Macardle, Dorothy Margaret (1889–1958), writer and republican activist, was born 7 March 1889 in Dundalk, Co. Louth, the eldest child of Thomas Callan Macardle (later knighted), businessman, and his wife, Minnie Lucy (née Ross), who had three sons and another daughter. Her father's family owned a brewery in Dundalk (Macardle, Moore & Co.); he was chairman of the Dundalk chamber of commerce and a justice of the peace for Co. Louth. Minnie Macardle was from an English anglican background (she converted to catholicism on marriage) and was a unionist in politics – her husband was a home ruler – and appears to have felt isolated in Ireland. She inculcated in her children an idealised view of England and an enthusiasm for the British empire, against which Dorothy later reacted. Dorothy's relations with her mother, who later opposed her desire for an independent career, were difficult; there are some indications that Minnie had a neurotic personality and that her marriage was unhappy (the Macardles lived separately in later life).
As a child Dorothy developed a lifelong love of literature. She suffered from health problems, envied her brothers who went to the Oratory School in Birmingham, and felt trapped in Dundalk (though the family undertook European travel; she learned several European languages and came to love the Continent). She was educated at home by a governess until 1905, when she went to Alexandra College, Dublin; here she came into contact with cultural nationalism and participated in social work through the Alexandra social guild. Exposure to the Dublin slums convinced her that an autonomous Ireland might be better able to look after its own affairs.
Macardle continued her studies in Alexandra's collegiate department, and graduated with a first-class honours BA in English language and literature from the NUI (1912), came third in Ireland in English literature, and won a scholarship to the Dublin University School of Education, where she qualified as a teacher in 1914. She engaged in educational and theatrical work (1914–16) at Stratford upon Avon, Warwickshire, where encounters with upper-class English people who expressed contempt for Ireland and supported repressing it by force weakened her anglophilia. Although she supported the Allied cause in the first world war (two of her brothers joined the British army – one was killed in action – and their father chaired the Co. Louth recruiting committee), she came to believe the true power-holders in Britain were not prepared to apply their professed principles of justice and freedom to Ireland.
After returning to Dublin early in 1917, Macardle moved in theatrical circles; her first play, ‘Asthara’ (since lost), was produced at the Hardwicke Street theatre of Edward Martyn (qv) in May 1918, and ‘Atonement’ (a depiction of a peasant family feud) was staged by the Abbey in December 1918. A popular teacher at Alexandra College, known affectionately as ‘Maccy’ by her students, she lectured on Elizabethan drama and the nineteenth-century romantic revival and in 1918 was appointed to the Pfeiffer professorship in English at the school – a post she held until her dismissal in December 1922 as a result of her political activities. She was also editor of the Alexandra College Magazine for a time, and continued to contribute articles to it until her death.
Through her theatrical activities Macardle came into contact with Maud Gonne MacBride (qv) and Constance Markievicz (qv), who completed her conversion to republicanism. In late 1918 or early 1919 she joined Cumann na mBan. Around this time she first met Éamon de Valera (qv), for whom she conceived a lifelong respect (she was godmother to his youngest son, Terry (b. 1922)). Macardle worked with Erskine Childers (qv) in publicising the Sinn Féin cause, and assisted Gonne MacBride and Charlotte Despard (qv) in organising aid for the bereaved and prisoners’ dependents through the White Cross agency and in publicising Black and Tan atrocities.
Macardle opposed the treaty and worked with Erskine Childers on the weekly An Phoblacht, reporting on anti-catholic pogroms in Belfast in June 1922. She accompanied Childers and de Valera to Munster on the outbreak of the civil war, but returned to Dublin in the autumn to resume teaching in Alexandra and propaganda activity in the capital. She also produced a journal called Irish Freedom with Markievicz. Macardle was arrested on 9 November 1922 and interned in Mountjoy, Kilmainham, and the North Dublin Union, where she conducted classes in ‘revolutionary history’, wrote the short stories later collected in Earthbound (1924), and developed a close friendship with her cellmate Rosamond Jacob (qv). A seven-day hunger strike in March 1923 seriously affected her health.
During her imprisonment Macardle abandoned adherence to catholicism in reaction against the catholic hierarchy's support for what she considered a usurping and murderous government. She was deeply affected by the execution of Childers and other republican activists. For the remainder of her life her principal spiritual commitment was to spiritualism; she attended séances (possibly in the hope of contacting her dead brother) and joined the Society for Psychic Research (SPR). Macardle, who always took a strong interest in psychology, did not see this as anti-rational, but believed that the preternatural was susceptible to reasoned investigation. During her last years in the 1950s her friends thought she had become obsessed by the subject, as she claimed to be followed by an invisible familiar. She was widely believed to have joined the Church of Ireland, and received a Church of Ireland funeral at her own request.
Macardle was released in May 1923 for health reasons. She returned to work as an investigative journalist for republican papers such as Éire, and in 1924 produced Tragedies of Kerry, an exposé (based on eyewitness accounts) of atrocities committed by Free State troops in Co. Kerry during the civil war. This appears to have been the inspiration for her project of writing a documentary history of the war of independence and civil war, for which she began to collect material. She shared a flat in Herbert Road with Rosamond Jacob; their relations were disturbed by what Macardle claimed was the presence of a poltergeist and by Jacob's resentment of what she regarded as Macardle's prudish objections to her relationship with Frank Ryan (qv). Macardle generally avoided deep emotional or physical intimacy with either sex, which apparently reflected concern for independence and possibly also the tensions of her early life. In 1933, after her mother's death brought another inheritance, she purchased a house, Creevagh, in Dundrum.
