Alice Letitia Milligan [pseud. Iris Olkyrn] (4 September 1865 – 13 April 1953) was an Irish writer and activist in Ireland's Celtic Revival; an advocate for the political and cultural participation of women; and a Protestant-unionist convert to the cause of Irish independence. She was at the height of her renown at the turn of the 20th century when in Belfast, with Anna Johnston, she produced the political and literary monthly The Shan Van Vocht (1896–1899), and when in Dublin the Irish Literary Theatre's performed "The Last Feast of the Fianna” (1900), Milligan's interpretation of Celtic legend as national drama.
Early life and influences
Family and education Milligan was one of nine surviving children born to Charlotte Burns, a linen shop assistant, and Seaton Milligan, a commercial drapery salesman in a village outside Omagh, County Tyrone, in 1866. In 1879, promoted by his company to an executive position, her father moved the family to Belfast where Milligan was able to attend Methodist College, Belfast, an early pioneer of secondary mixed-sex education. Her first poems were published in the school magazine Eos.
Her father, a liberal unionist and well-known antiquarian, organized talks and lectures for the local workingmen's institute and drew his daughter into discussion of history, international affairs and literature. Alice also acknowledged the influence of a family servant, Jane, who conveyed the spirit of her previous mistress Mary Ann McCracken (1770–1866). McCracken was the devoted sister of Henry Joy McCracken, the United Irish leader executed in the wake of the 1798 Rebellion and, to the end of her days in Belfast, an advocate for women and for the poor.
As a by-product of their participation together in the Belfast Naturalists' Field Club, Milligan and her father wrote an ethnographic travelogue of Ireland, Glimpses of Erin (1888). In the book her father offered that "patriotism … far from being an irrational sentiment is entirely rational and desirable from a utilitarian point of view. It is as much so from a Christian standpoint. By living in our own land and doing our best to benefit it, we can best carry out the command 'Do unto others as you would that they should do to you'".
The Gaelic League After a year studying in English history and literature at King's College, London, Milligan trained as a teacher and 1888 secured a position as a Latin instructor at the MacKillip's Ladies Collegiate School in Derry. It is here that she first became interested in Irish, the once majority language that as a child she had heard spoken only by farm hands. In 1891 she took a further position in Dublin. Unable, until the formation in 1893 of the Gaelic League, to find any school or group to teach Irish, she took lessons privately, while reading Irish literature and history in the National Library.
Milligan's command of Irish was never fluent, and on that basis Patrick Pearse was to object when, in 1904, the Gaelic League hired her as a travelling lecturer. With the help of costumed tableaux vivants evoking Irish historical or literary subjects (a skill she first acquired when commissioned to assist with the Irish exhibit at the 1893 Chicago World Fair), Milligan proved herself by establishing new branches throughout Ireland and raising funds along the way. In the north, in Ulster, she focused on the more difficult task of recruiting Protestants, working with, among other activists, League president Douglas Hyde, Ada McNeill, Roger Casement, Stephen Gwynn, and Seamus McManus.
Political development A Royal Democrat In Dublin Milligan was witness both to the first stirrings of the Irish cultural renaissance and to the last act in the political career of Charles Stewart Parnell. In June 1891 she saw the beleaguered leader of Irish nationalism at a public meeting "beaten and ashamed" by the furore created by his being named in a divorce case (his affair with Kitty O'Shea). In the poem "At Maynooth" she scathingly contrasts the private life of George V, in 1911 rapturously received at the Catholic seminary by Cardinal Logue, to that of the man once hailed as Ireland's "uncrowned King".
Fascinated by Parnell and his non-denominational nationalism, Milligan followed his appearances across the city, sketching him as she went. This, she conceded, represented a sea-change in her political consciousness. Until then she described herself (despite her father's relative liberalism) as still very much a product of a "Tory and Protestant" upbringing, blinded to the literature and history of her native land by her formal education. In May 1891 she noted in her diary: "While in the tram going up O’Connell Street I turned into a Parnellite."
Writing as "Iris Olkyrn", Milligan's first novel, published the year before Parnell's death in October 1891, A Royal Democrat, had been a neo-Jacobite tale of a future Prince of Wales who, born to an Irish mother, leads "his" people in the struggle for land rights and a restored Irish Parliament. Assuming of the defeat of the existing Irish Home Rule movement, and attempting too many reconciliations, it was not well received in the nationalist press.
Commemorating 1798
In 1893 Milligan returned to Belfast. She lived with Anna Johnston (later to write under the name, Ethna Carbery), the daughter of Robert Johnston, a leading member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Together with their next-door neighbour, the English-born suffragist Mary Ann Bulmer, they founded the Irish Women's Association (IWA) in Belfast both to spread "national ideas among the women" and to sustain the city's national and literary "prestige". Branches were also established in Moneyreagh (where the Presbyterian minister, Richard Lyttle, convened the Gaelic League), and in Portadown. In 1895 Milligan started writing a regular column for the Irish Weekly Independent entitled "Notes from the North" to remind a Dublin readership of these and other contributions of women, and of the North, to the national cause.
