Grace Gifford married Joe Plunkett in the chapel of Kilmainham Gaol a few hours before he was executed by a British firing squad.
In this rare footage, taken from the film of Michael Collins selling
...
the first bonds of the Republican Loan or Dáil Loan, Grace is seen at the front on the left in the view of those about to buy the loan, and then buying the loan from Michael Collins.
The business of selling those first loans was transacted outside St Enda's School, Sgoil Éanna, in Rathfarnham, on the block (now in the Kilmainham Gaol Museum) where Robert Emmet had been hanged, drawn and quartered.
The film was made by John MacDonagh, Grace's brother-in-law (he was the brother of her elder sister Muriel's husband, Tomás MacDonagh, signatory of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic and one of the seven leaders of the 1916 Rising. Another brother, Joe MacDonagh, who would die on hunger strike on Christmas Day 1922, is at the centre of the group - the bald man staring straight out, still amid the movement.
When this film was made, in October 1919, Grace had lost her husband, her brother-in-law Tomás, her sister Kay's husband Joseph, who died in the 1918 Flu, and her sister Muriel, who had a fatal heart attack while swimming in July 1917. She seems to move almost in a dream.
Many of those pictured here would be dead within five years: Erskine Childers, Arthur Griffith, Michael Collins - it is like a community of ghosts waiting to be born, these vigorous people who would not long survive.
The music used here is by the Aran singer Lasarfhiona Ní Choinníola.
