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Irish Examiner
28-06-2025
- General
- Irish Examiner
Clodagh Finn: Lessons to save us from reinventing the wheel in the fight for equality
Here is a little-known fact about the setting up of the Rape Crisis Centre in Ireland. When asked, Charlie Haughey, then a TD, happily and speedily went about obtaining a telephone service – and 'a new-fangled answering machine' – for the nascent helpline. 'I will be glad to assist you,' he wrote in a letter to founder member Evelyn Conlon in September 1978, 'and if you let me have the address of the centre I will get in touch with the Minister of State at the Department of Posts and Telegraphs on your behalf.' Then, Evelyn Conlon, Anne O'Donnell, the centre's first administrator, and a group of 19 volunteers went about, first, learning how to use the answering machine and, once they got 'the amazed hang of it', opening the lines. It was February 19, 1979. 'We learned, ferociously, and on their feet, Everything from listening, advocating, accompanying to Garda stations, attending court,' Conlon writes in After the Train (UCD Press), a gloriously affirming collection of essays that sets out not only what was wrong in Irish society 50 years ago but, more importantly, how it was righted. Charlie Haughey's contribution is mentioned in the book as an aside, but it somehow jumped out at this reader as a vivid example of what can happen when someone identifies an issue, speaks up and then goes about doing something to change it. The power and effectiveness of that three-step dance is evident on every page of this account of what happened after the famous contraceptive train from Dublin to Belfast jolted a Catholic country into a conversation about contraception and bodily autonomy. I like to think that momentous outing in 1971 by the Irish Women's Liberation Movement to illegally import contraceptives to Dublin is universally remembered (please tell me that it is), but what has certainly fallen below the radar is the fearless work carried out by the members of Irishwomen United (IWU) in the years that followed. Hands up, now. Which of you can outline the work done by this group of women – 'wailers broadcasting the death of the old regime' – who plotted volcanic change during their Sunday afternoon meetings in an upper room in 12 Pembroke Street in Dublin? You won't find it in the history books, apart from a dismissive paragraph here or there; examples of the kind of 'stalwart myopia' that inflamed writer Evelyn Conlon to join forces with academic Rebecca Pelan to gather the voices of the women who were there. Picture: UCD Press In 20 essays, they recall the crackling energy, the excitement and the considerable trepidation of coming together to tease out the issues of the day – 'the taboos, restrictions, inequalities, discriminations, exclusions, violence and coercion that dogged our lives', to quote Ger Moane's illustrative and profoundly dispiriting list. One of those restrictions, banal and accepted at the time, was the widespread refusal to serve women pints in pubs. Here, from Gaye Cunningham, is a wonderful description of how the women who went before us, including the late, great Nell McCafferty, went about changing that: [Nell] went into one of the pubs that refused to serve women pints and, accompanied by a group of 30 or so women, ordered brandies. When the drinks were served, she ordered a pint of Guinness; when the barman refused to serve, they refused to pay. It was, writes Cunningham, one of the lighter, more madcap moments in the history of the women's movement, although there was certainly something madcap and magnificent about the day – July 24, 1974 – a band of IWU members 'invaded' the all-male bathing spot, the Forty Foot, in south county Dublin. They invaded the 'men-only' Fitzwilliam Tennis Club too and, in 1976, they burst into the Federated Union of Employers headquarters to campaign for equal pay. Looking back, Mary Doran writes: 'I am amazed at our confidence and how we felt that the end justified the means.' And what fearlessness. In 1973, Maura O'Dea, a single mother, wrote a letter to a newspaper in an attempt to get in touch with other 'unmarried mothers', to use the phrase of the time, who had kept their babies as well as those who had been forced to give them up for adoption. It was the start of Cherish, now One Family, an organisation that not only showed there was such a thing as lone parenting but advocated to improve their rights. The IWU took a stand on a wide range of issues, campaigning for access to free contraception, LGBT+ rights, bodily