Letters to Angela Clifford

This text concerns Muriel MacSwiney, the wife of Terence MacSwiney, the Irish Republican martyr and international revolutionary who died after two-and-a-half months on hunger strike in 1920. Muriel Frances Murphy was a Cork heiress who was concerned about social injustice and who believed Irish freedom would bring that justice along with independence.;During her three years with Terence MacSwiney, Muriel did what she could to further the national cause. While her husband was on hunger strike, she attended the offices of the Self-Determination League to give bulletins on his health. She did not collapse physically herself till right at the end.;Muriel lived for a further 60 years. This book traces her life after her husband's death: her work against the Treaty; espousal of Jim Larkin's Communist Party and the Continental revolutionary movement; and political commitment to the worldwide oppressed.;Muriel's politics were not to the satisfaction of Catholic-nationalist Ireland. There was one child of the marriage, Maire. She was kidnapped from Germany by Mary macSwiney, and brought to Ireland, where the deed was ratified by the courts. A cause that Muriel believed in was the housing agitation led by Dennis Dennehy, whose hunger strike caught her attention, coinciding as it did with the 50th anniversary celebrations of the sitting of the First Dail in early 1969. It was the social agitation which occasioned this book, the letters written by Muriel to Angela Clifford in the following few years. These letters fill out Muriel's public profile, and reveal her as progressive ahead of her time.