In this week’s Sunday Read, SIPTU Deputy General Secretary Ethel Buckley pays tribute to Sheila Conroy, a pioneering trade unionist and feminist. Her story bridges the gap between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ Liberty Hall, symbolising the resilience and determination of women in the labour movement.
I am delighted to speak about Sheila Conroy and to have the opportunity to rescue her from the shadows of our Union’s history.
Like many women down the generations whose work and legacy is half forgotten or not remembered at all.
Union history tends to be exactly that… his-story. Let us remember and tell her-story as well.
Sheila Conroy, nee Williams, trade unionist, feminist lived an extraordinary life. She was a person who shattered a glass ceiling, not just for herself but for countless women who have followed in her footsteps. She was the first woman to serve on the National Executive of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union (ITGWU) having been elected in 1955.
Sheila Conroy bridges the gap between the ‘old’ Liberty Hall, the ‘Old Lady by the River and the ‘new’ Liberty Hall. She would have been in the old building in the 1950’s and here when the decision to build the present day Liberty Hall was made and would in fact have been quite involved during the design and build of the new building. She attended the laying of the foundation stone and the opening in 1965, 60 years ago this May Day.
She was a Cork woman, like myself. She was born on 22 April 1918 in Bantry in West Cork, the only child of Harry and Jane Williams. A Welsh petty officer in the Royal Navy, Harry Williams was stationed at Bantry (1914–18), where he met his future wife; their marriage led to her family disowning Sheila’s mother. Her death from tuberculosis soon after Sheila’s birth led to Sheila being fostered by a local family until age 6. Her father, stationed elsewhere, sent an allowance for her upkeep.
She contracted pneumonia as an infant, and she was cared for by the Sisters of Mercy in Bantry, who also ran the national school that she attended there. Moving to the order’s home in Cobh, she attended St Maries of the Isle secondary school in Cork city, where she enjoyed cookery, but endured throat infections and a bout of scarlet fever; she left after a year.
In 1937 she was apprenticed to a small family confectionery firm in the city; the allowance from her father paid for her lodgings. Fearing rejection, she never tried to make contact with her mother’s family.
In 1939 she lost her job and became a trainee waitress at one of Cork city’s finest hotels, the Victoria Hotel. When she worked as a waitress in the Victoria she worked a 6-day week starting at 7 in the morning and not finishing until 10 or 11 at night when the last of the diners had left. For this she was paid the flat rate, in other words, there was no premium pay for long or unsocial hours and no overtime pay.
Resenting the oppressive working conditions endured by the hotel staff, Sheila led their successful clandestine unionisation and membership of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union.
In her biography of Sheila, Fighting Spirit, author Marianne Heron paints a vivid picture of Sheila’s dissatisfaction with the low pay and poor working conditions that she and her colleagues endured in the hotel.
By 1942 Sheila and her colleagues had had enough and the waitresses, chefs and kitchen staff in the Victoria Hotel decided to unionise. Sheila, only in her 20’s was one of the ringleaders of the drive to organise and although she had the courage of her conviction; she rightly feared retaliation and reprisal from the management. There was a real possibility that they would be sacked on the spot for organising a union. And so their unionising had to be done under the radar of the management.
As is still the case to this day for workers in Ireland unionising their employment for the first time.
Heron, her biographer, describes a scene that would fill the heart of every trade union organiser with joy. It’s of a bunch of young hotel workers, linked arm in arm, laughing and singing in triumph’ as they tripped across Patrick’s Bridge over the River Lee at the bottom of Cork’s steep Patrick’s Hill.
It was after 11 o’clock at night and they were returning from a meeting in secret with an ITGWU Organiser.
Sheila recalled that in the 1940’s hotel staff, particularly back of house staff, were little better than slaves. There was no job security and workers were sacked on a manager’s whim. Although Sheila didn’t live in the hotel, instead staying in lodgings near the Western Road out by the university and the Mardyke, many of the young women did live in the hotel and they were particularly vulnerable as losing their job also meant losing their accommodation. The hotel bosses knew that these workers were dependent upon them for shelter as well as income and so there was an enormous imbalance of power between the boss and the individual worker.
