One of the most charismatic figures in the cause of Irish independence, Constance Gore-Bush, Countess Markievicz, was the daughter of a wealthy Irish landowner. Second-in-command of one of the Rebel garrisons during the Easter Rising, she was court-martialled and sentenced to death, but reprieved on account of her sex. During the next ten years, always either in prison or on the run, she was elected the first British woman M.P. and the first Minister of Labour in the "illegal" Dail Eireann of 1919....She died in 1927; 300,000 people lined the streets for her funeral..."