Moore, Marie (née Gilmore)

by Patrick Maume

Moore, Marie (née Gilmore) (1936–2009), republican activist, was born in Cawnpore Street in the Clonard area of west Belfast in May 1936, elder of two children of Peter Gilmore, tram driver, and his wife Nora (née O'Brien). On 5 April 1942, the five-year-old Marie was visiting her grandparents Frank and Mary O'Brien in Cawnpore Street when six IRA men led by Tom Williams (qv) entered the house, pursued by police. In the subsequent shootout, Constable Patrick Murphy was killed and the IRA men retreated upstairs, carrying the severely wounded Williams; according to Marie's recollection, the police then threatened to shoot her and her grandfather if the IRA men tried to shoot their way out rather than surrender. She spoke of this incident as her introduction to republicanism; on 19 January 2000 she attended Williams's reburial in Milltown cemetery, Belfast.

Marie's family background was republican; according to Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams, Marie said she did not get her republicanism from the Williams incident but 'from songs, from ballads, from the injustices around her, from all she could see' (Andersonstown News, 4 April 2009). Her views were further hardened by experiencing discrimination when applying for jobs with the Belfast housing corporation and electricity office. In 1968 Moore became active in the Belfast branch of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, attending numerous marches and demonstrations, including the first civil rights march from Derry to Coalisland. In 1969 she married Jack Moore (d. 1989), a Yorkshireman who shared her political sympathies; they had two sons and a daughter.

Marie Moore was living near Bombay Street in the Clonard area when it was attacked and burned by loyalist rioters on 15 May 1969. Shortly before this, she had participated in the 'battle of the Bogside' in Derry; according to the oration by Adams at her funeral, she was on the streets during the 'battle of St Matthew's' (27 June 1970), when IRA gunmen fought off a loyalist crowd on the edge of the Short Strand district, and she participated in the civil rights march in Derry city which ended in the 'bloody Sunday' shootings (30 January 1972). On 5 July 1970 she took a leading role in the breaking of the Falls Road curfew by a crowd of women laden with groceries who pushed through British army barricades by sheer force of numbers.

Moore was a leading member of the 'hen patrols' (the name mocked the British army term 'duck patrols') of women residents who followed any British patrols entering the 'no-go' areas (usually at night), making as much noise as possible with bin lids, sirens and other instruments in order to alert local residents to the army presence and undermine soldiers' morale (and, the security forces believed, to assist IRA attackers). In November 1971 she was shot in the foot while engaged in a hen patrol and taken across the border to avoid arrest; she spent six weeks in Monaghan hospital and was left with a permanent limp. The army claimed to have shot a gunman and an armed woman; since two Cumann na mBan members on hen patrol had been shot dead in Clonard on 23 October 1971, and another woman was killed in Derry while banging bin lids on 6 November, Moore believed her shooting was part of a deliberate strategy to deter hen patrols. At a December 1971 Dublin press conference she declared that she would return to Belfast to continue the fight against the British army.

In August 1971 Moore became one of four Belfast representatives on Comhairle Uladh, a body set up by Provisional Sinn Féin as the nucleus of its proposed 'Éire Nua' scheme (reorganising Ireland on the basis of four provincial parliaments). This began her involvement with the Sinn Féin party, which was then little more than a skeletal auxiliary to the military campaign, treated with some suspicion because of a perception that in the 1960s the republican movement had allowed political activities to distract it from the national question. Addressing the 1973 Sinn Féin ard fheis, Moore declared: 'Only another little time and we will have won … Our resolutions on housing et cetera are no good unless we support the freedom fighters in the North' (Ir. Times, 22 October 1973).

Sinn Féin was legalised in Northern Ireland in May 1974, and Moore organised one of the first Belfast cumainn (branches) in Clonard. (She later moved to the Glen Road in Andersonstown, west Belfast, then to nearby Lenadoon, where she lived until her death.) She was particularly close to Máire Drumm (qv), whom she got to know during efforts to accommodate catholic refugees who had fled into west Belfast after being driven from mixed areas; a well-known photograph shows Drumm and Moore marching through Belfast at the head of a group of women wearing combat jackets and black berets, defying a ban on carrying hurling sticks in public. Moore was one of a six-member Belfast executive of Sinn Féin, initially set up to orchestrate a boycott of the 1974 assembly elections but kept in place afterwards to organise party publicity and rebut attacks from the Northern Ireland Office, the Peace People, the SDLP and the catholic church; executive members' houses functioned as unofficial incident centres.

