Constance Markievicz: a fighter whose legacy has been fought over for decades

Those desires, as de Valera interpreted them, were far more conservative than the ideas that Markievicz or Connolly ever expressed. He proclaimed that Markievicz had stepped “down from the class to which she belonged [….]into the life of the plain people”. The “plain people”, a phrase common to de Valera’s rhetoric, homogenised the poor, the working class and the middle class, and pandered to the kind of mythical national identity that the Revival had propagated in its most conservative forms. The idea of the “plain people” enabled him to sidestep the wider issue of social class and to avoid particular problems, such as the matter of the Democratic Programme adopted by the First Dáil, which was, among other things, committed to public ownership (“all right to private property must be subordinated to the public right and welfare”). At the unveiling, de Valera claimed that for Markievicz, “freedom won would have meant very little unless it had brought with it real freedom for the individual”.

Similarly, he corrupted the radical gender politics that Markievicz had advocated. She fought for women’s freedom to participate in national life in whichever way they saw fit, but de Valera decreed, “To many she was simply a strange figure following a path of her own and not the accustomed paths, but she did that because she was truly a woman”. Similarly, he credited her as “Chief Scout and foundress” of the Fianna, using a gender-specific term that is at odds with Markievicz’s gender-neutral vocabulary of comradeship and her title as President of the Fianna.

The 1932 memorial bust depicted Markievicz in Fianna uniform, but the inscription identified her solely with the Irish Citizen Army. This distanced her from the IRA that rejected Fianna Fáil’s legitimacy and also buttressed the party’s lobby for votes from labour. An important presence at the unveiling was the Gujarati politician Vithalbhai Patel, founder of the Swaraj Party that sought independence through civil disobedience. Despite the rich history of affinity between Irish and Indian anti-imperialist movements, de Valera avoided mentioning Patel’s transnational anti-imperialism and instead introduced him as “a man who is fighting for the freedom of his country from outside interference”. This was an early indication of de Valera’s isolationist rhetoric and yet another example of his suppression of a major facet of Markievicz’s political thought.

On the Rising’s fortieth anniversary, in April 1956, President Seán T Ó Ceallaigh unveiled a second bust of Markievicz to replace the bust that had been defaced in 1945 and 1947. (Whether the defacement was politically motivated or was an act of random vandalism is unclear; when questions were raised in the Dáil, Ó Ceallaigh said the damage was possibly accidental.) The new bust, by Seamus Murphy, was sponsored by the Madame Markievicz Memorial Committee, of which Nora Connolly O’Brien was one of the chief organisers. The bust depicts Markievicz in Citizen Army uniform, reflecting the interests of the committee and also severing Markievicz from the Fianna that continued the armed struggle.

Ó Ceallaigh gave a fuller portrait of Markievicz’s career than de Valera had, mentioning her work for the Daughters of Ireland, but on the whole his speech replicated de Valera’s in its tone and judgments. He pronounced that Stephen’s Green marked the place where “Constance Markievicz reached the culmination of her pilgrimage from the big house to a dwelling-place in the hearts of the Irish people, where she and her memory have ever since abided…. Without ceasing to be a woman of charm and grace, she became a soldier.”

Fianna Fáil, Irish labour, feminists and militant Republicans all made claims on Markievicz’s life and work; these competing narratives diverged sharply as Fianna Fáil gained power, Catholic and anti-feminist ideology was instituted in the state apparatus, and the border campaign ensued. All the more surprising, then, is the joint commemoration on the first anniversary of Markievicz’s death, when representatives of all of these groups marched together from Stephen’s Green to Glasnevin to lay wreaths at her grave.

The importance of Markievicz to an array of political allegiances helped to cement her place in the national pantheon, even though the lineaments of her character remain subject to dispute. As the American poet Louise Bogan wrote to literary critic Edmund Wilson in 1937, “It’s not a country, it’s a neurosis…. Did I mention the 1916 collection in the National Museum of Dublin? That’s something. All the grisly /[mementoes/] of those heroic but gruesome days….There’s a photo of the Countess, in uniform, looking very beautiful with a drawn pistol in her hand, that slew me. I tell you, it gets you. For it’s still going on, and will never end.”

Lauren Arrington’s Revolutionary Lives: Constance and Casimir Markievicz is published by Princeton University Press