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16th Nov.
1915 RATHGAR KINDERGARTEN.
&
TRAINING COLLEGE.
11 FRANKFORT AVENUE. Dear Mrs. Sheehy Sheffington I am glad Owen is
better and that it is
nothing infectious. I
hope we shall soon
see him back at school. About Miss Somers - I
should be glad to
support her, but the
thing is for the
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most part in the
hands of a sub committee,
who are to select four
names to bring up
before the committee on
Monday, so the voting
will be restricted to
those four. There are over a hundred
applicants, so the work
of the sub committee is
pretty heavy. I hope Miss Somers may
be among the four
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selected. Yours very sincerely Isabella D. Tuckey
Letter from schoolteacher Isabella Dorthea Tuckey to Hanna Sheehy Skeffington (1877-1946)
regarding the health of Owen, Hanna's son, who has been absent from school on account
of illness. The letter then moves on to discuss the position of an applicant, Miss
Summers. Isabella explains that the selection process is decided by committees and
that there are a large number of applicants, but that she hopes that the woman Hanna
has written about is one of the four selected.
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.