Máire Comerford: a grand lady of Irish Republicanism

Máire Comerford’s life reads like an action-packed epic—secret missions, daring escapes, and unwavering dedication to Ireland’s fight for freedom.

From carrying dispatches for the IRA to escaping Kilmainham Gaol and even surviving a bullet through her hat, Comerford was a relentless force in Ireland’s revolutionary history.

A lifelong Republican, she stood firm against the Treaty, faced imprisonment, and continued her activism well into her 80s.

Discover the untold story of the woman who defied empires and remained an unyielding champion of Irish independence.

Mary Eva Comerford was born in Ardavon Rathdrum, Co Wicklow, on 29 June 1893 – although she preferred to call herself Máire after the Irish Civil War.[1]

At first, Máire was educated privately at home and afterward at a convent school. In 1911, Máire was sent to a secretarial school in London, where she stayed in the Ladies’ Club in Eccles Place. The school was run by a Miss Gradwell, ‘a Tory lady from Co Meath’ who ‘took to reading out Carson’s speeches in our shorthand classes’.

In London, Máire first became conscious of the political situation in Ireland, and she began to study Irish history and politics in her spare time.

Máire returned to Ireland around 1915 to live in Co Wexford where she became involved in the local co-operative movement and in the United Irishwomen, later the Irish Countrywomen’s Association (ICA).

At the outbreak of World War I, she also became involved in providing relief for Belgian refugees. Her plans to work with her mother in running their school in Courtown were disrupted by the Rising.

Accidentally and unexpectedly in Dublin at the outset, Máire volunteered to aid Countess Markiewicz in St Stephen’s Green but was turned away and instead carried despatches for the GPO garrison. She returned to Gorey, Co Wexford, after the Rising, and there she joined Cumann na mBan and the local Sinn Féin branch.

Comerford supported the prisoners who had been taken in 1916 and the reordering of the Sinn Fein party from 1917. During the War of Independence, she worked for Alice Stopford Green who assigned her to work for the Irish White Cross organization, led by the Quaker James Douglas, which aimed to assist civilian war victims by raising money in the US.

However, the working relationship between Comerford and Stopford Green eventually broke down because of their political differences, and later Máire worked for a time as Áine Ceannt’s secretary. Meanwhile, she was traveling the country, organizing branches of Cumann na mBan, carrying dispatches for the IRA’s Fourth Northern Division, and reporting on the activities of the Black and Tans. 

In 1920, while traveling for the White Cross among the women relatives of the IRA men on the run in Donegal, Comerford learned of the effects of the war on the families left behind, and later she wrote

Destitution was a new and terrible condition to be experienced by proud women; those who were in the worst case often least likely to advertise their predicament in unfriendly quarters. The bravest people can be too thin-skinned to face a parish committee or submit to questioning about their means. I cannot forget my calls at the homes of fighting men, or dead men, where the wives, or widows, were learning lessons that too often, are behind the scenes of glory.[2]

Comerford took the anti-Treaty side in the Civil War of 1922-1923, in contrast to the stand taken by some of her prominent cousins in Co Wexford, and she was to experience firsthand the desolation of imprisonment during the Civil War.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, she reported to the Four Courts garrison in Dublin, opened a first-aid station and rode her bicycle along the bullet-swept streets and quays keeping communications open between the Four Courts and the IRA headquarters in O’Connell Street. As the Four Courts were being bombarded, she escaped and later joined the O’Connell Street garrison. She was there when Cathal Brugha was fatally shot walking out the door of the Hammam Hotel, a revolver in each hand raised against the rifles of the Free State army.

Comerford was fearless and had no qualms about carrying weapons anywhere.