In 1925 Macardle's play ‘The old man’ (its theme of internal divisions within the Young Ireland movement over whether to rescue John Mitchel (qv) as he awaited deportation is a thinly disguised allegory of the treaty split) was staged by the Abbey. In 1926 Macardle participated in the protest against ‘The plough and the stars’ by Sean O'Casey (qv), which she called ‘a cynical disparagement of the Irish struggle’. O'Casey reciprocated her low opinion: ‘Miss Macardle as a dramatist is nil’ (Smith, 59). Macardle's abiding interest in contemporary European drama and association with the Gate Theatre (which staged her last play, ‘Dark waters’, in 1932) did not modify her political moralism; she criticised ‘The old lady says no’ by Denis Johnston (qv) as anti-idealistic and anti-revolutionary, and maintained that Norwegian cultural nationalists had been right to protest against Ibsen's satire on them in ‘Peer Gynt’ as their Irish equivalents protested against J. M. Synge (qv). In 1933 she co-founded the Irish Women Writers’ Club, and served as mentor to younger writers such as Maeve Brennan (qv).
In 1926 Macardle was a founder member of Fianna Fáil and a member of its first executive; this led to a breach with some old friends such as Mary MacSwiney (qv), with whom she exchanged angry letters in the newspapers. Macardle resigned in 1927 after the party's decision to take the oath and enter the dáil; however, her views remained generally in line with those of de Valera and Fianna Fáil. She wrote on the social problems of the Irish Free State and on employment discrimination against republicans in the Fianna Fáil weekly the Nation and (from 1931) its successor the Irish Press, where she was drama critic. Despite her continuing friendship with de Valera, she was critical of some of his policies in government, and opposed the 1935 Conditions of Employment Bill, which allowed the government to exclude women from certain industries at its discretion, and the emphasis on women's domestic role in the 1937 constitution. In 1935 she was appointed vice-chairwoman of a committee formed by the National Council of Women in Ireland to examine legislation affecting women.
Macardle is best remembered for The Irish republic (1937), a history of the Irish revolution written from an anti-treaty viewpoint with the intention of placing on record de Valera's view of the independence struggle. Although Macardle insisted that de Valera had exercised no control over the book, he clearly influenced it through protracted discussions with her. Macardle engaged in lengthy and repeated discussions with numerous anti-treatyites, the most prominent of whom she names, and also talked to some unnamed pro-treatyites. She does not cite the interviews in the book, which emphasises that it is based on documentary sources and can therefore be independently confirmed, so the purpose of this oral testimony was presumably to clarify Macardle's understanding and aid her – and her research assistants – in tracking and chronicling significant developments in the mass of printed material they covered. One of the book's strengths is its extensive reproduction of contemporary documents; it is also marked by a measured tone and an elegant style. The first edition of The Irish republic was published by the London publisher Victor Gollancz, whose Left Book Club made it a book choice. It provoked considerable opposition. Its presentation of Irish history from the Normans to the boundary commission as a struggle between the Irish nation and British oppression implicitly reduces the Ulster unionists and the Free Staters to instruments of Britain rather than autonomous agents. De Valera's rationalisations for his successive actions are faithfully followed throughout, without any indication that other interpretations are possible. In general, The Irish republic, is now prized more for the insights it provides into the ideological disputes of its time than as a historical work in its own right.
Macardle's liberalism was manifested during the later 1930s in a hatred for fascism and a hope (shared for a time by de Valera) that the League of Nations might preserve world peace. In 1935 she reported for the Irish Press on sessions of the League of Nations during de Valera's presidency of that body, and later drew on this experience in her second novel, The seed was kind (1944). During the second world war Macardle lived in Britain as an expression of support for the Allied cause and broadcast on the BBC North American service, where it was felt she might help to counter Irish-American anglophobia. She also worked with continental refugees in London during the war. Although publicly supportive of Irish neutrality (which she stated was the result of partition and therefore Britain's fault) she privately expressed the view during the opening years of the war that Ireland should allow the Allies to use the Treaty Ports. (As the Nazi threat receded she reverted to a more orthodox De Valeran view.) Her concern for refugees and the plight of children in the ruins of post-war Europe led her to undertake extensive travels immediately after the war, collecting details of the activities of Nazi occupation forces. These, supplemented by material from charitable agencies, provided the basis for Children of Europe (1949), a massive account, using the same investigative journalist's techniques found in The Irish republic, of the manipulation, mistreatment, and resistance of children in Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe; she includes a detailed account of the fate of Jews in the Nazi extermination camps, and ends by hoping that the work of UNESCO and more democratic education methods which emphasise children's rights will lead to a brighter future. The book is still used by historians of Europe in the period.
During the war Macardle began to write novels in the ‘women's gothic’ genre popular at the time, such as Uneasy freehold (1942), filmed as The uninvited (1944, dir. Lewis Allan), Fantastic summer (1948), and Dark enchantment (1953). She returned to Ireland after the war, and served as vice-president and president of the Irish Association of Civil Liberties (1949–57). She continued her involvement in social work and was an active supporter of the avant-garde Pike Theatre in Dublin. Macardle died of colon cancer in Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, Drogheda, on 23 December 1958. Her residence at the time of her death was Benedin, Windgate Road, Howth, and she was buried in the nearby St Fintan's cemetery. Her last work, Shakespeare: man and boy, written for school-age readers and largely completed during a final residence at Stratford in 1957, was edited by George Bott and published in 1960.
Although The Irish republic led Macardle to be stereotyped as ‘hagiographer royal to the Republic’ (J. J. Lee, quoted in Smith, 137), increasing interest in Irish women's history at the end of the twentieth century led to the rediscovery of her full stature and complexity. She is a figure of importance in the history of Irish liberalism as well as republicanism, and reflects many of the tensions within the political and cultural relations of twentieth-century Britain and Ireland.