Noontide Blazing : Brigid Lyons Thornton - A Biography Book

"On Easter Week 1916, medical student and Cumann na mBan member, Brigid Lyons travelled from Longford to Dublin. Her uncle, Joe McGuinness, was fighting with 'O' Company in the Four Courts and Brigid quickly became involved in helping the Volunteers." "At the end of that week when the order came to surrender, Brigid was arrested and taken to Kilmainham Gaol. There she was to hear from her cell fearful barrages of 'savage shooting': the execution of fourteen of her idols." "In 1917 she participated in the election victory of her uncle, Lewes Jail prisoner, Joe McGuinness, to Westminster. Michael Collins had proposed McGuinness as the Sinn Fein candidate." "That connection with Collins was to see Brigid act as an undercover agent for him during the War of Independence. Still studying, her textbooks were stuffed more with Michael Collins' notes than those of her professor of medicine. In 1921, she shared in his stranger-than-fiction attempt to spring Sean Mac Eoin from Mountjoy." "Despite her revolutionary activities Brigid qualified in 1922. Commissioned by Collins, she became the only woman officer ever in the new Free State Army. Descriptions of her altered relationships with some of her former comrades, now Civil War enemies, make the most tragic reading in this story." "Struck down by tuberculosis, she was sent to Switzerland with fellow officers similarly afflicted. There she learned how the Swiss treated TB, a knowledge that was of immense professional advantage in her later years." Brigid Lyons Thornton died in April 1987 and she was buried on the 71st anniversary of the Easter Rising.