Róisín Conroy:The death of publisher Róisín Conroy on April 15th removes from Irish life a figure who played a major role in giving public expression to women's writing in a form which combined political activism and publishing.
A co-founder of Attic Press, Conroy was a driving force in giving a generation of women the opportunity to express themselves in print and have their work professionally edited.
Róisín Conroy (née Smyth) was born into a Dún Laoghaire family of five children and showed a non-conformist streak from an early age. She was enrolled and removed from three primary schools before settling into a Catholic boarding school - Our Lady's School, Rathnew, Co Wicklow.
Her father, Dr Noel Smyth, was a major influence in her life. A general practitioner with a working-class practice, he railed against hypocrisy and injustice and was an advocate of civil rights. Her mother Bernadette (née Kilpatrick) had a strong political edge to her views as a Northern Catholic.
Conroy's journey into feminist publishing had an inauspicious start. She started and then abandoned training as a nurse, tried out teaching English in Spain and finally took a secretarial course. From there, she graduated to a job as a telephonist with Cert, the State training body for tourism and hospitality.
It was there she met a manager who was working as a volunteer for the De Beer ad-hoc committee, which preceded the establishment of the Commission on the Status of Women in 1970. Conroy began to meet campaigners for equal treatment and equal pay for women. It was in these circles that she was approached to apply for a job in the research department of the then Irish Transport and General Workers' Union (ITGWU), later to become Siptu. She accepted the post and was later to start a pay claim against the ITGWU itself, seeking equal pay for women employees of the trade union.
Throughout the 1970s, she combined her post in the ITGWU with activism, and finally left her job in 1979. Her attachment to the ideas of an emancipatory labour movement and women's unheard voices were to remain with her as a publisher. Speaking of this period to her friend Therese Caherty, Conroy remarked: "Things were bad in the late 1970s, early 1980s. The Catholic Church oppressed us. The mainstream politicians oppressed us. Many didn't have jobs. That's what made us do what we did. We wanted Ireland to be different, to be open. And we thought we could make it different."
In 1980 Conroy and her friends established Irish Feminist Information (IFI) and published the first Irish Women's Diary and Guidebook with the aim of linking the efforts of individual women and women's groups in bettering their lot. The diary, with its extensive contact lists and information, proved a big hit with women and opened up the prospect of publishing other material.
But first there was a need for publishing competence. This provided the incentive to organise a publishing course for women in 1983-1984. From this emerged a Women's Community Press alongside IFI. These were the landmarks that led to the establishment of Attic Press in 1984.
Attic Press had an unusual mission statement: "For too long Ireland has ignored the full potential of women's writings which have been lost to anonymity and foreign publishing. Our aim is to reclaim this material and fill the gap."
Mary Robinson as a young lawyer represented Conroy in a landmark social welfare case taken to the High Court in 1982. The case argued successfully that there was discrimination against women in their treatment as unemployed.
It was in the field of feminist non-fiction that Attic was to find its niche. The first two publications were The Best of Nell by Nell McCafferty with an introduction by poet Eavan Boland, and historian Rosemary Cullen Owens's Smashing Times - A History of the Irish Women's Suffrage Movement.
Conroy and the team at Attic went on to produce a large catalogue of publications which, initially viewed as marginal, gradually entered the mainstream.
Conroy and co-publisher Mary Paul Keane attracted considerable controversy with some of their titles. Among these were Lyn - A story of Prostitution co-authored by June Levine, Nell McCafferty's account of the Kerry babies case - A Woman to Blame - and Noreen Byrne's Choices in a Crisis Pregnancy, which mentions abortion. Attic also offered popular accounts of oral history as well as more substantial works such as Margaret Ward's Women and Irish Nationalism.
In 1997, with the emergence of web-based information and the inclusion of women's studies in mainstream publishing catalogues, it was time for Attic Press to bow out. Conroy converted her collection of documents from 20 years of activism into a women's archive, today housed in the Boole library at University College Cork. The Attic imprint was transferred to Cork University Press.
Believing herself to be facing a quiet semi-retirement, Conroy began studying painting and sculpture. Four years later, her retirement was rudely interrupted with a diagnosis of motor neuron disease.
For the next six years she returned to the activism of her earlier years and took on the "disability establishment" with demands for the right to live independently in her own home and to have technology provided which would enable her to function as autonomously as possible for as long as possible.
In this sense, her views had not changed from what she wrote in the Irish Women's Diary 25 years ago: "It is important for women's development that we seek change on our own terms and that we are not co-opted into, or compromised by, the existing system."
Conroy is survived by her brothers, her son Joel, his wife Katja and grandchildren Nina and Luca.
Róisín Conroy: born December 17th, 1947; died April 15th, 2007