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From Buckingham Palace to Caherdaniel

The aristocrat nurse who became the first woman councillor in Kerry

Albinia Brodrick, the first woman elected to Kerry County Council, in 1920.

The first woman to become a member of Kerry County Council came from a prominent British aristocratic family, was the sister of the Secretary of State for War and wined and dined in her youth at Buckingham Palace. Born at 23 Chester Square, Belgrave, London, on 17 December 1861, the Honourable Lady Albinia Lucy Brodrick was the fifth daughter of William Brodrick, 8th Viscount Midleton, and his wife, Augusta Freemantle. She spent her early years in London and at the family estate in Surrey. Privately educated, she travelled widely in Europe and was fluent in several languages. She regularly visited the House of Lords with her father. Her brother, St John, the 1st Earl of Midleton, was MP for Surrey and later a cabinet minister at the War Office and Foreign Affairs (1900–3). Like his father, he was a staunch unionist and was leader of the Irish Unionist Alliance from 1910 to 1918. He was involved in negotiations on Home Rule with John Redmond. Brodrick and her family were regulars at concert and balls in Buckingham Palace. Up until 1904, she was listed on the The Times Court Circular and attended events hosted by the Archbishop of Canterbury.1

In 1904, Brodrick qualified as a certified nurse, training at the district infirmary in Ashton-under-Lyne and qualifying as a midwife in 1909. Her father had a large estate in County Cork, which she visited in her youth. She became familiar with the country and its quest for independence. She became interested in the Gaelic revival and grew increasingly sympathetic towards Irish nationalism. Visits to the Gaeltacht prompted her to learn the Irish language and she developed a revulsion towards the poverty and social conditions in rural Ireland. Writing in the St James Gazette in 1902, she spoke of the need to promote indigenous Irish industry. Increasingly politicised, in 1903, she wrote of Ireland as ‘not the Ireland of Westminster … not the English Ireland in Ireland, which is not Ireland at all, but the bastard product of a conquest miscalled civilising’.2 To the chagrin of her family, she began to use an Irish version of her name, Gobnait Ní Bhruadair.

The death of her father in 1907 gave her financial independence. Brodrick invested in a site at West Cove, Caherdaniel, in south Kerry, which would become her home until her death. She set up the Kilcrohane agricultural co-operative, through which members could share resources and profits with the aim of stymieing emigration and rural deprivation. She hosted classes for locals and she encouraged vegetarianism and new farming practices. The area was one of those blighted by endemic poverty and fell under the remit of the Congested Districts Board, which oversaw overpopulated areas where hunger and poverty were rife. Moved by the inadequate health services, Brodrick set about developing a hospital using her own resources. She wrote to the British Journal of Nursing, appealing for financial support:

A Hospital for Kerry, for one corner of Kerry, because of the children haunted by tuberculosis, the women tortured in childbirth, the men struck low before their time … Did you ever need to be driven eighteen miles with a fractured thigh? Has your wife bled to death in childbirth for want of help? Is it your child that goes lame for life for want of treatment?3

Brodrick named the site Ballincoona, or Baile an Chúnaimh (the home of the help). The complex of buildings required the reclamation of four acres of bog, the planting of 5,000 trees and the construction of a new road and a twenty-foot well, as well as the development of a storehouse, workshop, piggery, cattle house and other ancillary buildings.4 With an expenditure of £2,620 in its first year, the project quickly ran into financial difficulties and only the foundations of the hospital were built. Brodrick sold her furniture, jewellery and personal belongings and continued to appeal to friends for donations to the project. Visiting the United States in 1912, she raised further revenue for the hospital and work resumed on its construction, but it never became fully operational. Brodrick offered to take in British soldiers injured in the First World War, but the offer was declined. A ‘lack of money fetters us continually’, she wrote.5

