When Mary MacSwiney rose to speak in the Dáil during the Treaty debates, she apologised in advance that her speech would not be a short one.
She was true to her word, all 15,000 of them to be precise, when she made the most trenchant and longest speech against the Anglo-Irish Treaty signed in London two weeks previously. It went on, with barely an interruption for two hours and 40 minutes.
She began with the “deepest and fullest sense of my responsibility . . . far more fateful than was the decision made in 1800, for with all the allusions made to Grattan’s Parliament, one thing has not been said: that is that it wasn’t the parliament of the people.”
Mary MacSwiney was the sister of Terence MacSwiney, the lord mayor of Cork who died on hunger strike in Brixton Prison in October 1920. His death drew worldwide sympathy for the cause of Irish independence and Mary MacSwiney was not about to allow the assembled TDs forget that fact.
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Not known for understatement, she declared that adopting the Treaty would be the "greatest act of treachery in history". Many deputies would support the Treaty on the basis that if it was good enough for Michael Collins, it was good enough for them. She countered, "If Mick Collins went to hell in the morning, would you follow him there?"
There was no more "unscrupulous scoundrel" in world politics than David Lloyd George, the British prime minister. Why would anybody trust him? Do not believe that the alternative to the Treaty is war, she added. The English public do want it and the House of Commons was unlikely to vote through the £250 million needed to finally subjugate Ireland.
If it must be war, so be it, she continued in the most bloodthirsty passage of her marathon speech. “I know that, but she [Britain] cannot win this battle, for if she exterminates the men, the women will take their places, and, if she exterminates the women, the children are rising fast; and if she exterminates the men, women and children of this generation, the blades of grass, dyed with their blood, will rise, like the dragon’s teeth of old, into armed men and the fight will begin in the next generation.”
As for herself, she was prepared to become “their first rebel under their so-called Free State, that they will have the pleasure or the pain, as it pleases them, of imprisoning me as one of their first and most deliberate and irreconcilable rebels”.
She was true to her word and was arrested during the Civil War and imprisoned twice by the Free State government. She also went on hunger strike.
She concluded: “I have kept you a long time. I make no apology for it, nor will you seek one. You may be tired, so am I. Let me tell you this. As you have faced, some of you, the enemy’s fire, as you have faced the torture of his jails, as you have faced his sentences of death, you must face this act of yours in its every detail, and this is what the young men of this Dáil – and I tell their constituents so – many of them have not done. They have not listened to the arguments against this Treaty they are voting for.”
If MacSwiney’s speech was intended to sway the deputies against the Treaty, it had the opposite effect. The length of her speech meant that the debates did not end at Christmas and resumed in the new year by which time many deputies were appraised in their own constituencies of the strength of feeling in favour of the Treaty in the country. It was eventually passed by the Dáil on a vote of 64 to 57 on January 7th, 1922.
Hard as it was for deputies to listen to the speech, it was harder still for the poor stenographers who had transcribed it first in shorthand and then in longhand for the record.
The handwritten transcript of her speech is in the National Archives and runs to 162 pages.
MacSwiney remained a member of Sinn Féin after the split that led to the formation of Fianna Fáil in 1926. It became an increasingly irrelevant organisation. She died in 1942 having never recognised the State.
Her speech and those who contributed to the debate were due to feature in the marathon Anu Productions Staging the Treaty at the National Concert Hall which was due to start on Tuesday.
It has now been postponed indefinitely as a result of rising Covid-19 numbers. “We will reschedule the marking of this important national event in 2022 when there is an optimal time to do so,” Anu Productions said in a statement.