autonomy and equal pay. As Mary Dorcey writes: 'We women's liberationists and gay activists, passionate but inexperienced, transformed our country from the ground up… We were the first generation to refuse to emigrate, or to be silenced, or banished. We insisted on making noise and making our presence felt.' They made space for the new, or rather the shock of the new. For the first time, publishing houses (Attic Press and Arlen House) laid open the 'untravelled terrain' of writing about the body and female experience. Picture via Evelyn Conlon private collection Another Mary (O'Donnell, poet and author of the excellent, just out Walking Ghosts, Mercier Press) recalls the influence of norm-breaking poet Eavan Boland: 'Until then, the body had not been permitted space in poetry or literature. So those of us who included aspects of feminine experience in our writing were really like frontier women heading into the unknown.' Those frontier women carved out new pathways and set up a number of organisations that still exist today – the aforementioned Rape Crisis Centre and the Well Woman Centre to mention two. In acknowledging, remembering and celebrating that fevered time, After the Train also makes it clear that feminism did not start with them. It quotes the incomparable Hilda Tweedy, founder member of the Irish Housewives Association and author of A Link in the Chain: So many people think that the women's movement was born on some mystical date in 1970, when it had actually been a long continuous battle… each generation adding something to the last. That is really important to remember in a week when Women's Aid reported the highest level of disclosure of domestic abuse in its 50-year history. It, like so many other feminist organisations, has its roots in those mould-breaking days of the 1970s. (Indeed, Women's Aid gave the fledgling Rape Crisis Centre a room in its building in Harcourt Terrace.) At a time when it seems we have made no progress, particularly when it comes to the epidemic of violence against women, it's important to remember what went before. As Evelyn Conlon so eloquently puts it: '… 'We always need to keep our eyes on the history books, because every time we take our eye off the true telling of what happened, we create the necessity to begin inventing the wheel all over again.' The wheel, though it might not feel like it, is indeed turning. Take this single example. When the Well Woman centre opened its doors in 1978, it 'elicited zero media coverage', writes founder Anne Connolly. Not a line. News of it made the papers only when four anti-abortionists picketed the clinic, a backfiring protest if ever there was one as it gave the centre the kind of publicity it could never afford. Now, at least, the issues ignored in the 1970s are mainstream news. On the same day that Women's Aid CEO Sarah Benson was invited to speak at length on the flagship Six One News, a documentary about Natasha O'Brien, the woman randomly and brutally attacked on the street by ex-soldier Cathal Crotty, aired on RTÉ. 'Don't bite your tongue,' she said, a mantra needed as much now as it ever was. Just remember, though, that we don't need to reinvent the wheel. We are links in a very long and interconnected chain. Read More Justice minister promises domestic violence register following report on record abuse complaints
Irish Times
02-05-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
Mary MacSwiney by Leeann Lane: A revealing, well-researched and compelling biography of this patriot
Mary MacSwiney Author : Leeann Lane ISBN-13 : 9781739086381 Publisher : UCD Press Guideline Price : €30 In September 1922, amid the Irish Civil War, Sinn Féin leader Éamon de Valera bared his soul to his confidante, the Cork Sinn Féin TD Mary MacSwiney . He told her he was struggling because 'Reason rather than faith has been my master ... I have felt for some time that this doctrine of mine ill fitted me to be leader of the republican party'. MacSwiney retorted that 'Faith and Unreason are not synonymous terms. I plead guilty to the former. I resent the latter.' She praised those who understood 'the Spiritual and psychological aspects of the struggle ... men who BELIEVED in the Republic ... Theirs was the Faith that moves mountains.' MacSwiney was a titan of that school of faith and this book does justice to the depth of her belief. As a TD, suffragette, educator and tireless republican activist, she was a lot more than the sister of Terence MacSwiney, the Lord Mayor of Cork who died in October 1920 after a 74-day hunger strike in Brixton prison, though Lane underlines the centrality