First man to give women a vote? My great-granduncle

IT WAS standing room only at Leinster House last week when the centenary of Irish women getting the vote was marked. The celebrations organised by Vótáil 100, a cross-party group of women members of the Oireachtas, will go on for a year following a conference in the Royal Irish Academy.

The programme of events is a major milestone commemorating Irish women’s suffrage but they appear to have either ignored, or forgotten about heroic Irishman John Ballance.

As prime minister of New Zealand, the Co. Antrim-born pioneer feminist was the first political leader in the world to give women the vote in 1893 – 25 years before Irish women.

John Ballance, a crusading journalist before he was PM, was also my great-granduncle.

It is not in our nature to miss an opportunity to boast about heroic Irish men or women, dead or alive.

So John Ballance’s exclusion from the upcoming 48-weeks of festivities is probably because the organisers knew nothing about him or his feminist credentials.

In 1890 he addressed the New Zealand parliament thus: ‘I believe in the absolute equality of the sexes, and I think they [women] should be in the enjoyment of equal privileges in political matters.’

And in 1893, the women of New Zealand became the first women in the world entitled to vote.

John Ballance’s wife Ellen was a prominent feminist in New Zealand and vice-president of the Women’s Progressive Society, an international organisation.

IHAVE visited his modest family home (restored by the New Zealand government and open to the public) near Glenavy, Co. Antrim from which he first left for England in 1857 and then New Zealand. He settled in the town of Wanganui and opened a jewellery shop before launching a newspaper, the Evening Herald, in 1867. In 1868 his English-born first wife Fanny tragically died, aged 24; he married a local woman Ellen, two years later.

After witnessing sectarian rioting in Belfast in his youth, Ballance founded the Liberal Party and championed secularism in New Zealand.

He also crusaded for social welfare legislation when Bismarck introduced it in Germany.

As native minister he pursued a progressive policy to protect Maori lands from private sale and removed large numbers of armed police to ease tension between natives and settlers.

He replaced property tax with land and income taxes when he became prime minister in 1891 and silenced criticism by delivering a record budget surplus in 1892.

The resulting prosperity earned him a flattering nickname ‘RainMaker’

He died prematurely from cancer aged 54, soon after passing legislation for women’s votes in 1893; his wife Ellen survived him by 42 years and died in 1935.

EVEN opponents acknowledged John Ballance to be an honest man of integrity whom historian and poet WP Reeves described as ‘absolutely… unassuming and unpretentious – as a premier he knew how to be a master in his own house’. According to contemporary historians, John Ballance was a deep-thinking, decent man whose professional instincts and personal experience put him with the most progressive statesmen of his era.

I was named after his father, Samuel, and I am very proud of the radical politician, crusading journalist and feminist John Ballance – my great-granduncle.

And maybe Irish women will acknowledge the role played by an Irishman in New Zealand for all women everywhere – especially those back in his homeland, Ireland. ★★★★★ CHIVALRY was part of the knightly virtues but it appears to been banished from the Vatican along with our distinguished former president, Mary McAleese. I was delighted that the emotionally intelligent Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, made his displeasure known by confirming that he had not been asked about the Vatican’s McAleese decision. Mary McAleese’s big brain and even bigger heart served the country admirably for 14 years and her devotion to Catholicism never faltered when clerical child abuse made it anathema to so many of her contemporaries.

The former president has written to the Pope for an explanation as to why she was barred from appearing and speaking in a conference in the Vatican on International Women’s Day. Cardinal Kevin Farrell, the most senior Irishman in the Vatican, has been identified as barring mother of three Mrs McAleese, with two other women: a Polish theologian and a lesbian Catholic from Uganda

Cardinal Farrell is in charge of organising the World Meeting of Families that Pope Francis is attending in Dublin next August.

That timeline may be an incentive for the Vatican to sort out its priorities and send a bunch of flowers with an apology to Mary McAleese.

It must be difficult to sit in Government Buildings in Dublin and watch the goings-on in Downing Street and the White House – where we once thought only grown-ups were allowed to work. Last week a document spelling out the catastrophic consequences of Brexit was ‘Trumped’ by the publishing a memo calling the FBI crooks. And the prospect of three more years of a blond himbo in the White House was topped by bookies making 49-year-old fogey Jacob Rees-Mogg favourite to be next British prime minister. ‘Be careful what you wish for’ is sound advice for the electorate but it needs an additional sentence: ‘And be even more careful who you vote for…’