Nell McCafferty lived outside society’s norms and she never stopped challenging them

Nell McCafferty was part of a remarkable generation of women journalists who felt compelled to upend expectations. The changing political environment, nationally and internationally, gave these feminists an added momentum from the late 1960s. Within a few years they had placed the issue of women’s rights in the public realm but had to fight hard to change minds and the law. They were not united or coherent in their campaigning and this was reflected in the speedy rise and demise of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement (IWLM), partly due to the emergence of ideological debates and tensions within feminism during the 1970s. Nonetheless, the extent to which the women succeeded in bringing to the fore issues that had been considered private and taboo is striking, and they played a crucial role in informing and politicising women who achieved much change, though innovation came more slowly than many would have wished.
There were numerous layers to McCafferty. As she recalled, “to be born Catholic in the anti-Catholic North was to live outside the norm; to be born female was outside the male norm; to attempt to live a feminist life was to live outside the male norm; to attempt socialism in a capitalist society was outside the norm”. Poet Eavan Boland recalled of IWLM meetings that McCafferty had “a feeling for the outside world and its concerns which was not all that common on those introverted occasions. She was always throwing spanners into the identity crises and consciousness-raisings.” When she first came out as a lesbian in 1961 a nun told her she would have “to live with it for the rest of your life”.
In the midst of all the chaos, urgency and vulnerability, it was McCafferty’s precision that stood out as she denounced the setbacks of the 1980s. “The gulf between the lip service – paid by priest, politician and lay fundamentalist to their own notion of womanhood – and the reality of women’s lives” was how she described what she wrote about that decade. “The eighties were as shocking as they were ineffably sad. The feminist vision was reduced to survival.”
Her book about the Kerry Babies case, A Woman to Blame (1985) is rightly recognised as a landmark publication that defined an era; from page one, it illustrated the grand scale of male hypocrisy. “In the opening days of the ‘Kerry babies’ tribunal a married man went to bed in a Tralee hotel with a woman who was not his wife. He was one of the forty-three male officials – judge, fifteen lawyers, three police superintendents and twenty-four policemen – engaged in a public probe of the private life of Joanne Hayes. When this particular married man was privately confronted with his own behaviour he at first denied it. Then he crumpled into tears and asked not to be exposed. He had so much to lose he said. “My wife … my job … my reputation …” He was assured of discretion. No such discretion was assured to Joanne Hayes, as a succession of professional men, including this married man, came forward to strip her character”.
That book was dedicated to Cathy Harkin, another Derry woman, who in the late 1960s lived in Derry “in a cold-water slum flat” with her mother and son, separated from her violent husband and vigorously campaigning for rights and change. McCafferty’s politics and agitation for social justice were a product of that Derry cauldron but that formation was also a reminder of the pronounced North-South divide. In seeking to explain the North to a southern audience, she sought to jolt the latter into awareness: “There is menstrual blood on the walls of Armagh Prison in Northern Ireland” she wrote in the opening to a piece in this newspaper in 1980, insisting the republican women’s dirty protest was a feminist issue. The ensuing controversy, she lamented, helped to reinforce the sense that “the North was dangerously unspeakable”.
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In her memoir Nell (2004), she referred to “the social exclusion that came from engaging as a Northerner with the South in which I lived”. In 1987, when asked on RTÉ radio by Conor Cruise O’Brien whether she supported the IRA, she replied “Yes, I do”. There was a stunned silence before O’Brien said, “your honesty is refreshing”. And yet, “Nobody asked me why I supported the IRA. Nobody wanted to talk about it”. The next day, the IRA killed 11 Protestants at the Enniskillen war memorial and McCafferty found herself “wholly beyond the Dublin political pale”.
Boland captured the essence of McCafferty as a “passionate witness” with “the ability to individualise the abstract course of events”; she was a feminist and activist who could “radicalise the experience by expressing it … someone meshed into things as they happen”. But we should remember that such empathy was also a product of manifold tensions, divisions, silences and denials.