Shortly after the death of Countess Markievicz, which occurred 75 years ago today, W.B. Yeats wrote in memory of her and her sister, Eva Gore-Booth: "The light of evening, Lissadell,/ Great windows open to the south,/ Two girls in silk kimonos, both/Beautiful, one a gazelle," writesBrian Maye
Yeats thought that Constance Gore-Booth (1868-1927) exhibited some of the finest qualities of the class into which she was born - the Anglo-Irish landlord class. This can be seen in another poem he wrote about her, On a Political Prisoner: "When long ago I saw her ride/ Under Ben Bulben to the meet,/ The beauty of her countryside/ With all youth's lonely wildness stirred."
But Constance Gore-Booth (1868-1927) was not satisfied simply to look attractive and be an expert horsewoman. Nor did the preoccupations of her class satisfy her. The Gore-Booths of Lissadell, Co Sligo, were enlightened landlords and she grew up on friendly terms with the tenants on her father's large estate, from whom she learned about the folklore and history of Ireland. Her upbringing was very much that of her class and in later life she recalled the joy of hunting with hounds over the entrancing Sligo countryside. But she also recalled the happiness of roaming among the tenants on her father's estate - "the dispossessed people of the old Gaelic race", as she described them.
Polish count
She studied art first in London and then in Paris, where she met and married a Polish count, Casimir de Markievicz. They settled in the Dublin suburb of Rathgar. Their daughter was called Maeve after the legendary Irish queen whose cairn is supposed to be on Knocknarea in Sligo. The count had a son, Stanislaus, by a previous marriage.
In Dublin they became part of AE's salon, a group which included W.B. and Jack Yeats, J.M. Synge, William Orpen, Percy French and George Moore. Drama and art were the count's main interests, while Constance was drawn more and more towards nationalist political movements.
In a cottage she was renting in the Dublin mountains she came across some copies of Arthur Griffiths United Irishman and Sinn Féin. Reading them had an enormous influence on her: "I awoke to the fact that Ireland had not surrendered and that there were men and women who had not acquiesced in the conquest." One of her biographers has written that the experience was similar to a religious illumination: "A prospect opened before her of purpose, action, adventure, comradeship with a noble people united in a noble aim."
Fianna Éireann
In 1908 she joined the women's nationalist movement, Inghínidhe na hÉireann and also Griffith's Sinn Féin. "We never became close friends for I never thoroughly trusted or understood him," she has been recorded as saying of Griffith. She was more militant in her attitude than he. She set about forming a boy-scout movement which could be trained in military tactics and form the basis of a future army to fight for Irish freedom. When the group - Fianna Éireann - was formed, Griffith's refusal to admit it as an adjunct of Sinn Féin angered her. Nevertheless, she was elected to the Sinn Féin executive in 1909 and remained on it for a number of years.
Countess Markievicz devoted a considerable amount of time and energy to Fianna Éireann and was its guiding light and president from 1909 to 1915. The organisation played a significant role in subsequent Irish history. Its members took part in the Howth gun-running and some of them fought and died in the 1916 Rising.
She was strongly drawn to James Larkin and James Connolly and took an active part in the labour struggles of the 1910-14 period. During the 1913 lockout in Dublin she worked hard on behalf of the starving and impoverished workers. She became a founder member of the Irish Citizen Army, formed in response to police brutality during the dispute, whose policy was to fight for a Workers' Republic.
On Easter Monday 1916, she marched as second-in-command to Michael Mallinat the head of a small contingent of the Citizen Army which occupied St Stephen's Green and later the College of Surgeons. It has been said that she cold-bloodedly shot a policeman in Stephen's Green but one of her biographers, Anne Haverty, very much doubts this, arguing that it would have been much more in character for her to have taken him prisoner. Haverty produces evidence that she saved a British soldier from being shot at the end of the Rising when he entered the College of Surgeons, "unarmed, bare-headed, smoking a cigarette", mistakenly thinking that the Irish garrison there had already surrendered.
She was court-martialled and sentenced to death after the Rising but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment solely on account of her sex. She was transported to Aylesbury Jail in England, from which she was released in the general amnesty the following year.
House of Commons
Imprisoned again in 1918 for her part in the anti-conscription campaign, she was returned for the constituency of St Patrick's in Dublin in the general election at the end of that year. She made history by being the first woman elected to the House of Commons but did not take her seat. Further history was made when she was appointed Minister for Labour in the first Dáil, thus becoming the first woman minister in these islands.
Countess Markievicz took the anti-Treaty side in 1922 and was active in the Civil War, leading to further terms in prison. She was re-elected to the Dáil but abstained from taking her seat. A founder member of Fianna Fáil, she was dead before the party entered the Dáil in 1927.
Like her or loathe her, the "rebel" countess, high-born friend of the poor fighter for Irish freedom, was by any standards a remarkable figure.