Margaret Buckley

Margaret Buckley (née Goulding; ; July 1879 – 24 July 1962) was an Irish republican, trade unionist and writer who served as president of Sinn Féin from 1937 to 1950. She was the first female leader of Sinn Féin and the first woman to lead a political party in Ireland.

An opponent of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, Buckley was interned during the Irish Civil War, during which she served as officer commanding the republican women prisoners in Kilmainham and led several hunger strikes against the conditions of her and her comrades' detention. Her account of that imprisonment, The Jangle of the Keys (1938), is regarded as the only published memoir by a female anti-Treaty prisoner and was reissued by Sinn Féin in 2022. As president of Sinn Féin she was the principal plaintiff in the Sinn Féin Funds case, an unsuccessful attempt to have the party recognised as the legal successor of the pre-1922 organisation and thus entitled to funds held in trust since the Civil War, a case that also produced a landmark Supreme Court ruling on the separation of powers.

Outside politics, Buckley spent four decades as an organiser with the Irish Women Workers' Union, and, writing under the pen name "Margaret Lee", was a persistent critic of the 1937 Constitution, which she said treated Irish women "as if they were half-wits".

Early life Buckley was born in July 1879 at Winter's Hill, Cork, the eldest daughter of James Goulding and his wife Ellen. Her father worked as a labourer at the time of her birth, and later as a railway porter and then a railway inspector; the family were supporters of Parnell. As an Inghinidhe activist she campaigned for the establishment of an Irish Industrial Development Society, and took part in protests against the visit of Edward VII to Cork in 1903. while another records that she was in Cork at Easter 1916 and joined only after the Easter Rising, becoming an active member of the Michael O'Hanrahan cumann in north Dublin. By 1925 she was prominent enough within the party to speak at that year's Ard Fheis, where, responding to concerns that Sinn Féin was losing support for want of a clear social and economic policy, she stressed that rank-and-file republicans wanted to know how their lives would actually be different under a republican government.

She was involved in the War of Independence in Cork. During her imprisonment, she was elected Officer Commanding (OC) of the republican prisoners in Mountjoy, Quartermaster (QM) in the North Dublin Union, and OC of B-Wing in Kilmainham.

The Jangle of the Keys In 1938, Buckley published The Jangle of the Keys, an account of the experiences of Irish republican women prisoners interned by the Irish Free State. The literary scholar Claire Dubois has described the book as a testimony to the physical and psychological brutality faced by republican women during the Civil War, arguing that it offers "a subversive narrative of the Civil War" that goes against the official silence imposed on women deemed deviant for their activism, and functions, in the terms of the philosopher Jacques Rancière, as a "dissensus" that renders visible what had previously been silenced. Historian Séan Ó Duibhir has noted that although her election was a historic first, it brought no immediate electoral gains, and by 1940 the party had become so marginal that the Irish authorities largely ignored it, even as republicans elsewhere were being interned over fears of collusion with Nazi Germany. The sum in dispute, originally around £8,610 when lodged in 1924, had grown through accrued interest to roughly £24,000 by the 1940s. She remained active in Sinn Féin affairs and in trade union work into her late seventies, retiring from her IWWU role only in the late 1950s.