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Women's Place Is In The Revolution
By Gerry Forde, Donoughmore Historical Society
On a rainy Sunday in Donoughmore, niece of the Sheila and Nora Wallace, Bernadette Wallace unveiled the plaque and her Sister Mary who returned from the UK for the commemoration brought with her the flag which draped Nora’s coffin in 1970. Mary and grand-nephew Ted Murphy laid the wreath. Castlelyons
Pipe Band played and the bugler was Ross O’Hea. Cllr Michael Looney
represented the County lord Mayor and TD Colm Burke, Cllr Eileen Lynch and Cllr Gobnait Moynihan also attended. Maureen Lynch lead the commemoration and Ellen Delaney hosted in the hall afterwards where for two hours we had Anne Twomey retelling the story of The Wallace Sisters followed by chatting and tea and scones.
Wallace’s shop was the centre for communications of Cork No.1 Brigade IRA and Sheila as Brigade Communications officer and Nora as Intelligence officer were indispensable in the Brigade.
Only a handful of women achieved such high rank during the War of Independence. Sean O’Hegarty said quite plainly that their home and shop was HQ for the Brigade after the Volunteer Hall in Sheare’s Street was closed down by the British Army. All communications came through these two women, and it was by their discretion that the whole operation was never fully exposed. There was a secret compartment within the house which was never discovered, despite all the raids and searches of the shop by the Black and Tans and the RIC. It was Anne Twomey of Shandon Area Historical Society who uncovered the Wallace sisters history and came to Donoughmore to give a talk on them a number of years ago. Bill Murphy, their grandnephew made the wonderful RTE Documentary on ONE called The Little Shop Of Secrets.
Before and after the Easter Rising 1916, the Wallace sisters ran a small newsagents in St Augustine Street in Cork. The shop and the sisters became the centre of communications for the IRA in Cork. Sheila and Nora Wallace came from the parish of Donoughmore. Their family had been evicted from their home and farm in the townland of Kilcullen South in the late 1890’s. With the help of their neighbours, they managed to erect a temporary structure on the side of the road to keep the weather out while they fought to regain possession of their home. It became clear that they would have a long fight for justice on their hands, and they eventually moved across the Dripsey River valley to Barrachauring. But they never gave up the fight and the Evicted Tenants Act of 1907, which offered recompense to families like the Wallace’s, gave them some hope of returning to their home again.
In the 1910 General Election, the Irish Parliamentary Party won a majority of the votes.
But in contrast to the rest of the country, the city and county of Cork returned a majority for the Nationalist All For Ireland League and one of their MP’s included Winston Churchill’s uncle, Moreton Frewen, who had an estate at Innishannon. Churchill and Frewen were Liberals at that time and supported Home Rule. As All For Ireland League party members of parliament, both D D Sheehan and William O’Brien worked hard for the people of Cork, helping advance the transfer of land from landlords to tenants in the various Irish Land Acts of the time. D D Sheehan’s political support came from small tenant farmers and rural labourers, and together with William O’Brien, was central to achieving full government backing and financial support to build cottages for rural workers and farm labourers at a time when many families lived under roofs hardly fit to keep animals in.
Such was the state of poverty in the country at the time. Over 40,000 labourers cottages were built under this free scheme where the delighted householders paid only a small rent to the council in return. But even after all that D D Sheehan achieved for the people of Cork, he could not help the Wallace family.
In 1910, their case came up in Westminster question time when Sheehan raised the Wallace family’s plight with Chief Secretary for Ireland, Augustine Birrell. But nothing came of it.
Their family situation came up in parliament again a year later, but no progress was made in their case. For Sheila and Nora Wallace, this was the end of engagement with Westminster. They made up their minds that they were going to take matters into their own hands because they had no choice but to help themselves.
James Connolly came to Cork 3 times before the Easter Rising and he visited Sheila and Nora in their little shop in St Augustine Street. Nora had a lifelong relationship with the Connolly family, especially Ina Connolly, and there are letters in the Cork Public Museum which clearly show the affection between the two families.
