Any future tour guide stopping at a statue of Gonne would have to devote considerable time to do justice to her complexity and robustness. Given the paucity of memorials to women adorning our capital, it would surely be a worthwhile addition.
Diarmaid Ferriter says in his article about our Maud Gonne Statue project in The Irish Times today. Ferriter is a brilliant Irish historian and public intellectual who has published fourteen books on Irish History. 

This supportive article, entitled: ‘It’s time Dublin had a statue to unconventional, complex Maud Gonne MacBride’ is a resounding endorsement for our work at the Maud Gonne Society. Ferriter reminds readers of Maud Gonne's own connection to The Irish Times saying:

Maud Gonne MacBride, the committed republican, agitator and campaigner, was particularly disturbed by the plight of the poor during the difficult winter a century ago in Ireland. It moved her to write to this newspaper to demand urgent action as “the cold, added to the hunger will destroy the health of thousands, sowing seeds of consumption [TB], and will cause the death of many if something is not done at once”.

The article provides a succinct overview of Maud Gonne's life and calls for a change in the colors history has paint her in.

‘attitudes to her have been reductive, shaped by the mores of the time and her failed marriage, but there was much more to her than that.’

We at the Maud Gonne Society certainly know Maud Gonne was more than the labels her relationship with the various men in her life casts her as. To illustrate Gonne's work, Ferriter juxtaposes her life against the lives of those she helped.

Gonne was certainly a hell of a lot more than that. By 1924, as she wrote of the scale of Irish privation, she had decades of frenetic political activity and subversion behind her, and her priorities were even more interesting because of her privileged background…

Gonne was born in Surrey, England and inherited significant wealth as a young woman. Yet Gonne employed her resources to helping those less fortunate than her, first by giving voice to the voiceless during the land wars in the 1880s. As a young woman who'd faced the inevitable pain of eviction herself, Gonne sympathised with the people she worked for.

The other common denominator between the people Gonne served and herself were exclusions from mainstream organizations. So in 1900, she formed her own nationalist women’s organization Inghinidhe na hÉireann.

And yet, Maud Gonne was all but forgotten during Ireland's recent commemorations. An oversight we're working on correcting. Ferriter writes about our work at the Maud Gonne Society:

The initiative is a reminder that the recently concluded commemorations to mark the revolutionary decade 1913-23, while doing much to complicate narratives and include hitherto neglected lives and deaths, also left lingering questions about those still sidelined. Ross sees Gonne as falling into that category, reminding us that she “was never a passive muse to a love poet”. It is often through the prism of WB Yeats’s poems and his obsession with her that her name is invoked.

While WB Yeats' poems have immortalized Maud Gonne as the most beautiful woman of her time, the article, as is inevitable, also mentions the other scandals that come to mind when the words “Maud Gonne” are uttered. First being her long-standing affair with the married right-wing French politician Lucien Millevoye with whom Maud Gonne had two children–Georges and Iseult. And the other being Gonne's doomed marriage with John MacBride which ended amid accusation of drunken violence, adultery, and sexual molestation.

Ferriter's reasons for mentioning these scandals are not to demote Gonne's credibility but to plant a pertinent thought in our minds:

It is worth considering why Gonne did not feature prominently in the decade of commemorations. Her independent mindedness, upending of social norms and decrying of an abusive, alcoholic man set her apart. Her focus on Europe was also distinctive and her journalistic endeavours had included starting her own journal, L’Irlande Libre, to internationalise the case for Irish self-determination.

Why would we not memorialize such a dynamic woman? It's indeed time for a Maud Gonne statue in Dublin city centre.

The post is subscription only, so I'm reprinting some of the key elements here. 

By Diarmaid Ferriter:

Advocating for the poor was just one layer of Gonne’s exceptional range of activism. Her life and career are the focus of a campaign launched this month by the new Maud Gonne Society, spearheaded by Irish writer Orna Ross, to erect a statue to commemorate Gonne in Dublin city centre.

 

Her fortunes were reversed by MacBride’s subsequent martyrdom owing to his execution after his fighting role in the 1916 Rising. Gonne embraced his now revered status. She continued with her welfare work, was imprisoned in 1918 and continually advocated for political prisoners during the upheavals of 1919-23. Though she initially supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty, partly due to her friendship with Arthur Griffith, she came to reject it and was an avowed enemy of the Free State while also promoting the work of the Irish White Cross charity.

 

When she died in 1953, The Irish Times paid tribute to her courage, grace and dignity, and famed beauty, which featured in everything written about her as few disputed the assertion of Yeats that she was “the most beautiful woman of her time”.

 

But the obituaries were also duly decorous, one referring to her as “perhaps the last of the Romantic Republicans”. This was reductive given the complications of her life, the currents she swam against and the prejudices she embraced, including her deep anti-Semitism, denunciation of the work of playwright JM Synge and sympathy towards aspects of fascism in the 1930s.