Faoi Gheall ag Éirinn

These young Turks wanted to make it a real conspiracy,

working towards the realisation of Wolfe Tone's dictum -

"England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity".

The Milligans were a most extraordinary family.

It was a very large family -

I think she was one of 13 children.

Her father was involved in the linen trade

as a salesman from the 1860s

and then helped to set up the first department store in Belfast,

in the Bank Buildings.

Come in, for it's growing late

And the grass will wet ye

Come in, for when it's dark

The Fenians will get ye

Four little pairs of hands

In the cots where she led those

Over their frightened heads

Pulled up the bedclothes

But one little rebel there

Watching all with laughter

Thought, when the Fenians come

I'll rise and go after

Wished she had been a boy

And a good deal older

Able to walk for miles

With a gun on her shoulder

Able to lift aloft

The Green Flag o'er them

Red coats and black police

Flying before them

And as she dropped asleep

Was wondering whether

God, if they prayed to him

Would give fine weather.

When I Was A Little Girl

is a poem which is

on the side of a constituency

which is universal - children.

It's really saying, OK,

children have their own way of doing things

and they may be very different

from what their allegedly wise seniors think.

Now, it translates quickly

into a poem about Irish politics,

and it has a strange fairy-like quality

because, of course,

the Fenians took their name from mythical Irish heroes,

but it became very quickly, in Protestant Ireland

and Protestant Britain,

a synonym for dangerous and untrustworthy Irish Catholics.

Alice Milligan moved from the rural countryside of west Ulster

into Ireland's only industrial city.

Belfast in the 1890s was a soaraway industrial city

built on that great tripod of linen, shipbuilding and engineering.

They came from a fairly wealthy family, in Catholic terms.

They were from that very small Catholic upper-middle class.

Their father was a rent agent, with offices in Chichester Street,

in the business heart of Belfast,

not very far from Alice Milligan's father's business

in the kind of Victorian Bank Buildings.

They were at that same level of society.

Elizabeth Corr said she grew up in a long family,

six brothers, several sisters,

and their great love, as teenagers, were the Belfast Philharmonic,

a world of books, the piano in the sitting room, you know,

on Sunday evenings.

A sense of Irishness, a pride in being Irish,

but she says that, until 1915,

she'd never thought of Ireland at all as an entity.

MUSIC: Londonderry Air

When Alice Milligan is in Dublin,

she is beginning to learn the Irish language,

she's taking that very seriously.

She is also very intrigued by Parnell,

who is leading the Irish National Party at this point,

and she sketches him over and over in her diary,

and it's actually whilst she's on a tram going down O'Connell Street

this evening, just after seeing Parnell,

she writes, "I became a Parnellite, perhaps it won't last."

But of course it DID last.

When Alice Milligan is in Belfast,

and feeling very politically alienated,

she writes in her diary at this time,

"I am in the enemy's camp.

"If I had but the money, I would go to Dublin

"to be with people who feel as I feel."

And she sends a great big wreath to his funeral procession

and when she's reading the newspaper,

in her diary she notes that she sees the one that she sent

on his coffin as it's being led through.

On a night of sorrow

I cried aloud her name

God, who heard, said, hasten

And in my dreams she came

She stood

I saw her clearly by the moon's white flame

Her eyes were sweet as ever

Her voice was yet the same.

# Oh, the French are on the sea says the Shan Van Vocht

# Ah, the French are on the sea says the Shan Van Vocht... #

Not only was it run by two women,

but they also generated a readership in Belfast,

across Ireland

and further, internationally,

so they actually had a readership in South Africa,

in Canada, in America,

in Irish communities, you know, this kind of diaspora,

internationally, which was extraordinary,

given that they licked every stamp

and sent off every copy of this journal internationally.

These young Turks in the northern capital wanted to revive it

and make it a real conspiracy

working towards the realisation of Wolfe Tone's dictum -

"England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity."

Grandpa always said that, as a young man,

he was sitting in the window of Dufferin Villas

and he saw his elder sister

just suddenly decide to run

and she ran straight into the sea

and, unfortunately, he was the only one of the family

who witnessed what happened to her.

When they went to try and save her,

unfortunately, she had passed away.

