Countess Called a Show-Off

By Paddy Clancy

A NEW study of 1916 heroine Countess Constance Markievicz claims she was a “blood-thirsty show-off” who brainwashed children into believing they must die for Ireland.

Author and historian Ruth Dudley Edwards says Markievicz killed without pity and “continued to murder” after 1922 during the Civil War.

Dudley Edwards’ scathing attack in an RTE radio program to be broadcast next week is the second assault on the reputation of Markievicz, the first woman elected to the House of Commons and first woman minister in an Irish government.

Earlier this year it was claimed in recently-discovered British documents that instead of bravely facing a British court after the 1916 Rising, she wept and begged for her life after her execution was ordered.

Dudley Edwards argues in the programme, part of a series called Speaking Ill of the Dead, that Markievicz was a self-indulgent prima donna who craved the limelight and adopted causes she barely understood. She was driven to politics because she longed for excitement and was mesmerised by charismatic men.

“She did give up a life of material comfort when she embraced the revolution. But she was a snob with a bogus title,” the author says.

“She was physically brave to the point of recklessness but she lacked the moral courage to admit her failure of nerve when she was faced with the prospect of execution.

“She was beautiful and flamboyant but she was all style and no substance along with other uncompromising green harpies of her generation.”

Even her title was bogus, it is claimed. She had invented a background of nobility for her husband, Uk-rainian widower Casimir Markievicz, because she didn’t want disapproval from her own family, the Gore-Booths, who at the time owned the sprawling Lissadell estate in Co. Sligo.

Dudley Edwards will tell listeners that Markievicz sent her eight-year-old daughter Maeve to be reared by her family in Sligo because the child got in the way of her social life in Dublin.

One of the most famous pictures of her, in rebel battle uniform, was taken in a studio when she posed for it in 1916 so it would be her epitaph if she died in the Rising.

Dudley Edwards claims, “Markievicz was a snob and a fraud and an exhibitionist and a murder. She neglected her own child and betrayed others by urging their children to die for Ireland. She was certainly a beauty but, boy, she was terrible.”