‘MNA’ (Women)

Stories of the lives of ordinary and famous Irish women from 1895. Lizzie Ryan’s verbatim testimony of the stormy night they all nearly died on Eagle Island, through ‘Eirebrushed’s 1916 hero Elizabeth O’Farrell’s surrender testimony. Julia Clarke was sentenced in the 1930s for kissing a man. ‘Eirebrushed’s Eva Gore Booth, playwright and suffragist and campaigner for Roger Casement. The 1980s ‘Quilt’/’Party Boy’ women - an Aids Nurse and a contemporary Cork woman on nuns, veils and gender identity.

A series of independent monologues charting the changes in the status of women through the 20th century, the crossroads of the 1970s and the promise for ‘Mná na hEireann’ (women of Ireland) around the election of Mary Robinson as President of Ireland in the 1990s. Starring Flo Mc Sweeney, Brenda Mc Sweeney and Elaine Moore O’Donohue in a new treatment by Brian Merriman.