Reclaiming Elizabeth O’Farrell: A Radical Icon for Our Times

Last Thursday evening at the launch of Jim Fitzpatrick’s powerful new portrait of Elizabeth O’Farrell, SIPTU Deputy General Secretary Ethel Buckley delivered a stirring speech that reclaimed the legacy of one of 1916’s most overlooked revolutionaries.

The event, hosted by the Moore Street Preservation Trust, wasn’t just an unveiling of inspiring art, it was a call to remember O’Farrell as she truly was, a socialist, a feminist, a trade unionist, and a lesbian woman whose radical vision of Ireland remains the unfinished business of today.

It is an honour to speak to you this evening as we gather to mark the life and legacy of a remarkable Irishwoman, Elizabeth O’Farrell, and to launch the new artistic tribute to her by one of our most iconic artists, Jim Fitzpatrick.

I want to thank the Moore Street Preservation Trust for hosting this event and for their continued work in safeguarding a part of our city that holds the deepest roots of our Republic’s birth.

Moore Street is not just a street of stone and brick. It is a living monument to the brave women and men of 1916, and the ideals that spurned on that collection of poets, artists and social revolutionaries who led the Easter Rising.

Among them was Elizabeth O’Farrell, a woman who must be remembered for two great services to the Irish people. First, and I apologise to my politician friends, was her lesser success, that of a political life lived with deep courage and conviction.

A nurse by profession, she was a revolutionary by conviction, joining Cumann na mBan and participating in the Rising itself, serving as the Chief Medical Officer of the Irish Citizen Army, the armed wing of the ITGWU, my Union. Throughout Easter 1916, she was at the heart of the Rising, providing front line medical aid to the injured and dying or couriering important commands.

She was among a small group of women who stayed inside the GPO and later moved with the Rising’s leaders to Moore Street, where the final headquarters were set up in a house at number 16. Among the injured she provided care to the Acting General Secretary of my Union and leader of the newly formed Irish Republican Army, James Connolly, who had been gravely injured in the fighting at the GPO.

It was Elizabeth who walked unprotected towards the Crown Forces lines on Moore Street carrying the white flag of surrender. She walked in proud dignity along with Padraig Pearse to deliver the surrender of Republican forces in the midst of what was crushing military defeat.

But, and it is important to remember this, it was at the end of a battle that had been fought with honour and in accordance with the international laws of warfare. Only the British as they crushed the Rising, used terror tactics with their massacres in North King Street and other civilian victims. In those less connected perhaps, more innocent times these crimes were only uncovered in the aftermath of the Rising.

In Gaza and the West Bank we all bear witness to the destruction of Palestine, with the mass murder of its people broadcast daily, hourly, minute by minute into our homes.

We bear witness to crime after crime, committed by an Israeli Army which is fully integrated into the militaries of the US led NATO states. That is why I think it is essential at this time we remember Elizabeth O’Farrell played a leading part in a Rising whose immediate aim was to end Irish involvement in an imperialist war not of its making.

Every historical figure lives in their own times, views are shaped by lives lived, they are not inherent, but if there is one political lesson which the Rising brings to our time it is that it was an anti-Imperialist insurrection, and its leaders would be unlikely to support our small Atlantic nation being brought closer to a military alliance assisting, perhaps overseeing, a genocide in Palestine.

The Irish Citizen Army was of a different type to these militaries; it was founded to defend workers against violence and exploitation. Led by James Connolly, its example continues to guide the labour movement today. Elizabeth walked the same path as Connolly, as Countess Markievicz, as Helena Malony as the women and men who dreamed of an Ireland which was never realised.

Elizabeth was a revolutionary, a feminist and a trade union activist. She involved herself in supporting workers’ families during the 1913 Lockout, she believed in workers’ rights, in dignity for the poor, in the power of collective action, in national and personal liberation. These were not separate struggles in her eyes.

She would stay loyal to her convictions throughout the War of Independence, Civil War and the splits of the 1920s and continued to support armed insurrection and the Republican Movement up to her death in 1957.

In recent years, it’s been said that her role in political events was largely unmarked, that she had been forgotten, that is certainly not the case now with scholarly works on her life and wider examination of the revolutionary period. Elizabeth O’Farrell now has her rightful place in our understanding of the Rising and the Golden Generation which led and fought it.

But I’m not sure she was ever forgotten. She unashamedly supported an increasingly fringe form of socialist republican politics which was being pushed further and further to the margins, she was a ‘difficult figure’ for a conservative state to remember. Probably one better for it to forget.

She was certainly not forgotten in the communities who benefited from her most important success, her work as a midwife and an organiser of midwives. It was in this work she helped the mothers of generations of working class Dubliners, in that vital time of bringing new life into what was an often a difficult world.

In Liberty Hall Elizabeth O’Farrell’s name stands proudly alongside the names of the other women and men who fought with the Irish Citizen Army in 1916.

It was her work and the work of those she organised that ensured many poorer citizens of our city had at least basic maternity care, ensured that thousands of infants were professionally cared for in those vital first hours of life.

So, when we remember Nurse O’Farrell, it must not be in the context of the mere sight or not of her in a picture accompanying a surrender, but as the young bold woman of this new portrait. As she challenged the failures of a society which failed to provide care for children on the basis of their needs rather than wealth or the private health insurance scheme of their parents. Nurse O’Farrell opposed this and this must too be remembered.

Neither should we shy away from her life as a lesbian woman, and her love of Julia Grenan whose name is alongside Elizabeth’s on their gravestone in Glasnevin, the two women lived a full political and personal life together.

The State which was created in the aftermath of the insurrection she served in was clearly not the state she envisaged as the one which she was fighting for.

We must recommit ourselves to that vision of Elizabeth O’Farrell and her comrades. To an Ireland of solidarity, not silence. Of care, not cruelty. Of proper remembrance of revolutionaries who were not just merely ‘Irish Patriots’.

SIPTU stands shoulder to shoulder with the Moore Street Preservation Trust in calling for that national monument’s proper preservation and respect as a place of commemoration. Because knowledge of our history must be our foundation, the ideals of Nurse O’Farrell and her fellow revolutionaries must still fire us on.

In closing, let me say this: every generation must choose what it remembers and what it values.

May Elizabeth O’Farrell’s image, captured powerfully by Jim Fitzpatrick, inspire new generations to continue the fight to make a Republic in Ireland that strives to be close to the one she dreamed of, where children would not want, where all love is cherished and no-one is subjected to bigotry.

May she now take her place alongside Che Guevara, James Connolly, Joe McCann, Countess Markiewicz, Kevin Barry, all great revolutionaries whose inspiration has been captured by the genius of Jim Fitzpatrick, all who strove for a better world.

Go raibh míle maith agaibh.