‘Friend of all Ireland’ – An Irishman’s Diary on Ulster Protestant and Gaelic Leaguer Alice Milligan

Thomas MacDonagh, poet, playwright and lecturer who was executed after the Easter Rising, said of the subject of this Diary in September 1914: “Alice Milligan, Ulster Protestant, Gaelic Leaguer, Fenian, friend of all Ireland, lover of Gaelic Catholic as of her own kith, strong in faith and in hope and in charity, clear of eye and of voice, single-minded, high, inspired and inspiring, humorous and solemn, taking encouragement and praise and blame and rebuff as they come, without thought of herself, with thought always of Ireland’s cause – Alice Milligan is the most Irish of living Irish poets, and therefore the best”.

She knew and interacted with WB Yeats, Maud Gonne, Roger Casement, Arthur Griffith, Eoin MacNeill, Douglas Hyde and James Connolly. George Russell (AE) described her as “the best producer of plays before the Abbey started on its triumphant way”.

Yet, who now remembers Alice Milligan?

She was born 150 years ago on September 14th in a village near Omagh, the second of nine surviving children of Seaton Milligan, a successful businessman, antiquarian and member of the Royal Irish Academy, and Charlotte Burns, a linen-shop assistant. Her parents were Methodists. There is a tradition that her great-grandfather and five of his sons fought with the United Irishmen at the Battle of Antrim and that her great-uncle, Armour Alcon, spoke Irish to his farm labourers.

She attended a local school in Omagh and then Methodist College, Belfast, before studying English and history at King’s College, London. She graduated as a Latin teacher from Magee College, Derry, during which time she developed an interest in the Irish language. Moving to Dublin in 1891, she became greatly interested in Parnell. Her biographer, Catherine Morris, sees Parnell’s fall as a turning point in her life whereby she abandoned her unionist background and saw cultural revival as the path Ireland should follow.

Returning to Ulster, she travelled as a Gaelic League organiser and used local theatre groups as well as magic lantern shows and slides to promote the Irish language and culture. Her efforts reaped success, with the number of Irish speakers in Belfast growing fourfold in the 1890s.

In 1893, she and Anna Johnston (who wrote under the pseudonym, Ethna Carbery) established the monthly Northern Patriot in conjunction with the National Workers' Club of Belfast. A disagreement between them and the club three years later led to their setting up Shan Van Vocht (Poor Old Woman). Their journals were not just political but published poems, plays and stories to promote the language and culture.

She founded the Irish Women's Association in Belfast to promote a feminist agenda and was organising secretary for Ulster of the 1798 Commemoration Committee. In 1899, when Arthur Griffith and William Rooney began the United Irishman in Dublin, she closed Shan Van Vocht and passed on its list of subscribers to them. She continued to have stories, poems and plays published in Griffith's United Irishman and Sinn Féin for many years.

She was a tireless worker but both her gender and her religious and political background militated against her. She was ordered to leave meetings because she was a woman. She recorded how Patrick Pearse opposed her being employed as a Gaelic League organiser because she was not a native Irish speaker.

A great friend and supporter of Roger Casement, she travelled to London for his trial. She set up a bookshop in Dublin in 1917 to support herself and her brother William, who had just left the British army, and she raised funds for political prisoners. She and William had to leave Dublin because of a death threat to him as a former British soldier. It is clear from the last poems she wrote that the Civil War deeply affected her; she published hardly any new poems after 1923.

She spent the rest of her life in Drumragh, near Omagh, where she looked after William and his paralysed son. As the only unmarried daughter in a large family, it was often her lot in life to care for her ageing parents and siblings’ children.

She helped set up the Anti-Partition Union in the late 1920s and continued her devotion to Irish culture and the arts.

In 1941, the National University of Ireland awarded her an honorary doctorate. She died in 1953 and is buried in Drumragh Cemetery.

Sadly, as a result of partition, the contribution of Alice Milligan and others in what became Northern Ireland to the cultural revival and indeed independence of Ireland was ignored, overlooked or forgotten.

[ The Glass Shore, Short Stories by Woman Writers from the North of Ireland (New Island) ]