36May 2015
IVANA BACIK
I
N a recent short video, filmed by director Lenny
Abrahamson, Mrs Brown – comedian Brendan
O’Carroll, explains why she will be supporting the
marriage equality referendum. She wants her gay son
Rory to have the same opportunity for happiness as
everyone else’s son. It’s a simple but effective statement
that sums up the core message of this referendum. Mrs
Brown notes that there was once a time when Catholics
could not marry Protestants and when women were
not allowed to vote, and concludes: “Every generation
gets a chance to make a big change, and you’re getting
your chance on May nd”.
As we head to the polls in May for this historic vote
on the civil liberties issue for our generation, marriage
equality for gay couples, it is timely to reflect on the
vital civil liberties campaign for a previous generation
to which Mrs Brown refers – the campaign seeking
votes for women. As we head into the Easter  cen-
tenary commemorations next year, it is important to
also commemorate and celebrate the achievements of
the suffrage movement.
In Ireland, the moderate wing of the suffrage cam-
paign was represented by activists like the Quaker
couple Anna and Thomas Haslam, described by Carmel
Quinlan as “genteel revolutionaries”, who set up the
Dublin Suffrage Association in . A more radical
approach was adopted by many women who were also
prominent in the struggle for Irish independence, with
strong female icons like Constance Markievicz
involved in both the suffrage and nationalist cam-
paigns. A well-known feminist contemporary of
Markievicz’s was Hannah Sheehy-Skeffington, who
along with her husband Francis, set up the Irish Wom-
en’s Franchise League. The Sheehy-Skeffingtons were
nationalists but, unlike Markievicz, took a pacifist
position in the Easter Rising.
For activists like Markievicz and the Sheehy-Skeffin-
gtons, even where they disagreed on the particular
tactics of the nationalist campaign, the causes of Irish
independence and women’s suffrage were closely
linked by the same motivating force. Some years later
Markievicz, then a TD, described in a Dáil speech how
the women’s suffrage movement had led to her embrac-
ing of other campaigns:
“My first realisation of tyranny came from some
chance words spoken in favour of women’s suffrage and
it raised a question of the tyranny it was intended to
prevent – women voicing their opinions publicly in the
ordinary and simple manner of registering their votes
at the polling booth. That was my first bite, you may
say, at the apple of freedom and soon I got on to the
other freedom, freedom to the nation, freedom to the
workers”.
The campaign for women’s suffrage achieved partial
success when the right to vote was extended to some
women across the then United Kingdom in February
 through the Representation of the People Act.
This Act however applied more restrictive conditions
to women than to men, extending the franchise to
almost all men over , but only to women over ,
subject to property qualifications. This was followed by
the Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act, passed in
November , which allowed women to become
MPs.
In the December
 UK election,
Constance Markiev-
icz was the only
woman elected, and
she became the first
woman MP and TD,
choosing to sit in
the first Dáil Eire-
ann. She also
became one of the
first women Govern-
ment Ministers in the world, as Minister for Labour in
the - Sinn Féin government formed following
that election.
In , women in Ireland obtained the right to vote
on an equal basis to men through the Electoral Act
, an important assertion of equal rights for the
nascent Irish Free State. This Act extended the vote to
all women over  and abolished any remaining prop-
erty qualifications, some years before women in
Britain obtained equal voting rights.
After the creation of the Irish Free State in  and
ensuing Civil War, Irish women like Markievicz, and
many other of Margaret Ward’s “unmanageable revolu-
tionaries”, became much less visible publicly, their
voices suppressed by the dominant deeply conserva-
tive nationalism. Few women were involved at a
policy-making level in the new state, and women’s
groups were generally organised around women’s
domestic roles as wives and mothers. It would be sev-
eral decades before a second-wave feminist movement
began to seek more substantive change for women’s
rights.
The extension of the equal right to vote for women in
 was the last feminist law to be passed for a gener-
ation. Only a tiny number of pioneering women stood
for election or became TDs during the first decades of
the new state. It is perhaps no coincidence that one of
those early pioneers, elected to the Dáil in , was
Brendan O’Carroll’s own mother, then Labour TD Mau-
reen O’Carroll. •
Linking gay
marriage to
women’s suffrage
O’Carroll corollary