When I opened RTÉ’s letter offering me a job in the newsroom in 1972, I thought “Nell”. After three years working for the Nationalist in Carlow, I had applied to all the national papers with no success. I knew I was at least as good as the young men I worked with who seemed to find it easy to get jobs in Dublin. But then a group of women including Nell and other members of the Women’s Liberation Movement went on the Late Late Show in 1971 and pointed out, among other things, that there was a dearth of women’s voices and women’s faces on the airwaves. RTÉ needed to change that and I happened to apply. Nell and her mates had made a difference.
The older I get, the more grateful I am for what that generation of women did. Were we not grateful at the time? Yes, we were. But the pressure to succeed, now that we had been given the chance, was massive. I remember the director general of RTÉ calling me over before I fronted one big TV programme in the late 70s. He was taking a big chance on me, a female presenter, he said. His neck was on the line and so was mine. It had better be good. As far as I can remember it was. So we, the ones who scrambled through the gap in the hedge that Nell’s generation had made for us, needed to prove that we were as good as any man. And for me that meant sticking to more general politics and current affairs. It is only as the years have gone on that I have come to appreciate that so called “women’s issues” and the revolution that brought about the economic and social independence of Irish women has had a central role in Irish politics, central to the modernisation of this country and the crucial separation of church and State.
So Nell was the fiery revolutionary and I was the sober suited journalist. We respected one another at a distance. It could be terrifying to be with Nell. You never knew what she was going to do or say, and while I admired her ability to throw cats among pigeons, I was nervous of it. We had very different views about the IRA. What I admired massively about Nell was her writing. It was fast-paced, clear, conversational. I remember a piece she wrote about her own coverage of the Bloody Sunday march. She was lying down on the ground in the dirt while the bullets flew overhead, she said, hugging the road. She wasn’t the one, she said, who wrote the front page story the next day, who rang the police and the army and the politicians to collect the official response. She reported what it felt like down at ground level. That’s what she always did.
That’s how she highlighted so often what was hiding in plain sight, what many of us chose not to see. She covered the Kerry babies case. Then, after all the charges against Joanne Hayes and her family were dropped, she covered the tribunal afterwards which was supposed to look into the gardaí’s handling of the case but seemed to spend most of its time focusing in on the private and sexual life of Hayes. The photographs from the tribunal show an almost totally male phalanx of officials, gardaí and of course the male chairman of the tribunal, Mr Justice Kevin Lynch. Nell, among others had organised to have flowers delivered every day to Hayes and Mr Justice Lynch made his attitude clear in noting the flowers delivered every day to Hayes. He asked why there were no flowers for Mrs Locke, the wife of Jeremiah Locke who was Hayes’s married lover. So the press asked Mrs Locke for her reaction to the case. As Nell put it: “The reply which journalists brought back from her was a rebuke to a man who did not understand why Joanne Hayes’s ordeal before him should have evoked such sympathy. ‘Joanne Hayes was harshly treated’ said Mary Locke.”
Olivia O’Leary: It could be terrifying to be with Nell McCafferty. You never knew what she was going to do or say
Nell McCafferty ‘changed Ireland for the better’, mourners at her funeral in Derry’s Bogside told
Nell McCafferty’s empathy and precision defined her, but they were a product of manifold tensions and denials
‘If I’m intimidated, that’s a problem’: Fireworks fly as Joe Duffy hears tales of teenage delinquency
I know it sounds like a truism when I say she liked women but I grew up at a time when as a woman you weren’t always sure of your welcome when you approached a group of people. With Nell, you were always included – maybe in a combative way if you had said or done something she didn’t agree with – but you were always included. You never had to struggle to be heard as you often did in groups of men. You counted. And this extended to nuns. Nell was a fierce critic of the Roman Catholic Church but she was grateful to the nuns who taught her in Derry who were so proud of these girls from a working-class background whom they had tutored to be able to go on to university, the first generation to do so. It was the head nun at her school that Nell talked to about being lesbian. “She did not try to convert me, did not say I was a sinner, did not blink. She was calm and gentle and solemn.” One of her very best friends towards the end of her life was a nun – the UCD historian, Margaret McCurtain, formerly Sr Benevuta, head of the Dominican Order in Ireland. I remember meeting them both at the Kilkenny Arts Festival a few years ago, and we all went to the pub. Just as the singing was about to start, Nell stood up to leave. When I protested, Nell said she was still getting over a heart operation and had to head earlier to bed. I remembered ruefully all those evenings when Nell was the last to leave a party and as she and Margaret headed out the door, I was glad that she had such a good friend keeping an eye on her.
It’s clear from her memoir that the real love of her life was her mother. Her mother was the voice you heard all the time in Nell’s pieces. In May 1974, the Ulster Workers Council called a general strike to protest against the powersharing Executive in Stormont, the first Northern Irish government ever to include nationalists. British prime minister Harold Wilson condemned the strikers, saying that they “spend their lives sponging on Westminster and British democracy and then systematically assault democratic methods. Who do these people think they are?” In her piece next day, Nell quoted her mother ranting not about the strikers, but about Wilson. How dare he call us spongers, said Nell’s mother. Mrs McCafferty may have been a Derry Republican but she wasn’t going to have any Northerner, even the Ulster Workers Council and the loyalists, referred to as spongers by a British prime minister.
She trusted her mother’s instincts, her courage, how after her own mother’s death, she had from the age of 17 acted as housekeeper and surrogate mother to her three younger siblings when she might have gone to join her older sister in America. She then brought up her own six children. Mrs McCafferty was fiercely loyal to her own community in their Bogside street and believed in sharing family secrets with the neighbours so that, for instance, if there was an unplanned pregnancy, there would be neighbourly support. But when Nell wanted to tell them she was gay, her mother said no. That hurt.
[ Nell McCafferty at 80: ‘Celebrating eight decades of enduring courage’Opens in new window ]
She was kind and kindest when you were at your most vulnerable. After my husband died, she’d ring me every few weeks, just to make sure I was coping. And the day of the funeral there she was, five foot nothing and with the best hug in the world. “You’ll be all right, darlin’,” she said. And eventually I was.
- Sign up for push alerts and have the best news, analysis and comment delivered directly to your phone
- Join The Irish Times on WhatsApp and stay up to date
- Listen to our Inside Politics podcast for the best political chat and analysis