It may not be very politically correct in these post Romantic Ireland times to write about a woman who spent Easter Week 1916 with the Citizen Army in St Stephen's Green, but Nora O'Daly's account still bears telling. Or Nora Gillies to use her maiden name. She was born on August 12th, 1883.
Her father, John Gilles, was a Scot who came to Ireland in 1879 to work as commercial manager of the Freeman's Journal. He was a Presbyterian, as was Nora until her life underwent something of a personal revolution.
As a young women she was caught up in the Irish-Ireland movement. She converted to Catholicism and became actively involved with Conradh na Gaeilge. By 1906, she was secretary of a Conradh branch. She also became involved in republicanism, leading her and her sister Columbia (Daisy) to marry two IRB men, brothers Seamus and Padraig O'Daly, in 1910. A branch of Cumann na mBan was set up in Fairview, Dublin, in 1915, and she attended the very first meeting. "Our principal study was first aid", she said, but they also "did a course in rifle cleaning and sighting, drill and various other things . . ."
Regular arsenal
Nora and Seamus O'Daly lived from 1910 to 1916 at a house in Clontarf, named "Cluny". By 1916 she had three children, aged five, four and two, and the house had become "a regular arsenal of bombs which had been made on the premises, dynamite, gelignite, rifles, beyonets, ammunition and what not."
This "arsenal" was to have been collected on Easter Saturday but Eoin McNeill's calling off of the Rising "upset these arrangements and the owner of the car (who was to collect the "arsenal") had gone off in it to have a nice holiday in the country".
Her "upset" was short-lived as on Easter Monday she and two other women in their Cumann na mBan branch were ordered to report to the south side of St Stephen's Green. They went by tram.
The Green had been taken over by about 30 members of the Citizen Army, led by "Commandant Malin and Countess Markievicz". Nora and her two colleagues were assigned to first aid work. "The idea of bloodshed had always been repugnant to me, although the sight of blood had no effect whatever on my nerves," she observed without irony, arsenal or otherwise.
Not everyone was prepared to take the rebels seriously. "A young lady accompanied by a British Flying officer was strolling through the Green and they sat on a seat to watch proceedings at their leisure", she said. The young woman was told to go home and the soldier was arrested, but the young woman was having none of it. She said they (she and the soldier) would wait until the manoeuvres were over and "would not disturb them (the Citizen Army) in the least." It was some time before the couple could be convinced "that matters were serious," Nora recalled.
Other prisoners were brought into the First Aid compound. Included was a " big military man" who, "accompanied by some ladies, looked very aggrieved." He declared he was a doctor, which Nora doubted "after he expressed his opinion on a man whose arm was in a sling, and on being contradicted on all points said `Well, the man is in pain anyway and should be in hospital'."
Eventually this man, his accompanying ladies, and the other prisoners were released "owing to lack of accommodation."
Comical remarks
The Cumann na mBan women dealt with their first casualty late that night when a young man called O'Brien was brought to them with a bullet in his neck. He was removed to St Vincent's Hospital nearby. The women spent that night trying to sleep on the seats of the summer house and on "the cold ground". It was the first night Nora had free of toothache in over a year, and it never returned. From that night also she recalled "a girl named Bridie Goff, who kept making the most comical remarks about the snipers who were disturbing her sleep".
On Tuesday, all were ordered to the Royal College of Surgeons, where they went in small groups as "bullets were flying everywhere and sending the gravel up in showers off the path." She was amazed to find people out sightseeing. Some even remarked, about the young rebel women, "Look at them running with no hats on them". Could it happen anywhere else but in Dublin, Nora wondered.
She was put in charge of First Aid at the College, and it was there they had to deal with the first really serious casualties. The first was a man named Doherty, who had 15 wounds. Others included a Ms Skinnider who, during the following week," bore her frightful wounds with the greatest fortitude." And there was "a boy named Keogh" who received eight stitches in his wrist without anaesthetic "and he stood it like a hero."
Then there was a Mr Partridge who was wounded on the hand. The day after Nora bandaged him he told her he had been free since then of a headache which had bothered him for years. So it continued, with one day "so much the same as another in the College that it would be hard to describe the week's events progressively."
Presence of women
On Sunday they got news of the GPO surrender, and were marched into York Street. "I carried a Red Cross flag, as some extraordinary stories were afloat to account for the presence of women amongst the garrison," recalled Nora. A soldier kept hissing into her ear "what he believed and hoped would be our ultimate (and sanguinary) fate . . ." Soldiers going the opposite direction shouted "Wot you goin' to do with this lot?" Their colleagues replied "Ow, goin' to biyenet 'em like the rest." Eventually they arrived at Kilmainham Jail where they were locked up, four to a cell.
They were kept there for over a week during which they had to make statements accounting for how they had got mixed up with "those frightful rebels," and were refused permission to do Irish dancing at "exercise hour". Then word filtered through about the executions just beginning, news they heard "with heavy heart." Shortly afterwards she was released.
Following the Rising she was a judge in the Sinn Fein courts in Dublin. That continued until the Treaty, which she supported. In later years she worked for the Dail Courts winding up committee, while also writing poetry and prose, on political and religious themes, in her free time.
In 1926, she wrote an account of what she experienced during 1916 for a magazine called An t- Oglach. Under the title "The Women of Easter Week; Cumann na mBan in Stephen's Green and in the College of Surgeons", it is the basis for this diary. Nora died on May 10th 1943.