A theatre production, which tells the story of Ireland's leading suffragette, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, opens at the New Theatre in Dublin for its Irish premiere tonight and runs until November 2nd. Sheehy Skeffington, Reminiscences of An Irish Suffragette, is a one-woman play, written and directed by Rosalind Scanlon and performed by Ailis Duff.
At the time of her death in April 1946, The Irish Times’s obituary described Sheehy Skeffington as “the ablest woman in Ireland”. Born in Cork in 1877, she grew up in a republican household. Her father was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and had been imprisoned several times for republican activities. Her uncle Eugene was a famous Land League priest, who once shared a platform with Anna Parnell and was a strong supporter of The Ladies Land League. As a three-year-old child, Hanna visited her uncle Eugene in Kilmainham Jail. When she was 10 years old, her family moved to Dublin, where years later she would become one of the first women in Ireland to go to university. Women were not allowed at that time to attend the same lectures as men but they were allowed to sit the same examinations. Hanna graduated from University College Dublin with a Masters in French and German.
While she was at UCD she met her future husband Francis Skeffington, (Frank). An ardent pacifist and feminist and a conscientious objector, he was also hugely active in Irish politics. A much-loved figure in Dublin, he was admired by Dublin’s free-spirited thinkers, the poets, the writers, artists and dreamers who were at the time dreaming of a free Ireland and were preparing to bring about an Irish uprising.
In 1903 Hanna and Frank got married and in order to mark their commitment to equality for the sexes, they combined their last names to Sheehy Skeffington. Shortly after they married, they formed The Irish Women’s Franchise League, a campaign group for Irish women’s rights. In 1912 Hanna was arrested for the first time for militant suffrage action. Along with a few other Irish suffragettes, she had broken windows at Dublin’s Custom House, the GPO and Dublin Castle. This scene was re-enacted last year by Hanna’s grand-daughter Micheline Sheehy Skeffington to celebrate the suffrage centenary. It was to be the first of five prison sentences that Hanna would endure in her life time.
During the 1913 Lockout, Hanna was one of the key figures who set up the Dublin soup kitchen, which fed hundreds of strikers and their families and helped save them from starvation. In 1914, when the first World War broke out, Hanna and Frank fervently campaigned against it and strongly objected to the conscription of young Irish boys and men, who they believed would to be used as front line fodder for the convenience of the British military.
Rosalind Scanlon, whose short, 30-minute version of the play was performed in the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1989, says that she has a deep interest in Irish women in history and in ensuring that through theatre their stories can be told. Her play Rouge, Rifles and Revolvers: A Tribute To The Forgotten Heroines of Ireland’s Easter Rising 1916 was produced at the Riverside Studios, London in 2016 to mark the centenary of the Easter Rising. When she first researched the story of Hanna in 1989 she realised that it was a story that hadn’t been told and needed to be. She returned to the script in 2016 and wrote a full-length version which was produced, last year, at London’s Tabard Theatre and the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith.
“What struck me the most about Hanna was she is so inspirational, even for women today,” Scanlon said. “No matter what she had to endure, all the imprisonments, the hunger strikes, the brutal murder of her husband Francis, she suffered so much for her political beliefs and yet her spirit never broke, she kept on fighting and she never gave in.”
Sadly at the end of her life (she died in 1946), Hanna felt that the Irish State had failed the revolutionary women of Ireland. She had no pension and was forced to rely on the small income generated by part-time teaching . In 1945, she fell ill and unable to support herself. She died on Easter Saturday, exactly 30 years after the death of her beloved husband.
The production of the play in London received outstanding reviews and it got the full approval of Micheline Sheehy Skeffington, who has seen the production and said: “ It is terrific that this play about my grandmother is finally coming to Dublin, the location of most of her activist life”.
Scanlon said: “I really feel as if the play is coming home, it some-how belongs in Dublin and I want the people of the city to celebrate the memory of both Hannna and Francis. They were such extraordinary people, decades ahead of their time.”
