Commemoration for Mayo suffragette Meg Connery
A HEADSTONE is to be unveiled on the grave of Mayo suffragette Meg Connery (1881-1958), who was very prominent in the Irish struggle for voting equality for women.
Feminist activist Margaret Knight Connery, better known as Meg Connery, was born in Triangle, Aughagower, Westport, and died, after spending most of her life in Dublin, in 1958. She married the love of her life, John Patrick 'Con' Connery in Clonmel in 1909, and moved to Dublin, where Margaret became known as 'Meg'.
She was a prominent and tireless advocate of women’s voting rights, through public speaking, lobbying, protesting and publishing articles in a variety of publications, especially in the Irish Citizen.
She was also a heckler, a disrupter of political meetings, and a believer in the use of physical force to pursue votes for women. She disrupted public appearances by Winston Churchill, Edward Carson and John Redmond.
Meg broke windows in the London War Office, in the Customs House and Dublin Castle in well-planned symbolic acts of defiance. She underwent three periods of imprisonment for each of these actions, but this turbulent period also included two hunger strikes, beatings, ridicule, and humiliation, in her relentless pursuit of voting equality.
Meg Connery was acquainted with Constance Markievicz, Maud Gone, Padraig Pearse, James Connolly, Jim Larkin, George Bernard Shaw, and Douglas Hyde (who visited her in prison).
After her aims were achieved, and after Con's death, which had a devastating impact on her mental health, she faded from view into obscurity, and in a final disgraceful slight, she was refused a pension by the new Irish state she did so much to shape.
Her close lifelong friend was Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, widowed by the cruel murder of her husband Frank in 1916.
Despite her prominence, she is no longer well known or remembered, even in her native place, and her final years were difficult, blighted by failing health and poverty.
A commemoration committee have how located the unmarked grave which is the final resting place of Meg and her husband Con and after fundraising, a headstone has been erected on her grave in Mount Jerome Cemetery, Harolds Cross, Dublin 6.
On Friday, April 5, at 10 a.m., a short ceremony of remembrance will take place in the Victorian Chapel in Mount Jerome, followed by the unveiling of the newly installed headstone by Dr. Micheline Sheehy Skeffington, the renowned botanist, academic, and grand-daughter of Meg Connery's great lifelong friend and ally, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, founder of the Irish Women's Franchise League. The event will then move to her graveside.
Meg had no surviving children, and most of her family emigrated apart from a brother and a sister who did not marry. At least 15 descendants of her siblings will be travelling from the USA for the event, led by her grand-nephew Vince King, a West Virginia attorney.
The memorial service in the Victorian Chapel will be led By Sister LaVerne King, of the Mercy Order in the USA, who is Meg Connery’s grand-niece.
Original music has also been specially composed for the event by Vermont, USA, professional musician Lissa Schneckenburger (Meg's great-great-grand niece).