What should a wife do when a husband gambles on his own life? This was the dilemma faced by Muriel MacSwiney when her husband Terence, republican Lord Mayor of Cork, Ireland announced that he was going on hunger strike following his arrest.
Frustrated by the failure of three Irish Home Rule Bills not to reach the statute book; angered by the refusal of the British to recognise Sinn Fein’s victory in the post-war General Election of December 1918 and disillusioned that Britain had blocked Ireland’s right to speak at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, the Lord Mayor chose desperate measures. Challenging its validity, he told the court that, it was he, not they who would decide on his sentence. “I shall be free in a month alive or dead”.
Muriel left her two-year-old daughter with her mother Mary in Cork and headed off to London to support her husband who had been taken to Brixton prison.
The Woven Dream is a collection of interweaving monologues that tells this story through the eyes of three women : Muriel, Mary her mother and Geraldine her best friend.
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