Sheila didn’t come from a union background or know anything about unions. In fact, when a colleague mentioned that they should form a union; Sheila had to enquire… what is a union? She says that she knew nothing of unions when she joined the ITGWU.
But she knew right from wrong. And Sheila Williams, as she was then, was not willing to accept poor working conditions as her lot and she ran the gauntlet of being sacked, union busted, blacklisted -call it what you will- in order to fight for better for herself and her colleagues.
Afterwards, she said of her first meeting with an ITGWU Organiser,
“At the time I didn’t realise how significant that night was to be for me and how it would give my life a new direction. I was only just into my twenties, the others around the same age and we were all out for a bit of a laugh but at the same time we wanted to do something to prevent so many of the people we worked with being sacked out of hand.”
At that time workers in the hotel and catering industry in Dublin were organised. They had their own branch of the ITGWU since 1918. But although the Union was strong in Cork among general workers – particularly in transport and dock work – there was no unionised hotel in Cork. So, Sheila and her comrades were literally breaking new ground for workers and for the Union.
Heron quotes Sheila as saying that,
“when we made contact with the local union official he asked us to try to get all the staff together for a meeting. That wasn’t easy because we didn’t finish work until after half past nine or even ten and then the resident staff weren’t allowed to come in after eleven. If the two night porters hadn’t been on our side and turned a blind eye to some of the staff tip toeying in our stockinged feet I don’t think that we could have organised the hotel.”
Sheila was given responsibility for unionising the back-of-house staff, and when they did eventually meet with the ITGWU Organiser on that night that she described as a turning point in her life, they managed to get about 70 workers to the meeting. The meeting was chaired by quite a significant character in the ITGWU in Cork at the time, Jim Hickey, Branch Secretary and subsequently Labour TD and Lord Mayor of Cork. There were two more secret meetings of the staff with the ITGWU full-time organisers. At the third meeting all 76 people present signed union cards. With the exception of the management, Sheila and her comrades had managed to sign up everyone in the hotel.
No mean feat in such a hostile environment for unionising!
Sheila recalled that during those early days of unionising, a great sense of friendship and solidarity was built up between the workers. She said that those early days in the union showed her the importance of having a social element in any kind of organisation, that this helped to bond people together.
When it was decided to advise the hotel management that the workers had unionised and were seeking recognition to engage in collective bargaining, a letter was sent from the ITGWU to the hotel.
Of course, it was Sheila who was hauled up before the management to account for the letter. The management suspected that she was the ringleader. Not wrong.
Sheila says,
‘although I was helpful and did well in my work, she (the Manager, Miss Tobin) knew that I was a rebel underneath.”
The Manager sternly rebuked the young Sheila for her role in unionising and threatened the future of her employment. But Sheila held her ground and responded,
“If we were in the union we would have better conditions, shorter hours, have a half-day a week and every second Saturday off instead of having long hours and bad pay as we do now.”
She said she found it hard to keep her nerve, but she did keep her nerve.
After the hotel was organised and the Union had negotiated better pay and conditions, Sheila felt that she had found the means of transforming workers’ lives.
In the trade union movement she found her cause and her calling.
She said of the union that she came to see it as the redeemer of the whole of disadvantaged society and that she threw herself into work for the union.
You had the feeling when you joined, she said, that you were becoming part of a struggle, not only for yourself and the people you worked with, but for a much larger cause.
Over the next few years other hotels in Cork city were organised and the hotel workers began to play a central role in the Union. All the time, the staff at the Victoria Hotel and their progress was watched closely by other workers. To all intents and purposes, Sheila and her colleagues formed the vanguard for a hotel worker organsing drive by the ITGWU in Cork in the 1940s. They became the activist leadership of the fledgling hotel, restaurant and catering branch in Cork and Sheila was at the centre of the effort to organise for better pay and conditions.
