Nell McCafferty at 80: ‘Celebrating eight decades of enduring courage’

The journalist Nell McCafferty, often described as a firebrand feminist, turns 80 on March 28th. As she reaches a milestone birthday, President Michael D Higgins and a wide circle of writers reflect on her achievements and explain why young people should study and celebrate her work

President Michael D Higgins

To have shared so many of those decades and their controversies with her is a privilege

What a privilege it is to send a message of the deepest appreciation and affection to our friend Nell, celebrating as she does eight decades of enduring courage that was delivered with a curiosity that was ethical and fearless on the side of those without power.

To have shared so many of those decades and their controversies with her is a privilege that was brightened by her ability to see with humour, at the longest distance possible, humbug coming down the tracks and the need to expose it.

Those who have had Nell as a friend and an ally are very fortunate in their being given the gift of experiencing humanity in all its possibilities and vulnerabilities, and delivered as she did it with a sense of humour that paid tribute to the authenticity of her Derry upbringing.

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From Sabina and Michael D with all our love and gratitude for all we have been able to share with her. May the next decades bring you health and joy Nell as you make them your own, and full of opportunities for your laugh which we will recall on your special day.

Eamonn McCann, activist

Few journalists have an effect on the world they write about

I have known Nell for more than 60 years, but I can still be frightened of her in case she turns on me.

We used to play 20-a-side football in Meenan’s Park. I was 12, she was 10. Sitting at her bedside recently, I wistfully reminded her of those glorious days of our rowdy childhood.

“You were a very dirty player, Nell,” I smiled. And so she was. Ever ready to go in over the top. Kick you on the ankle as quick as she’d look at you.

“And you were useless”, she retorted, not smiling. I should have known better than to bring it up.

At Queen’s, we went to the Aquinas Hall formal together, me in a dickey bow, her in a shimmering dress. I don’t bring that up. I have a photo of the occasion which I keep in case I ever need it for blackmail purposes.

Like all of us, Nell has changed over the years. But she’s still as spiky as a bag of porcupines. And still as smart and kind and open-hearted. She has never learned guile.

Very few journalists have a real effect on the world they write about. In this, too, in Ireland, Nell is where she has always been, out on her own. There hasn’t been a significant battle for women’s or for gay rights in more than half a century that Nell hasn’t played a key role in.

If I were to recommend a book to a stranger that might help towards an understanding of who we are and where we’ve came from, and who suffered most grievously in the process, it would be Nell’s A Woman to Blame; eloquent and unflinching, it lifted the hearts of Irish women as it made male society a little more accountable. Nell McCafferty from Derry changed Ireland.

Susan McKay, Press Ombudsman

She burst into male bastions and left the door open for others to follow

Nell blazed across the Border in the 1970s already a phenomenon, raised in the Bogside, a Northern rebel and not one bit impressed by the complacent pieties of the Republic. A natural writer, she laid about her with a passion, exuberantly taking down dimwit patriarchs who were blindsided because they had just assumed they were entitled to respect. She gave that respect to others, people who were poor, who were denied justice, who needed protection from the cruel excesses of Irish conservatism, women, in particular.

She burst into male bastions, including journalism, and left the door open for others to follow.

She sought out and told stories of devastation with compassion and rage. She asked cheeky questions. She was unbelievably witty. Ask an older feminist about Nell’s Golden Balls and wait for their laughter. That was published in 1983 an infamous year. Nell’s Swiftian hilarity was a balm. Everyone knew her smoky Derry voice.

Nell didn’t do well in the harsh wilderness of 21st century freelancing. Quite recently I listened to her fretting about getting a salaried job again. She’s ill and that won’t happen, but in truth, she was not latterly given the professional respect – and care – she was due as one of Ireland’s greatest journalists. Like her beloved Edith Piaf, she was a little sparrow. She had an astonishingly powerful voice but she had frailties. She deserved a safe perch, but did not get one. I speak of her in the past only because she is no longer writing. Still, her fierce and brilliant work survives in books and archives. It reads like new. I recommend it to the feisty young feminists of today. Start with Golden Balls.

Séamas O’Reilly, writer

Nell McCafferty helped build the future

In the past century, few people can claim to have been present for more of Ireland’s social and political upheavals than Nell McCafferty. Fewer still can claim to have been the active agent of said changes. A key figure in the Northern Irish civil rights movement – who returned to Derry from London the day after The Troubles started and immediately joined the riots – and the fight for women’s liberation, she also campaigns for the rights of children, is a tireless champion against the stranglehold of Catholic Church institutions and an advocate the rights of LGBT people on both sides of the Border.

Throughout she’s also been a prolific and astute writer, inarguably one of the most important of her, or any other, time – whether documenting the Troubles, championing the cause of the Kerry Babies, or spinning yarns of delicious humour and rare candour in her memoir, Nell.

For many years, the price she paid for being on the right side of history was to be reviled in whatever present she stood. Charged at by soldiers, politicians, journalists and priests in opposition to her numerous stands, she also found conflict within her own movements. In the closed world of male republicanism, her feminism was rebuked. To some of her feminist allies in Dublin, her republicanism was a liability. As always, she put this best herself. “In the south” she wrote, “I could be a feminist; in the north I could be a fighter”.

Her fight, it turned out, was everyone’s. Her life and work continue to be an incredible gift to everyone who’s come after.

