out in such numbers to fill the Larmor Theatre that night, there was consternation as to why so much of this aspect of Irish history is occluded in so many of the official histories of the period. And indeed the lively discussion session that ensued afterwards opened up further questions relating to historiography and, in particular, the writing of women’s lives in Ireland today.

In her closing coments, Dr Clancy stressed that in terms of national history and public memory, we need to re-think ’ who is remembered in public, and what is remembered in private’. After Tuesday night, the private story of Hanna and Margaret will be warmly remembered by all who attended this Irish Studies public lecture last March.

http://www.hannashouse.net/
Hanna's House mission is to mobilise the collective energy of women to work towards feminist ideals of justice, equality and non-violence.

 

This online newsletter is published by the Centre for Irish Studies.  Any views, comments, or suggestions are welcome and should be forwarded to Nessa Cronin, Editor at nessa.croninnuigalway.ie or Samantha Williams, Technical Editor at samantha.williamsnuigalway.ie

 

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