This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Patrick Maume. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Born: 1878, Ireland
Died: 18 July 1934
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: Kit or Cait, Mary Kate O’Kelly
Ryan, Mary Kate (‘Kit’, ‘Cáit’) (1878–1934), academic and political activist, was born at Tomcoole, Taghmon, Co. Wexford, second of twelve children (four sons and eight daughters) of John Ryan, strong farmer, and his wife Elizabeth (née Sutton). The family was notable for its commitment to education, reinforced by the influence of the eldest child, Joanna (1877–1942), who as Mother Stanislaus in the Loreto order of nuns took a leading role in developing a hall of residence for women university students at Loreto College on St Stephen’s Green, Dublin. After attending the local national school, all twelve siblings received secondary education and eleven went on to tertiary education. Even though the family were reasonably well off by contemporary standards (they had 150 acres and employed three live-in farm servants in 1901 and 1911, were assisted by two uncles who were priests of Ferns diocese, and by the 1930s owned 600 acres), the educational accomplishments and foreign travel (at times working as governesses in France, Germany and Belgium) of the siblings are quite remarkable.
The family were also early local adherents of the Sinn Féin and Gaelic League movements, under the influence of one of the siblings, Fr Martin Ryan (1883–1929), the fifth child and eldest son, who picked up these ideas (c.1902–4) while studying at Maynooth and passed them on to the family during home visits. The family were further influenced by Seán T. O’Kelly, who became a friend and (persistent, though initially unsuccessful) suitor of Mary Kate and a regular visitor to Tomcoole.
Mary Kate was educated at Loreto Abbey, Gorey, Co. Wexford, and then studied at the Loreto College, St Stephen’s Green; she was a prominent member of the Loreto Hall Literary and Debating Society. In 1902 she graduated BA from the Royal University of Ireland (RUI) with first-class honours in modern languages, and then studied at Girton College, Cambridge, taking her teaching diploma with double first-class honours. She taught modern languages in the High School at St Andrews, Scotland, at a school in Bedford, and in a school run by London County Council. For a period of her time in London, she was attracted to Thomas Kettle, but was put off by his cynicism and by a sense that his associates (and future in-laws) the Sheehy family looked down on the more bucolic Ryans. In 1909 Mary Kate returned to Ireland to become a lecturer in languages at UCD; she was stylish and greatly admired by her students. She provided accommodation for younger members of the family studying in Dublin, and her house served as a meeting place and salon for members of the separatist and Irish-Ireland subcultures. She was an active member of the Gaelic League and supported Sinn Féin from its foundation.
After the 1916 rising she was imprisoned in Mountjoy jail for some weeks before being released because of ill health. The UCD authorities subsequently expressed suspicions that she was indoctrinating her students with her political views. On 1 April 1918 she married Seán T. O’Kelly (notwithstanding her earlier expressions of preference for ‘the bohemian life’ and of a distrust of men); there were no children of the marriage. She worked for the Dáil Éireann government during the war of independence; her services may have included translating diplomatic documents and acting as an interpreter for her husband on his 1919 mission to the Paris peace conference. She opposed the 1921 Anglo–Irish treaty; pro-treaty relatives claimed she had initially welcomed it (she was in Germany when it was signed) but was influenced against it by her husband. During the civil war she offended her sister Min (see below) by advising her to leave her husband, Richard Mulcahy, because of his support for the treaty. (This was particularly delicate as the Mulcahys were then living in Mary Kate’s former residence in Rathmines, which she had rented out to them after the O’Kellys moved to a more upmarket address.)
Later in the 1920s, Mary Kate O’Kelly was a vice-president of UCD Republican Club, which united republicans of various shades, including Fianna Fáilers and Sinn Féiners. She developed rheumatic heart disease (c.1930), which obliged her to resign her UCD post early in 1934 after she was confined to a wheelchair. She died on 18 July 1934 at Bad Nauheim, Germany, where she had been undergoing treatment for a month; she was joined there by her husband and some medical friends a week before her death.
