ABSTRACT
In the spring of 1886, in Aghaloora, County Cavan, girls' national school teacher Margaret Smyth refused to turn in her school key after being dismissed from her post for fighting with Mathew Comisky, her male counterpart in the boys' classroom next to hers. 2 According to the local school manager Terence Brady, when Smyth's replacement Suzanne Wilson arrived to collect the key, Smyth's sister pulled the newcomer's hair as Smyth, ‘forcibly [held] possession of the school’. While Wilson was being attacked by Smyth's sister, Brady watched ‘a crowd headed by Miss Smyth's brothers with a flag c[o]me … to take the boys from my school if I would not put out Miss Wilson’.
