This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Lawrence William White. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Born: 1896 (circa), Ireland (assumed)
Died: 26 June 1957
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: Sighle Bowen
Dowling, Sheila (Sighle) (née Bowen ) (c.1896–1957), republican, socialist, trade unionist, and feminist, was a member of Cumann na mBan. During the war of independence she served as stenographer in dáil courts in north Dublin city, and worked for the republican solicitor Michael Noyek. Arrested during a raid on an IRA depot in Blackhall Place, she was taken to Dublin castle and searched, but not before successfully disposing of certain important papers by eating them. Opposed to the 1921 treaty, during the civil war she was arrested while attempting to leave Dublin to speak for Sinn Féin in Glasgow. She was among eighty-one republican women prisoners in Kilmainham jail who, resisting transfer to the North Dublin Union to avoid separation from two colleagues who were on hunger strike, were moved forcibly by male prison authorities with considerable violence (May 1923). By the late 1920s she was serving on the Cumann na mBan executive. Also active in the labour movement, she was personal secretary for a time to William O’Brien (1881–1968), general secretary of the ITGWU. She was an organiser for the Irish Women Workers’ Union (IWWU), which she represented on Dublin trades’ council, and she represented the Irish Trade Union Congress at international labour conferences in Prague and Geneva.
Bowen married (c.1930) Frank Dowling, who later managed Dublin’s Metropole cinema; they had one daughter. She was closely associated with Helena Molony as the most prominent figures of a militantly socialist and pro-republican group within the IWWU leadership, in persistent tension with the dominant moderate group led by the general secretary, Louie Bennett, and Helen Chenevix. The tensions erupted into open conflict amid the ideological polarisations of the early 1930s, focusing on Dowling’s and Molony’s pro-Soviet sympathies and alliances with Irish communists. Active in the Irish section of Friends of Soviet Russia (1930–31), Dowling visited the USSR (summer 1930) on a delegation that included Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington and Charlotte Despard. Impressed by improvements there in the status of women and by the professed commitment under the communist system to equality of the sexes, on her return to Ireland Dowling lectured widely on life in the Soviet Union, thereby generating much controversy.
Dowling was one of four women (including Molony) on the founding executive of Saor Éire (September 1931), a revolutionary leftist political party linked to the republican movement. On its proscription within weeks by the Free State government, she announced her withdrawal from the executive. She was forced to resign as IWWU president and trustee (March 1932) after a legal re-interpretation of union rules regarding the eligibility of members in receipt of marriage benefit, and thereby no longer functioning as an ‘industrial unit’. The affair highlighted the contradiction between the IWWU’s rhetorical advocacy of equal opportunity for all women and men, and its reluctance in practice to facilitate entry of married women into the job market in competition for employment with the single women comprising the bulk of the union’s membership; it seems likely that Bennett exploited the issue to oust from office an ideological opponent. Dowling remained active in such bodies as the British Boycott Committee, and in opposition to ratification of the 1937 Irish constitution owing to provisions affecting the status of women and woman’s role in society. She engaged in the campaign organised by the Dublin constituencies council of the Labour party opposing the 1939 Offences Against the State Act. From the early 1940s she resided at 8 Belgrave Rd, Rathmines, Dublin. After suffering several years with breast cancer, she died 26 June 1957 at Hume St. hospital, and was buried in Glasnevin cemetery. She was remembered by ITGWU general secretary, Senator Frank Purcell, as ‘the nicest and most sincere little woman I ever met
a grand character’ (Ir. Press, 28 June 1957).