The Biggest Lie of the Irish Revolution Pt. 1

Welcome to the History of Ireland. The American Commission on Conditions in Ireland, published in February 1921, had this to say about the treatment of women in Ireland during the War of Independence. The fact that for four and a half years an army of at least 78,000 British was occupying Ireland without provoking charges of major sensual offences against Irish women is remarkable. It would appear to be more remarkable when that army is proved to contain drunkards, highway robbers, gunmen and petty thieves. It would seem to the Commission that the credit for sparing of Irish womanhood must be attributed at least in part to the officers commanding the Imperial British forces in Ireland.

Now this belief that Irish women were spared and got off rather lightly in the Irish War of Independence found its way solidly into the history books. You’ll see it repeated again and again that rape and sexual assault was remarkably rare in the conflict. Over the next two episodes we’re going to explore and interrogate this assumption and look at how women were treated throughout the war. And there are no prizes for anyone who guesses early that it’s all a lot more complicated than originally thought.

The mostly male historians argue that both the Republican and British sides were slow to disrespect women and that the tiny number of reported cases suggests sexual assault was just not a factor in this war. However in the last five to ten years an increasing number of historians, people like Louise Ryan, Susan Byrne and Anne Matthews, have begun to question this claim. And are re-examining the female experience in the War of Independence.

To begin with one of the most common forms of assault inflicted on women during the Irish War of Independence was a practice of forced head shaving or bobbing. This was carried out extensively by both the IRA and the British. The IRA used this frequently on women they suspected of spying or fraternising with the British. While the Black and Tans did it for much the same reason, shaving women they believed to be helping the IRA.

A common Amman member explained it saying, These were days when girls were roughly searched and had their hair cut off by British soldiers. While a member of the IRA’s Cork Number One Brigade describes how, I remember at the time young girls from Cork going out to Ballincolleg to meet the British soldiers. We curbed this by bobbing the hair of resistant offenders. Short hair was completely out of fashion at the period and the appearance of a girl with bobbed hair clearly denoted her way of life. Or another IRA member described it saying, Quote Some young girls created a problem. The British uniform was an attraction for them, as indeed would any uniform. They could be a real danger to the movement and gave bad example by consorting with the enemy. They were warned repeatedly and stronger measures had to be resorted to. No volunteer liked the job but on occasions these girls’ hair had to be cut.

And look, initially cutting your hair off doesn’t seem that bad. And some historians sort of go, well the men got shot, all that happened to the women was they had a haircut. Even the term bobbing downplays how violent it could be. But imagine it. You’re sleeping quietly at home. You’re alone. Maybe you’ve been tending to flying collar men all day or you made the mistake of chatting to a British officer. Either way, in the middle of the night, you wake to the sound of masked men breaking down your door. Wearing nothing but a nightdress, you managed to jump out the back window and run through the wet, cold fields. The men follow until you can’t run anymore. One of them strips you down hangs you up by your hair and roughly hacks it off as the rest cheer him on. They then leave you lying in the grass, your head bleeding.

Kathleen Clark, a leading member of Cumann na mBan, wrote in a letter how a woman named Agnes Daly was attacked in such a way by the British. She said, they grabbed her, threw her on the ground and pulled her to the gate on her face by the hair. Then one of them put his foot on her back and, stooping over, cut off her hair with a razor. So it was much more violent than a mere haircut. Women would then be left humiliated and a shorn woman was often looked down upon by the community, especially if she’d had her hair cut due to dealing with the British. As historian and sociologist Linda Connolly puts it, the shearing of women’s hair was not a benign act at the individual or collective level. It constituted a form of symbolic, physical and sexualised violence that singled out women as sexual transgressors and traitors and could terrorise them depending on the nature and duration of the assault inflicted.

And sometimes the attackers went further than just bobbing. Among the IRA, bobbing could sometimes be used as a warning before moving on to more drastic measures. There are stories of an IRA troop piercing a woman’s buttocks with a pig ring. And there’s instances like Bridget Noble from Castletown, Bexar. Noble was accosted by the IRA in March 1921. After she had returned from a hospital visit, her hair was bobbed or shorn as a punishment ordered by the local IRA battalion. Subsequently her house was searched, after a military raid, by order of the captain of the Ardgrum Volunteer Company and in this search and in this search, part of a letter from the RIC head constable in Castletown, Bexar was found, along with five half-torn letters from other RIC members and two photographs of RIC men. Once these were found, she was shot.

There was also the very high profile case of Mary Lindsay, a 60-year-old woman who was kidnapped along with her chauffeur also in March 1921. She had overheard plans for an ambush in Cork and had immediately gone to the local RIC. She was held captive and the IRA hoped to trade her and her driver for some captured IRA men. When the British executed the IRA soldiers, the Cork Brigade did the same to Mary Lindsay. As Flying Column member Frank Bastide put it, the impression I got of her was that she was a stubborn woman, that you would not get any information from her. She wasn’t cooperative, notwithstanding the fact that she was sentenced to death. I told her she was going to die. She never blinked an eye. I will say this for her bravery. She was excellent. The whole incident was actually highly embarrassing for the GHQ and the IRA. It kind of turns out that shooting a 60-year-old woman is not great for publicity.

Traditionally that’s where historians stop. They mention bobbing and a few murders and kind of move on. But as I’ve said, an increasing amount of research has gone on into sexual assault during the Irish War of Independence and sadly it seems a lot of women’s experiences were overlooked and played down. As discussed, sometimes the war has even been said to be a relatively quote clean war. But next week we’re going to look at research that sadly proves we’ve been ignoring a huge part of the experiences of women who lived through the Irish War of Independence.

This podcast was recorded in the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. Sovereignty was never ceded.