Ardclough Sedition Case was a complaint and threat of prosecution leveled against “Nora J Murray” (1888–1955), an Irish poet and school teacher, during the revolutionary period.
Ms Murray’s teaching of history in Ardclough National School was the subject of a complaint from local Unionist landlord Bertram Hugh Barton (1858–1927) in 1916.
[1] Late in 1917 these allegations reappeared in the form of a complaint about “seditious teaching” filed to the National School commissioners in the name of Mrs Bourke, who said that her child had been discriminated against because he was the son of a British soldier.
[2] Mrs Bourke informed the Commissioners that the teacher “instructs the children always to hate the British and tells them when they grow up she hopes they will fight and die for an Irish Republic,” phrases uncannily similar to the complaints used by Bertram Barton.
Fr Donovan referred to “the celebrated tongue” Mrs Bourke had in the neighbourhood.” He claimed that the teacher was both efficient and popular, and that any songs that may have been sung in class were so widely known that “no-one attaches any significance to them.”[4] A sworn enquiry organised by Commissioners was postponed, pending a prosecution for sedition by the Dublin Castle administration in Ireland.