The Honorable Albina Lucy Broderick was born on December 17, 1861 into a family of English aristocrats and absentee Irish landowners.

Although born into fabulous wealth, her life’s work would be a rejection of the privilege her family had enjoyed for centuries and few sacrificed more for Irish freedom than the daughter of the 8th Viscount Midleton.

But if his old age and middle age were characterized by his radicalism, his early years were absolutely normal; He grew up in his father’s country mansion in Surrey, near London, received an excellent education at home and traveled throughout much of Europe as a young man.

Politically in his youth, he conformed to those of his imperialist and conservative family; Young Albina used to read the newspaper to her half-blind father, but only on the condition that he never mention the name of one William Gladstone, the British Prime Minister who made several brave but doomed attempts to give Ireland a Autonomous Parliament. .

By 1910, his brother William, the 1st Earl of Midleton, had become the leader of the Irish Unionist Alliance in the south of Ireland and spent much of his political career trying to thwart Irish independence.

Young Albina shared her brother’s loyalty, if not his “low opinion of the Irish.” He once wrote Unionist poetry, but his periodic visits to his father’s estate in Cork He began to gradually change his views on the native Irish and the earl’s sister became an ardent republican with all the zeal of a convert.

Broderick, 42, trained as a nurse and moved to Dublin to practice as a midwife. Around this time, she developed an interest in social reform and the rights of her fellow nurses. It was the first step in her journey from ultra-conservative to Irish revolutionary.

He then became interested in the Gaelic League and the revival of the Irish language that was flourishing across the island. She began making regular visits to impoverished areas of the Irish-speaking country and was shocked by what she saw. It was the catalyst for the course of the rest of his life and, like many revitalists, he Gaelicized his name to Gobnait Ní Bhruadair.

In 1907 his father died and the nouveau riche Ní Bhruadair moved south. Kerry where even the Government had noticed that the locals were on the verge of starvation. He paid £40 for 13 and a half acres of land and set about building a hospital. In 1912 there was a farm, a nursing home, a store and a cooperative on the land, but the construction of the hospital itself was not fully completed. Lacking money, he sailed to America and raised the rest there; His gamble paid off and by 1913 the co-operative store had an annual turnover of £3,000.

In 1914, the armies of Europe mobilized against each other and Ní Bhruadair offered the British Army the use of the hospital for wounded troops. While in later years Irish republicans did their best to sweep under the carpet the service of the 200,000 Irish soldiers who fought in the Great War, then most of Ireland supported the war as one aimed at liberating the small and Catholic Belgium from the barbaric clutches of Germany.

But his sympathy for the British army was limited to its actions on the European continent; When fighting broke out in Dublin on Easter Sunday 1916, Ní Bhruadair’s support for the rebel republicans was unconditional. He joined Sinn Féin and Cumman na mBan (the Women’s IRA) and visited Frongoch prison in Wales, where most of the volunteers had been sent.

After the end of the war in November 1918, she gave many hours of her time campaigning for Sinn Féin in the general election held the following month and, a few months after the British Parliament granted women’s suffrage, she was elected as a member of the Kerry County Council under the Sinn Féin banner.

After news reached the Blacks and Tans that he was hiding IRA members, his home was frequently subjected to random searches. Her relentless opposition to British rule in Ireland was further reinforced by her work with the Irish White Cross, with whom she worked tirelessly to distribute food parcels to wives and children in need. of IRA volunteers.

When michael collins After signing the Anglo-Irish Treaty that divided Ireland in 1921, Ní Bhruadair found herself on the opposite side of most of her fellow citizens and made no apologies for her outright rejection of the Treaty. She was a talented orator and was regularly deployed across Kerry by anti-Treaty forces to convince crowds of the folly of accepting any agreement that kept Ireland within the British Empire.

The end of Civil war He did not diminish his disdain for the Free State and in 1923 he was shot in the leg after he refused to stop his bicycle for soldiers to inspect. For her crime she was imprisoned in Dublin, where she quickly went on hunger strike, forcing her release within two weeks.

Her imprisonment did not harm her standing in Sinn Féin and she served as the party’s delegate to Munster at its 1926 party convention. Her involvement with Cumann na mBan came to a sad end in 1933, after the organization abandoned its emphasis on militant nationalism in favor of social reform. Her new party, “Women of the Republic,” attracted few members.

Despite all the political ups and downs of his long and radical life, he had several constants; his regular Gaelic League meetings in Tralee and the harmonium he played weekly at a Protestant Church service in his adopted home town of Sneem, Co. Kerry. No doubt her fellow worshipers, mostly of Unionist sympathies, thought little of her paramilitary activities, but she was, in the words of one biographer, “a woman of frugal habits and decided opinions, she was in many ways difficult and eccentric.” .

His death in 1955 at the age of 93 would begin legal challenges that lasted more than two decades. His will stated that his considerable estate of £17,000 would go to the republicans “as they were in the years 1919 to 1921”. Such a request was always going to be challenged in court and it was not until 1979 that a judge ruled that his last will and testament were “void due to remoteness.”

Ní Bhruadair lies buried in the Protestant cemetery in the parish of Sneem, where a room in the local museum is dedicated to her extraordinary life.

*Originally published in 2017. Updated in 2024

H/T: History of Ireland.