42 Alice M. Cashel–A Fenian at Heart

Posted by on Apr 6, 2015 in Ireland | 25 comments To the Fans and Relatives of Alice Cashel,  Thank you for your interest in Alice Cashel’s story. I am giving a talk on her during RTE’s “Reflecting the Rising” event on Easter Monday, 28 March 2016. Following that. I will post a revised version here with new information and resources. Please get in touch with me if you have memories or information about her you would like to share. Thank you! Christine Cozzens Ireland is in the midst of a “decade of centenaries” commemorating an array of historical events that left a mark on the country from the Home Rule crisis of 1912, to the Dublin Lockout of 1913, the Great War from 1914 to 1918, the Easter Rising in 1916, and the struggle for independence that culminated in 1922. Almost every week there’s another anniversary, another shadowy corner of history opened to the light of modern scholarship and debate. I’ve encountered these commemorations everywhere this year as lectures, exhibitions, renovations, conferences, ceremonies, new books and films, and more. It’s exciting to be here at this time as the Irish confront the past and try to understand not only what actually happened, but also why it’s important to today. One strand of this era of commemorating and revisiting the past is bringing to light some of the lesser known participants in the independence movement, the women, whose stories are only now getting the attention they deserve. Alice M. Cashel (1878-1958) was one of these revolutionary women. A committed and energetic supporter of rebellion in Ireland from the moment she joined the Sinn Féin party in 1907, she gave her whole life to the cause of Irish independence. To name just a few of her roles, she served as a political organizer, a spy, an educator, a Sinn Féin judge, a finance specialist, vice-chairwoman of the Galway County Council, and author of a pro-rebellion young people’s novel The Lights of Leaca Bán that was taught in schools in the early years of the fledgling Irish Free State. In the course of supporting an independent Ireland, Alice worked beside many of the leaders and notables of the Easter Rising and the War of Independence including Eamon De Valera, Constance Markievicz, Terrence MacSwiney, Arthur Griffith, Erskine Childers, Bulmer Hobson, George Nobel Plunkett, Sean Heggarty, Alice Stopford Green, Ada English, Kevin O’Higgins, Seán MacEntee, and W. T. Cosgrave. Given the times, she was remarkably mobile. Her activities took her all around both southern and northern Ireland, often...
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41 Not Just a Postbox

Posted by on Mar 30, 2015 in Ireland | 4 comments When Ron and I were in Cork a few weeks ago, we stopped on one of the city’s main streets to take a photograph of a postbox—what we call a mailbox in the US—when a couple about our age, laden with shopping bags and obviously walking home with their groceries, stopped to talk to us. As I moved around to get just the right angle on the postbox, their bemused expressions pretty much told me what they were thinking. “Excuse me,” said the man kindly, as one might talk to an old lady doing something embarrassing in public, “but it’s just a postbox.” We laughed. We’re used to people staring at us incredulously when we take pictures of postboxes in Ireland; I have a folder full of such photos on my computer. “Actually,” I said politely, pointing to the V R below the mail slot, “it’s not just a postbox; it’s a postbox that was put here during Queen Victoria’s reign and painted green in 1922.” “So it is!” they exclaimed, suddenly interested. “We never noticed that before,” said the woman, wanting to make up for her husband calling us out. I explained that my husband collects stamps, and so we are interested in postal history. “Thanks for showing us something about our city!” were their parting words. No matter who you are or where you live, you can always learn something about your home from outsiders who see it with different eyes. But the story of Irish postboxes is a particularly interesting one, fraught with political meaning, as so much on this island tends to be. In January of 1922, after a two year War of Independence with Britain and a six month truce during which treaty negotiations had taken place, the twenty-six counties that today make up the Republic of Ireland abruptly found themselves to be an independent entity that would be called the “Irish Free State.” The British army and government officers immediately started the process of pulling out, leaving the new provisional government to manage the transition. The Irish were eager to prove their ability to run a state and made a number of adaptive moves while more long term plans, including a new constitution, were in the works. But while other governmental activities could be hammered out over the coming few months, the mail had to be delivered day in and day out without interruption....
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40 Bursting Fetters, Striking Off Chains