Becoming somewhat restless in Cork, Sheila got a one-way train ticket to Dublin and set forth with all of her possessions in a single suitcase. Crucially, for the next phase of her life, she brought with her from Cork a letter of commendation from the then ITGWU Branch Secretary Eamon Wall.
She found a job waitressing in the Capitol restaurant – which was over the Capitol Theatre in Prince’s Street North- and digs in Phibsboro. Workers in the Capitol were members of the ITGWU Dublin No. 4 Branch known as ‘the hotels and catering branch’.
As one would expect, Sheila became active in the Union in the workplace and in the branch which was located in the ITGWU headquarters in Liberty Hall.
Such was her standing among her new colleagues, that she was elected Shop Steward in her first year in the job. An elected position that she would hold for the next 15 years. Although most of the Branch’s 4,000 members were women, the full-time Union Officials were all men. In the Dublin No. 4 Branch, Sheila worked alongside legendary union officials like Michael Mullen and John Carroll. She would collect the dues off the members in the Capitol and bring them to the old Liberty Hall, here on this site, on a weekly basis.
The No. 4 Branch ran a hiring hall in Liberty Hall. The Branch was always a hive of activity as every day about 40 or 50 casual workers would come in to check the lists of parties, balls or weddings in the various hotels as essentially the Union controlled casual employment in the main city hotels.
Despite the establishment of the Labour Court in 1946, to provide a mechanism for the settling of industrial disputes, in the late 1940s and early 1950s strikes were frequent and tended to be long and bitter. A particularly protracted and bitter strike occurred in the Dun Laoghaire hotels and restaurants in 1951. This strike is known as the ‘four houses dispute’. Sheila was regularly involved in collections and fundraisers for the four houses strikers and assisted in picket duty.
After the strike was settled, at the 1952 AGM of the branch which took place in the Mansion House on Good Friday, Sheila and her friend Theresa Monaghan (who had herself been involved in the bitter strike) were elected to the Branch Committee. Their nomination was proposed by members of the former strike committee in recognition of their endeavours on behalf of the strikers during the strike. They were voted-in unanimously.
The Branch Secretary, Michael Mullen, recognising Sheila’s commitment proposed that Sheila attend the ITGWU Delegate Conference in 1952. Sheila attended and was the only woman in attendance at the conference. She didn’t shy away at the back of the Hall. She was determined to have her voice heard. And from experience, I know, and other women know, that even in this day and age, it is not always easy for a woman to have her voice heard in a room full of or dominated by men.
Sheila addressed the delegates and is said to have castigated male workers who squandered the family income on drink and horses leaving their families short. At first her speech was met with a sort of stunned silence, but soon the reaction turned to support and she received a round of applause. This was to be the first of many groundbreaking speeches at union conferences delivered by the fearless Sheila Williams.
The following year she attended the Union delegate conference again. Addressing the delegates, she said, I regret to note that the number of ladies present is very small. That should not be, as I understand that there are about 35,000 women members of the Union, consisting of about a quarter of its numerical strength around the country. On that basis, there should be at least 60 female delegates present.
In this intervention, Sheila was going to the heart of the democratic deficit in the Union where women’s membership was encouraged, but women’s participation was not.
Sheila did not lay the blame for the lack of female participation and representation entirely at the feet men. She laid down a challenge stating,
‘I appeal to women to show more interest in affairs in general’.
She was the sole woman delegate at the Congress of Irish Unions conference in 1954, and observed how the marriage bar (requiring women’s resignation upon marriage) never applied in the catering industry, or other low-status, poorly paid jobs, such as domestic service, retail, cleaning or fish-gutting.
In June 1955, she was the first woman elected to the ITGWU’s national executive. This was and is a historical achievement that deserves widespread recognition in our Union.
