This is the documentary on one from Auti in Ireland, just another to say that the multi award winning documentary on one is now available for sponsorship, both on radio and podcast. If you're interested, you can e-mail us documentaries at or to EdTech for further information. And now to today's story from the documentary on one and narrated by Bill Murphy, this is the Little Shop of Secrets.

This idea of the Wallace sisters, when someone described them to me as free ladies, very hardworking ladies running a small shop. And this was the center of the IRA intelligence network in Cork City growing up.

I remember my mother talking a lot about her aunts, my grandsons, the Wallace sisters, Sheila and Nora, and the important role they played in the Irish War of Independence in Cork. She talked a lot about their little shop in St. Augustine Street, not so much that they were shopkeepers, but that they were intelligence officers in the old IRA.

They formed a headquarters that would serve their purposes fantastically. And that was the shop of Nora and Sheila Wallace and the Boston Street. Very few people would have suspected that it was the headquarters of the Cork Brigade of Irish volunteers, but that's exactly what it became.

My mom passed away a few years ago, and I regret now that I didn't ask her more about her.

And every operation, in effect, has its origin in the shop.

It is absolutely made clear by those who survived and who lived to tell the tale.

It all the major players on the scene, certainly in terms of intelligence that was where they met, either to have an informal chat and gossip or to exchange specific pieces of information. From 1919 to 1921, Ireland fought for independence from the British Empire and my Gran aunt secret activities were a central part of that fight in Cork. The only tangible evidence of those activities that my mother left us was Sheila Wallace's War of Independence Medal and a stocktaking ledger containing a list of items that you would be shocked to find in your little corner shop.

Anybody associated with them had a lot of time for them just because they were really committed, but also really skilled activists and were just incredibly intelligent, being able to think fast, not giving anything away and just be able to hide in plain sight.

That's kind of a remarkable thing about them. I got a feeling that people didn't fully appreciate just how up to the neck they were in all this. My cousin Bernadette Wallace lives in my granddad's old house. Hello, how are you? I'm great all together. Great to see you. How are you getting out with this business? Very well. And Bernadette, Wanis and I e to know, and she once Bernadette has taken great care over the years to preserve the house and the items that belonged to both Sheila and Nora.

And so in many respects, the House hasn't changed since the Wallis sisters were living there.

And there are a lot of photographs around the house in relation to the war of independence.

We serve neither King nor Kaiser.

I think that's the citizen's army. Correct. That's quite a famous photograph, but I imagine that's quite an old print. Yes.

Over in the other corner, of course, we have it's a plaque of Padraic Pierce and Thomas McCarten.

Bernadette tells me about an apron which was given to my grandkids by Countess Markovitch.

That apron today has a special pride of place in the Sligo Museum.

Over in this corner, we have a famous and wonderful hair. Is there any connection between Nora and Sheila and Raymond over there?

One himself, and she needs bandolier that were very similar. And Sheila. So every time Deve came to the house, Nora had to call the local painter to say, please come and paint the house. Davis coming.

It's kind of interesting to imagine the Valera sitting in this room chatting with your aunts. That's quite an extraordinary memory to have.

But who were these women who were close to former teacher can President Aymond and the renowned activist and first woman to be elected to Daulaire and Countess Markovitch? The Wallace sisters were talked about a lot in our family, but I hadn't heard much about them. Other than that. This was surprising as they seemed to be connected to so many of the central figures of the Irish fight for independence exactly a hundred years ago. No.

Etc. My brother Ted has researched our own family's connection to the Wallace sisters, so you have some material for us.

This is a census from 1981 in a house in Ballarat. My grandmother and Granaz came from a large farming family in the parish, have done a more about 20 miles northwest of Cork City.

They were quite big family. There was 10 altogether. And it has the father and the mother, a daughter, Julie.

So Julie would have been sheather. Yes, correct. And Nora, who was six, there were seven girls and three boys in the family.

Sheila, the elder of the two sisters, was born in 1887 and Nora in 1893, left.

So we were heading for Kent Collins. Kilcullen So this was where the old family farm was in and around the late 19th century. Life was very hard in those days and many people were very poor and suffered evictions from the land, to the best of my knowledge, any holdings, any buildings are long gone.

It was probably difficult area to scrape a living together. I mean, how big is an acreage that could be? There could be two acres, maybe a feed and a bit beyond. You're not talking very much, but enough to keep a family in food and milk and probably they grow potatoes.

And as soon as the kids were of age, they went to a more national school shield, moved to the city in our early 20s in search of a better life. She rented the premises at St. Augustine Street with a shop on the bottom floor and living quarters overhead. Nora, still only in her late teens, soon joined her sister. By 1911, she had gone to a saint across the street, Nora had joined her and there brought down as reading and writing.

