Putting Helena Molony back centre-stage in Irish history

Biography is not merely a mode of historical enquiry. It is an act of imaginative faith. Richard Holmes

I googled the Bureau of Military History, clicked on Search Witness Statements and keyed in “Helena Molony”. There it was. WS Ref #: 391, Witness: Helena Molony. All 64 pages with the satisfying look of a typewritten document that has been stamped, signed and scanned. Her own account of what she had done between 1903 and 1921. I began to scroll down through the PDF of a statement that had once felt like the holy grail.

Somewhere in my papers is a file of 1990s correspondence with several government departments and history professors. I had tried and failed to get access to this statement for a book chapter I was drafting on Molony. As I continued to read it was already inevitable and irresistible – I was going to have to return to the material and write a full-length biography. I blame Google and the National Archives.

When I began my early research on Molony her name popped up everywhere; in memoirs, in biographies of nationalist women and labour men as well as in survey histories, but there was no detailed work published on her. She was intriguing; a radical nationalist, feminist and trade unionist, who was active in public life until 1941. I was energised by the humour and sheer surprise of her journalism in the early 1900s. She wrote of “the ‘rámeis’ of the early Victorian male mind which prates much of the sphere of women… when he wants to oppose her claim to equal civic rights”; or how “all that about red petticoated barefooted cailiní is most pernicious nonsense”. A history undergraduate, I was astounded. It flipped received versions of 20th-century Irish history on its head, while the excitement and potential of the pre-1916 days leapt off the page.

At that stage an outline chronology of Molony’s public life was discernible from Margaret Ward’s Unmanageable Revolutionaries and Mary Jones’ history of the Irish Women Workers Union, Those Obstreperous Lassies. “Headlines” included her time as secretary of Inghinidhe na hÉireann, editor of Bean na hÉireann and then first political prisoner of her generation. She was an Abbey actor, second general secretary of the Irish Women Workers Union and imprisoned for her role in the Easter Rising. In the years of the Free State she was a founder member of Saor Éire and later president of the Irish Trades Union Congress. During the Emergency she was involved in hiding Nazi spy Hermann Goertz. The more I researched, the more there was to find out.

I loved the “old school” research, pre-internet. The rhythm of days spent in the National Library manuscript reading room and the National Archives, but in particular the people it brought me into contact with. I was lucky enough to meet many of a generation now gone, including John de Courcy Ireland, Francis Stuart, Nora Harkin and Seán Scully as well as corresponding with others. Chasing material brought me to a bookseller in the George’s Street Arcade who had bought her library. The garage of a house had been cleared out, papers dumped and books sold on. All delivered to the arcade in a trunk which also contained an SS helmet.

Another mention led me to local historian Hugh O’Connor. in a local dump he had found a single folder – all that remains of Molony’s private papers, it seems. There were Christmas cards from Maud Gonne, typescript articles about James Connolly and a reference for her time in the Irish Citizen Army. It all seemed very close. What had been in history books was coming alive.

The plot thickened and references to her drinking were regular. A friend recalled how Molony had told her that she drank because Bulmer Hobson had broken her heart in 1910/11. Then I went to interview the late Finian Czira, son of her great friend Sydney Gifford Czira, who told me that she had fallen in love with Dr Evelyn O’Brien. They lived together for over 25 years. A friend kindly but firmly gave me a copy of AS Byatt’s Possession. I knew what she meant.

One of the biggest challenges of any biography is how to shape and imagine historical material into the narrative of a lived life. In Molony’s case this encompassed 40 years of Irish nationalist, trade union, theatre, left republican and feminist histories and their intersection. A part of that early work was published as a chapter in the groundbreaking Female Activists: Irish Women and Change but had to be written out in full before I could cut the text back.

The saying that if I’d had more time I would have written you something shorter comes to mind. With such a limited word count one of the editors, Mary Cullen, cut it further...and further. She rang, You’re going to get a shock. Let it settle. If you still really hate it you don’t have to put it in. I did (both hate it initially and then put it in!), promising myself that the longer version would find a publisher.

However, by the time Female Activists came out I had already made the move away from historical and documentary research. I decided that Molony had had enough of my time. In any case the cuts made were better than I had realised. As that chapter, flaws and all, began to feed into secondary texts, I was concentrating on my first then second and third poetry collections, while working as a teacher and a literary programmer. And life went on. Boom and bust.

Until along came the Decade of Centenaries. I gave a few talks, wrote some articles, glimpsed sideways at the wealth of the newly released source material, including the Bureau of Military History Witness Statements and Pensions Collection. Some of the “black holes” in her life were now filled in, new survey histories added to the context. So I took out the archive boxes and secured a publisher. I wrote like a demon in the winter and spring of 2015/16, relishing what Sylvia Plath called the “open hand” of long form in comparison to the “closed fist” of poetry. (a quotation extended by Holmes into describing biography as a “handshake”).

In denial about the scale of what I had taken on, I happily told myself that the long draft of that original chapter could be the basis of this full-length book; I would just slot a few new things in. It never works like that. I had to unpick it all before restitching some of it back into a new structure. I spread the sections out on the floor of a spare bedroom and walked around and around them.

I wanted this full-length biography to be academically sound and a “cracking good read”. After all, here was humour and intrigue, appearances on Dublin and London stages, armed rebellion and war, imprisonment, feminism, headlines about communist plots, unorthodox personal lives, German spies – the works. And that was not even counting her work as an advocate for working women, a leading public figure in the 1930s. She also seemed to be catching other people’s imagination. Then, as I wrote, her words were used for the Abbey Centenary Programme, which, when launched, sparked off Waking the Feminists. It was a delicious irony and I knew I had my Legacy chapter.

I tried to get the book finished and out for the 100th anniversary of the Rising but despite the valiant efforts of myself and Alan Hayes of Arlen House it wasn’t to be. Then, as is the way with these things, other deadlines and priorities took over until finally, this month and a satisfying delivery. Six author copies sit on my desk. Helena Molony: A Radical Life 1883 - 1967. No more corrections, additions, changes or rewrites possible. Separate now from the bulging archive box, the desktop of notes and drafts, it is an object in itself and out of my hands. Now, can you option a biography?

Nell Regan is a poet and non-fiction writer. She was a recipient of the 2016 Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship. www.nellregan.com @nellree Helena Molony: A Radical Life 1883-1967 (Arlen House) is being launched in Liberty Hall, Dublin on April 28th at 3.30pm. All welcome