Gender ARC Seminar “The Political is Personal: Mary Sheehy Kettle and the story of The Ways of War (1917)” by Speaker Prof. Niamh Reilly

“The Political is Personal: Mary Sheehy Kettle and the story of The Ways of War (1917)”

Speaker: Prof. Niamh Reilly, School of Political Science and Sociology

Introduction by Dr. Muireann O’Cinneide, English/School of Humanities  

Supported by the IRC New Foundations 2017 Decade of Centenaries Scheme

Mary Sheehy (1884-1967) was born into a prominent nationalist family in Ireland, a  daughter of David Sheehy, Irish Party MP, and sister of Hanna Sheehy Skeffington. Over her lifetime, she became well-known as a leading women’s movement activist, an advocate for “nationalist veterans” of World War I, and a determined champion of social and economic justice, especially on behalf of women and children. In 1908, Mary Sheehy married Tom Kettle (1880-1916), then viewed by many to be a “rising star”; a young Irish Party MP (1906-1910), gifted journalist, essayist, orator and vocal supporter of women’s rights. Both were part of an emerging, university-educated generation, many Catholic, who expected to play a leading role in the “new Ireland”.  As is now well known, events surrounding the 1916 rising radically altered the trajectory of Irish history. The story of how Tom Kettle came to spend the final weeks of his life in 1916 in France, with the Dublin Fusiliers fighting in the Allied War effort, is laden with poignancy and paradoxes. One of his last acts in France was to change his will asking that Mary be his literary executor and to send scribbled notes outlining a book of essays that he hoped would be published, which he wrote on the warfront in 1916 and earlier, as a war correspondent, in Belgium when the country was first invaded in 1914. This paper traces the story of that book, The Ways of War, published 100 years ago, in which Mary S. Kettle is the main protagonist. It is a story of the pair’s enduring political and intellectual partnership and Mary S Kettle’s struggle to establish herself as a post-1916 political actor in her own right and to vindicate Tom Kettle’s reputation after his death. As such it offers a unique window on how the dramatic transformation of the post-1916 political terrain in Ireland, and its new nationalist narrative, was encountered by those whom it eclipsed.