The portrayal in the media of militant women fighting for equal rights in these times was not very complimentary. The English suffragette Emily Davison was a member of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) and she was arrested on nine occasions, went on hunger strike seven times, and was force-fed
on forty-nine occasions. To highlight the cause, she tried to hang a suffragette scarf onto the King’s horse on the run in to the winning post of the 1913 English Derby at Epsom. She was so badly hurt that she died a few days later on the 8th of June 1913. The papers said she had committed suicide, but that was not the case.
Women were only allowed to vote for the first time in 1918. Many prominent Irish women were involved in the movement for equal rights for women, and after the final attempt by D D Sheehan in Westminster in 1911 to get some compensation for the Wallace family for the injustice of their eviction, Sheila and Nora Wallace turned to James Connolly and the Citizen Army as the avenue to express their support for the changes they wanted to see in society. The Irish Citizen Army treated women and men as equals. But in their efforts for freedom and justice, the sisters would have to endure tragedy after tragedy.
The first tragedy in Sheila and Nora’s new political activity happened when James Connolly was executed. Sheila was 25 years old and Nora was only 21 at the time. It was to Nora Wallace that the Cork Volunteers turned to when they wanted first hand news of the happenings in Dublin after the 1916 Easter Rising. She brought back the account of what had happened and the sad news of the executions. But Nora was not to be put off, and after she was put in touch with Tadhg O’Sullivan, she started up the Citizen Army in Cork again.
On the 6th May 1919, the Grattan Street bomb factory – which was no more than a back kitchen behind a shoemakers shop in the tenements – blew up. Volunteer Michael Tobin, who was badly injured, died later in hospital. A number of organisations formed a guard of honour at his funeral. One of these was the Citizen Army and at the head of it would have been Nora Wallace. The Tadhg O’Sullivan previously mentioned would be killed on the 19th April, 1921 when his body was riddled with bullets. In Nora Wallace’s documents, she identified a man known by the nick name - Translator - as the man who shot Tadhg O’Sullivan. These are astonishing details. The Lord Mayor Tomas MacCurtain depended on Nora to operate as a secretary for the Volunteers and the last place he was at before he went home on the night he was killed, was Wallace’s shop. She fondly referred to him as the Brigadier and wrote about how he encouraged her in her efforts with the national movement noting that the Brigadier held the Citizen Army girls in high regard.
Terence MacSwiney was the next major casualty in their lives. Nora had written that she was taken by how the little unruly curl on his forehead kept falling down on his face. Such terms of affection for her fellow revolutionaries are all over the Wallace Collection papers at Cork Public Museum. Sheila and Nora were devastated when he died on hunger strike in 1920 Another great friend and activist whom Nora had great admiration for was Tadhg Barry, and when he was killed on the 15th November 1921, in a prisoner camp in Co. Down while the treaty negotiations were going on, she wrote that “Tadhg Barry is a juniper in heaven”. The mental and physical strain and the sadness suffered by the sisters was enormous. Even though they persevered, their health broke down and Nora contracted TB. The local IRA paid to send her to Switzerland to recover. The terror of the nighttime in Cork during the War of Independence is exemplified in Maud Mitchell’s recorded memoirs, The Man With The Long Hair. She wrote how “Very real to me was the terror of the night and the devil who walks in darkness, a devil whose name was Charlie Chance. A Black and Tan sergeant who ruled part of Cork from the North Mall to Gilabbey Street.”
Sheila and Nora had a deep spiritual faith and straight across the narrow street from their shop was a door into St Augustine’s where the Rev. Dr. Pat Coakley was resident. His father and
Donoughmore. Stuake Church is where Sheila and Nora went to mass every Sunday of their youth. One particular letter in the Wallace Collection in Cork Public Museum is from Fr. Pat Coakley’s sister Mrs Mary Walsh. In this letter she offered Nora condolences on the sad passing of Sheila Wallace who died on the 14th April 1944 and at the same time remembered the last time they spent together.
