If the second Lord Monteagle clung to the idea that landlords still had a significant role to play in Ireland

his daughter was less certain.  Her diary suggests a high spirited woman with a love of adventure but her

actions suggest that she was searching for a role.  Lennox Robinson's play "The Big House", which was inspired by the family he knew at Mount Trenchard in the early years of the twentieth century, suggest that Mary ( see photo MAry Spring Rice)   had the courage of her great grandfather.

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Her Distant aunt, Charlotte Grace O'Brien, a poet who lived , unmarried, at Ard an Óir near Foyne, and was involved in the co-operative movement, had joined several groups which had strong allegiances to the interests of the country people.  In the 1880's she had become a Catholic and had declared herself a supporter of Parnell.  Later she had become a member of the Gaelic League on the Irish Guild of the Church of Ireland (Irish Anglicanism), become a supporter of Sinn Féin and found the Irish College at Carrigaholt in Co. Clare, demonstrating an involvement in new Irish institutions while retaining the assumption that her social background enabled her to play a leadership role.  These have been an inspiration to Mary to depart from the paternalism of her family.

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The constitutional route to independence seemed almost secure in 1912 when the third Home Rule Bill was passed by Asquith's government.  The only obstacle seemed to come from the Ulster Unionists who established the Ulster Volunteers.  They were soon being armed with smuggled weapons, the express purpose of the organisation being to use 'all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland'.  In 1913 the Irish Volunteers were formed in response by Eoin McNeill.  It had the support of many different types of nationalists, including the constitutionalist , John Redmond, and the maverick, Roger Casement. 

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Whether thinking abstractly about parity or being able to envisage armed conflict, even civil war,  Mary Spring Rice suggested that the Irish Volunteers should also be armed with guns bought on the continent and smuggled into Ireland in a fishing smack.  She knew of just the boat, the Santa Cruz, owned by the mill at Foynes and moored on the river near Mount Trenchard.  Jim Ring, Erskine Childer's biographer, imagined Mary Spring Rice arriving excitedly at the Childer's home on the Embankment in London, announcing her brain wave as she removes her gloves to the immediately appreciative Erskine and his wife Molly.  Mary Spring Rice's cousin, Conor O'Brien, and his cousin Hugh Vere O'Brien, were already members of the Irish Volunteers, confident that it was not a political movement.  (Hugh protested that the Volunteers was not political; this may have been disingenuous).  And Hugh's eagerness to help was already causing his mother, Florence Vere O'Brien, some concern.  Not because she was a die hard Unionist - she had spent her life reviving the craft of lace making in Limerick to introduce skills and employment in the area - but because she was not prepared for the militarism of the new era.  She wrote to her sister on 20th July , 1914, ' He [Hugh] had asked me if I should mind the Volunteers coming over to drill on the island - adding as an inducement that Monteagle had lent them the Memorial Hall in Foynes.  It goes against my inclination to refuse Hugh anything but I did not like the idea at all'