User:Stevenkilcoyne93/sandbox

'''Elizabeth McAlerney

'Lily Kempson' – Personal Life'''

Lily was born into poverty and left school to started working in Jacobs' in 1911. That year all the female workers went on strike for higher wages, and won. At 14, she was jailed for two weeks because of her involvement in a trade union. Several years later, she joined the Irish Volunteer Army. Lily became a lynch pin in the Irish Voluntary Army which quickly developed into the Irish Republican Army. Lily helped seize St. Stephen's Green, a park in the heart of Dublin City, during the Easter Rising of 1916, which was a rebellion against the British rule, that left Dublin City in tatters.

One of seven children, she slept on the floor of a two-room house in Dublin, where her father worked for the railway. In 1916, the British held the Post Office in Dublin for a week. McAlerney worked as a courier for the men inside, ducking to avoid police snipers on rooftops. She also worked as a potato peeler to help feed trapped rebels. After the Rising was contained, the government posted a notice listing rebels to be executed or exiled. Lily Kempson was named publicly as one to be sent away. Exiled from Ireland in 1916, she took a boat to America and moved to Seattle. There she lived with two uncles who sailed merchant chips bound for China and Alaska. Eventually she married a man named Matt McAlerney, another Irish immigrant. Matt worked for a railroad and died in 1981. McAlerney used to lecture to history classes at universities in Seattle but has outlived some of the historians who invited her. Women in her family, she said, live a long life while the men do not survive their seventies. Before she left Ireland however, her family had one more fighting experience. As the police intruded her house one night, looking for weapons, they found themselves in the company of Lily's Grandmother, Esther Moore Kempson. Esther made an effort to get out of her bed to roast the police, who immediately left. Lily's Grandmother had reason to be livid, she kept several rifles under her mattress. "She was an old warrior," McAlerney recalled.

- Sun-Sentinel Co. Jan 27, 1996

- The Washington Post Company Apr 17, 1990