Why did an earl’s sister devote herself to the fight for Irish freedom?

The Honorable Albina Lucy Broderick was born on December 17, 1861 into a family of English aristocrats and absentee Irish landlords.

Although born into enormous wealth, her life’s work would be a rejection of the privilege her family had enjoyed for centuries, and few sacrificed more for Irish freedom than the daughter of the 8th Viscount Midleton.

But while her old age and middle age were marked by her radicalism, her early years were entirely ordinary; she grew up on her father’s country estate in Surrey near London, received a good education at home and traveled through much of Europe as a young woman.

Politically, in her youth she conformed to that of her imperialist, conservative family; Young Albina read the newspaper to her half-blind father, but only on the condition that she never mention the name of one William Gladstone – the British Prime Minister who made several valiant but doomed attempts to give Ireland a Home Rule Parliament.

By 1910, her brother William, 1st Earl of Midleton, had become leader of the Irish Unionist Alliance in Southern Ireland and spent much of his political career thwarting Irish independence.

Young Albina shared her brother’s loyalism, if not his “low opinion of the Irish”. She once wrote unionist poetry, but regularly visits her father’s estate Cork gradually began to change her views regarding the native Irish, and the earl’s sister became an ardent republican with all the zeal of a convert.

At the age of 42, Broderick trained as a nurse and moved to Dublin to practice as a midwife. Around this time she developed an interest in social reform and the rights of her fellow nurses. It was the first step in her journey from arch-conservative to Irish revolutionary.

She subsequently became interested in the Gaelic League and the revival of the Irish language that was flourishing across the length and breadth of the island. She began regularly visiting the impoverished Irish-speaking areas of the country and was shocked by what she saw. It was the catalyst for the rest of her life and like many revivalists she Gaelicised her name to Gobnait Ní Bhruadair.

In 1907 her father died and the newly wealthy Ní Bhruadair moved south Kerry where even the government had noticed that the local population was close to starvation. She paid £40 for 13.5 hectares of land and started building a hospital. In 1912 there was a farm, workhouse, general store and co-operative store on the land, but construction of the hospital itself was not yet fully completed. Lacking money, she sailed to America and collected the rest; her gamble paid off and by 1913 the co-operative store had an annual turnover of £3,000.

In 1914 the armies of Europe were mobilized against each other and Ní Bhruadair offered the British army the use of the hospital for wounded troops. While Irish republicans did their best in later years to sweep under the carpet the service of the 200,000 Irish soldiers who had fought in the Great War, most of Ireland supported the war as one aimed at destroying the small, Catholic to liberate Belgium from the barbaric clutches of the Great War. Germany.

But her sympathy for the British army was limited to its actions on the European continent; When fighting broke out in Dublin on Easter Sunday 1916, Ní Bhruadair’s support for the rebel republicans was unconditional. She joined Sinn Féin and Come on with mBan (the Women’s IRA) and visited Frongoch Prison in Wales, where the majority of the volunteers had been sent.

After the end of the war in November 1918, she spent many hours of her time recruiting Sinn Féin at the general election held the following month, and just months after women’s suffrage was granted by the British Parliament, she was leadership of Kerry County Council elected to the Kerry County Council. the Sinn Féin banner.

After news reached Blacks and Tans that she was hiding IRA members, her home was regularly subjected to random searches. Her implacable opposition to British rule in Ireland was further cemented by her work with the Irish White Cross, through which she worked tirelessly to distribute food parcels to needy women and children. of IRA volunteers.

When Michael Collins After signing the Anglo-Irish Treaty that divided Ireland in 1921, Ní Bhruadair found herself on the opposite side of most of her fellow citizens and was unapologetic in her complete rejection of the Treaty. A talented speaker, she was regularly deployed by anti-Treaty forces throughout Kerry to convince crowds of the folly of accepting an agreement that kept Ireland in the British Empire.

The end of the Civil war did not temper her contempt for the Free State and in 1923 she was shot in the leg after refusing to stop her bicycle so soldiers could inspect it. For her crime, she was jailed in Dublin, where she promptly went on hunger strike, forcing them to release her within two weeks.

Her imprisonment did no harm to her reputation in Sinn Féin and she served as the party’s delegate in Munster at the 1926 party congress. Her involvement with Cumann na mBan came to a sad end in 1933 after the organization dropped its emphasis on militant nationalism in favor of social reforms. Her new party, “Women of the Republic”, attracted few members.

Despite all the political ups and downs in her long and radical life, she had several constants; her regular town meetings of the Gaelic League in Tralee and the harmonium she played weekly at a Protestant church service in her adopted hometown of Sneem, Co. Kerry. No doubt her fellow worshipers – mostly with trade union sympathies – paid little attention to her paramilitary activities, but she was, in the words of one biographer, “a woman of austere habits and strong opinions, she was in many ways difficult and eccentric.”

Her death in 1955 at the age of 93 would trigger legal challenges that lasted more than two decades. Her will stated that her substantial estate of £17,000 would go to the Republicans “as they were in the years 1919 to 1921.” Such a request was always going to be challenged in court and it was not until 1979 that a judge ruled that her will was ‘void due to its remoteness’.

Ní Bhruadair is buried in the Protestant cemetery in the parish of Sneem, where a room in the local museum is dedicated to her remarkable life.

*Originally published 2017. Updated 2024

H/T: History of Ireland.