From the photos we have, she is petite and delicate looking as a young woman, Nora looks more robust and formidable. These physical characteristics, from what my mother used to say, mirrored their personalities. OK, we're on the grand parade, which just leads off Country Street, which is the very center of the city, and across the road is St. Augustine's Church. And to the rear of that is St. Augustine Street. And that's where the Wallace sisters had their shop.

As you can see, it's a quite a narrow streets with not much to traffic, and of course, the shop existed long before I was around.

But I do remember our mother talking very fondly about the shop. She worked in there when she was a young girl. Did you ever get to see the shop? I know you were very young at the time, but can you have one, you reckon, staring up as US snow about?

There would have been the front door. My brother Kate bottom floor, a single watt bulb, bare shelves, a wooden counter with a small little where you put a penny in it for money for the African missions, the little shop.

So sweets, cigarettes, newspapers, books and religious goods that might have been a box of Cadbury's chocolate, which I'd be knowing all the time.

Of course, snack bar or whatever. In the back was the kitchen. There was a gas cooker, a little table with plastic covering and mom would like to fire a toilet, but I was at the side and steps going up to two bedrooms. There was two entrances while in pictures there raised as the front door of the shop, the front door of the house and a skylight at the back.

Like most of the country, Cork City in the 1980s was a grim place with high unemployment and very bad living conditions. Well, there was a possibility of home rule where Ireland would have some powers of self-government. Full independence was far off.

To find out more about my grandson's early days in Cork City and what motivated them to become involved in the nationalist movement, I spoke to local historian and to me when they came into the city, I think they were assailed by the complete class difference in Cork City, but also the terrible conditions of the lanes and the tenements and that stalked their sense of social justice.

That sense of socialist nationalism found its expression through political groups like the Irish Citizens Army and through the increasingly powerful trade union movement.

They were very involved in the Irish Citizen's Army. There were very big on that side of things from kind of 1914, 1915 to 1918. They were still very much building a reputation for themselves as two women that were very interested in the Irish language in Irish newspapers and very much so in the Irish labour costs. And their big hero was James Connolly, and they were quite friendly with him and Countess Markovic. So if you like, there were already cutting their teeth on the Irish national question.

But from the socialist perspective, they thought that society had to change as much as the political situation had to change.

So prior to the outbreak of the war of independence, you had these clusters of separatists, a lot of people who became Republicans.

Dr John Berger, novel from the History Department in University College Cork has written several books on the period.

And there were kind of overlapping groups of radicals and militants. And you had in Dublin and Belfast and Cork, you had pretty big cohorts who kind of formed a cadre of folks who would lead the revolutionary movement and the independence movement. So in Cork among that group are the Wallace sisters. They're very apparent at a relatively early stage. Their news agents seem to assault some radical publications, including left wing publications.

And so but you had one stop shop for all kind of radicals in the city, I think. In Easter 1916, an armed rebellion broke out on the streets of Dublin with the Irish volunteers fighting to gain independence from the British Empire all around the country. Volunteers mobilized for what became known as the 1916 Rising put in Cork. Nothing came to pass because of conflicting orders and a failure of communications. When the rising failed, the leaders, including Patrick Pierce, were executed by British forces.

This created a new thirst for Irish independence throughout the country. And in Cork, a surge in rebellious activity began to gain momentum. The Cork volunteers were then commanded by Thomas McCarten with Terence McSweeny as the second in command.

University College cork historian Gabriel Doretti explains how things were changing in bearing in mind the lessons of 1916, which was that nobody knew what was going on and the volunteers, let alone what was happening on the British side. There is a realisation that that intelligence failure and failure of communications within the volunteers is something that has to be addressed very, very quickly.

Most of the volunteers weapons were surrendered and local leaders were arrested and interned when the volunteers were released from interment in December 1916.

And then most of the others are released in 1917, albeit there's a series of arrests. Intelligence is something which is prioritised all across the volunteer structure. It's not just in Cork, it's in Dublin and elsewhere.

My shop became a place where many of the leading figures of the revolutionary movement in the city visited, and Sheila and Nora soon became trusted confidantes of both McCarten and McSweeny in terms of the Wallace sisters.

They were fearless. I suppose there was a little bit of the sort of the Fenian outlook to them.

And it was realised that these women and the shop and the women, perhaps more than the actual physical building, could serve as, in effect, an informal brigade HQ in June 1917 as a volunteer schemed to gain independence.

