Gaelic games administrator and Irish language activist
Maire Ni Chinneide
(English
Mary
or
Molly O'Kennedy
[1]
) (17 January 1879 ? 25 May 1967) was an
Irish language
activist
,
playwright
, first President of the
Camogie Association
and first woman president of
Oireachtas na Gaeilge
.
[2]
Maire was born in
Rathmines
in 1879 and attended
Muckross Park College
and
Royal University
(later the
NUI
) where she was a classmate of
Agnes O'Farrelly
,
Helena Concannon
, and
Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington
.
Irish language
[
edit
]
Maire learned
Irish
on holiday in
Ballyvourney
and earned the first scholarship in Irish from the
Royal University
, worth £100 a year, which was spent on visits to the Irish college in
Ballingeary
.
She studied in the school of Old Irish established by professor
Osborn Bergin
and was strongly influenced by the
Irish-Australian
professor O'Daly. She later taught
Latin
through Irish at
Ballingeary
and became proficient in
French
,
German
,
Italian
and
Spanish
.
She spent the last £100 of her scholarship on a
dowry
for her marriage to Sean MacGearailt, later first Accountant General of Revenue in the
Irish civil service
, with whom she lived originally in
Glasnevin
and then in
Dalkey
.
She was a founder member of the radical Craobh an Cheitinnigh, the Keating branch of the
Gaelic League
(Conradh na Gaelige), composed mainly of
Dublin
-based Kerry people and regarded, by themselves at least, as the intellectual focus of the League.
Camogie
[
edit
]
In August 1904, some six years after the establishment of the earliest women's
hurling
teams, the rules of
camogie
(then called
camoguidheacht
), first appeared in
Banba
, a journal produced by Craobh an Cheitinnigh. Camogie had come to public attention when it was showcased at the annual Oireachtas (Gaelic League Festival) earlier that year, and it differed from men's hurling in its use of a lighter ball and a smaller playing-field. Maire Ni Chinneide and Cait Ni Dhonnchadha (like Ni Chinneide, an Irish-language enthusiast and cultural nationalist), were credited with having created the game, with the assistance of Ni Dhonnchadha's scholarly brother
Tadhg O Donnchadha
, who drew up its rules.
[3]
She was on the first camogie team to play an exhibition match in Navan in July 1904, became an early propagandist for the game and, in 1905 was elected president of the infant Camogie Association. She wrote:
"all existing games were passed in review, but it was felt from the first that Hurling was the model on which the new game should be formed.” Initial matches were played on the grounds of Mr O’Dowd in Drumcondra Park, but “the place was not very suitable and players did not join in any numbers until the Keating Camoguidhthe betook themselves to the
Phoenix Park
, where they have a convenient ground well off the main road."
[4]
Gaelic League
[
edit
]
Maire later served as Vice-President of Craobh an Cheitinnigh, to
Cathal Brugha
. She was active in
Cumann na mBan
during the
Irish War of Independence
and took the pro-treaty side during the
civil war
and attempted to set up a woman's organisation "in support of the Free State" alongside
Jennie Wyse Power
.
Peig Sayers
[
edit
]
Maire first visited the
Blasket Islands
in 1932 with her daughter Niamh, who was to die tragically young. In the summer of 1934, Maire Bean Nic Gearailt as she was then, who had known
Peig Sayers
, put the idea into the old woman's head to write a memoir. According to a later interview with Ni Chinneide
- "she knew and admired her gift for easy conversation, her gracious charm as a hostess, her talent for illustrating a point she was making by a story out of her own experience that was as rich in philosophy and thought as it was limited geographically."
[5]
Peig answered that she had "nothing to write." She had learned only to read and write in English at school and most of it was forgotten.
Maire Ni Chinneide suggested Peig should dictate her memoir to her son Micheal, known to everyone on the island as An File ("The Poet"), but Peig "only shook her head doubtfully." At Christmas, a packet arrived from the
Blaskets
with a manuscript, Maire transcribed it word for word and in summer brought it back to the Blaskets to read it to Peig.
She then edited the manuscript for the Talbot Press. Peig became well known as a prescribed text on the
Leaving Certificate
curriculum in Irish.
Writing
[
edit
]
Maire had an acting part in the first modern play performed in Irish on the stage,
Casadh an tSugain
by
Douglas Hyde
in 1901. She was later author of children's plays staged by An Comhar Dramuidhachta at the Oireachtas and the
Peacock Theatre
, of which
Gleann na Sidheog
and
An Duthchas
(1908) were published. She was a broadcaster in Irish on 2RN/Radio Eireann after its foundation in 1926 and author of a translation of
Grimms' Fairy Tales
(1923). She was president of the Gaelic Players Dramatic group during the 1930s and a founder of the Gaelic Writers Association in 1939.
Ni Chinneide soon became interested in writing children's plays, including "Gleann na Sidheog" [Fairy Glen] (1905) and "Sidheoga na mBlath" [Flower Fairies] (1909). Although there is little information available on the staging of Ni Chinneide's first play, by the time her second children's play,
Sidheoga na mBlath,
was published in
An Claidheamh Soluis
in December 1907, "Eire Og" ["Young Ireland"] branches of the Gaelic League had been established in conjunction with adults' branches. P.H. Pearse in particular voiced the expectation that this play would be staged by many "Eire Og" branches "before the New Year is very old," thus indicating the immediate take up of such plays. Indeed, a week after the play's publication, it was staged in the Dominican College in Donnybrook, Dublin, where Ni Chinneide had spent several years as an Irish teacher.
[6]
Personal life
[
edit
]
She died on 25 April 1967
[7]
and is buried in
Deans Grange Cemetery
.
Trophy
[
edit
]
In 2007 the
camogie
trophy for the annual inter-county
All Ireland Championship for counties graded Junior B
was named in her honour.
Publications
[
edit
]
- Gleann na Sidheog
. (Dublin : Muintir na Leabhar Gaedhilge, 1905).
- An Duthchas: drama ein-ghniomha
. (Dublin: Connradh na Gaedhilge, 1908).
- Scealta o Ghrimm (Jacob Grimm 1785?1863)
(Translation, Dublin: Conradh na Gaedhilge, 1923).
- Peig i a sceal fein do scriobh Peig Sayers
; (Edited, Dublin, Talbot Press 1936, and subsequent editions)
References
[
edit
]
- ^
Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 29: 2009 p202 Kassandra Conley, Erin Boon, Margaret Harrison ? 2011 "... were Ireland's well-known, first-wave feminists Mary Hayden and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, and leading cultural nationalists Una Ni Fhaircheallaigh [ Agnes O'Farrelly] and the aforementioned Maire Ni Chinneide [Molly O'Kennedy]."
- ^
Moran, Mary
(2011).
A Game of Our Own: The History of Camogie
. Dublin, Ireland: Cumann Camogaiochta. p. 460.
- ^
Riona Nic Congail, "'Looking on for centuries from the side-line': Gaelic Feminism and the rise of Camogie", Eire-Ireland (Spring / Summer 2013): 168?192.
Gaelic Feminism and the Rise of Camogie
- ^
Camoguidheacht by Maire Ni Chinneide, GA Annual 1908.
- ^
Irish Independent, 12 January 1952.
- ^
Riona Nic Congail, '"Some of you will curse her": Women's Writing during the Irish-Language Revival', Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, Vol. 29, (2009), pp. 199?222.
Women's Writing during the Irish Language Revival
- ^
"NI CHINNEIDE, Maire (1878?1967)"
.
ainm.ie
(in Irish)
. Retrieved
28 July
2022
.
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