Together with Johnston and Bulmer (and her son Bulmer Hobson, later also of the IRB), Milligan was drawn into the orbit of Francis Joseph Bigger. Bigger was a wealthy Presbyterian solicitor; like her father an avid antiquarian (he co-edited the journal of the Irish Folklore Society with Milligan's sister Charlotte); and a celebrated host. To his house, Ard Righ, on the northern shore of Belfast Lough, Bigger attracted the poets and writers of the "Northern Revival" (among them Seumus McManus, Helen Waddell, Herbert Hughes, and Margaret Pender) as well other prominent culturati. It was at Ard Righ that Milligan first met, among the regular visitors, James Connolly, Roger Casement and W. B. Yeats. Walking with her on Cave Hill above Ard Righ ("holy" to Milligan as the site where Wolfe Tone and McCracken pledged themselves to Irish independence), Yeats disappointed Milligan. He failed “to warm to the least mention of '98".
Milligan's passion for the United Irishmen was shared by Bigger (he had a room in Ard Arigh dedicated to the rebellion). Together, Neal O'Boyle and Ethna Carbery, they sought to organise a Belfast commemoration of the 1798 centenary. Milligan produced a six-penny Life of Theobald Wolfe Tone (Belfast, 1898). However, the descendants of the "Protestant leaders and peasants" who, according to Milligan, had sealed Tone's union of creeds on "the battle field and scaffold",Alice Milligan (1895) "The North is Up!", Weekly Independent, Christmas effectively restricted any commemorative display to Catholic districts. A processive outing (organised with help of Lyttle) to the grave of Betsy Gray, heroine of the Battle of Ballynahinch, ended in a fracas and the destruction by unionists of her memorial stone. Milligan's emphasis upon Belfast's republican past "served to highlight just how different the city was at the end of the nineteenth century".
Meanwhile, attitudes on the nationalist side persuaded Milligan to launch (through the IWA) a separate Women's Centenary Union. As a woman she found that she was being barred from Centenary meetings, and that these were being appropriated by local politicians to solicit Catholic votes. On April 6, 1897, she beseeched readers of The Shan Van Vocht: "Is it too much to ask [...] that the women of Ireland, who are not asked to have any opinion whatever as to who shall have the right to speak for Ireland in the British Parliament, should form the Union which an historic occasion demands".
The Shan Van Vocht The two-penny journal
The Shan Van Vocht (The "Poor Old Woman" in Irish, the metaphor for Ireland in a rebellion-era ballad) was produced by Milligan and Johnston in the offices of Robert Johnston's timber yard (and often edited at Ard Righ). They had been editing the paper of another commemorative circle, the Henry Joy McCracken Literary Society, the Northern Patriot, but in December 1895 they were dismissed possibly because in three of their four issues they had supported amnesty for Fenian prisoners.Curtis, Liz (1993), The Cause of Ireland. Beyond the Pale, Belfast. p. 168
In a short period, the two-penny monthly achieved a wide circulation. As touring lecturers for the Irish Women's Association, Milligan and Johnston promoted the magazine and the formation of reading circles. Agents were found in Dublin, Derry, Glasgow and New York. Within a year subscriptions were also coming in from the Irish diaspora in South Africa, Canada, Argentina and Australia. Maud Gonne, who described Milligan as "small, aggressive and full of observant curiosity", said that she and her friends were "full of almost envious admiration of some numbers of the Shan Van Vocht, a daring little paper".
The formula was similar to that which had launched the Gavan Duffy's Young Ireland paper in the 1840s. Like The Nation, The Shan Van Vocht offered a mixture of poetry, serialised fiction, Irish history, political analysis and announcements.
The second issue (Belfast, February 1896) contained the following: "America ... Oh mighty foster land" (poem); "The Captain’s Daughter" (a serial written by Milligan under the name Iris Olkyrn); "The Lonely One" (poem); "The Rise and Fall of the Fenian Movement of ‘67" (serialised history); "Manus O’Mallaghan and the Fairies" (folklore); "Irish Football Victory"; "On Inisheer’" (poem); "Willie Kane of the “Northern Star”, How He Escaped the Scaffold" (United Irishman); "Irishmen in the Transvaal" (volunteers with the Boers against the British); "The Burial-Place of the Sheares" (United Irishmen); "Our National Language"; "James Clarence Mangan"; "Reviews – The life of Owen Roe O'Neill (the rebel Ulster chieftain), The Life and Writings of Fintan Lalor" (prophet of the Land War); "Our Notebook’" (diary and announcements); "The Moonlighters Hound" (poem); "For the Old Land" (review of different agencies advancing the national cause).
Unity above creed and class The very first issue, January 1896, had given a platform to James Connolly: "Socialism and Nationalism", his argument that without a creed capable of challenging the rule of the capitalist, landlord and financier, the nationalism of "Irish Language movements, Literary Societies or Commemoration Committees" would achieve little. Connolly was allowed further submissions, and Milligan published appreciative letters from readers. Yet while expressing "full sympathy with Mr Connolly's views on the labour and social questions", Milligan opposed the formation of his Irish Socialist Republican Party and refused their invitation to lecture.