They suffered a major blow when their headquarters in Sheere Street was shut down by order of the crown forces.

They needed to find another place to meet and plan their operations someplace safe and discreet and the shopping center of the street with two sort of spinsters, it is the perfect cover there at the front, apparently just going about their business.

In reality, even while they were doing their regular business, they're also doing business for the volunteers. And out the back, Sujiatun is being planned in no uncertain terms. That headquarters is something which has to be in formal or informal, but you need the right quality of people who will be acting as the cover. And you could not have found better material than the one assistance. I try to imagine the shop dark, dimly lit, full of religious statues and shelves with newspapers, cigarettes behind the counter and sweets and jars.

I picture Nora serving a customer, maybe a mother and her child looking at the sweets, or maybe it's a man who walks in businesslike and is ushered into the back by Sheila to meet with fellow volunteers to discuss the latest dispatches or plan an enemy raid, 1917 1918.

The emphasis is very much on acquiring new weapons. I mean, the weapons that were lost in 1916, you can't fight unless you obtain the weapons.

Probably the best and least risky operations was in September 1917, when the grammar school in Cork is rated. They had an officer training corps in the grammar schools and 47 rifles were seized, which was a huge hole, considering how difficult it has been to acquire basically the same number before the 1916 rising.

I took my search for more information about my grandkids to the public museum, which holds the personal papers of Sheila and Nora Wallace that had been loaned to the museum by my cousin Bernadette Wallace.

I am Daniel Breen, curator, Cork Public Museum. These are wonderful collection of documents that were donated to the museum, I think, in the 90s related to the Wallace sisters.

As we opened the box, we could see files full of photos, letters, essays, lists and other material. Seems to be a combination of personal recollections, poetry, typed or handwritten love, their amazing personal artifacts to have.

It's quite interesting to see their actual handwriting. This was really a treasure trove of firsthand material belonging to my grand aunts. Myself and my brother Ted couldn't wait to go through it.

Among the papers, we found handwritten notes made by Sheila where she lists the military activities she was directly involved in House was brigade headquarters, had to be ready day or night to receive dispatches, was not allowed to take part in any public display from an early stage. The Wallaces, they were the kind of base of operations for the IRA in Cork City, initially for the whole county Dr. John Berger novel. So initially that headquarters was for all of the IRA in County Cork and then they separated into three brigades.

The court number one brigade was mid cork in the city cork number two brigade was North Cork and number three brigade was West Cork. One of the key people in that was the brigade adjutant, the guy who became in charge of all the communications and written orders and later also their intelligence network. And that was Florry O'Donoghue, and he worked in a little Draper's shop on the corner of Castle Street, North Main Street. And according to him, it became apparent that they needed a real proper structure for all the messages that were coming in and coming out.

So he kind of approached them and they were already known to people. They were experienced activists.

He said they were really discreet and they were really trustworthy, was aware of all activities during the period, had to keep touch between county battalion officers and brigade officers.

Anybody who came to contact the IRA, you always went to the Wallis's and the walls were kind of good at figuring out who was legit and who wasn't. And that was part of their function.

Sinn Fein swept the boards in the December 1918 election, and on the 21st of January 1919, they formed a breakaway government in the first dailan, which declared Irish independence and was later outlawed by the British government. The volunteers, now known as the Irish Republican Army, escalated their operations to an armed conflict with British forces and a Royal Irish Constabulary D.R.C. And so began the war of independence.

Kind of the important thing about the Wallis's to keep in mind is they weren't coming amann. They were their IRA activists.

They were totally integrated within the IRA organization Shela know in her early 30s and Naura, in her mid 20s, were among the thousands of women active in the war of independence. Most were members of common names on the Republican women's organisation that gave logistical backup to the men in the IRA. Put in a society where a woman's role was just to support the men, Sheila and Nora were on equal terms with them.

Sheila was a brigade officer in charge of communications. Nora was essentially an intelligence agent for the brigade intelligence department.

Yeah, I think that's a very interesting element of their story as to young women who seem to be considered very highly by their male counterparts, is their role unique in that sense?

Sheila Wallis was the officer commanding communications, which meant she dealt with all the dispatches and couriers, all the people who are running messages. And the one brigade had a really good network of couriers by couriers, train couriers, ship couriers. She seems to have managed that kind of operation. And I haven't seen any other woman, brigade officer, brigade staff officer and the IRA as a whole. So she's unique in that way. There are a couple other women involved at battalion level, but no one at that brigade level.