And, though her chronicling of injustice and social change is an invaluable resource for us all, Nell McCafferty is no mere witness to history. More than almost anyone else I can think of, Nell McCafferty helped build the future.

Doireann Ní Bhriain, broadcaster

Nell was a superb journalist with a marvellous sense of humour

Nell McCafferty was an outstanding and fearless journalist and one of the most influential feminists of her generation. She was never afraid to say what she thought about injustices, of all sorts. Her writing in The Irish Times and other newspapers; her bearing witness to what was being revealed in the courts, especially about those whose voices would have otherwise gone unheard; her razor-sharp awareness of the layers and layers of misogyny in Irish society; her books – especially the remarkable A Woman to Blame, about the Kerry Babies case – her presence as a thorn in the side of those who were unwilling to see or acknowledge the hypocrisy of Irish society; her efforts to get people in the South to understand and pay attention to the conflict in Northern Ireland – these are only some of the reasons to celebrate her work, and for younger people to be grateful for her dogged determination to tell it as she saw it. Nell was a superb, if often spiky journalist with a marvellous sense of humour. Hers was the angry, outraged and sometimes hilarious voice that spoke for so many Irish women. Happy 80th, Nell!

Fintan O’Toole, columnist

She has had a habit not just of saying the unsayable but of saying it with style and wit

A few years ago, I was writing a book about modern Ireland and was trying to capture the mood of a weekend in 1972 when the unionist regime at Stormont had fallen and the IRA had declared a ceasefire. How to convey the feeling at that moment – so poignant in retrospect – that the Troubles were over? I found a report from Derry for The Irish Times written by Nell McCafferty. She had interviewed the mother of the IRA’s leader in the city, Martin McGuinness: “His trade’s been interrupted. His father is a welder, his brothers bricklayers and carpenters, but what will become of Martin? That’s why they’ll have to get an amnesty, so’s he can get back to work and not always be on the run.”

Who else would have known how to capture such moments so brilliantly through the view from below? Only Ellen P McCafferty, universally known as Nell. She has been one of the best journalists in the English language for so long that it is easy to forget what a remarkable contribution she has made to Irish life.

A lesbian, a working-class woman, a Northern Catholic and at a point – most awkwardly for many of her admirers – declaring herself a supporter of the Provisional IRA, McCafferty has always been at several angles to the mainstream. She has hovered between pariah and national treasure, much loved and much hated, sometimes by the same people at the same time.

She didn’t just influence the national conversation, she redefined what could be discussed within it

—  Fintan O'Toole

Like many readers, I first really became aware of her work through her In the Eyes of the Law column in The Irish Times. It was written from the District Courts, the lowest rung of the ladder of justice where cases too inconsequential for ordinary court reporting were heard. She used the quotidian miseries of those cases as a prism through which she refracted a whole society. That fusion of reportorial rigour and moral outrage continued throughout her career, most notably in her excoriating coverage of the Kerry Babies story.

The driving force of that outrage has always been feminism. McCafferty was an activist, a founder member of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement, and her apparent fearlessness made her an often uncomfortable figure. She has had a habit not just of saying the unsayable – about sexuality, the body, religion, the workings of patriarchy – but of saying it with style, wit, clarity and a glorious panache that was hard to resist, even for those who opposed everything she stood for. She didn’t just influence the national conversation, she redefined what could be discussed within it. Very few writers ever get to do that.

Una Mullally, columnist

The thing about McCafferty’s journalism, is that she expressed herself

Why should anyone read and keep reading Nell McCafferty? Because she is one of the finest journalists this country ever produced.

One of the best collections of Irish Times writing is Changing the Times: Irish Women Journalists 1969-1981, edited by Elgy Gillespie. In it, McCaffety’s work sings. Here is her perfect eight-word description of Ian Paisley canvassing in Ahoghill in 1969, “Scrubbed and smiling, solid in the drizzling rain”.

There’s a 1971 piece on the consequences for young women in Derry “fraternising” with British soldiers, “To live in Derry now is to know only what is wrong – to know that street lights are out, that jobs are out, that amusement is out, that life itself can be wiped out if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time. And in this tribal context, public opinion states that it is wrong to step outside and claim the right to enjoyment with whom your tribe has said is the enemy.”

The stunned shock that permeates her piece on Bloody Sunday still hovers above her words, decades later, “How do you spend the day after 13 people have been shot dead?… We walked and talked in circles yesterday and smoked and went home for cups of tea and came out again. Sometimes it hits you, this awful sacrifice that was made, and then it goes away because there is no comparable experience to which you can relate it.”

Sardonic and insightful, compassionate and cutting, she changed Ireland by being herself in a society that was hostile

—  Una Mullally

For someone like me, who had a grand total of zero Irish lesbian role models growing up, McCafferty beat a path. We rarely encountered each other, and when we did, I was intimidated to the point of fear, and she lived up to her formidable reputation.

The thing about McCafferty’s brilliant journalism, is that she expressed herself. Her style was simultaneously curt and flowing, as though the writing itself contained a fierce stare and a smirk. Sardonic and insightful, compassionate and cutting, she changed Ireland by being herself in a society that was hostile – and remains hostile – to anyone who sticks their neck out, who challenges orthodoxy and who won’t be pushed around. That’s a rare spirit, and remains a vital one.

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