Women and the Irish Revolution by Linda Connolly

Women and the Irish Revolution by Linda Connolly

Author:Linda Connolly [Connolly, Linda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Gender Studies, History, Europe, Great Britain, General, Business & Economics, Women's Studies, Economics
ISBN: 9780230509122
Google: epuIDAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2001-11-12T01:01:33+00:00


Women and the Irish Grants Committee

Through the mechanism of the Irish Grants Committee (IGC), which operated between 1923 and 1928, the British Government made financial restitution to 2,237 southern loyalists (just over half of the 4,032 claimants) for injuries suffered between the declaration of the Truce on 11 July 1921 and the end of the Civil War on 24 May 1923.31 Geographically, there were claimants from all counties, though the largest numbers were from Cork, Tipperary and Clare, with the fewest from Ulster and especially the six counties of Northern Ireland.32 While the records have been utilised for specific geographical and occupational analysis, such as Brian Hughes’s examination of the claims from County Cavan and Paul Taylor’s examination of claims by ex-servicemen,33 their value as a source for evidence of the experience of women specifically has yet to be fully realised.

Gemma Clark’s study of Everyday Violence in the Irish Civil War examined the incidence of gender-specific violence, and in particular sexual violence, in a sample of compensation claims.34 As Linda Connolly has also demonstrated (see also Chapter 6 of this volume), the collection contains details on one of the most notorious cases of rape during the revolution, of which a written record exists. Mrs Eileen Biggs,35 wife of a Protestant (Church of Ireland) market gardener from Dromineer, County Tipperary, was ‘outraged altogether on eight or nine different occasions’, when her family home ‘was raided by about a dozen armed men who stated that they were the IRA’, on the night of 15–16 June 1922. Her husband was attacked physically, and while the assault upon his wife was in progress he ‘was kept fully informed by these raiders of what they were doing’.36 The details in the IGC report, which dates from 1926, are similar to those reported to authorities by her husband on the day following the assault:

The men locked up Mr Biggs and another old man, an invalid, in a room. They ransacked the house, consumed a quantity of whiskey, and then two of them seized Mrs Biggs while another man outraged her. The men warned Mrs Biggs that if the matter were reported they (the Biggs’s) would be shot.

A number of items of jewellery and clothing were also stolen during the raid. Such was the extent of the physical and mental trauma experienced by Mrs Biggs, it was considered ‘not inconceivable that the guilty party may be charged with manslaughter’.37

The only motive that Samuel Biggs could suggest for his wife being mistreated was that she ‘did not associate with the “lower-class” neighbours’.38 The attack appears to have been part of a wider series of threats made against Protestants in the area at that time. A week before the incident, the local Church of Ireland Bishop of Killaloe and Clonfert, Thomas Sterling Berry, brought concerns regarding the safety of Protestants in Tipperary to the Minister for Home Affairs: ‘There is scarcely a Protestant family in this district which has escaped molestation’. In addition to property being damaged, cattle driven



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