So that's unique. Nora Wallace was almost certainly was assisting her sister kind of in that operation and then also was serving as an agent to the IRA intelligence officer, Florea Donahoo, kind of reaching out and contacting IRA assets in the British administration and communications network and what have you. I mean, in Cork City, especially, a lot of women were involved in intelligence. And so that wouldn't have been that uncommon, but still pretty remarkable. She would have been considered a really, you know, highly valued asset to IRA intelligence gathering and intelligence operations.

And for people to be trusted with that kind of information meant that they were considered intelligent, they were considered discreet. They were considered able to think on their feet quick-witted. And that seems to have been very much how Sheila and Nora were perceived by their IRA comrades.

OK, so there's another document here, a handwritten note on the top of it is a copy of Associates reference. So that's Shawano here versus the heavies.

All right. I call him the heavy.

I'm just reading from in the early volunteer days, once Shop became a rallying cry for city and county men.

And as the organisation developed and the campaign became more intense, it was clearly the natural selection as a carrying hosts for dispatches.

So this is further indication of the communications. All that they shop had. Yeah, but it's a natural situation would have been quite useless if the Wallace sisters had not been the right stuff. Miss Sheila Wallace, the senior, was put in charge. All dispatchers in and out passed through her hands. She possessed the fundamental of all efficiency, a sound common sense with the highest courage and astute but natural feeling, which nevertheless did not overreach or judgment.

So their personalities, their abilities to be discrete and to be calm under extreme pressure is borne out by the testimony of national Hecate.

Nora also worked closely with Commandant Thomas. She was like his eyes and ears around the city in an account of her activities, she writes, received and delivered verbal and written messages for Thomas. McCarten kept in contact with the different brigade officers and had the responsibility of deciding when and how people seeking interviews with senior officers were to be put in touch.

OK, that's interesting, isn't it? Yeah, that element of trust and the more senior people within the organization being able to rely on them for their discretion in making decisions on where and how that information will be for the transmission.

As the operations and activities grew more ambitious within the correct number one brigade, my granaz responsibilities grew from not just providing a safe place for meetings among the leadership and passing messages, but to creating a spy network within the crown. Forces maintained contact with a soldier in Karkh barracks and got very useful information from him. But Nora did have a connection with a spy in Victoria Barracks, local historian and Toomy no Collinses because it was the center of British military rule really in the city, and his name was Pat Margetts.

But he used to help her pass information as to who had been caught, who was imprisoned up there, who had been just delivered into the barracks for, I suppose, interrogation and that. And he was also able to tip off on who had been giving information, you know, so that was a tricky one then as well, because she had to pass that on. And, you know, whatever happened after that then in terms of dealing with informers and all that sort of stuff.

So she's a tough role that way.

Jerry White is my name. I'm a local historian with a huge interest in military history from 1913 to 1923. I'm just retired from the Defence Forces where I served for 43 years. All the things really that are essential to any military organization are good communications and good intelligence. What else goes any chance of a successful operation would be reduced. The two girls themselves, because they were young ladies at the time, became responsible for communications because at the end of each meeting a number of decisions would be taken and those decisions would have to be communicated to the battalions here in the city and the outlying battalions in the districts around calk to the outside world.

There were simple shopkeepers, but behind the scenes they were leading a double life of secrecy.

I can't emphasize enough the great danger that the two girls faced at the time because what they were doing was actually treasonous. The eyes of the British authorities. If caught, they potentially could be executed or at the very least put away behind prison bars for a long, long time.

But they persisted. They placed themselves in danger on a daily basis in pursuit of the objective of an independent Irish Republic, nor was responsible for a lot of the despatch boxes and that finding safe places around the city.

And to me, setting up all these lines and chains of communication was fascinating to me.

Communications that were being run down to be dispersed across Monster Wide through the Wallis's and going through their network of couriers. Dr. John Parvanova. We also know that they had a courier network for train communications from Dublin, where they had guys on the trains who basically carried messages. Often they would just take them to the footstep underneath the carriages or they'd have engineers in the engine compartment.

They put them in like seemingly discarded Guinness bottles or lanterns if they weren't lit or in daylight. And then they had a young teenager messenger who go down to Kent Station, collect the messages, bring them back to the Wallis's. And apparently they had some kind of hidden compartment at the train station and Wallis's and they've kind of put them up and that stuff would go out that way. Think about Clark in terms of it's a railway terminus for five different railways.

It's also a big major southern port. So there's also a lot of communications going to New York and going to like Liverpool and London, and so all those messages coming out of Munster are in a certain way going through. If they're not going to want to, coming out of cork or not cork, they're going through the Wallis's. So that's pretty amazing.

In many cases they'd be sent out in court. Gerry White, because the last thing would have happened if your dispatch was intercepted, obviously would give your enemy a good idea about your operations.