Dumps were moved where necessary and I learned from experience that the Lee Enfield service rifle could be carried under my coat without protruding at the bottom if the muzzle was held under my ear…..There was at least that much to be said for the longer skirts that were worn to boot-top level in those days.[3]

On one occasion while she was in Co Wexford, she encountered the Free State Army. They shot at her on her motorbike but she escaped, and later wrote: "shot through the hat, drove through and delivered the stuff." [4]

Hunger strikes

In January 1923, she was involved in a Sinn Féin plan to kidnap the Taoiseach, William T. Cosgrave. However, she was arrested and imprisoned in Mountjoy Prison, where she staged a protest against overcrowding. For this, she was removed to the criminal section of the prison and given a three-month sentence of hard labor. Her response was to go on a hunger strike.

During that time in prison, she was shot in the leg by a soldier, and she would always maintain afterward that this was because she was waving to fellow prisoners. Later she was transferred to the North Dublin Union, but she escaped from there on 9 May 1923. Maire escaped over the walls Along with Maura Deegan and Aiofe Taffe, and an additional 20 women escaped the next day.[5]

Following her re-arrest on 1 June, she was imprisoned in Kilmainham Gaol, where she said she was ill-treated yet again. This time, she staged a second hunger strike for 27 days before being released from jail on a stretcher. By August 1923, Máire had recovered sufficiently to campaign for Sinn Féin in Co Cork during the general election. She was arrested in Cork while she was collecting deposits for candidates and jailed but was released soon after.

Politics

After the Civil War, Comerford supported Éamon de Valera and his abstentionist Republican candidates. In November 1923, de Valera sent her to the US on a nine-month fund-raising mission to the US. She traveled under the name of Edith Lewis, but her efforts proved to be disappointing. On her return to Ireland, she refused to take the oath of allegiance to King George, and so was unable to work in the Civil Service. In 1926, she was arrested and jailed for six months for allegedly trying to influence a jury. That year she also attended the Sinn Féin ard fheis representing Leinster, and for the first time was elected to the executive of Sinn Féin.

However, Comerford split with de Valera when he took his supporters into the Dail in 1927. From then on, she was a member of what was generally seen as a group that was unwilling to compromise in terms of everyday politics and on constitutional matters. Máire remained a life-long member of Sinn Féin and she was arrested on a Sinn Féin platform in Dublin in 1974 at the age of 81. In 1976, she was fined £10 for taking part in another similar demonstration, and offered to serve a jail term instead.

The same year she was interviewed as an articulate die-hard for the Curious Journey television documentary with other survivors of the 1914-1923 period, later published as a book.[6] Up to her death, she supported the IRA campaign in Northern Ireland, including the hunger strike campaign in 1980-1981.

Máire never married. Her last birthday celebrations were on 29 June 1982, when she was 89. Writing a week earlier in The Irish Times under the pen-name Candida, her friend and former journalist colleague Eileen O’Brien recalled that Maire was once "de Valera’s driver. Even the ranks of Tuscany must have cheered the sheer bravery of the man who entrusted his life to her driving. That they both lived so long is clearly a wonder."

One of Máire’s last letters published in The Irish Times stated: "The Churches have played a part in the despoliation of Ireland. I appeal to them to make amends to the Irish people, and to provide an example of Christian living, by giving up their wealth, and by joining together in unity".[7]

Máire Comerford died on 15 December 1882 at the age of 89 at her home in Sandyford, where for years she had held court as the grand old lady of Irish Republicanism.

Footnotes: 

[1] See Comerford Family History. http://comerfordfamily.blogspot.com/2009/09/comerford-profiles-21-maire-comerford.html

[2] Comerford, Máire. Autobiography. See Ward, Margaret. In Their Own Voice, p. 108.

[3] UCDA, Elgin O’Rahilly Papers, Maire Comerford Memoir, p. 200/65.

[4] Comerford, Máire. Autobiography.

[5] McCarthy, Cal. Cumann na mBan and the Irish Revolution, p. 21.

[6] Griffith, Kenneth and Timothy O’Grady, editors. Ireland’s Unfinished Revolution, An Oral History. Originally published as Curious Journey, An Oral History of Ireland’s Unfinished Revolution. (London,1982; Cork, 1998, Boulder, CO, 2002).

[7] The Irish Times, 21 June 1982.

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