In December 1977 and again in April 1978, Moore was arrested (along with the other executive members and the staff of the party paper Republican News) and charged with treason on the basis of a policy document advocating 'people's courts' and 'people's councils' to provide alternative governmental structures in nationalist areas. Moore spent some months on remand in Armagh women's prison before charges were dropped. Sinn Féin claimed the real purpose of the arrests was to disrupt the developing campaign in support of the prisoners in Armagh and the H-blocks who refused to wear prison uniform and demanded recognition as political prisoners. Active in the Relatives' Action Committee (later developing into the H-block Action Committee), which demonstrated in support of the prisoners, Moore also campaigned for the repatriation of IRA members imprisoned in Britain. 'I was never at home. I was away every weekend marching, but Jack, my husband, was very supportive, and he and my mother looked after the kids' (Moore (2006), 71).

She took a leading role in Sinn Féin's 'prisoner of war department', organising a system whereby messages were systematically smuggled to and from prisoners by female prison visitors and used to coordinate actions and publicise the H-block and Armagh prisoners' campaign for political status; she continued to oversee this system when placed in charge of the H-block Information Centre founded by Tom Hartley. Moore became a familiar visitor to the prisoners, including Bobby Sands (qv), who nicknamed her 'Bean Uasal' (Noble Woman). After Sands's death, she was a founding member of the Bobby Sands Trust, set up to publish and publicise his writings (to which the trust holds the copyright).

In October 1978, Moore was elected to the Sinn Féin ard comhairle (national executive). As the Sinn Féin women's department developed during the 1980s, she took a leading role, co-drafting the first party policy document on women, addressing meetings on International Women's Day, and contributing to the department's occasional publication, Women in Struggle (1991–4); these, like her occasional contributions to An Phoblacht, mainly concerned personal reminiscences of the conflict and tributes to former associates.

During Adams's first period as MP for Belfast West (1983–92), Moore was his constituency secretary; one of the first meetings between Sinn Féin and representatives of the presbyterian church took place in her house. Moore's extensive knowledge of the constituency and commitment to working for constituents were further deployed in her own electoral career. In 1993 she was elected to Belfast City Council as a Sinn Féin councillor for Lower Falls, replacing another woman councillor, and was re-elected in 1997, 2001 and 2005. She took a particular interest in women's issues, housing, unemployment and urban regeneration, but primarily regarded electoral politics as 'another battlefront' in the struggle against British rule.

As Sinn Féin mobilised its electorate in the 1980s and 1990s, the unionist council majority declined, and Sinn Féin councillors (including Moore) gained membership of council committees, relations between the two sides were often highly abusive. In May 1994, Moore and Councillor Alex Maskey narrowly escaped a UVF bomb attack on the party's councillors' office in City Hall (two workers were injured).

The unionist parties lost their overall majority on Belfast City Council in the June 1997 local elections; Sinn Féin (now the largest party), the SDLP and the Alliance party (who among them had a one-vote majority) then devised a pact whereby the mayoralty and deputy mayoralty would rotate among the parties. Alban Maginness of the SDLP became Belfast's first nationalist mayor in 1997; in 1998 Moore was one of the first two Sinn Féin councillors to represent the council on statutory bodies, and in June 1999 she was elected as the first Sinn Féin deputy mayor by 26 votes to 25. The mayor-elect, Robert Stoker of the UUP, refused to invite her and the twelve other Sinn Féin councillors to his inaugural dinner, stating that Sinn Féin did not warrant an invitation 'at this point in time', because it had not yet shown itself to be 'wedded to democracy' despite the 1998 ratification of the Belfast agreement; Moore described this as an insult to Sinn Féin voters, and claimed: 'I'm not there to disrupt, I'm there to try and heal and to make it easy for all of us to get together' (Ir. Times, 2 June 1999). Despite this, Moore and Stoker jointly led an eve-of-millennium carol service outside City Hall on the night of 31 December 1999.

Moore used her new position to preside over numerous community events in nationalist areas (such as a celebration of 'thirty years' resistance' in Clonard), wearing her official chain and evading a regulation that the queen should be toasted at civic dinners presided over by the deputy mayor. In April 2000 she was injured while participating in a protest outside Springfield Road RUC station. She was also filmed by UTV 'presiding benignly over a high-spirited reception in City Hall for Belfast's gay community' (Ir. Times, 17 June 1999), to the disapproval of many protestant fundamentalists, and participated in a reception organised by the Bahá'i community to honour Belfast humanitarians. Although unionist councillors paid tribute to Moore's performance of her duties when she and Stoker left office in June 2000, and after her death unionists were among those praising her accessibility as a councillor, her period in office did not – as expected – immediately lead to a Sinn Féin mayoralty, because an Alliance councillor voted with the unionists against Sinn Féin's Alex Maskey (elected mayor in 2002 after the 2001 local elections were followed by a new pact). Moore was also a board member of the Upper Springfield Development Trust and sat on Belfast Education and Library Board.

Marie Moore died on 21 March 2009 in the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast, after a long illness. Her life centred on the catholic ghettoes of west Belfast and her career mirrored the development of west Belfast republicanism from a subculture centred on a number of extended families to a wider communal defence movement, and from traditionalist militarism to an electorally effective community politics emphasising commitment to socialism and feminism.