Yes, her women have done their share in making Ireland what she is, a heroic land, unconquered by long centuries of wrath and wrong, a land that has not abandoned its Faith through stress of direst persecution or bartered it for the lure of worldly dominion; no—nor ever yielded to despair in face of repeated national disaster.
It was this fidelity to principle on the part of the Irish Catholic people which won for them the alliance of all that were worthiest among the Protestants of north and south in the days of the Volunteers and the United Irishmen. What interesting and pathetic portraits of Irishwomen are added to our roll at this period! None is more tenderly mournful than that of Sarah Curran, the beloved of Robert Emmet. The graceful prose of Washington Irving, the poignant verses of Moore, have enshrined the memory of her, weeping for him in the shadow of the scaffold, dying of heart-break at last in a far-off land. No more need be said of her, for whom the pity of the whole world has been awakened by song allied to sweetest, saddest music. What of Anne Devlin, Emmet's faithful servant, helping in his preparations for insurrection, aiding his flight, shielding him in hiding, even when tortured, scourged, half-hanged by a brutal soldiery, with stern-shut lips refusing to utter a word to compromise her "Master Robert"?
What of the sister of Henry Joy McCracken, Mary, the friend and fellow-worker with the Belfast United Irishmen? An independent, self-reliant business woman, she earned the money which she gave so liberally in the good cause, or to help the poor and distressed, through the whole period of a long life. Some still living have seen Mary passing along the streets of Belfast, an aged woman, clad in sombre gown, to whom Catholic artisans raised their caps reverently, remembering how in '98 she had walked hand in hand with her brother to the steps of the scaffold, and how, in 1803, she had aided Thomas Russell in his escape from the north after Emmet's failure, had bribed his captors after arrest, provided for his defence, and preserved for futurity a record of his dying words. Madden's History of the United Irishmen, as far as it tells of the north, is mainly the record that she kept as a sacred trust in letters, papers, long-treasured memories of the men who fought and died to make Ireland a united nation.
And now a scene in America comes last to my mind. Wolfe Tone, a political fugitive who has served Ireland well and come through danger to safety, is busy laying the foundations of a happy and prosperous future, with a beloved wife and sister and young children to brighten his home. An estate near Princeton, New Jersey, has been all but bought, possibilities of a career in the new republic open before him, when a letter comes from Belfast, asking him to return to the post of danger, to undertake a mission to France for the sake of Ireland. Let his own pen describe what happened: "I handed the letter to my wife and sister and desired their opinion.... My wife especially, whose courage and whose zeal for my honor and interest were not in the least abated by all her past sufferings, supplicated me to let no consideration of her or our children stand for a moment in the way of my duty to our country, adding that she would answer for our family during my absence and that the same Providence which had so often, as it were, miraculously preserved us would not desert us now."
Inspired by the fortitude of this noble woman, Tone went forth on his perilous mission, and similarly the Young Ireland leaders, Mitchel and Smith O'Brien, were sustained by the courage of their nearest and dearest. "Eva," the poetess of the Nation, gave her troth-plight to one who had prison and exile to face ere he could claim her hand. Other names recur to me—"Speranza", with her lyric fire; Ellen O'Leary, fervent and still patient and wise; Fanny Parnell and her sister.
And what of the women of Ireland today? Shall they come short of the high ideal of the past, falter and fail, if devotion and sacrifice are required of them? Never: whilst they keep in memory and honor the illustrious ones of whom I have written. The name of Irishwoman today stands for steadfast virtue, for hospitality, for simple piety, for cheerful endurance, and in a changing world let us trust it is the will of God that in this there will be no change.
REFERENCES:
On Ethne, mother of St. Columcille: The Visions, Miracles, and Prophecies of St. Columba (Clarendon Press Series). On Ronnat: S. Mac an Bhaird, Life (in Irish) of Adamnan (Letterkenny); Reeves, St. Adamnan's Life of St. Columba; The Mother of St. Adamnan, an old Gaelic text, ed. by Kuno Meyer (Berlin). On Gormlai: Thomas Concannon, Gormflath (in Irish; The Gaelic League, Dublin). On Granuaile: Elizabethan State Papers (Record Office Series); William O'Brien, A Queen of Men. On Ineen-Dubh: O'Clery's Life of Red Hugh (contemporary), ed. by Denis Murphy, S. J. (Dublin, 1894); Standish O'Grady, The Flight of the Eagle, or Red Hugh's Captivity. On Rose, wife of Owen Roe O'Neill, see references in Father Meehan's The Flight of the Earls, and in Sir John Gilbert's History of the Confederate War (Dublin, 1885). On the wife of Wolfe Tone, see Wolfe Tone's Autobiography, ed. by R. Barry O'Brien (London, 1894). The American edition has a fuller account of Tone's wife, her courage and devotion in educating her son, and her interviews with Napoleon, and life in America. The women of the United Irish period are fully dealt with in K. R. Madden's Lives and Times of the United Irishmen. On Mary McCracken, see Mrs. Milligan Fox, The Annals of the Irish Harpers. On the women of the Young Ireland period, see C. Gavan Duffy's Young Ireland (Dublin), and John O'Leary's Fenians and Fenianism. On the women of Limerick, see Rev. James Dowd, Limerick and its Sieges (Limerick, 1890). For the women under Cromwellian Plantation persecutions and the Penal Laws, see Prendergast's Cromwellian Settlement, Rev. Denis Murphy's Cromwell in Ireland, and R. R. Madden's History of the Penal Laws.