The Women’s Podcast: 100 years of Votes for Women

At 5am on June 13th, 1912, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington set out alone for Dublin Castle, the seat of British Government rule in Ireland.

Armed with a stick, her aim was to break some windows near the castle’s Ship Street entrance as an act of rebellion by the suffrage movement, in response to votes for women being excluded from the Home Rule Bill for Ireland 1912.

Less than six years later, the Representation of People Act 1918 was passed, allowing some women over the age of 30 and all men over the age of 21, to vote in general elections.

On today's Women's Podcast, Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington's granddaughter Dr Micheline Sheehy Skeffington's re-enactment of her grandmother's act of defiance and a speech by Queens University Belfast academic Margaret Ward, recorded at the first event in the State's Vótáil 100 commemoration programme at Royal Irish Academy in Dublin last week.