She continued to write her poetry,

cycle from Antrim to Cork, promoting the Irish language,

not perhaps a fior Gael, but she'd more than a couple of focail,

but she didn't write poetry as Gaeilge during that period.

But she remained firm.

The major intervention that she made

was to radicalise what we call "tableau".

Tableau shows... People would be very familiar with them

through Irish melodrama.

It's where a moment of pause and stillness takes place,

and silence, and it's almost as though it takes it out of

the localised moment of the drama

and enables people to recognise something broader.

They were a mixture of romantics and revolutionaries

and of course, these meetings were often the front for more important

kind of tete-a-tetes between revolutionaries.

So he used culture as a cover for revolution?

He used culture and yet there was a naivety about Bigger.

The great romantic, the antiquarian.

He thought that a Gaelic-speaking, independent, united Ireland

could be achieved, you know, on music and Gaelic tales

and conviviality.

What really encouraged Clarke and Mac Diarmada

and all of these people was really the Ulster Crisis of 1912-14,

because who would have imagined that Edward Carson, you know,

the upper-middle-class unionist lawyer

would inculcate to the hearts of Ulster unionism

a movement called the UVF, which would threaten to use force

against the King's Army in the event of Home Rule coming to Ireland.

Suddenly, you had the leader of the Irish race, John Redmond,

and his Belfast lieutenant, Joe Devlin,

urging Irishmen to go wherever the firing line extended

to fight for the freedom of small nations.

And to somebody like Elizabeth Corr,

Ailish na Corra, as she preferred to call herself,

and her sister Nell,

but Ireland was a nation.

Why were they going to fight for the freedom of other nations?

What about the freedom of Ireland? She disliked, she said,

girls she knew, at parties, talking about "our soldiers"

and the British Army's triumphs on the battlefront.

They weren't actually able to get near the graveside,

but they heard about the grand funeral,

they saw the serried ranks of the volunteers.

They saw the leaders - Clarke, McDermott, Major John MacBride

who was educated in Belfast.

They were all there.

And she said that more importantly, they were aware of Pearse's

ringing words, "The fools, the fools they have left us our Fenian dead."

And suddenly she was drawn into it.

Immediately afterwards she and her sister joined Cumann na mBan,

which was a kind of women's auxiliary to the Irish volunteers.

It was actually in a conversation in the 1970s, an elderly Miss Corr,

in a nursing home, happened to say,

"You know, I was in Dublin in 1916."

And suddenly the words flowed

and she took us back to the very very cusp of the Easter Rising.

They been dispatched from Belfast to Cole Island

to meet the Irish Volunteers there,

the Tyrone men would meet the Belfast men,

and the Armagh men and they would march west

through Inniskillin into Connaught and take part in a rising there,

so the North would not be disturbed.

Connolly and Pearse had said no shot must be fired in Ulster.

Connolly knew the North as a trade unionist,

he knew its deep sectarian divisions

and he feared that the slightest sort of emeute

in the Province of Ulster

would spark perhaps a sectarian conflagration.

The six Cumann ma mban girls from Belfast where irate.

Nora Connolly was raging that men were going

to risk their lives in Dublin, including her father,

James Connolly, while the Ulstermen were going home on the train

with their guns and bandoliers.

So they decided to go to Dublin.

And he said that he couldn't bring

the proclamation up to Belfast

but he had some messages

for leadership to say that things were to continue

and they were to take them up to Belfast.

They were secreted into Nora's hatband,

as we understand it.

Then I think Pearse came in and wished them good luck.

And...

they were on their way back up to Belfast,

and on the train some woman must've detected they were up to something

and leaned forward and said, "Good luck with your enterprise."

Alice Milligan immediately went to London

to attend his trial and to support him.

She began to write extensively about him.

So she wrote poems that were published

and censored in the Irish Nationalist presses.

She wrote to the Home Office, she was one of many extraordinary women,

like Eva Gore-Booth and many women who supported Roger Casement.

Many of them being northern Protestant women who had made

an intensive kind of cultural journey themselves.

Alice Milligan hoped that their intervention would save

Casement's life.