Always kept the code in the house and was responsible for same red cord messages from the GPO and frequently recorded them and for the most part in alphabetical cipher will be used.

That would match one letter against another letter. In other words, the letter E would actually mean the letter W or something like that, and for most people would be very hard to decipher unless you had the actual cipher. So these ciphers would have been used and passed along to the different units. And when the dispatches were there to be deciphered, when the intelligence service of the brigade was organized, she's special duties in relation to a part of this. What my brother Ted copies of Enemy Telegraph messages in code were delivered to her from our men walking the GPO, nor she had the code book.

That's interesting. And hers was the only place to which such messages were delivered. She retained these messages if it was not possible to deliver them immediately to the brigade intelligence officer. Frequently she assisted in decoding them and it was the usual practice to lead the code key at brigade headquarters in her custody. Again, strategically, it would have been of huge importance to the British forces if they could get their hands on those called. Another remarkable aspect of the little shop and my grandson's clandestine activities was its location only a few minutes walk from the Bridewell oracy station in the cold to the north and another RLC station on Tuqay Street to the south.

In a real sense, they were hiding in plain sight. It's more late 1919, things start to get very active in Cork City.

Gabriel Darity, one of the first things that the IRA do is to start and this again is part of a national policy, is to start attacking RISC barracks, especially rural barracks. And of course, remember, within the number one brigade, you have very extensive rural areas as well as within both the city and kov. So those barracks are attacked. They are indefensible, very vulnerable, and they are vacated.

Throughout 1920, Yorick deployed the auxiliaries and the infamous Black and Tans, mainly made up of British army World War One veterans. These were brought in to support the RNC. This really ramped up the violence with increased attacks and reprisals on both sides the most.

McCarten was lord mayor of Cork, but also commander of the number one brigade was under constant threat. But he and his comrades, including my grandsons, didn't fully appreciate how much danger he was in. The atmosphere in the city had really ratcheted up around March 1920 and Toomy and there were tit for tat reprisals. And at that stage, the black and Tans were in the city. And one particular incident on that same date was the killing of Constable Marter.

That was Long Popescu that really ratchet it up and the risk and of course, the black times, they were looking for, you know, a tit for tat. And they made clear that TMOS then was a legitimate target in the eyes of the state forces. In Noris papers, we found her recollection of Thomas McCartin calling to the shop the night he died.

Cork's lord mayor, after a busy day in their capacity, visits his HQ late at night and do some volunteer work. Ready to go? He questions what do you not ignore a jumper? That's right. I thought it might be socks for some fella mind nor caught in my bicycle till the war is over. We'll have something else to do. And I don't want them leaving any windows. On the night that he was killed, the last place he visited was your granddad's shop and then went home to Blackpool.

And later on that night, you know, the door was broken down and he was shot in his own house and later died from his injuries. It must have really hit at the heart of both your grandsons. Their grief, I think, motivated them to stick it out, even though it became very dark days and cocreator very difficult days.

When I was very young, I remember my mother had a stocktaking ledger with the name Sheila Wallace on it and lots of lists in it. My brothers and sisters and I didn't realize what a ledger was far, and it was actually used by one of them as a stamp album when Gaige Backside were engaged with a like shotgun's miniature 20.

I only know realised the full significance of the ledger kept and moved. Small arms and ammunition frequently was responsible for keeping arms and ammunition kept by Sheila in the shop. The Ledger contains an extremely detailed inventory of the arms kept by the correct number one brigade, IRA Springs' ejection part of a machine gun 31.

She had Springsure. These were all the guts of the weapon springs trap footplate. Amazing. Forty 46 rush rifles. Well, it's also an indication of actually how much equipment that connectable brigade actually had at the disposal.

Rifles magazine love to whether it is stored in the home of the Wallace sisters or not, we don't know. But it must have been stored somewhere that would have enabled them to carry out such a detailed stocktaking. And it is exceptionally detailed.

Especially from your military background, so to find out more about the ledger, I brought it to the military archives in Kahar Brewer Barracks, Dublin, and spoke with the officer in charge, Commandant Daniel Iota's.

I suppose what we call in modern parlance, it's a it's a quartermasters ledger of weapons and ammunition and associated hard and soft ordnance. So it really is a unique piece of history that you have here. I suppose it speaks to the proficiency and the professionalism as well as what it was doing. So I would imagine that Shela had to keep this quite securely as well, because even without materials mentioned that this would have been enough to get her into an awful lot of trouble with police and army forces at the time.

