A – Local elections today. Are you voting?
B – I cast mine by post. I cannot understand a low vote.
A – Blood has been shed for the right to vote.
B – In my Irish village, Ballinacurra, one day in 1928, a group of young women ran through the Main Street shouting “We’ve got the vote. We’ve got the vote”.
A – Why did they do that?
B – To be allowed to vote, an organisation of women turned to violence. They were called suffragettes.
A – Who was the first woman Member of Parliament?
B – She was Countess Constance Markiewicz, a member of the ruling class from Galway. Exactly 90 years ago, in the 1916 Easter Rising, she was sentenced to death, but later reprieved because of her sex. Eleven men were shot, one in a wheelchair. She was elected to Parliament in 1918 for Sinn Féin in Dublin for women over thirty, but never took her seat in Westminster. In 1928, women got complete electoral equality.
Rose Lynch
5-May-2006
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