By the start of the 20th century many Irish people were living in
squalor: the country's infant mortality rate was the highest in Europe
and tuberculosis was rampant. The daunting and tireless Lady Ishbel
Aberdeen, wife of the British Viceroy to Ireland, devoted herself to
social changes that could save lives. But she often faced ridicule
because of the contrast between her own high status and her concern for
the common man. Arthur Griffith, future president of Ireland, publicly
nicknamed her The Viceregal Microbe.
This book tells the story of the friction between the struggle for Irish
independence and the 'good works' of the Anglo-Irish elite. The mainly
Protestant and upper-class women who gathered around Lady Aberdeen
through the Women's National Health Association she founded were all
fine people with good hearts. But Irish Nationalists treated them with
suspicion, and progress in the war against tuberculosis was the
casualty.
Lady Abderdeen became ever more radical in her campaign for better
living conditions for Ireland's poor. The Chief Medical Officer of the
Guinness Brewery, John Lumsden, was one of her close allies. By the end
of her decades of work (most intensely 1906-1915) in Ireland, Ishbel
Aberdeen became as out-spoken as the trade union rebel 'Big Jim' Larkin.
She was a strong woman and often alienated people by her relentlessness.
She drove herself to exhaustion and her family almost to bankruptcy in
her campaign for a better life for Ireland's poor. But in the end she
was doomed to be viewed as part of the system of British rule over
Ireland. And history belongs to the victor. The contribution of Lady
Aberdeen and her volunteers to the welfare of Ireland's poor and sick
was largely forgotten in the wake of the country's independence and its
nationalist fervour.