Her sister Mary Josephine (‘Min’) Ryan (1884–1977), teacher and political activist, was born at Tomcoole, the sixth child (and fifth daughter) of their parents. She came to Dublin in 1902 to study at the RUI while staying at the Loreto College, St Stephen’s Green; she graduated BA in English, French and German, took a one-year teaching degree from the University of London, and then taught for two years in Fulda, Germany, and (after a period in Rouen, France (1907–9)) for four years in North London Collegiate School, where Sophie Bryant was headmistress. (She may also have taught for some time at a school in Arklow, Co. Wicklow.) By the time she left Ireland she was already involved in the Sinn Féin movement and founded a Sinn Féin branch at London University. Many years later she recalled with some bemusement that she had not taken an interest in the agitation for women’s suffrage because she saw it as a side issue and un-national. (In April 1945 she delivered a speech in favour of greater participation by women in public life and criticising the view that women were more intuitive and less rational than men: ‘Take our own war of independence … The men could not have achieved the success they did but for the support of the womenfolk even under the most dangerous conditions’ (Ir. Times, 16 April 1945).)
With Mary Kate’s encouragement, she wished to return to Dublin, and when Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington was fired from her teaching position in Rathmines, Min sought it. When a London branch of Cumann na mBan was formed in 1914 she became its secretary. The branch disintegrated in November 1914 after the Volunteer split; Min Ryan was responsible for bringing the money it had collected to Eoin MacNeill in Dublin. She then returned to Tomcoole before moving to Dublin in January 1915, teaching German classes at Rathmines commercial college and keeping house for Mary Kate. This left her with free time for her paramilitary activities, which included becoming one of the secretaries of Cumann na mBan.
She first met Seán Mac Diarmada in 1905, and kept in contact with him through meetings at the house of her sister Mary Kate. After her return to Dublin in 1914 they grew closer and developed an ‘understanding’, though they were not formally engaged and Mac Diarmada did not discuss his political activities with her. In a letter to his brother before his execution, however, Mac Diarmada called her the woman he had hoped to marry and bequeathed some of his belongings to her.
In Holy Week 1916 she carried despatches to Volunteers in Co. Wexford, first for Mac Diarmada, and then MacNeill’s Easter Saturday countermanding order. During the Easter rising she and her sister Phyllis spent much of the Tuesday and the Tuesday night in the GPO before being sent out with messages; they were unable to return to the GPO until Thursday evening and then were immediately sent out with further messages. Because of her status as Mac Diarmada’s fiancée, she was allowed to visit him for three hours shortly before his execution on 12 May, and on several occasions throughout her life gave interviews describing the scene. In July 1916 she was sent to America to report to John Devoy and then carried out a lecture tour, describing the rising to Irish-American audiences.
On 2 June 1919 she married Richard Mulcahy ; during their early married life the flat where they lived (and where she had their first baby) was regularly raided by British forces, and for some months in late 1920 she moved to Belfast to live with her sister Agnes (see below). After the treaty split she was active in Cumann na Saoirse, a short-lived organisation representing the pro-treaty minority of Cumann na mBan. For reasons of security, after the death of Michael Collins the Mulcahys leased Lissenfield House, beside Portobello barracks (it had formerly been the commanding officer’s residence). Here they lived until 1966, and brought up their three sons and three daughters, with Min’s managerial skills applied to the task of managing the household (including servants) and keeping the family afloat by growing fruit and vegetables on the few acres attached to the house and keeping fowl and dairy cattle (the produce being for sale as well as domestic consumption). By such means the family made ends meet throughout Richard’s long and modestly remunerated political career. Their children remembered them as a reserved but affectionate couple, and underestimated her early radicalism. Late in life she took up golf and practised less utilitarian forms of gardening.
