Part 3 - Letter from Alice Ginnell

A letter from Alice Ginnell (1882-1967) to Fr. Senan Moynihan OFM Cap. Ginnell was a Westmeath-born nationalist, feminist, and prominent member of Cumann na mBan. The letter refers to her hope to have an article published in ‘The Capuchin Annual’ on the recently deceased Marie Perolz Flanagan. Marie Perolz (d. 12 December 1950) was a radical Irish activist and revolutionary whose close acquaintances included James Connolly, Jim Larkin, and Constance Markievicz. Perolz was a member of the Irish Citizen Army and was also associated with Delia Larkin’s Irish Women Workers’ Union. In her letter, Ginnell concurs with Captain Robert Monteith’s description of Perloz as a ‘white flame … both spiritually and nationally’. All the women she suggests as an author for such a tribute were celebrated for their close association with the nationalist movement. Her first preference was Helena Moloney (1883-1967), another veteran of the Irish Citizen Army, who fought in the General Post Office in the 1916 Rising. Alternatively, she refers to ‘John Brennan’, a pseudonym for Sydney Gifford Czira (1889-1974), a journalist, former suffragette, and radical nationalist whose sisters Muriel MacDonagh and Grace Plunkett were both left widowed after 1916. Finally, Ginnell mentions ‘Madame MacBride’ or Maud Gonne MacBride (1866-1953), a leading political activist and revolutionary.