Posted by on Mar 23, 2015 in Ireland | 1 comment Though I didn’t realize it until later, earlier this year I stood on the spot where two of the world’s greatest human rights leaders, Daniel O’Connell and Frederick Douglass—one an Irishman at the end of his career, the other an American at the beginning of his—met and conversed for the first and only time on September 29, 1845. In an earlier post, “38 Waiting in Line To Be Legal,” I wrote about the day Ron and I spent at the Irish Immigration and Naturalization Service (IINS) office on Burgh Quay in Dublin trying to straighten out our visa situation. Located in a choice spot overlooking the river and only a block from O’Connell Bridge where the statue of Daniel O’Connell, known as “The Great Liberator,” presides, the ugly modern building with its subdivided structure and cheap materials was clearly built for bureaucratic purposes. I didn’t think much about the building at the time, but I did notice that the adjacent structures, clearly Georgian in style, were much nicer. Then a few weeks ago I made a discovery after reading Tom Chaffin’s book about Frederick Douglass’s 1845 trip to Ireland, Giant’s Causeway: Frederick Douglass’s Irish Odyssey and the Making of an American Visionary and digging around in some online archives. It turns out that the IINS building, the very same building where visitors and immigrants come to seek legal status in Ireland, stands on the site of “Conciliation Hall,” erected in 1837 by an organization dedicated to repealing the Acts of Union. The Acts of Union, passed by the British parliament in 1800 and put into effect on January 1, 1801 in retaliation for the 1798 Rebellion, closed the Dublin based Irish parliament and placed control of Ireland’s affairs with Westminster, far removed from the country’s problems and needs and further disenfranchising the country’s largely Catholic population. O’Connell was the leader of the repeal movement in 1845 and was speaking in Conciliation Hall on September 29 when Douglass–a former American slave and author of an account of his life under slavery (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass An American Slave. Written by Himself) who had arrived in Dublin a few weeks earlier–walked in. I had known about their famous meeting for a long time–Willie Tolliver and I always discuss and commemorate it with the Agnes Scott students we bring to Ireland–but until recently I had not known Dublin well enough to grasp the details of where it actually occurred. Compare the two images...
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39 The Gray House with the Yellow Door

Posted by on Mar 16, 2015 in Ireland | 1 comment Spring has come to Dublin, first with the bevy of tour buses appearing in Nassau Street alongside Trinity College and the school groups from Italy and Japan gathering around the steps of the museums and encircling monuments like the Molly Malone statue in Suffolk Street or the Fusiliers Arch at Stephen’s Green. November and January are really the only months in the year when Dublin isn’t mobbed with tourists. Though the cold has by no means gone away, when I call up the “10 day” outlook for Dublin on weather.com, more 50s than 40s appear as the highs. In the shop windows on Grafton Street, the palette has changed from winter colors to the bright pastels of spring and summer, though it’s not yet time to wear those flimsy items of clothing. I’m still taking my wool scarf when I go shopping. Today The Irish Times reported that the rooks are starting to build their nests and showed one in flight with a beak full of twigs. In the last two weeks I’ve noticed the snowdrops, crocuses, primroses, and daffodils on every available patch of ground or flower pot. Especially the daffodils. Heads bobbing in the March winds, these graceful flowers don’t last more than a day or two in a vase and seem to live their few weeks in the soil just to let us know that spring is coming. The other day we were walking home from the grocery store in Sandymount when we passed by the gray house with the yellow door and daffodils in the yard pictured at the top. I grew up in a gray house with a yellow door on Kedzie Street in Evanston, Illinois. The ramshackle Victorian surrounded by a white picket fence was a child’s dream with its nooks and crannies, bay windows, stair landings, and magical attic. My brothers and I had special games for each of the two landings; the attic was where we played “the olden days,” a game that usually had me as the teacher in a one-room pioneer schoolhouse. There was a thrillingly scary “furnace room” in the basement and a walk-in “linen closet” upstairs that had great cupboards for hiding. My dad built a huge sandbox in the back yard that overlooked the yards of four different neighbors’ houses, so there was always someone to talk to or spy on. The house was gray when...
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38 Divided by a Common Language IV, PG-13 Edition

Posted by on Mar 9, 2015 in Ireland | 4 comments I have to confess that I am suffering from “language creep,” a term I invented that probably has an equivalent in the science of linguistics. I’ve been living in Ireland long enough that the line between American English and Irish English is starting to blur: expressions, usages, and pronunciations that sounded strange to me at the beginning of my stay are starting to seem normal and are even creeping into my vocabulary. People who spend a lot of time in both North America and Britain are sometimes accused of having an “Atlantic” accent, a ghastly hybrid of the two tongues, part eagle or beaver and part lion. I’m not quite there yet, nor am I in danger of “going native”—dressing in a long skirt and shawl and carrying a basket of turf as I stroll barefoot on the rocky shore. Women dressed that way were once held up as the image of Irish womanhood and today are derisively called “shawlies,” by the way. But the strange mixture of words and sounds in my head is unsettling. I am shocked when someone recognizes within seconds of my opening my mouth that I am American, which they always do, of course: to me my speech doesn’t seem that different from theirs, but that only shows how badly I am afflicted by language creep. A few weeks ago I met a lovely woman down in Kilkenny named Helen whose speech was a veritable gold mine of unusual and vivid expressions. Her conversation was so interesting and her words so perfectly chosen that I could have talked to her all day. She was telling the story of the long and complicated process of renovating her home when she began one of her colorful sentences with the phrase “Between the jigs and the reels” to mean “With one thing and another.” Jigs and reels are, of course, types of musical pieces with distinct tempos, jigs being faster than reels. The phrase also brings nice mechanical imagery to mind: without too much stretching, jigs and reels could be machine parts, and the expression would still work well to mean something along the lines of “I had to deal with many different complications.” Helen was the owner of the bed and breakfast where we stayed. We asked her if she was also the chef, and she said “Yes, I’m the chef and the slosher,” by which we...
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