By mid 1920, IRA operations intensified with more raids on enemy barracks. My gran aren't very much in the thick of the action kept going cotton for the blowing up of blakney barracks. Sheila writes, helped to disguise the men going on the job and also go cotton for the blowing up of King Street. Barack's sister and myself had to leave our house that night as brigade order. They thought our house would go up as a reprisal after the curtains. Killing the man who succeeded them was his second in command, Terrence McSweeny.

Jerry White. He succeeded Thomas McCarton both as officer commanding cognizable brigade, but also as Lord Mayor of Corke. One story that was in the family was that on the odd occasion, Terence McSweeny served customers from behind the counter in the shop. And I found where Nora actually writes about this in her papers. It is early morning. I am awakened by my sister Terrazzano. He wants me to take this dispatch and wouldn't let me close the shop. I dressed and hurried downstairs to find Terry behind the counter, reading the paper he had sold to packets of cigarettes and a paper he enjoyed his little minutes of shopkeeping.

It was his last visit. He was arrested outside City Hall on the 12th of August and charged with sedition for being. He was found in possession of a cipher belonging to the Royal Constabulary. He was sentenced to two years in Brixton prison in London, and he announced at his court martial in Victoria Barracks that he had been refusing food. And he said he would continue to do so until either he was freed or he went to his death.

In the weeks and months during McSweeney's hunger strike in prison, his comrades met around the kitchen table of my shop to plan ways of securing his release by either putting the crown under pressure to let him go or, if necessary, break him out of jail. One of these towns was an audacious one to capture the commander of the British Army 6th Division based in Victoria Barracks, Major General Peter Strickland, the IRI received information that he was going to head back to England and his car would be coming down.

Patrick's Hill, a unit comprised of selected members of the brigade, positioned themselves at the bottom of Patrick's Hill on the day in question. And towards the evening, his car did appear. Gunshots were exchanged. But fortunately for the general, he actually managed to be good escape and brought his ship for England.

In October 1920, after 74 days of hunger strike, Terence McSweeny died in Brixton prison.

His hunger strike drew the eyes of the world on the conflict for independence that was then raging through fraudulent Shawano.

Heggarty took over running the brigade. I remember my mother referring to him as Boss Heggarty and I think as a child she found him a formidable and scary figure. That was, of course, many years after the war of Independence. Under his leadership, the campaign intensified in December 1920. The brigade carried out an ambush, wounding a dozen auxiliaries, leaving their barracks and killing one of them in an act of reprisal that later became known as the burning of Calk.

Crown forces set fire to the centre of the city. All over five acres close to the shop were destroyed. The shop itself appeared to be unscathed.

By late 1920s, casualties were mounting on both sides when the numbers were nowhere near as high as conventional war. The viciousness and violence with which both sides carried out their attacks made cork and the whole of Ireland a dangerous place for everyone. Many probably felt the struggle wasn't worth it.

The next phase and this, of course, is a hugely controversial phase is is the simple shooting of spies. The British realised that they're losing the intelligence battle, that they already know more about them than they do about the IRA. They know practically nothing about the IRA.

So they now start actively courting spies.

And of course, also spies themselves volunteer their services to the British, in many cases, not for money.

I mean, in many cases, these will be members of the loyalist community feel it is their duty, as it were, to put down what they say is rebellion. You also do have individuals who do pass on information for money.

And Sheila's papers, we find reference to an ex British soldier called Timothy Quinn Lisk, who was shot dead in Cork by the IRA earlier that year for being suspected of spying. After Quinlan's was shot, some brigade officers remained in our house all night.

You start to then have this very, very brutal war where the IRA, you have to take house and spies for their own safety. And they also have to send out a signal to anybody else who's thinking of doing the same thing that the payment they will receive ultimately will be death. But all of this comes back to intelligence. You cannot take out spies if you don't have intelligence.

My grandparents and the shop continue to provide a safe haven for the active volunteers during this intense period of the war because they always had something cooking on the stove.

Again, that was kind of their cover so that if any man was cut there, they were there eating and there were black, there were a larger there were this or whatever. But it actually had a practical purpose because guys that were on the run or guys that were released from prison were really put to the pin of their colour to find food and to keep well. So in that way, like they were also a support network for the guys on their own, the stress must have been extraordinary not to be discovered and caught.

The shop came under increasing surveillance and under a lot of pressure because it was such a terrible time. They lived on their nerves. They lived on the edge. They had to step up to the plate every day. Never knew of the knock on the door was the end of the line for them or somebody else looking for their help.

As valuable documents were always held in HQ and it was being frequently raided, one person had to be on alert for the whole 24 hours and men staying awake at night. This was done, Sheila and I sharing duty.

