Next week marks 100 years since women got the right to vote in Ireland following the passing of the Representation of People Act. As presenter Sean O’Rourke put it, the Act “heralded a landmark shift in Irish society”. He was joined on the Today programme by Archivist Catriona Crowe and Professor of Modern Irish History at UCD, Diarmaid Ferriter.
Catriona described the two “pillars” of the Irish suffragette movement to Sean.
“There’s the steady, cautious reform movement which is around petitions to parliament, making friends with MPs, constantly trying to get this on the agenda. That goes on from the 1860s until 1918 when we get the Representation of People Act. And then, later, the militant feminism of people like Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington…who engage in violent tactics to get the attention of the State around the cause that they’re proposing.”
Diarmaid noted that the Irish suffragette movement is sometimes classed as an “offshoot” of the British movement. He disagrees with this analysis.
“One of the things that enormously annoyed the more militant suffragettes was that the promise of suffrage was not included in the Third Home Rule Bill in 1912. John Dillon, who was active in the Irish Parliamentary Party at the time, insisted that…votes for women would lead to the ruin of Western civilisation. So, they were contending with those ingrained sexist attitudes. But they were much more than an offshoot [of British suffragettes] you know, they had their own dynamic.”
That being said, there was some collaboration between Irish and British suffragettes. Diarmaid recalled the time suffragette Mary Leigh threw a hatchet at British Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith during one of his visits to Ireland. She herself was English and had travelled over for the occasion. It was all part of what Diarmaid termed “the struggle to be heard”.
“That was one of the difficulties for women at the time, to be taken seriously. Now, if you’re going to start throwing hatchets at Prime Ministers, you are going to be taken seriously.”
Listen back to the full discussion on the suffragette campaign, the disputes within the movement and the celebrations that followed the passing of the Representation of People Act on the Today programme here.