Dorothy Macardle (1889–1958)

Dorothy Macardle was born in Dundalk, Ireland, to a wealthy brewing family famous for their Macardle's Ale. They moved to Dublin when she was in her teens, and she was educated at Alexandra College and University College Dublin. After graduating, she returned to Alexandra College to teach English. She was active in republican and feminist politics, and was writing plays. The first professional production of one of her plays took place in the 1910s with the Little Theatre in Dublin, founded by Daisy Bannard Cogley, who directed a production of Macardle's play Asthara in 1918. Mcardle worked as a journalist and publicist during the War of Independence and the Civil War.

When the republican movement split in 1921–1922 over the Anglo-Irish Treaty to create the Irish Free State, Macardle sided with the anti-Treaty faction and accused the new Irish government of betraying its ideals. She was arrested in 1922, and served time in both Mountjoy and Kilmainham Gaols.

McCardle deplored what she saw as the reduced status of women in the 1937 Constitution of Ireland. Noting that the mew Constitution had dropped the commitment to guarantee equal rights and opportunities "without distinction of sex," she demanded of Eamon de Valera how anyone "with advanced views on the rights of women" could support it. She also criticized compulsory Irish language teaching in schools.

While working as a journalist with the League of Nations in the 1930s, Macardle came to feel an affinity with the plight of Czechoslovakia as it was being pressed to make territorial concessions to Nazi Germany. Believing that "Hitler's war should be everybody's war," she disagreed with de Valera's policy of Irish neutrality. She went to work for the BBC in London, worked on her fiction writing, and, at the end of World War II, campaigned for refugee children, a crisis described in her book Children of Europe (1949). In 1951 she became the first president of the Irish Society of Civil Liberties.

Macardle recounted her Civil Car experiences in Earthbound: Nine Stories of Ireland (1924). She continued as a playwright for the next two decades. In her dramatic writing she used the pseudonym Margaret Callan.

Her book The Irish Republic was first published in 1937 and was well-received by criticsl Macardle was widely praised for her research, thorough documentation, range of sources, and narration of dramatic events, The book was reprinted several times, most recently in 2005. The Irish Republic was the only authoritative account of the period 1916-1926 that was widely used by de Valera and Fianna Fáil over the years.