So one of them was on guard on 24 hour call in the shop, looking out for any raids because of the importance of the material that they held in the shop.

The war was raging out of control. Martial law was declared in parts of Ireland, including Cork, in an attempt to curb the activities of the IRA. Krung forces carried out raids and searches on homes around the city, and ordinary people were subject to curfew at night. Later, it became a requirement to keep a list of all people staying in the House.

Well, British intelligence gathering operations were definitely not as good as those of the IRA in Cork. Gerry White. They did manage to identify various. Specs are key locations around the city that were being used, and eventually one location that came under suspicion was the shop of the Wallace Sisters in St. Augustine Street.

The British finally caught up with the Wallace sisters house, was raided by 10000 and military two men arrested on the premises at Krafts Annealing. They were released after a week and I was arrested, court martialed and fined two pounds for not having their names behind the door. After that, we were raided continuously after years of seditious activity. The shop was shut down in May 1921 by order of W. Higginson military governor. We will never really know how much the British knew of my grandson's activities and for how long they were under surveillance, but maybe if they knew the full extent to what Sheila and Nora were up to, they would almost certainly have put them in prison or maybe even worse.

When the shop was closed down temporarily, they set up a stall in the English market to continue somehow the running of the operations. They may have lost their means of making a livelihood, but seemed determined to continue the intelligence and communications work of the brigade. We took a stall in the market and held divisional HQ and brigade dispatches. No dispatch was ever found by the enemy forces. We saved them. All right. Through to the end, a truce was called on the 11th of July 1921, bringing a halt to all insurgent operations in Ireland.

Well, there can be no definitive number of casualties, the numbers who died on both sides and Cork totaled over 500 during the two and a half years of the conflict, a treaty was signed between the Irish and the British, creating a self-governing, free state of Ireland. The fact it did not mean full independence ignited a vicious and sometimes brutal civil war. The Wallaces chose the anti treaty side and were close to devil error in some respects. This was a darker time when old comrades quickly became enemies once the Civil War had Pitroda to.

And it must you know, that was a very, very hard time for the people on all sides. But when it all the dust settled, your grandsons just OK to put things to one side. And the next day they appeared in the shop selling the tobacco, the cigarettes and the newspapers and continued on.

So this is the online military service pensions collection, and you can see Sheena's full reference there and her in the 1930s, those who took part in the war of independence could apply for a pension from the free state government.

Those two ladies had to fight tooth and nail for their pension and me to prove that they had active service.

In fact, a lot of the women found it very difficult to prove that, like in World War two, the female agents find it very difficult because it wasn't accepted, Norm, to see women involved in wars, if you like, their old comrades had to provide witness statements in support of their pension claims.

By the nature of revolutionary warfare and guerrilla warfare, the kind of records that the state or national military will keep don't exist.

Commandant Daniel Iota's of the Military Archives. So it was necessary for people applying for pensions to give references to either confirm or contradict the testimony that this person had given an application for a pension. And so it was down to, I suppose, adjudicative committee under the testimony of support and claims.

So Heggarty 5th of June 1937, the highest praise must be given to him, Sheila Wallis and her sister, Miss Nora Wallis, for the manner in which all difficult situations were handled. And Miss Wallace and her claim for acknowledgement is entitled to the most generous and by the board. It wasn't until the 1940s that the Department of Defense recognized that both my grandparents had served in the Irish volunteers and IRA were cataloguing by the Military Service Pensions Project is ongoing. This puts Sheila and Nora in a very select group of less than 10 women identified so far whose revolutionary work outside of Common Namon earned them this high status by the state, the state whose foundation they had so much to secure.

But again, what distinguishes the Wallis's is that they were recognized as IRA officers by the IRA. And so if you have like a brigade less of a brigade officer, Sheila is listed as a brigade officer. She's not listed as comparable because she wasn't.

She was IRA, although it was only Sheila who had served formally as a brigade officer. The nature of Nora's work meant that they were both awarded the same level of military service pension as a male IRA brigade officer typically received.

And it was Sheila was awarded at first and then Nora, along with the pension medals, were awarded by the state in recognition of the service of those who took part in the war. Sheilas medal was handed down to my mother and it's one of our most prized possessions.

And a significant thing for me is the fact that it has the bar on a commandant, Daniel Iota's.

I mean, the difference between a man with a beard and without a bar, it indicates that the recipient had been engaged in active combat.

Nora would have been entitled to a medal, too, but there's no trace of it in the family. Nora and Sheila never married. In 1939, they bought a house in Mayfield on the north side of Cork City to live in while they kept the shop going in St. Augustine Street. My cousin Bernadette Wallace now lives there, so they moved at that stage.

