MULTI-VENUE EXHIBITION CURATED BY CATHERINE MARSHALL

Kathleen Lynn of Mayo: ‘a brave and wise soul’

This is a line from a poem dedicated to her which was published in the Worker’s Republic 22 April 1916.
 
Dr Kathleen Florence Lynn passed away after eighty-one years of life on 14 September 1955 in Saint Mary’s Anglican Home in Pembroke Park, Ballsbridge, and is buried in the Lynn family plot, in Deansgrange Cemetery, an unmarried woman laid to rest alongside her parents and siblings.
This seemingly unremarkable set of circumstances is in fact extraordinary, given the life that Dr. Lynn had lived over the previous eight decades. Kathleen had set her own course in life, but, unlike others who were female pioneers and innovators during this era, the choices she made necessitated the breaking of connections with family and class.
 
Her role in the 1916 Rising was not forgotten by her contemporaries. Members of the Old IRA, the 7th Eastern Battalion, fired three volleys over her grave. Those recorded as attending Dr Lynn’s funeral reflect the life she lived, and in which she had achieved and given so much. The front page of the Irish Press shows an image of her funeral cortege passing nurses from Saint Ultan’s, the hospital she founded, lining the road in Rathmines in their crisp white uniforms. The Irish Citizen Army provided a guard of honour at the graveside and an Army bugler sounded the Last Post.
 
Members of Cumann Gaelach na hEaglaise were also in attendance.  Kathleen Lynn was a committed member of the Church of Ireland, but was vocal in what she saw as the need to reform the Church of Ireland, working with Douglas Hyde to de-Anglicise the church through their involvement with Cumann Gaelach na hEaglaise.

Kathleen was born in Mulaghfarry, north Mayo, on 28 January 1874 to Katherine Lynn nee Wynne who was descended from
the Earl of Hazelwood. She was distantly related to Countess de Markievicz through an aunt’s marriage to the Gore-Booths of Sligo. Maeb Ruane, one of Kathleen’s early biographers, discovered that circuitously Kathleen was descended from Mary, Queen of Scots. 
 
Her more immediate antecedents included her grandfather, Sligo doctor Robert Kerison Lynn. When he died in May 1873 he left his effects, valued at just under £800 to his son, Canon Lynn, in Mullaghfarry. It was there in midwinter that his second daughter, named Kathleen Florence, was born; her second name had been made popular by nurse Florence Nightingale, famed for her work during the Crimean War.
 
There were two other daughters, Anne Elizabeth known as Nan, born in January 1873 and Emily Muriel, born 1876, followed by the youngest and only boy, John.  In 1882, when Kathleen was nine, the family moved from North Mayo to Shrule in Longford where her father took over the Ballymahon Parish. Four years later the family was back living in Mayo, this time in Cong, where her father’s parish was under the patronage of the Ardilauns of Ashford Castle. Lady Ardilaun was a Patron at Alexandria School in Dublin and Kathleen was sent there when she was sixteen.
 
She was described in the school magazine as ‘one of the most gifted student doctors’ and congratulated when she gained first place in anatomy: ‘a distinction not hitherto achieved by a woman’. Legislation introduced during Kathleen’s lifetime allowed women to qualify in the medical profession ‘without distinction of sex’.  During her training she interned in the Maternity Hospital at Holles Street and at the Rotunda Lying-in Hospital she received her licentiate in midwifery and in 1902 she joined the staff of The Royal Victoria Eye and Ear Hospital. In 1904 she moved into 9 Belgrave Road, Rathmines, where she established her practice as a GP and where she continued to live for the rest of her life. In 1909 she was made a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, described as a ‘rare distinction’. An advocate of the rights of women, she became a member of the Irish Women’s Suffrage and Local Government Association in 1903.
 
At the time of the Lock Out in 1913 Kathleen became active in the relief efforts for the workers and their families who had been locked out by their employers. This charitable activity or political philanthropy according to biographer Margaret O’ hOgartaigh was to push Lynn further along the road to Revolution. When the Irish Citizen Army was established she was appointed Chief Medical Officer with the rank of Captain. James Connolly was said ‘to be constantly amazed at how completely she was accepted by members of the ICA. It was to Dr Lynn, rather than the Countess, that he presented a gold brooch on Holy Thursday 1916 in recognition of her work for the ICA. During Easter Week she was in City Hall. In the 1950s Connolly’s daughter Nora wrote:  The members of the Citizen Army, who were perhaps more famed for the toughness of their qualities than for the delicacy of their perceptions, were swift to recognize this calm serenity of Dr Lynn, and won comfort and assurance from it many times … Those who were there with her remember and often tell of her calmness and serenity while on the roof of the City Hall with bullets smacking all round her.
 
