My grandmother's support for the IRA was copper-fastened when her brother was killed during the 1916 Rising. But it was her subsequent activist history, and accusations of spying for the Third Reich, that I find hardest to reconcile, writes MANCHAN MAGAN
MY GRANDMOTHER, Sighle Humphreys, was told to bring her four young cousins for a walk on Sandymount Strand while their father, The O’Rahilly, bid a final farewell to his pregnant wife before heading out to the GPO to face certain death.
She was only 16 at the time and watched him pull on his fine officer’s boots knowing that, as co-founder of the volunteers and director of military operations, he would never return. It proved to be the single most influential moment of her life, and 54 years later, when I was born, she set about trying to instil in me the selflessness, grit and tír-ghrá she remembered in her uncle.
I and my siblings were putty to be moulded in his image. Every word of Irish we spoke was both an honorific token in memory to him, and a bullet aimed at those in Westminster who had killed him.
I was an eager recruit to my grandmother’s mission, hungry for insight into his sacrifice and for details about her own periods on the run, her three years in prison, her 31-day hunger-strike. Her idealism and fanaticism were heady, yet incomprehensible. When reporters and researchers came from Britain and America to interview her I would sit at her feet trying to see her through their eyes.
After school I would help her write “comms” to H-Block inmates. The effort of writing these minuscule, easily smuggled letters on cigarette papers would remind me of the struggle The O’Rahilly had endured to write his final letter in blood as he lay dying. “I was shot leading a rush up Moore Street. I got more [than] one bullet, I think. Tons and tons of love Dearie to you and the boys. It was a good fight anyhow.”
I always knew there was more to Sighle thanthe powdery mints she plied me with and the buttermilk scones she baked daily, but how much more? When Loic Jourdain, a French director, asked if he could make a documentary about my memories of her, I found myself looking for a reason to refuse.
Nine years ago while researching an RTÉ Hidden Historydocumentary about a gun-battle in Sighle's house on Ailesbury Road in 1922, I learned that it was most likely she had shot a poor young Free State soldier (Sighle died in 1994). How does one come to terms with the fact that the sweet old lady who cuddled me when I had nightmares had the blood of an innocent Leitrim teenager on her hands? I'm still wondering. Some histories are perhaps best left hidden.
Yet, over time, Jourdain convinced me that I owed it to my grandmother to face the past with the same courage that she had always shown, and so, last August, I found myself squatting for extended periods on the cold stone floor of her dark cell in Kilmainham Gaol, trying to rekindle my connection with the woman who had helped me so often with my homework and who used to tuck me into bed after reading extracts from Pearse's Iosogán agus Scéalta Eile.
Sighle had spent most of 1923 in this cell before the gaol was closed the following year – it is still decorated with her graffiti, messages scratched into the walls with the same fervency The O’Rahilly had written in blood a decade earlier and that we had written on Rizla papers 60 years later.
The cell is now closed off and so I found myself occupying a space in which she had been the last occupant 90 years before – an unsettling experience, heightened by the realisation that my humdrum, self-absorbed life could never come close to equating in any way to her idealism and self-sacrifice. It was all summed up in one faintly scrawled message she’d written behind a pipe: “Tunnel begun in basement of laundry, inside door at left, may be of use to successors, good luck, S.”
From the cell, I followed Sighle’s trail to the Blasket Islands where she had spent her most idyllic days: long summers with Peig Sayers, Tomás Ó Criomhthain and Cáit Ní Guithín, the daughter of the King of the Island. Here she had been able to slip from the reins of decorum that her family had tried (unsuccessfully) to impose on her and lead a wild, rampant life of dances, high-jinks and outdoor adventure.
It was on the Blaskets I came to realise that the Irish language for Sighle was far more than just a weapon or memorial card. It was not linguistic fanaticism that made her wish to be sent to prison in 1977 for failing to pay her television licence (because of the paucity of Irish language content), but cultural devotion.
Yet, it was neither the Blaskets nor Kilmainham that had propelled me to accept Jourdain’s challenge to partake in the documentary, but a secret file held in the Military Archives in Cathal Brugha Barracks.
I had always known that the reason I spoke German was because of my grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ interest in Germany as a possible source of armaments. My family had been involved in gun-running in the early decades of the 20th century, but come the second World War, how close had we got to the Third Reich?
There were rumours that Sighle may have assisted Nazi spies or even been a spy herself. Was her home a safe-house for Nazis? Historian Dr Margaret MacCurtain kindly agreed to accompany me to the archives to open the intelligence files, which I hoped (and feared) might shed some light.
The files proved to be little more than sparse supposition on scant tracing paper and it was Dr MacCurtain who convinced me that sympathy for Germany during the second World War must not be mistaken as support for Nazi policies, and that Sighle’s interest was always more towards socialism than National Socialism.
Dr MacCurtain further tried to make me comprehend Sighle’s continued support for IRA violence through the 1970s and 1980s in the context of the period, but perhaps I am too prejudiced by the mores of our age to ever see this objectively. No matter how far I follow in my granny’s footsteps there are some things my generation can never fully understand about the attitudes and outlook of those who went before.
Yet, do I regret that I sent letters of support and comfort to hunger-strikers who also had the blood of innocents on their hands? Certainly not. If I had the choice again between doing my homework or writing letters to isolated, frightened young men who had shot and bombed their neighbours, I would still chose the latter.
B'Í Mo Mhamó Í,Manchán Magan's personal journey to get to know his grandmother, Sighle Humphreys, is on TG4 on March 4th, 9.30pm (repeated March 5th, 8pm)
Written in stone
Graffiti written by Sighle Humphreys on the walls of her Kilmainham cell
"Ní suíocháin go saoirse." (No peace until freedom)
"An Phoblacht abú."
"Tunnel begun in basement of laundry, inside door at left, may be of use to successors, good luck, S."