And the house is Kartikeya, which I still have kept name after. She was a very close, was very close to my father.

Despite the great danger that she had lived through during the war of independence and the civil war, it was a simple accident that ended her life. In Easter week, 1944, she was alighting from a bus on Patrick Street in Cork when she fell and sustained a head injury. She died a few days later in hospital Tanura. It must have been a sudden and devastating loss as they were so close. Sheila was only 57.

The word went out that she died and the IRA as a tribute to Sheila Wallace, what they thought of her, how they trusted her, how she minded them. They carried her coffin the whole way from the church all the way up to San Finbar Cemetery in Reelers. That's what they thought of your brother and not a lot of people that get that kind of honor. That was a big demonstration of the old IRA.

They were really honoring her. And I think that's because she had this kind of unique standing within the movement. Norris Health deteriorated not long after the Civil War, she was treated for tuberculosis and made several visits to a sanatorium in Switzerland. According to her pension application, it was caused by her going out in all weathers during the war of independence. She kept the shop going until the 1960s when her has began to worsen. We made an unexpected discovery of a recording of Nora in an Iraqi documentary made in 1960 about her beloved comrade, Terrence McSweeny.

He was beautiful, dark, torn tournament Monge.

Having heard about her all my life, I was taken aback to hear her actual voice and he gently lunged at Nahrawan is a little red on top of her piano, but he never seemed to be able to control that little touch of hair.

She died on the 17th of September 1970 in St. Martin's Nursing Home in Cork. The newspapers of the Time report that the shock jock Lynch and Commandant General Tom Barry were there as well, of course, as my grandmother. And there was a firing party from Collins Barracks.

And let's see if we can see the inscription isn't very clear on it. But Sheila Devilish Nora and Sheila are buried in St. Finbar Cemetery in Cork, their grave not far from the Republican Party, loving memory of Sheila Wallis, staff officer Cork one brigade, St. Augustine Street.

That's our sister. Some of us right there on the site. Nora Wallis died 17th of September, 1917. It's hard, even after all the research and interviews for this documentary to imagine what Cork and Ireland was like 100 years ago during the fight for independence. Up until now, the only link with my grandkids was the fund where my mother would mention them from time to time. It still seems incredible and almost unreal what I have discovered about them. Their ability to run the shop as an intelligence and communications center, a secret meeting place and a safe house right under the noses of the British police and army forces is an amazing testament to their character.

If any two women deserved immortality for their work in the following three or four years. He was referring to the war of independence. They did. And that came from Florey. O'Donoghue was the intelligence officer for the number one Iara brigade, referring to two of his finest secret agents. These women there were all shunted into the sidelines of history. And if there's any value to commemorations, it really is since the 1916 100th anniversary that that this spotlight has been put on the women and your your grandsons fit into that.

I think it's great that people are paying attention to them.

Finally, and their remarkable story, it's the idea of them being accepted as peers within the IRA. That's what kind of makes them quite unique.

I think, paradoxically, the scale and extent of the success of the intelligence operation, which is centred on the Williams sisters, is the extent to which is unknown. It was unknown during the war of independence because the British simply are unaware of what's going on in that shop.

Well, I feel closer to them, I still wonder what it would be like to travel back, stroll into the little shop dark in the shadow of the large church and see gnaw at the counter and maybe catch a glimpse of Sheila in the back at the kitchen table, glancing up to check who I was. Rifle's Remington friend are Full Pistols, Revolver 455 with six inch barrel before returning to carefully writing a secret message, are working on her stocktaking ledger side style magazines, pins, cash safety, sword bayonets.

The cause of their success and the extent of their success in terms of penetrating British intelligence and stopping the British gaining intelligence really remains unknown to the present day. Those who are in the best position to know where they did go on record, they are universal in their praise for Iran, who in effect says without them the campaign could not have been waged in the successful manner that he did. So, in a strange way, a silence of history is itself.

The best praise that one can pay to an intelligence officer is that they keep mum. You've been listening to the Little Shop of Secrets from the documentary on one. It was narrated by Bill Murphy and produced by Bill Murphy and Sarah Blake with additional research by Ted Murphy. Sound supervision was by Limor Brian Naylor, Sullivan and Brian Fitzpatrick. The historical consultant was Nigel Murray. The voice of Sheila Wallace was played by Don Bradfield's nor Wallace Buy nor Michigan and Shannon Haggerty by Tim Desmond's.

For more information, visit RCAF or its last Dockum won. Until next time, thanks for listening.