She negotiated on behalf of her branch at the Labour Court and in the establishment of regional sectoral joint industrial councils, which set wages and working conditions. She also campaigned for the establishment of a national pension scheme to cover all workers.
In the 1958 ITGWU NEC elections Sheila Williams topped the poll. An almost unbelievable achievement for a woman at that time and to this day.
Sheila acknowledged that her re-election and poll-topping was principally due to the votes of men.
At the June 1958 ITGWU congress, she and the Union’s General President, John Conroy introduced new rules concerning the payment of marriage gratuities to women members.
And speaking of marriage, Sheila married John Conroy, then General President of the ITGWU in the summer of 1959 at the Church of Christ the King in the Dublin suburb of Cabra and they honeymooned in Southport in England.
A victim of the marriage bar herself Sheila had to resign her membership of the Union.
She greatly missed the stimulation of work, especially union activity and conferences. To keep busy and relevant, she volunteered with Our Lady’s Hostel for Homeless Boys in Eccles Street, Dublin.
John’s death in February 1969 devastated Sheila.
In 1970 Conroy’s profile as one of Ireland’s leading female trade unionists led to her appointment to the Commission on the Status of Women, to assess the employment conditions and pay of women.
Embodying mainstream, pragmatic feminism, the Commission made forty-nine recommendations to the Minister for Finance in its December 1972 final report, seventeen of which concerned equal pay and equality of employment. The government subsequently removed gender and marriage differentiated pay scales (1973–4), implemented equal pay (1974), and abolished the marriage bar in all forms of public employment (1977); later legislation introduced maternity leave and equalised unemployment assistance.
Conroy opposed Ireland’s accession to the EEC, fearing increased food prices that would fuel poverty.
The plight of widows was one of her particular concerns, and she was variously chair and public relations officer of the National Association of Widows in Ireland (NAWI), lobbying governments through the 1970s to ameliorate the difficulties facing widows, especially diminished property rights and inequitable treatment under law compared to widowed men.
Having criticised the national broadcaster for neglecting adult education, Conroy was appointed to the RTÉ Authority (May 1973) on the suggestion of Minister for Labour Michael O’Leary. Proceeding to chair the authority (1976–9), she was the first woman to chair an Irish semi-state body.
Her speech at the launch of the RTÉ 2 television channel, at the Cork Opera House (2 November 1978), enunciated her concerns to promote community-led programming, spur RTÉ efforts to support adult education initiatives, and adopt a bilingual approach to promoting the Irish language.
She also championed greater staff participation in the organisation, and in January 1979 launched a working party to examine the role of women in broadcasting. Insisting on being referred to as ‘chairman’ of the RTÉ Authority, she refused to accept or use any other description. She served a third term on the authority (1979–82).
In the face of adversity, she stood tall, undeterred by the countless obstacles that stood in her way.
No doubt, she had to confront scepticism and prejudice, but she never allowed them to define her or dictate her destiny. With each setback, she emerged stronger, more determined than ever to prove her worth and capabilities.
Her journey was not without sacrifice. She never wavered in her pursuit of excellence, always striving to be the best version of herself in every aspect of her life.
Through hard work, dedication, and sheer perseverance, she climbed the ranks, breaking through barriers that once seemed insurmountable.
Her achievements served as a beacon of hope for women everywhere, inspiring them to reach for the stars and pursue their ambitions without hesitation.
But her impact goes beyond the boardroom or the halls of power. She became a symbol of empowerment, a role model for future generations of women who dared to dream big and defy expectations. Her success paved the way for others, opening doors that were once firmly shut.
Today, as we honour her legacy, let us remember that the glass ceiling was never meant to confine us but to be shattered, allowing us to soar to new heights and achieve our fullest potential.
Let us continue to break barriers, challenge stereotypes, and create a world where every woman and man, every person, has the opportunity to thrive and succeed on her own terms.