The Women of Cumann na mBan, After The Revolution
As Part of the ICC’s Irish History Lectures and In-Conversation History Events, the ICC presents an Irish History Lecture given by Dr Susie Deedigan. (PhD).
Ireland’s republican women’s organisation, Cumann na mBan or the Women’s Council, was founded in 1914 to work alongside the militant nationalist Irish Volunteers. It was active throughout the Easter Rising, the Irish War of Independence and took the anti-treaty side during the Irish Civil War. However, by the period of the Second World War (or Emergency, as it was known in independent Ireland), historians agree that the organisation essentially existed only in name. Its activity and public presence had significantly declined in the decades immediately following the revolution and it was struggling to recruit a new generation of activists.
Nonetheless, as this talk will explore, Cumann na mBan maintained its traditional role in support of the Irish Republican Army’s (IRA) activity through propaganda, communications, welfare for prisoners and their dependents and the provision of safe houses in the decades after the revolution and particularly during the Second World War. It also challenged its status as an auxiliary to the IRA in this era – re-asserting its right to act independently.
Doors: 7.30pm; Starts: 8pm
Tickets: £8
About Dr. Susie Deedigan – Queen’s University Belfast
Dr. Susie Deedig
an is Programme Manager for the Analysing Research Ireland North and South (ARINS) Project which is a joint initiative of the University of Notre Dame and the Royal Irish Academy. She is based at Queen’s University Belfast, where she obtained her PhD in History in 2024. Her doctoral research, which she is currently adapting for publication as a book, examines female political imprisonment across the island of Ireland during the Second World War. Susie lectures on twentieth-century Irish and European history and her broader research interests include gender, imprisonment, activism and labour. She also sits on the Executive Committee of the Women’s History Association of Ireland. This will be a fascinating and engaging lecture about Ireland’s forgotten heroines – The Women of Cumann na mBan.
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