 St Ultan’s Hospital, Teach Ultain, began with a £100 and two cots in 1919 and grew from an old domestic training college in Charlemont Street into a pioneering hospital for infants under the careful guidance of Kathleen Lynn and her partner Madeleine ffrench Mullen. The hospital was managed exclusively by women and staffed by doctors recognized for their excellence such as Dorothy Stopford-Price, Alice Barry and Ella Webb. One of the aims of the hospital was to be ‘a university for mothers’ and this extended to running a holiday home for families in Baldoyle. St Ultan’s pioneered the modern form of the BCG as early as 1937, when Dr Dorothy Stopford Price, who had become expert in childhood tuberculosis, introduced it from Sweden. The BCG was in use in St Ultan’s ten years before it was available

throughout the country. Dr. John Cowell, the first man employed at the hospital, said he owed his appointment to his expertise in the treatment of TB.
 
Dr Lynn, alongside her partner Madeleine ffrench Mullen, worked tirelessly to ‘spread knowledge’ with the St Ultan’s Hospital Utility Society. In 1934 Dr Maria Montessori, the first female medical doctor to qualify in Italy, visited the hospital and the two women exchanged ideas; by the end of the year there was a Montessori ward at St Ultan’s.  This learning method was criticized by some of Kathleen’s contemporaries; one UCD professor calling it ‘braggart blasphemy’.

Politician and Advocate:
Following the Rising Kathleen was not permitted by the family to visit them in Mayo. However, they were instrumental in getting her ‘open arrest’ assisting a doctor in Bath rather than a prison term for her part in the Rising. In 1917 Kathleen was elected to the Sinn Féin Executive, which was an umbrella organisation of nationalists following the Rising. Active in the War of Independence, she was arrested in 1918 but was released to assist with the flu epidemic. She was elected to the Dáil, but having opposed the Treaty of 1921, she did not take her seat. By 1926 she had distanced herself from politics and concentrated on her hospital. She remained a member of Rathmines Urban District Council until 1930.
Always a humanitarian, she was Vice-President of Save the German Children, an organisation which located homes for German children in Ireland during the Second World War. She had spent time in Germany in her youth and always kept her contacts there. The German Government was represented at her funeral.
Kathleen continued to work as a doctor until she was over eighty. Today her hospital is gone but during her lifetime she saved and changed the lives of countless mothers and infants. She was a pioneer, an innovator and a leader. She followed her own beliefs in everything, including her relationship with Madeleine, the details of which are preserved in her diaries from 1916, now in the Royal College of Physicians.
Today people enjoying the benefits of fresh air and exercise can stay in her cottage in Glenmalure in County Wicklow which she willed to An Óige. If indeed the proposed new children's hospital were to be named after her it would be a fitting tribute given her enormous contribution to the foundation of the State, and the care she gave to so many of the mothers and children who were most in need.
 
I am proud to be associated with the Mayo Arts Collaborative. We all share the belief in the importance of this Mayo woman and trust this work will encourage people to read her story and be inspired by her courage always to be her own person, true to her ‘brave and wise soul’.
 
Sinead McCoole 2016



Kathleen Lynn; Insider on the outside

We think of ‘insiders’ as those who belong because of their family connections, their education, their wealth, and generally their confidence and social ease. Born into a comfortable Church of Ireland family with close connections to some of the best established families in Ireland, there was no reason why Kathleen Lynn might not have enjoyed this empowering position all her life. That, however, is not how it turned out for her. Lynn studied medicine in the early years of the 20th century, only to find that paid hospital work was denied her, simply because she was a woman. Outrage at this drove her to systematically challenge the status quo over the next decades. She joined James Connolly’s Citizen Army, fought in the 1916 Rising, formed a lasting relationship with another woman, Madeleine ffrench Mullen, with whom she set up St Ultan’s Hospital for Infant Children in Charlemont Street, Dublin, and refused the Dáil seat she was elected to because she opposed the Treaty in 1922. Those actions were enough to place her outside her circle of family and friends, but she became even more of an outsider when her old colleague Éamon DeValera, as Taoiseach in the 1930s, opposed her attempts to integrate St Ultan’s with Harcourt St. hospital to form a National Children’s Hospital, because he feared that as a confirmed Protestant, her involvement would modify the Catholicism of the new institution. Lynn’s choices throughout her life placed her firmly outside the circles of power.

