Margaret Buckley
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Margaret Buckley (nee Goulding) (1879—24 July 1962) was an Irish republican and president of Sinn Féin from 1937 to 1950.
Originally from Cork she joined Inghinidhe na hÉireann, which was founded in 1900. She was involved in anti-British royal visit protests in 1903 and 1907 and was among the group that founded An Dún in Cork in 1910. In 1906, she married Patrick Buckley, described as "a typical rugby-playing British civil servant". After his death she moved into a house in Marguerite Road, Glasnevin, Dublin. Later, she returned to Cork to care for her elderly father.
Arrested in the aftermath of 1916, she was released in the amnesty of June 1917 and played a prominent role in the reorganisation of Sinn Féin.
After his death of her father, she returned to Dublin. In 1920, she became a Dáil Court judge in the North city circuit, appointed by Austin Stack, the Minister for Home Affairs of the Irish Republic.
She opposed the Anglo-Irish Treaty and was interned in Mountjoy and Kilmainham, where she went on hunger strike. She was released in October 1923. During her imprisonment, she was elected O/C in of the republican prisoners in Mountjoy, Q/M in the North Dublin Union and O/C of B-Wing in Kilmainham. She was an active member of the Women Prisoner’s Defence League, founded by Maud Gonne and Charlotte Despard in 1922.
In 1929, she served as a member of Comhairle na Poblachta which unsuccessfully attempted to resolve the differences between Sinn Féin and the Irish Republican Army.
Buckley was also an organiser for the Irish Women Workers’ Union.
At the October 1934 Sinn Féin ard fheis, she was elected one of the party's vice-presidents. Three years later at an ard fheis attended by only forty 40 delegates she was made president.
Importantly, when she assumed the leadership of Sinn Féin, the party was not supported by the IRA, which had severed its links with the party in the 1920s. When she left the office in 1950, relations with the IRA had been resolved.
In 1938, she published wrote a book about the experiences of Irish Republican women prisoners interned by the Irish Free State forces, called The Jangle of the Keys. In 1956, her Short History of Sinn Féin was published.
She served as honorory vice-president of Sinn Féin from 1950 until her death in 1962. She was the only member of the ard chomairle of the party not to be arrested during a police raid in July 1957.
She was buried in St. Finbarr’s cemetery, Cork.
[edit] Sources
- "Margaret Buckley, president of Sinn Féin", Saoirse, July 1998.
