By Kelly Smyth
At a recent protest at the Hampton by Hilton hotel in Smithfield, a banner was held blocking the entrance to the building saying, “our women and kids don’t feel safe, enough is enough”. This protest was based on false assumptions that the hotel was being transformed into a direct provision centre to house refugees. Despite the common rhetoric of this group that resulted in the Dublin Riots in 2022, we must ask ourselves how the same people who claim to want to protect children are also nationalistic. The far-right romanticisation of Irish history has become a notable feature of their protests- yet they fail to acknowledge the gendered nature of violence towards women throughout the Irish War of Independence and the Troubles. Additionally, they fail to recognise that a woman in Ireland is more likely to be killed in her home by an intimate partner than by an unknown “unvetted foreign male”.
The Irish War of Independence holds a number of disturbing stories- stories in which women have been victim to disturbing violence at the hands of militant groups. A notable case of this is of Cumman na mBan member Maggie Doherty in 1923, who was brutally raped by 3 Free State Army soldiers in her own home. Maggie never recovered from the violent incident, with doctors believing her untimely death in a mental institution in 1928 to be connected to the attack. The men involved were acquitted from their charges. This horrific attack was not isolated, with the National Army being found to have had soldiers involved in the rape of two sisters in Cork in 1922, which was covered up. Based on this evidence, it is clear that there was a systematic acceptance of this gendered violence by the Free State, even to republican women. Yet the far-right will romanticise this era as a safer time for women.
Sexual violence as a weapon of war was also perpetrated against women throughout the War of Independence, with a protestant woman named Eileen Mary Warburton Biggs being raped between eight and nine times by anti-treaty IRA men in Co. Tipperary in 1922. Eileen also later passed in a psychiatric facility in the 1950s. While this is often not addressed in retellings of Irish history, this violence was well known within both the Free State and English governments respectively. The IRA also was noted for the severe mistreatment of women who were perceived as supporting the British cause, with one woman described in the 1922 Report to the Labour Commission of Ireland as having ‘…three pig rings [put] into her buttocks with pincers. She has been supplying the [British] police with milk’. Although women did get the opportunity to participate in more direct militant activity, it is clear to see that gendered sexual violence was imposed upon many women regardless of their involvement at this time, and regardless of their republican, unionist or pacifist ideologies.
While this may seem to be a long time ago, the Troubles provides an unsettling more recent mirror of this sexualised violence. Republican women in Northern Ireland were subject to daily threats of sexualised violence at the hands of British Army soldiers, with evidence of women being called “Irish whores” in addition to rape threats. Women were also subjected to house raids, often while alone, and often reported being vilified for being found with contraceptives or ‘sexual’ clothing. In interrogations, sexual violence was also commonly threatened by British forces, with one republican woman recounting how her interrogator stood behind her with his trousers unzipped and later slapped her in the same interview. The same interrogator also later attempted to grope her, although a female member of staff intervened. Based on these accounts, it is safe to assume that this sexualised violence was normalised throughout the Troubles as it had been throughout the War of Independence.
Based on this evidence, it is historically clear that violence against women was often perpetrated and normalised within Irish institutions long before Ireland saw large numbers of immigration. Additionally, the traditional nationalist views that far-right groups show support for were also complicit in this perpetuation of violence against women, leading one to wonder if this institutional normalisation has blinded far-right groups to Irish perpetrators. While they claim violence against women today is perpetuated by immigrants, they fail to acknowledge the highly gendered nature of crimes against women. According to Women’s Aid, 1 in 2 femicides in Ireland since 1996 has been committed by a current or former male intimate partner of the victim, with only 13% of all femicides in Ireland being committed by a stranger. It is clear to see that racism and xenophobia are responsible for the far-right’s motivations to “protect women and children” rather than actions justified by research. Violence against women in Ireland has been and continues to be gendered in nature and needs to be addressed by legislators in a better way.