So when Áras Inis Gluaire-Erris, Ballina Arts Centre, Ballinglen Art Foundation, Linenhall Arts Centre and Custom House Studios and Gallery, Westport decided to collaborate to hold an art exhibition, spread over all five venues, to honour this Co. Mayo woman, I was very excited and flattered to be invited to curate it. The resulting exhibition brings together newly commissioned work by 12 artists and one pre-existing work. Given his love of the Mayo landscape, and Kathleen Lynn’s lifelong concerns about nutrition for the poor, Patrick Graham’s painting, Famine, (1998), seemed an appropriate starting point for the show. Near famine conditions recurred in areas of Ireland until well into the 20th century and there is a widely-publicised photograph of Lynn holding emaciated babies that could just as easily have dated from the 1840s. If Graham’s Famine captures the poverty, still real during Lynn’s childhood in Mayo, the other artists in this exhibition have all responded to Lynn’s concerns about the environment, gender, the right to freedom and love.

In 2016 as we celebrate the courage and selflessness of figures like Lynn and her fellow revolutionaries, Seamus Nolan invites us to think about what it is like to be a woman participant in an armed struggle for liberation now. How did her vision differ from that of the young Kurdish teenager, Silhan Özçelik? The historical obscuring of women in Lynn’s time is actively challenged in Matriline, Mary Kelly’s project. Kelly wants to make women from Lynn’s time to ours so visible that they will not be easily erased in the future. Conor O’Grady’s installation, Some Irish Mothers, also draws attention to historic erasure, aligning images of women’s work to that of men to question their respective values, opportunities and processes. Janet Mullarney, inspired by the notorious incident when a Suffragette threw herself to her death under the King’s horse at Ascot, got to thinking about macho campaigns such as the crusades, and wittily substituted a clothes horse draped with both a trousers and a skirt to conjure up further thoughts about male and female identity. Given Lynn’s lifelong political activism, Michelle Browne focused her attention on contemporary women who followed in Lynn’s footsteps and moved from the family home to the political arena, competing at the hustings, participating in the political process to the highest level. Her recorded interviews raise questions about continuity as well as change. Sadly, so do Deirdre O’Mahony’s twitter conversations about medical provision in rural Ireland. What would Kathleen Say? O’Mahony asks in poster after poster detailing first hand experiences of service failures and the closure of clinics and dispensaries. Lynn’s medical career is also referenced very subtly in Will O’Kane’s use of plaster casts of images that result from the overlap between digital technologies and scanning. While the images take us back to the Church in Mullaghfarry, where Lynn’s father served as rector, their fabrication and their placement in the gallery raise thoughts about communicative processes in contemporary life.Geraldine O’Reilly, Joanna Hopkins and Margo McNulty tease out aspects of Kathleen Lynn’s personal life as well as her public position in their work.

McNulty studied artefacts including Lynn’s diaries, fascinating in structure as well as content, that connect to Lynn’s faith in republicanism, in Germany and other matters. Geraldine O’Reilly’s homage to Lynn throws up a wonderful drawing of her now derelict birthplace as well as lively drawings of aspects of Lynn’s character as seen in photographs of her in Saint Ultan’s. Joanna Hopkins opens up the previously unexamined relationship between Lynn and Madeleine ffrench Mullen through tender, delicate watercolour drawings of their letters and an installation to mark their special celebrations.

Gary Coyle and Dermot Seymour round off this contemporary response to Kathleen Lynn’s life and work with two landscape works that together make telling and poignant comments on current attitudes to nature and to urban poverty. It was a now defunct chemical plant, still polluting local waterways and by extension the fields immediately surrounding Lynn’s birthplace that caught Dermot Seymour’s sardonic eye. Asahi Epitaph could have been painted from Lynn’s old nursery window. Its concern about the ecology of the Irish countryside makes this an appropriate epitaph for a founder member of An Óige.

Gary Coyle’s drawings explore the layers of memories that attach to places, often otherwise unremarkable. In this instance his attention was caught by the emptiness of the site, on Dublin’s Charlemont Street, which was occupied until 2013 by ffrench Mullen House, a social housing unit that Lynn and ffrench Mullen had campaigned for in their fight to improve the lot of inner city poor in the first half of the last century. Its vast emptiness now, while homelessness is once again a major issue shows how contemporary Lynn and her friends continue to be. That is how the artists in this exhibition saw them.

Catherine Marshall
Curator