Muriel MacSwiney (née Murphy, 8 June 1892 – 26 October 1982) was an Irish republican and left-wing activist, and the first woman to be given the Freedom of New York City.

The 1920 hunger strike of her husband Terence became an international cause célèbre, and following his death she became one of the most high profile Irish republican activists in the world, widely campaigning in the United States throughout the early 1920s.

Following the defeat of the Anti-Treaty IRA in the Irish Civil War in 1923, Muriel never again lived in Ireland and instead embarked upon a bohemian life on the European continent.

In this capacity MacSwiney travelled to the United States to attend the "Commission on conditions in Ireland" of 1921, which was being held in Washington DC.

MacSwiney took the anti-treaty position; a letter expressing her opposition to it was read in the Dáil by William Stockley and in June 1922 was part of the garrison in the Hammam hotel led by Cathal Brugha.

[1] It was also during this period that MacSwiney was part of a group posing as a Red Cross delegation who broke Annie M. P. Smithson from Mullingar prison with the help of Linda Kearns MacWhinney.

[1] MacSwiney returned to Ireland in the summer of 1923; by that point, the Irish Civil War was fizzling to an end in a decisive defeat for the Anti-Treaty IRA.

MacSwiney publicly declared herself an atheist and began supporting, and eventually joining, Jim Larkin's Irish Worker League.

Because Mary refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Irish Free State, she had to be issued a special passport by the newly elected leader of the country, the republican Éamon de Valera.

[3][4][5][6][9][10][7][11] For the duration of the 1930s, MacSwiney lived in Paris, France, where she continued to be engaged with politics, typically those of left-wing, including communist, groups.

She was particularly active in the Ligue de l'enseignement, a non-sectarian teachers' union that she recruited Owen Sheehy Skeffington, an Irish socialist who was living in Paris at the time, into.

Kaan, a member of the French resistance during World War II, was sent to a concentration camp by the Gestapo and died on 18 May 1945 as a result of his treatment there.

[1] By 1950 MacSwiney's entire inheritance had been spent, however, she was able to successfully apply for a widow's pension, to the sum of £500 a year, from the Irish state on account of her marriage to Terence.

[1] As late as the 1970s, MacSwiney remained politically engaged: She was critical of American foreign policy on Vietnam, calling the USA a "world imperialist power".