Female Networks and Political Prisoner Support Organizations in 1940s Ireland

By the Second World War, or Emergency as it was known in Éire, Cumann na mBan was in many ways an organisation in decline. Both membership and public support had dwindled and it no longer maintained the prominent role it held within the republican movement during Ireland’s revolutionary period. Cumann na mBan’s own membership recognised this with one member stating in 1944: ‘the man in the street has dubbed us as dead as doornails’.⁵ Nonetheless, Cumann na mBan, and its members, remained active within welfare organisations for prisoners and their dependants. As numbers of internees and prisoners sentenced under emergency legislation increased in both states the efforts of prisoner support groups grew more concerted.

Consideration of Cumann na mBan records in University College Dublin alongside Department of Justice records in the National Archives of Ireland and Home Affairs records in the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland informs this paper’s discussion of work carried out by Cumann na mBan for prisoners, their dependants and deportees. The paper also considers the activities of other prisoner welfare and support organisations in which Cumann na mBan members and unaffiliated republican women were active. The paper demonstrates that existing networks of female activism were central to the operation of prisoner welfare organisations and that a gendered division of roles simultaneously limited women’s status within republicanism and gave them agency and ownership of this area of activity. In this way, the paper reconsiders an area of female led activism that is often overlooked in dominant narratives of Irish republicanism in this period. It demonstrates that female networks established in the revolutionary period remained central to the operation of prisoner support throughout the 1940s and in doing so challenges assertions that this was a time of limited female activism in Ireland.