Mary MacSwiney

Until now, in-depth analysis of key female figures in Irish republicanismin the early twentieth century has been limited. Mary MacSwiney was one of themost single-minded anti-Treaty women, leading Eamon de Valera to describe heras 'incorrigible'. Rather than just dismiss MacSwiney as one-dimensional in heropposition to the Treaty and in her continued political intractability, thisbiography seeks to place her political life within the centre of the turn ofthe twentieth-century republican narrative and understand why she wasincreasingly viewed as a virago.

To saycontemporary gender roles played a part in reducing MacSwiney to a cipher forextreme republicanism limits a fuller understanding of her political life. Heruncompromising stance against the evils of compromise during the Treatynegotiations was indelibly formed by the experience of watching her brotherTerence MacSwiney die on hunger strike in Brixton Jail in 1920, and the traumashe experienced. She witnessed an intimate act of self-sacrifice which boundher to a belief that her task was to continue her brother's fidelity to aseparatist republic. Betrayal of the republic, for her, would have meant betrayal ofa brother she loved and admired.

Mary MacSwiney situates thisstandout figure in the context of her tightly knit family, tracing herpolitical evolution from suffrage and cultural revival activism to advancednationalism. While the focus of MacSwiney's political action was Cork, from1920 onwards she began to assume a progressively more important role in Irishpolitics at a national and international level, including American tours, acentral role during the Civil War and within Sinn Fein and a close politicalrelationship with de Valera. From 1926 onward, she was increasingly politicallyisolated and marginalised as she sparred with members of Fianna Fail in the press,seeking to justify her continued refusal to engage with the reality of the IrishFree State.

Leading biographer of women in twentieth-centuryIrish history, Leeann Lane delves into newly discovered archival material tointerrogate MacSwiney's oppositional stance to the establishment of the IrishFree State in 1922. Mary MacSwiney offers a comprehensive understandingof a misrepresented and marginalised voice in early twentieth-century Irishpolitics.

'The central chapters on trauma dealing withTerence's lingering death on hunger strike, her propaganda tour in the US soonafter, and her vehement opposition to the Anglo-Irish Treaty, together with hercivil war experiences, imprisonments and hunger strikes are among the best andmost evocative I've read of books published in the Decade of Centenaries'.

Dr Mary McAuliffe, Directorof Gender Studies, University College Dublin

'Therehave been studies of anti-treaty figures, but they have been male (Brugha,Boland, de Valera, etc). Lane's other biographies of women, Jacob and Macardle,contain considerations of those on the anti-Treaty side, but neither women hadthe single-mindedness of MacSwiney and her determination to maintain allegianceto the second Dail'.

DrMargaret Ward, Honorary Senior Lecturer, School of History, Anthropology, Philosophyand Politics, Queen's University of Belfast

Dr Leeann Lane is a lecturer in the Schoolof History and Geography, Dublin City University. She is the author of RosamondJacob: Third Person Singular (UCD Press, 2010) and Dorothy Macardle(UCD Press, 2019).

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