of that event to Mary's life, career and ultimate disillusionment with her peers. Her uncompromising stance led to her being caricatured as unhinged by her erstwhile comrades. This was unsurprising given the prevailing cultural ethos and fear of loud, assertive and politically charged women; what this book provides, in admirable detail, is a layered overview of what drove her and the perception of her. READ MORE The book draws on a wealth of valuable source material, including MacSwiney's collection of papers in the UCD archives. Born in London in 1872 to an English mother, a teacher, and a Cork father, Mary was the eldest of seven children. The family returned to Cork in 1879 where her father started a tobacco business that failed. Education for members of this tight-knit family was a priority (Mary received a BA from UCC in 1912) as was cultural nationalism and for Mary, the Munster Women's Franchise League. She became a teacher in St Angela's Ursuline College but was dismissed from that position in April 1916 due to her central position in Cork's Cumann na mBan (CnB). Terence was one of the founders of the Cork branch of the Irish Volunteers, but Cork's failure to rise in 1916 in tandem with Dublin was to remain a sore point and some of Mary's snobberies were reflected in her comment to Cork CnB members that it was only 'the scum of Dublin, Larkin's crowd' who fought, an early indication of her penchant for invective. Nonetheless, she threw herself into prisoner welfare work and opened her own school, St Ita's in Cork, to 'eradicate the slave mind from Ireland'. While deeply committed to Catholicism, she was prepared to challenge religious authority. Her fractiousness was also reflected in post-1916 splits in CnB, some of whose members in Cork saw her as overbearing, one contemporary recalling her being 'very annoyed at her wishes being questioned'. As a republican activist during that period, she was heavily influenced by Terence and it was his hunger strike during the War of Independence that led to the life she had lived until then being 'viscerally sundered', a trauma illuminated in powerful detail. Lane draws on the memoirs of Mary's sister and fellow activist Annie, who recalled of Brixton prison, 'none of us will ever forget the horror of that place'. This was political and personal for Mary and in London, she displayed the vigorous energy, resilience, talent for propaganda and rhetoric and disregard for barriers that were the hallmark of her career. She harried officialdom - prison governors, politicians, medical officers and churchmen - and good use is made of British Home Office files to document Terence's demise (in his coffin his body appeared 'like that of a child of twelve') and capture her wrath. If he were let die, Mary told the home secretary, 'we shall hold you personally responsible for murder'. One medical officer found her to be 'troublesome ... unpleasant and disorderly.' She was successful in ensuring Terence's hunger strike 'reached the world' and this was not unrelated to the shame still felt about Cork's passivity in 1916. Her profile and volubility stood in contrast to Terence's wife Muriel, who struggled with her mental health, and who Mary believed 'had not the inner stoicism of the MacSwineys'. With the death of Terence, unwillingness to compromise and determination to honour and vindicate his sacrifice defined Mary to an overwhelming degree and the emotional weight of the loss was channelled into spreading the republican gospel. She criss-crossed the United States from December 1920 to August 1921, where she had a powerful impact and honed her speaking skills, taking precedence over Muriel, who also travelled. There is fascinating detail here on the scale of this tour of 58 cities involving more than 300 meetings, fundraising, confronting infighting among Irish-American groups and the struggle to get access to senior American politicians ('Americans like to be flattered and I don't flatter them,' she wrote). She was also elected a Sinn Féin TD in her absence. One of the values of this book is the extensive documenting of her relationship with de Valera; their letters reveal an intimacy but also her frustration at her lack of involvement in the moves towards a ceasefire and negotiation. She told him in July 1921 she was 'longing for a peep at the inside negotiations', but the Anglo-Irish Treaty, negotiated without de Valera, shattered, in her words, 'the cause for which Brixton was endured'. Mary became the most vociferous opponent of the Treaty. She spoke for more than 2½ hours against it during the Dáil debates . Her speech