The Easter Rising in 1916 and the execution of the rebel leaders had a profound effect on Brodrick. She joined Sinn Féin and Cumann na mBan. She visited many of those interned in Frongoch in Wales after the Rising and wrote to newspapers offering advice to those planning to visit the prisoners.6 Brodrick’s new-found republicanism put her at odds with her family’s unionism and she became increasingly detached from her family. Her brother, the Earl of Midleton, was particularly embarrassed. In a letter to The Spectator in 1916, apologising for his sister’s support of the Rising, he wrote: ‘She separated herself from my family thirteen years ago and I have not seen her since; she has always been very unbalanced in her views.’7 During the 1918 general election, she campaigned for Sinn Féin candidates and in 1920 she was nominated for election to Kerry County Council in the Killorglin Electoral Division. Commenting on her candidacy, The Kerryman observed:

Miss Brodrick, since her advent to Kerry, has accomplished an immense amount of great work in social improvement projects, and in carrying out philanthropic schemes generally. Always intensely Irish, she had devoted much time and patient labor [sic] to furthering the cause of the Gaelic League, and she has earned a reputation of being a fluent Irish speaker.8

Brodrick was one of five candidates returned, unopposed, and made history by being the first woman ever elected to Kerry County Council. She was a member of the County Infirmary Committee and became chair of the Kerry County Committee of Agriculture. When the Dáil tried to reduce the number of workhouses operating around the country, she resigned from the council in protest, but resumed her role soon after.9 During the War of Independence, she sheltered IRA members and she campaigned during the Dáil election of 1921, formally nominating candidates Austin Stack, Edmond Roche, Tomás Ó Donnchú and Piaras Béaslaí.10 She took the Anti-Treaty side in the Civil War and was present when the Dáil debated the Treaty and heckled the South Kerry TD, Fionán Lynch, from the public gallery when he spoke in its favour:

LYNCH: I know what the people want, I know that I can speak for my own people – for the people of South Kerry, where I was bred and born.

A VOICE FROM THE BODY OF THE HALL: ‘No.’

LYNCH: With one exception. Yes, a minority of one against, an Englishwoman. Well, if I am interrupted from the body of the Hall, I will reply, I say that that person should be removed from the Hall, a person who interferes with a speaker in this assembly, and I ask the chair to protect me.11

In April 1923, Brodrick was shot in the leg by police when she refused to stop while running errands on her bicycle for the IRA near Sneem. Arrested and jailed in the North Dublin Union, she went on hunger strike for fourteen days before being released. When Fianna Fáil was founded in 1926, she opted to remain in Sinn Féin and she ran the party’s newspaper, Irish Freedom, for ten years, acting as editor for a time. With others like Mary MacSwiney, she left Cumann na mBan to set up the short-lived Mná na Poblachta.

In parallel with her republican activism, Brodrick employed her political nous in nursing. She was a vocal advocate of adequate training and registration for nurses; she had been a member of the Society for the State Registration of Trained Nurses from 1907. Her other area of interest was venereal disease. She wrote a paper called ‘Morality in Relation to the Public Health’ in which she ‘broke down the silence’ around sexually transmitted diseases and she chaired a National Council of Nurses Committee on the subject.12 In April 1921, she chaired a nursing conference in Tralee which debated the need for a new hospital in the town. She lectured on the need for the professional organisation of nurses and nurses’ rights, supporting calls for trade union representation for the profession.

Despite her political views, Brodrick remained a member of the Church of Ireland and played the harmonium in the church in Sneem. She continued to operate a co-operative shop in Caherdaniel. She lived a very frugal life, reputedly wearing the same pair of boots for seventeen years.13 Albinia Brodrick died at the age of ninety-three at her south Kerry home on 16 January 1955. In her will, she left most of her wealth (£17,000) to republicans ‘as they were in the years 1919 to 1921’. The vagueness of her bequest led to legal wrangles for decades. In February 1979, Mr Justice Seán Gannon ruled that the bequest was ‘void for remoteness’ as it was impossible to determine which republican faction met her criteria.14