Ever hear of the wild woman of Donegal and her great escape from Mountjoy? Eithne Coyle was born Annie Coyle in 1897 near Falcarragh in Donegal. Coyle is best known for her leadership in Cumann na mBan, the revolutionary women’s paramilitary organization. Coyle’s career was marked by gun-running, boycotts, train hold-ups and two dramatic prison escapes that made international headlines. She was a Gaelic League organiser by day, whilst secretly building Cumann na mBan branches across the North and Ulster. Her brother Donal was a commandant in the IRA’s 1st Northern Division. During the War of Independence, she carried weapons, mapped out police stations for the IRA, and dodged Black and Tans who twice destroyed her family’s home. She was caught with sketches of a barracks and sensitive IRA papers, and arrested on New Year’s Day 1921. Coyle was sentenced to three years in Mountjoy Prison under the Defence of the Realm Act. At her trial, she refused to recognise the court, hilariously reading a newspaper in the dock and telling the judge ( as Gaeilge) that he was wasting his and her time. Inside Mountjoy, she met fellow revolutionaries like Constance Markievicz. Conditions were brutal with overcrowded yet still freezing cells, rotten food and lethal sanitation. On Halloween night, 1921, Coyle and three comrades Linda Kearns, Mae Burke, and Aileen Keogh staged one of the great escapes of the revolutionary period. A friendly female warden let them make a wax mold of the prison key. Outside the walls, the IRA stood ready with cars. Inside, prisoners staged a football match. I believe it was Cork versus the Rest of Ireland, to distract the guards. As the game raged below, Coyle and the others climbed a rope ladder flung over the wall. She was the last up, helping the unwell Kearns, before slipping into the night. The next morning’s New York Times blazed the headline: "Four Women Break Jail." For months she hid in an IRA camp in Carlow until the Truce was called. But peace was short-lived. During the Civil War, Coyle refused to accept the Free State. She organised Cumann na mBan across Donegal, Derry, and Tyrone, enforced the Sinn Féin Belfast Boycott, and even held up trains at gunpoint. Then new Irish government came after her. In September 1922, she was arrested in Ballyshannon, earning her the dubious title of the first woman seized by the Free State. Her protest began immediately with a seven-day hunger strike demanding female prison guards. Transferred to Mountjoy, she found the place worse than before.She led the women in a prison riot, hurling their beds out of cells, sleeping on the floor for six weeks, then launching another hunger strike.When conditions grew unbearable, the authorities moved her to the North Dublin Union internment camp. This former workhouse was so filthy, Coyle wrote, "you could dig the dirt off the floors with a spade and leave enough behind for worms." On the 7th of May 1923, she escaped again, along with twenty others. But this time she was arrested at a train station the next day and dragged back to prison. She remained locked up until December, long after the war’s bitter end. Yet none of this broke her spirit. She rose to become president of Cumann na mBan in 1926, leading the organisation through its difficult postwar years. Later she married Donegal IRA man Bernard O’Donnell and continued to research and write about revolutionary women especially those forgotten in Northern Ireland and Scotland. She died in 1985, aged 88. In 2022, a monument engraved with the words "Fearless Revolutionary" was unveiled in her honor in Falcarragh,