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In this letter from Alfred ('Alfie') Byrne (1882-1956) to Hanna Sheehy Skeffington (1877-1946), he expressed his sympathies regarding the execution of Hanna's husband, Francis. He then discusses the inquiry made into Francis' death and the possibility of compensation. Alfred Byrne was first elected an MP in the 1915 by-election as a nationalist candidate for the Irish Parliamentary Party. Although opposed to the Easter Rising, he spent 1916 lobbying on behalf of the interned prisoners. Before the Rising he was also a vociferous anti-conscription campaigner. Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, suffragette, nationalist, language teacher, was the founder of the Irish Women’s Franchise League and a founding member of the Irish Women Workers’ Union. She was the widow of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington who was summarily executed on 26 April 1916. She was active during the Rising, bringing food to the Volunteers in the G.P.O. and the College of Surgeons. Four days passed before she found out what had happened to her husband, Francis (1878-1916), and it wasn't until almost two weeks later that the full details of his execution emerged.
The data in these XML files was generated based on a data dump from the Magellan database (https://github.com/Maynooth-Center-for-Digital-Humanities/Magellan). Each database record has been converted to a JSON file (https://github.com/letters1916static/letters-data/tree/main/json). The element section of the JSON file contains the TEI-encoded contents of the letters. The TEI XML has been cleaned and made well-formed using a Python script (https://github.com/letters1916static/letters-data/tree/main/src).