It seemed that he was threatened if he didn't leave Dublin

and so this is while she was fund-raising for the Irish language

and for the Irish political prisoners

and then she abandoned pretty much everything she owned

and left with him.

They went to the North and she continued to look after him

for many years.

"Since the opening of 1919, I have been more or less of a prisoner,

"entirely secluded by circumstances

"among relatives entirely opposed to the Republican cause."

These were the years of the pogroms in Belfast,

intensive sectarian and political violence,

in which 500 people died

between the summer of 1920 and the autumn of 1922.

These were black days in Belfast.

Churchill described the city as an underworld

with violent passions of its own.

He said that the perpetrators perpetrated

everything except devouring the flesh of their victims.

This shocked respectable, middle-class Protestant nationalists

like Alice Milligan,

as it did middle-class Catholics like Ailish na Corra.

She continued to be incredibly active

in the anti-partition movement.

She was still writing prolifically for the presses.

She was still engaged in that kind of theatre process

of trying to engage people around the Irish language and culture.

My father-in-law, Charles Milligan,

looked after her in old age, of course.

She was completely dependent moneywise,

having spent and given away

everything she owned

and if she saw someone who needed something on the road,

she would just have taken her coat off

and passed it to them without a second thought.

"A most distinguished Irishwoman who had devoted her great talent

"to the cause of Irish independence

"and the preservation of the national language.

"Ireland mourns her loss."

Both of them applied for pensions

and they were subject to examination in Dublin.

Elizabeth could go for examination

and had to produce references

and so force and so on.

Nell wasn't well enough and couldn't travel for the examination.

Elizabeth did and was awarded the pension,

and subsequently then received various medals, three medals.

I, having gone to a good Catholic grammar school, St Malachy's,

did no Irish history.

I actually didn't know anything about 1916

so I read avidly

before doing the painting, and the result is in a sense

a fundamentally romantic image of 1916,

hence the use of Celtic tracery, zoomorphic figures.

In this case, the GPO is there,

and sweeping up in front and behind it, this Celtic tracery,

which becomes a green, white and orange image.

It suggests something being reborn

so it became a Phoenix rising out of the ashes.

On the other side here,

we have the other side of the Irish dimension, in a sense.

Cos this was the Red Hand of Ulster,

but in many ways it's clinging on to the orange sash,

indicating that, even then, this clinging on to the North

was still very much part and parcel of...

I was going to say the problem.

I was imposing quite clearly a kind of romantic image -

the Phoenix rising, everything emerging out of this

which is perfect and today I realise that that hasn't been the case

and we're still trying to solve the Irish question, as it were.

Aunt Elizabeth was thrilled and delighted to be involved in it.

She was so proud to receive the invitations

and she went off to Dublin with her friends

and she went to every single event round that 50-year celebration.

It brought her back to the 1916, it sort of acknowledged

and validated her moment then.

And I think it was her moment then because Nell and Harry had gone.

And she was full of pride for that.

There is no doubt that the high point of her life

was from the Cumann na mBan

through 1916,

and it more or less pinned her down and transfixed her.

She bristled and said, "Oh, no, I wouldn't want that."

But in any event, she did become 100,

and she did get a telegram from the Queen of England.

But sadly, she didn't get a telegram from the President

which she would have liked.

That did annoy her. She died shortly afterwards.

I think one of the greatest tributes to Alice Milligan

as a nationalist poetess of this period

came from her unionist brothers who didn't share her outlook at all.

When she died in 1953, they erected a tombstone

over her grave in Drumragh Cemetery in County Tyrone...

As Gaeilge agus as Bearla.

Nior car fod eile ac Eirinn.

"She loved no land but Ireland."

I think their place is secure, both Elizabeth and Nell.

I think they wouldn't have done it any other way.

I didn't know Aunt Nell, she died when I was very young

but Aunt Elizabeth, this is someone who is a dreamer.

A romantic dreamer.

Maybe that's what she was, but she was comfortable with her part

in Cumann na mBan and Sinn Fein in her time.

In some ways I'm ashamed that I have all these writings

of this woman and they're not properly conserved.

And they really should be because reading through them

you explore another period other than your own life

and you find them all interesting.

So I'd say we're very proud of them.