Nell McCafferty is back in the Bogside in Derry.
Eileen Allen stands at her door looking up at McCafferty’s face, which now adorns the gable wall opposite.
“There hasn’t been a dish washed in my house in the last week,” she confesses. “I’ve been too busy looking out the window at the painters.”
All of the other murals in the area are about tragedy, says Allen, gesturing towards one depicting Bloody Sunday.
But McCafferty had a brilliant life and was “a speaker and an ambassador for Derry, for women, for the women of the Bogside”, she says. “We’re very proud of her.”
McCafferty, an outspoken journalist, including for this newspaper, author and campaigner, especially for women’s rights, died last year, aged 80.
The mural will be formally unveiled later on Saturday to mark International Women’s Day.
“It’s our Nell,” says her sister, Carmel McCafferty. “The artist has got her eyes so well, because when Nell looked at you like that, she was asking you two things: ‘Is this the truth? Are you talking crap?’”
Friend and LGBT activist Shá Gillespie, who organised the mural, says there is nobody else who has done “so much for women in Ireland”.
“She was fearless and she was an icon to me,” she says.
Gillespie says many young activists in Derry saw McCafferty’s work and were inspired by her: “They want to be a Nell McCafferty”.
Funding for the project came from Ulster University, the Gasyard Wall Féile and a GoFundMe page. It was painted by local street artists Donal O’Doherty and Ray Bonner, of the Peaball Collective.
O’Doherty believes McCafferty and graffiti artists share the same “ethos” of “pushing against the grain, of asking questions”.
“Murals are a big part of our cultural identity, so to have Nell’s mural in the middle of the Bog[side] is a great visual representation of progress,” says O’Doherty.
Childhood friend Eamonn McCann says the tribute to Nell shows what she means to the Bogside. “I think there’s been a reassessment of Nell, and that means there’s been a reassessment of women’s place in the history of this town.
“We all owe Nell a debt, and I’m glad I didn’t have to say that when she was alive, as she would have bit my head off,” he says.
She was a “very significant figure” in Derry, and the mural gives “her proper due at long last”, he adds.
“When I look at it, I think, fair play Nell, you did it.”
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Carmel does not know “what Nell would think” of the public portrait. “I know she fought to get a woman put on one of the murals, because it was all men ... She came home and said: ‘Were we not there?’”
“The whole family was always proud of her,” she says. “I only know her as our Nell, the sister I fought with, loved, argued with, all those things.”
She gestures towards the mural. “By the way, the coat she has on her in that painting, we bought it between us, and I was very lucky that she even let me wear it.”
McCafferty’s niece Muire McCallion says: “Any woman alive knows the fight’s not over, so it’s nice to have her up there.”
McCallion says that no matter where she ended up in life, “Nell belonged to the Bogside, and the Bogside belonged to Nell”.
“I think there’s something incredibly poignant that Nell McCafferty, once again, is hanging around a gable wall in the Bogside, where it all started.”