was, as Lane notes, fanatical; if all the Irish were exterminated, she declared, 'the blades of grass dyed with their blood, will rise, like the dragons' teeth of old, into armed men'. Her words rested on the assertion that Terence's deathbed scene was 'the like of which has never been known in the world before'. She did not care if her constituents were pro-Treaty because she would only adhere to, as she told CnB members, 'the sacred question of principle'. This was also a period that marked a ferocious reaction to her from men such as Dublin TD Batt O'Connor, who decried women 'frothing to the mouth like angry cats'. For Mary, the Civil War was about reclaiming 'the worth and meaning of her brother's sacrifice'; she was arrested four times and endured two gruelling hunger strikes - the first lasted 24 days - during which she lambasted the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin for the refusal to allow her receive communion. She compared herself to Joan of Arc, and in parallel, spent much time pleading with de Valera to 'stand firm' and 'not break our hearts'. Her criticisms of Treaty supporters, and indeed its opponents, whom she regarded as not firm enough, became increasingly severe. WT Cosgrave's assertion that her 'ambition is, I believe, to be Queen of Ireland' is seen by Lane as a sexist slur, but it was hardly an unreasonable claim given Mary's language and dismissal of democracy ('we shall win out, even if only a few are faithful'). She was well able to dish out the insults herself, declaring proudly she was 'the most extreme of the extreme'. This is an intense, revealing, well-researched and often compelling biography. Lane, author of previous biographies of Dorothy Macardle and Rosamond Jacob, has made a profound contribution to our understanding of the republican women of that generation and their intimate and public lives. This book is, however, somewhat undermined by poor editing, repetition and unnecessary didactic interventions about gender and trauma themes. Readers are well able to see, in the copious contemporary correspondence and commentary the author uncovers, the forces that were at work in relation to how politicised, campaigning women were viewed. They do not need it constantly pointed out to them; likewise, the narrative of Terence's agonising death is gripping and tragic enough without the need for heavy-handed authorial interjections to remind us how it traumatised his family; again, that is painfully apparent in the quoted accounts and their own words. Mary's mindset led to increasing resentment against her, including from many women; Macardle criticised her 'sense of our moral inferiority'. Loyal to the second Dáil elected in 1921, and anti-Treaty Sinn Féin, she lost her Dáil seat in 1927. There was an inevitable parting of the ways with de Valera, and eventual resignation from senior positions in both CnB and Sinn Féin for their members' perceived compromises in tolerating certain dealings with the Free State she regarded as illegitimate. She was still desperately pleading with de Valera in 1936, when he was ensconced in power with the Fianna Fáil party she scorned, to 'come back to the Republic before it was too late'. But the response from de Valera was a refusal to engage in a 'futile controversy on matters of past history'. Mary never relented; her constant focus on that history made her increasingly politically marginalised, but this book makes us understand why she would not compromise. Diarmaid Ferriter is Professor of Modern Irish History at UCD. His most recent book is The Revelation of Ireland 1995-2020 (Profile Books). Further reading Margaret Ward's groundbreaking Unmanageable Revolutionaries: Women and Irish Nationalism (Pluto, 1983), quotes the memorable summing up by Sheila Humphreys of the bleak new Free State dawn for women republican activists: 'We felt the Irish public had forgotten us. The tinted trappings of our fight were hanging like rags about us.' The long-neglected memoir of another anti-Treaty republican, Máire Comerford's On Dangerous Ground (Lilliput, 2021) was edited by Hilary Dully to preserve the 'authenticity of Máire's voice in the telling of her story'. At the outset of the Civil War Máire wrote, 'I was in a place where there was no need for argument, and among people whose unanimity was like a distilled spirit of highest concentration.' Síobhra Aiken's Spiritual Wounds (Irish Academic Press, 2022) is also strong on trauma and argues strongly that 'The many voices that broke the silence can no longer be overlooked. Civil wars engender vibrant bodies of competing discourses.'
