Interviewed on the RTE show "Live at Three" in 1991, Margaret Morrissey told Derek Davis what she witnessed from her Grants Row home, off Mount Street, in Dublin during the 1916 Easter Rising.
During the Rising, Margaret Morrissey was just 12 years old. Speaking to the RTE, for the 75th anniversary of the Rising, the then 87-year-old described everything she witnessed.
As RTE's archives state, "she recalls her brothers, who were members of the Citizen Army, training in the weeks leading up to the Rising. They carried out drills with wooden rifles. Margaret goes on to describe the events that she witnessed at Boland's Mill and Mount Street Bridge on Easter Monday."
She described how she actually witnessed Eamon DeValera sparing two drunk British soldiers' lives.
As fighting broke out in her neighborhood, Morrissey and her family were pinned down.
She said "We were in the house and the battle was going on, and the fighting and the shooting and we couldn't get out of where we lived cause we were going out of food [sic]. We couldn't get out even to loot."
Eventually, her father decided to attempt to visit family close by when he realized the British Army were positioned on the roofs right across from their home.
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Morrissey said "He said 'We all better get out of here and go somewhere else.' Cause we only had the flat on the top of the house. And when that happened, he hadn't said the words till it was hell. The machine guns were turned on the house.
"My brother fell, I saw all the blood all over the place, and then I heard my father saying to my mother 'Lizzie, I'm hit too'. And he fell.
And I had one boot on and one boot off and I jumped up and I run down towards the hallway door. I opened it anyhow and I dashed across the street to go down to Holles Street hospital, that was the nearest to us.
Her father died in Holles Street Hospital and her brother lived on for a further two years. In the interview, Morrissey went on to describe how her father was buried along with other victims in a trench grave at Glasnevin Cemetery.
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"They were talking the bodies out of Holles Street hospital, the military in a lorry." she explained.
"So, my uncle it was who went up. There were other bodies along with my father, and a woman and somebody else were getting put in the lorry. And they took the bodies to Glasnevin Cemetery on the lefthand size and they had a trench dug. All them bodies, there was nearly a hundred bodies thrown into that trench. And they were just covered up. My father was buried in his trousers and shirt the way he was starting to get ready to go out."
In the aftermath of the Rising, Margaret Morrissey channeled her grief into action. She became an ardent supporter of the Irish independence movement, joining Cumann na mBan, the women’s auxiliary of the Irish Volunteers. Over the years, she worked tirelessly to support the cause. She even ended up staying in a safe house with Michael Collins.
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