An Irishwoman’s Diary on Máire Ní Cillín, Maud Gonne and 1916

Election time was not always “showtime”, as the late P J Mara so aptly put it, and for Maud Gonne it was quite the opposite a century and a bit ago.

“I am employing the comparatively idle time afforded me by the general election in SERIOUSLY taking lessons in Irish,” she wrote, the capitals being hers, in a letter to “my dear Willie”.

“I have a most CHARMING teacher in Miss Killeen with a wonderful Irish face and the most beautiful black hair I have ever seen,” she continued in her despatch to WB Yeats of October 1900. “She has a wild admiration for your poems and says she has never read anything which moves her so much . . .”

The recipient probably didn’t know it, and perhaps the writer didn’t either, but “Miss Killeen” was no idle admirer. Máire Ní Cillín shared a serious interest in European poetry and literature with her husband Pádraic Ó Bhrolcháín, who worked in the then ministry of education in Dublin.

Celtic Literary Society

From Cong, Co Mayo, Ní Cillín met Maud Gonne through the Celtic Literary Society in 1896. The society “did not admit ladies as members”, Ní Cillín explained, but “they had certain functions such as Irish classes and special literary meetings that ladies were allowed to attend”.

Ní Cillín and Gonne were among the founders of Inghinidhe na hÉireann, which preceded Cumann na mBan. Under the pen name "Máíre", Ní Cillín wrote for the journal Bean na hÉireann, published from 1908.

Patrick Pearse was also a contributor, and both worked as Gaelic League examiners of Irish – then an optional subject in schools. Ní Cillín’s first fiancé was the journalist, poet and Irish language revivalist William Rooney, co-founder with Arthur Griffith of the Celtic Literary Society and the first Cumann na nGaedheal.

Sadly, Rooney contracted and died of tuberculosis at the age of just 27 However, Ní Cillín took up with his friend, Pádraig Ó Bhrolcháín, from Inishowen in Donegal. These were all pieces of a slightly scattered family jigsaw puzzle for a young Galwegian, Deirbhile Ní Bhrolcháin, when she was growing up.

Deirbhile, the baby of her family, never met her grandparents, but was vaguely aware as an otherwise occupied teenager of dinnertime references to Griffith and Pearse. It was only when she began sorting out papers kept by her late parents, an tOllamh Cilian Ó Brolcháin of NUI Galway (NUIG) and Mairéad Bean Uí Bhrolcháin, that she was drawn in.

A flyleaf dedication in a music anthology confirmed that Arthur Griffith had been her grandfather’s best man, and what she thought were old copper pipes kept by her late father were, in fact, links with Roger Casement.

The "pipes" were originally guns from the Asgard consignment, which her grandfather had buried in a back garden after their landing in Howth. One of the pair is now on display in the National Maritime Museum in Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin, as part of its commemoration of "lesser known maritime aspects" of 1916.

Continuing her quest, Ní Bhrolcháín came across a Bureau of Military History witness statement given by her grandmother about the couple’s experiences on that fateful Easter weekend, and how they caught sight of an “anxious, tense, urgent” O’Rahilly as they tried to reach the city centre.

On Tuesday, they read Pearse’s Proclamation, pasted on the walls of St Patrick’s Training College, but when they noticed that the names of Eoin MacNeill and Arthur Griffith were missing, they felt “heavy and sick”.

Ó Bhrolcháín visited MacNeill to try and persuade him to change his mind about his countermanding order, but with no success. MacNeill held no bitterness about what had happened, Ní Cillín testified. “There was no faintest tinge of animosity towards those who had usurped his authority,” she said.

There is much more, including photographs – one of Ní Cillín dressed as a “Celtic goddess”, with the waist-length thick hair that Gonne admired so much. However, Ní Bhrolcháin was most surprised by an uncanny link with another woman she never knew. In among the material were handwritten lyrics of a song dictated by her great-grandmother Máíre Bean Sheáin Uí Chillín.

The song is Liam O Raghallaigh, the haunting late-18th-century words of a heartbroken young widow who lost her husband in Mayo's Sruwaddacon estuary on her wedding night. Deirbhile Ní Bhrolcháín is herself a singer, and is closely associated with that particular piece. She performed it every night during one whole summer season in the Taibhdhearc theatre, and latterly sang it with Galway's Cois Cladaigh choir.

If she had never found anything else in those boxes, this was one piece of paper, one inexplicable link to a family past, that “took her breath away . . .” The tale of two other women in opposing camps during the time of the Rising, and the loss of 15 students in the first World War

are reflected in A University in War and Revolution, 1913-1919, a free exhibition currently running at the James Hardiman library at NUIG.

Details of the National Maritime Museum’s “Sea and 1916” lecture series, including at tribute to Dr John de Courcy Ireland on June 9th, are at www.mariner.ie