AUTOBIOGRAPHY: Nuala Fennell played a vital progressive role at a transformative time in politics

Political Woman: A Memoir, by Nuala Fennell, Currach Press, 208pp, €14.99

AS THE DAUGHTER of a garda, Nuala Campbell grew up in a home in Portlaoise that was “an academy of duty, decency and self- sufficiency, of standards upheld and religion respected and well practised”. She paints a bleak portrait of 1950s Ireland in this memoir and describes a “most undomesticated” unfulfilled mother who found provincial life frustrating and dull. A move to Dublin, education at the Dominican College on Eccles Street, marriage to Brian Fennell, a stint in Canada and three children are briskly recounted before she found herself facing her mother’s dilemma, invisible as “one of the foot soldiers in the vast army of suburban housewives” in the late 1960s.

She began writing for the women’s pages of magazines and newspapers and got significant feedback from her frustrated peers. Journalism also provided an introduction to some of the leading figures of the emerging Irish Women’s Liberation Movement, and she was mesmerised by Mary Kenny in particular (“set out to shock and mostly she succeeded”).

Fennell was more cautious; she disliked the anti-man rhetoric of some of her new-found mentors, regarded the contraceptive train stunt as histrionic and tended to regard herself as a social reformer who wanted to target political institutions rather than wave placards. In October 1971 she left the movement, writing an extraordinary public resignation letter decrying “the elitist and intolerant group that is using women’s liberation as a pseudo-respectable front for their own various political ends, ranging from opposition to the Forcible Entry Bill to free sedatives for neurotic elephants”.

It made for great copy, but, looking back, she is magnanimous enough to acknowledge that she was wrong in this assessment. The movement may have been chaotic, short-lived and riddled with class tensions, but an irreversible start had been made in making the status of women a political issue.

Her subsequent activities with Action, Information and Motivation (Aim) are documented, and she suggests that minister for justice Patrick Cooney has not been given enough recognition for his role in introducing the sort of family-law legislation that Aim campaigned for, including the Maintenance Orders Act of 1974. During the 1970s Fennell made an exceptional contribution to increasing awareness about domestic violence and providing shelter to its victims through Women’s Aid.

Her first foray into electoral politics came in 1977, when she declared as an independent candidate for Dublin South just two weeks before polling day. Although she was not elected, she performed very well, securing 3,828 votes. In the aftermath of that election – during which first-preference votes for women candidates doubled from the previous election – Fennell criticised the assertion of the new leader of Fine Gael, Garret FitzGerald, that “women’s rights are the wrong reason to want to get into government. It may be a worthy motivation but it is not an acceptable one”.

Ironically, in joining Fine Gael the following year and eventually getting elected to the Dáil in 1981 in Dublin South, she proved FitzGerald wrong, with his direct assistance through his co-option of her as a candidate, though Fennell, as frequently happens in this memoir, does not elaborate on this episode.

There was a loneliness for women in politics in those years, as Fennell held her seat in the February and October 1982 elections. Dáil Eireann is described as “a strange male club, which felt like a political locker-room”.

In December 1982 FitzGerald, newly elected taoiseach, made her minister of state for women’s affairs, and she remembers bluntly that no “blueprint or plan existed” for the holder of this position. It was a difficult time for her politically; starved of resources and sometimes shunned (she reveals the archbishop of Dublin, Dr Dermot Ryan, refused to be photographed with her; and she challenged him on his rudeness) during a decade when abortion and divorce took attention away from what she felt were more pressing issues.

She endured the pro-life TDs “taking women’s bodies apart in speeches sprinkled with vaginas, ovaries and uteri, to prove points or make an impression down in the home parish”. She was “scarcely involved at all” in the failed campaign in 1986 to legalise divorce, a subject that gets barely two pages of coverage. What she did succeed in doing was abolishing the concept of illegitimacy, establishing a mediation scheme for those whose marriages had broken down and introducing legislation dealing with domicile and citizenship rights.

She lost her Dáil seat in 1987, was elected to the Seanad and re-elected to the Dáil in 1989 before resigning in 1992, troubled by backbench isolation and “a sense of a shift to the right” in the party.

There is a certain reticence in this memoir. Fennell notes at the outset that she had “a few false starts over the years getting to grips with a book”, but she managed to complete this one just three weeks before her death, in August this year, as a result of a blood disorder. Given her declining health, it is understandable that the book is short and lacks sufficient detail to fully satisfy. There are useful insights – in relation to feminism, class, the operation of the Civil Service and the scale of both the challenges that faced the Irish feminist movement and some of its achievements – but many campaigns and controversies are given only a cursory treatment, and the reader is left wanting more.

It is, nonetheless, a welcome addition to our canon of political memoirs. Fennell’s career was a significant one, during difficult times. Courageous, determined, with an original mind and a wonderfully supportive family, she made a difference.

Diarmaid Ferriter is professor of modern Irish history at University College Dublin. His new book,Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland , is published by Profile Books