Ireland’s recent Decade of Centenaries 2012-2023 saw an array of public commemorations, research, events, talks and documentaries produced to commemorate the Irish revolutionary period. A combination of academic, governmental and local outputs aimed to encapsulate historical events as well as more specific social history and lived experience. However, as an undergraduate student of History and English literature during the latter half of the Decade, I found myself asking if public discourse surrounding Ireland’s struggle for independence has evolved to incorporate nuance and intersectionality to match efforts made by historians and those involved in creating a programme for the Decade of Centenaries who strove for nuance and inclusivity. The 2021 programme, for instance, included ‘reflection about the multiple identities, traditions and perspectives that are part of the overall Irish historical experience’ within its objectives, as well a theme of women’s experiences.^[i] However, public memory engagement, particularly regarding darker facets of the revolutionary period, can be very difficult. Civilians were tragically collateral damage in the conflict between the Irish Republican Army and the Black and Tans and RIC. However, civilians were also actively and deliberately harmed by all forces, with many women targeted specifically because of their gender. I think it is important to reflect post-centenary if this history was disseminated as much as we would have liked, and/or if the general public is willing to engage with us on these topics.

In 1920, Hannah Sheehy-Skeffington published ‘Statement of Atrocities on Women in Ireland,’ which highlighted the impact of the Irish struggle on women, including assault with rifle butts, the shooting of pregnant women and trauma induced miscarriages.^[ii] This merely scratches the surface of the sexual violence and intimidation that was used as both a method of warfare and civilian policing. Madge Daly noted British soldiers held a special hatred of Cumann na mBan, and the members had ‘little rest’ from harassment.^[iii] Women were resented by British forces because they rebelled against and rejected their jurisdiction in a perceived male dominated sphere of politics, war and violence. Women were taken out of their homes in the night, refused the right to dress themselves and had their hair cut, often accompanied by violence and assault through weaponry. Yet not all women were active members of Irish republican organisationsand were still subjected to consistent policing of their everyday lives. For those who were members, hair cutting likely acted as a performative power play aimed to deprive women of a physical marker of their femininity and thus serve as a retaliatory punishment for dispossession of masculine authority.

Although popular history and public discourse surrounding events at the time juxtaposes the positions of Irish Republican and British forces, they imposed the same method of violent ‘punishment’ against women. Irish Republicans also cut women’s hair for consorting or fraternising with the enemy. A woman’s shorn head was a physical marker of her ‘otherness’, her isolation from Irishness which was perceived above all else to be in total opposition to anything British. Deemed a security risk and a danger to the Independence movement, women with shorn heads were starkly contrasted to their male counterparts for whom it was a ‘martyr’s badge’, tangible proof of their fight for a free Ireland as opposed to women who had risked that very independence through their ‘collusion’.^[iv] Women were policed, therefore, not only by British auxiliaries as Irish people, but also by both Irish republican forces and auxiliaries as Irish women. Their behaviour was monitored and their sexuality policed by both sides.

Many academics and historians have been researching and writing on this topic for decades, with publications specifically produced to highlight this history during the Decade of Centenaries, such as Lindsey Earner Byrne’s Mná100 and Mary McAuiliffe’s research soon to be published as a book.[v] However, this darker facet of our revolutionary history was not given prevalence within large-scale, public or televised events, despite efforts outlined within its various programmes. Collective historical memory appears unwilling to fully engage with these topics, which means many women who were victims of sexual and gender-based violence are still being relegated to the shadows cast by male historical figures of the period. Furthermore, there is still an underpinning of heteronormative and patriarchal rhetoric which frames this revolutionary period and its commemoration, such as that of Enda Kenny at the Easter Rising Centenary when he hailed the rebellion as a sown ‘seed’ resulting in ‘the birth of our sovereign nation.’[vi] Sinéad Kennedy argues this frames the narrative of the centenary event in terms of the heterosexual re(production) of the body politic by a state which has historically exerted control over women’s bodies and reproductive capacities. Rather than addressing such a history, the Easter Rising Centenary was marked by words which reinforced this heteropatriarchal structure.[vii]

How, then, do we as historians further disseminate these histories as real and tangible aspects of the Irish revolution specifically within public memory and engagement?

Bio Aoife Lydon

Aoife Lydon has a BA in English literature and history from Trinity College Dublin and an MA in Gender, Sexuality and Culture from University College Dublin. She is currently a postgraduate hoping to move onto a PhD funding dependent. Her research interests include modern Irish women’s history with a focus upon emigration, the diaspora, the gendered nation, citizenship, sexuality and reproductive rights.  

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[i] Decade of Centenaries 2012-2023, 2021 Programme, Government of Ireland, pp. 6-7.

[ii] Hannah Sheehy-Skeffington, ‘Statement of Atrocities on Women in Ireland, Made and Signed by Mrs Hannah Sheehy-Skeffington, n.d. (1920) in Hannah Sheehy-Skeffington: Suffragette and Sinn Féiner, Her memoirs and Political Writings, Margaret Ward (ed.), (Dublin, 2017), p. 182.

[iii] Madge Daly, Bureau of Military History Witness Statement 855, p. 9.

[iv] Kennedy, Sean, Bureau of Military History Witness Statement 885.

[v] Mná100, Mná100 highlighting the role of women during this Decade of Centenaries. Accessed 11/12/2025.

National LGBTQ+ Federation, ‘Mary McAuliffe’ Mary McAuliffe | National LGBTQ+ Federation. Accessed 11/12/2025.

[vi] Quoted in Sinéad Kennedy, ‘“No Country for Young Women”: (Re)producing the Irish State’ in Oona Frawley (Ed.) Women and the Decade of Commemorations. Indiana University Press, 2021, ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucd/detail.action?docID=6479692, pp. 295-313 at p. 295.

[vii] Ibid.