After the civil war, Min Mulcahy was prominent in the Wounded Soldiers’ Comforts Fund, and in the 1940s worked for the Army Benevolent Fund with her sister Phyllis, although they had been on opposite sides in the civil war. A further sign of wartime reconciliation was her service during the Emergency as treasurer to the ladies’ committee of the 43rd Battalion, which knitted socks and pullovers for the Local Defence Force and was chaired by Kathleen Lemass (wife of Seán Lemass).
In 1925 Min was spoken of as a possible Seanad Éireann candidate. She also helped to raise funds for the Central Catholic Library through bridge tournaments (she was a keen player), and organised a fund-raising bazaar for the construction of a new catholic church in Cabra. She was a member of the ladies’ fund-raising committee for the Meath Hospital; founded in 1944, the committee resigned in 1949 after the Knights of St Columbanus exploited a loophole in the constitution to displace the hospital board. Active in the Loreto Past Pupils’ Union, she served as its president. Surviving her husband by six years, she died in Our Lady’s Hospice, Harold’s Cross, Dublin, on 11 April 1977, after suffering dementia for some years.
Their sister Agnes Ryan (1888–1967), teacher, activist and philanthropist, was born at Tomcoole, ninth child and sixth daughter in the family. After attending schools at Glynn, Co. Wexford, Loreto Abbey in Gorey, and Darmstadt, Germany, and spending some time in Belgium, she entered UCD in 1908, taking a BA in modern languages, and in 1913 completed an MA in Old Irish under the supervision of Osborn Bergin. She was active in the Gaelic League and Sinn Féin. In 1913 she went to Belfast to teach in St Mary’s Training College for teachers. The following year she founded and organised a Belfast branch of Cumann na mBan. In Belfast she met Denis McCullough, whom she married on 16 August 1916 after his release from detention following the Easter rising. The couple lived initially in Belfast, where Agnes remained active in Cumann na mBan and ran the family’s musical instrument business during her husband’s repeated imprisonments, while rearing young children. (The McCulloughs had four sons and two daughters; the couple’s correspondence during his imprisonment is preserved in the McCullough papers, UCD Archives (IE UCDA P120).) She was also a Belfast poor law guardian, and in September 1921 participated in an anti-partition delegation of Belfast nationalists who met Éamon de Valera in the Mansion House, Dublin. Their business injured by the Belfast boycott, the McCulloughs moved to Dublin in December 1921 after Denis was released from Ballykinlar internment camp.
In Dublin, Agnes was active in a variety of charitable bodies, including Saor an Leanbh (the Irish Save the Children fund, for which she delivered a radio appeal in 1941) and the Catholic Social Services Council. In 1941 she was appointed vice-chairman of the statutory trade boards, composed of employer and labourer representatives, which fixed rates in certain industries. She worked on behalf of the Coombe Hospital Linen Guild, the Dublin Rheumatism Clinic and the Incorporated Orthopaedic Hospital of Ireland, and spoke at meetings in support of the Society of St Vincent de Paul. She was also active in the women’s section of the National Agricultural and Industrial Development Association, a business lobbying group. In 1954 she was an unsuccessful candidate in the NUI Seanad Éireann constituency. In the 1950s the McCulloughs (who had been pro-treaty in 1922) appear to have been on better terms with Seán T. O’Kelly than was Richard Mulcahy; they were present at O’Kelly’s second presidential inauguration in 1952 (as was Mrs Mulcahy, though not General Mulcahy), and in March 1957 they accompanied the president on a visit to Rome. At a 1962 meeting of Saor an Leanbh, Agnes expressed concern about the effect of television on children, believing that it was desensitising them to violence and failed to inculcate patriotism. She died suddenly on 31 March 1967 at her residence in Ranelagh, Dublin; her husband died the next year. Her Irish Times obituarist, who had been a fellow student, commented: ‘She believed that women should take part in public affairs, but she was womanly to the core in her actions and in her feelings’ (Ir. Times, 8 April 1967).
Ryan family material can be found in the NLI (with the Seán T. O’Kelly papers (MS 48,443/1–MS 48,503/2), and there is material relating to Min Ryan in the Richard Mulcahy papers, UCD Archives (IE UCDA P7).