The mysterious spirit of the French résistance is alive and well at a Dublin venue currently hosting an exhibition on Irish involvement in that cause.
I missed the official launch last weekend but on Monday dropped by to see the show, noting from my invitation that the venue was the “Ireland Institute” at No 27 Pearse Street in Dublin.
Surprised I had no recollection of ever seeing this important-sounding place, I nevertheless made my way to No 27 and was somewhat puzzled there to find no sign identifying it as an Institute, Ireland or otherwise.
Instead, there was an old shop sign reading “Pearse & Sons, ecclesiastical and architectural sculptures”. And yes, that was those Pearses, as confirmed by a double stone plaque on the wall commemorating the revolutionary brothers Patrick and Willie in the house where they grew up.
To underline the point, a plaque beside the (forbiddingly closed) Georgian doorway read “Ionad an Phiarsaigh – the Pearse Centre”.
For a moment, I wondered if there were upper and lower Pearse Streets, with two No 27s. But intelligence gathered from my iPhone, via Agent Google Maps, confirmed that this was indeed the Ireland Institute, albeit apparently in disguise.
Luckily, a courier had called to the door just ahead of me, seeking a place that turned out to be elsewhere. When he left, I asked the young woman who had answered him if there was something called the Ireland Institute inside.
There was, she thought, although she seemed a little unsure until I mentioned the exhibition – it felt like a codeword – at which point she confirmed this was the right place.
Once safely inside, I reflected that only in Ireland could you find an officially designated institute (for arts and culture) hiding under the cover of a nest of revolutionaries.
But somehow, this makes it a fitting venue for an exhibition called Irish In Resistance: a multidisciplinary show in which painters, poets, and film-makers respond to the stories of a dozen Irish people – 10 of them women – who worked undercover in occupied France and Belgium during the second World War.
Everyone knows about Samuel Beckett’s involvement in that struggle, with undercover agents including “Jimmy the Greek”, which won him a Croix de Guerre and a Médaille de la Résistance. And sure enough, he features again here too.
But the exhibition includes other, less celebrated heroes of the time, such as Maureen Patricia “Paddy” O’Sullivan (1918-1994), who grew up in Dublin and later Belgium, joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force in England during the war, and parachuted into France a few months before D-Day.
It was a rough landing. She might have died had the impact not been softened by a backpack stuffed with two million French francs.
As it was, she suffered concussion only, and survived to become a wireless operator for a resistance group in the area around Limoges. She too lived to win a Croix de Guerre and, back in England, an MBE.
Others were less lucky: Catherine Crean (1879-1945) for one. Born in Dublin’s Moore Street, Crean later moved to Belgium to work and was in her 60s by the time the second World War started. A live-in governess in Brussels, she then became involved in a local resistance network helping Allied soldiers and citizens to escape Nazi-occupied areas. Arrested in 1942, she was probably interrogated and tortured – details are scarce – before being deported to Ravensbruck concentration camp. She died there, of dysentery, in April 1945.
A Belgian friend fellow inmate recalled that on their last meeting, a dying Catherine asked her to “comb her beautiful red hair which lay scattered around her pale face”. Herself weakened by hunger, the friend could barely hold the comb.
Happier stories include the extraordinary Margaret Kelly (1910-2004), born in Dublin’s Rotunda Hospital to a poor mother who couldn’t keep her. She was placed with a foster family from nearby O’Connell Street, where she was living when the Easter Rising broke out.
Nicknamed “Bluebell” (for her bright eyes) by a Dublin doctor, she later emigrated to Liverpool and took dance classes there to strengthen her skinny legs.
This led eventually to a professional career, with her own troupe of dancers, the “Bluebell Girls”. Their revue became the Riverdance of its time: three different groups performing simultaneously in Paris, Las Vegas, and on tour.
But marriage to a Jewish-Romanian pianist pitched Kelly into the resistance too. Both were interned for a period. Later, suspected (rightly) of hiding her husband, Kelly was held for questioning by the Gestapo, but survived. Francois Truffaut’s The Last Metro (1980) was part inspired by the story.
She lived to be 94 and her gravestone in Montmartre now depicts the several French military medals she won. It also includes the name given to her by a Dublin GP, nine decades earlier: “Miss Bluebell”.
The Irish in Resistance exhibition is curated by artist Mary Moynihan and includes contributions from Hina Khan, Féilim James, and Amna Walayat.
It runs daily (including Sundays) until the end of October at the Ireland Institute, aka the Pearse Centre. If the door is closed when you get there, knock three times and tell them “Frank the Irishman” sent you.