Autobiography/Nell by Nell McCafferty: The Bogside comes alive in Nell. Within the first few pages, we learn about the close-knit Derry neighbourhood into which McCafferty was born; about her maternal grandfather, a Catholic policeman, and his Protestant wife, who converted in order to marry, writes Ivana Bacik
She had a happy childhood, with a rich array of neighbours and friends, a loving father (one of the few men on the street with a clerical job); and a mother whose tremendous character shines brightly through the many episodes of this eventful story of her life.
Other reviewers have focused on McCafferty's immense love for her mother, on her strong affinity with her hometown; on her difficulties coming to terms with being lesbian; or on the account of her 15-year relationship with writer Nuala O'Faolain. But while the book is about all these things and more, for me a central theme is Nell McCafferty's love affair with writing. From her early years as a delicate child, experiencing the library for the first time as a "place of wonderment", through her time at grammar school and Queen's University, and her subsequent three decades working as a journalist, her passion for writing endures. Towards the end of the book, she says with conviction: "I will write until I die" - and the saddest chapters in her personal life have tended to coincide with low points in her journalistic career. The Irish Times not taking her back on the staff in 1979 (she had left two years earlier hoping to write the great novel) was a particular low. She describes movingly how devastated she felt at what she saw as an "expulsion from the fold".
It was another 16 years before she had the nerve to ask Conor O'Clery why they would not re-hire her; and was told that she was believed at the time to be "too radical" for the newspaper.
My first introduction to Nell McCafferty was through her radical writing. In 1985, Trinity College law lecturer (now President) Mary McAleese told her first year class to read In the Eyes of the Law, a collection of McCafferty's columns in The Irish Times observing proceedings in the Dublin District Courts over previous years. These insightful, often poignant descriptions of the humdrum reality of law in action had a huge effect on us teenaged school-leavers - and remain relevant today. The book is still on the first year criminal law reading list in Trinity.
Over many years, Nell's distinctive voice, both written and spoken, has had a powerful and provocative place in Irish society. She has been vocal, often at personal cost, on the rights of those brought before the criminal courts, on women's rights, and on the rights of Northern Catholics.
Her outspokenness on what was euphemistically called "the national question" led to her non-appearance on RTÉ for a time in the 1980s. She writes with feeling about becoming a social pariah among media colleagues, many of whom regarded those who refused to condemn the IRA as "hush puppies". The discussion of her difficulties over this makes fascinating reading. She is justifiably critical of Southerners for failing to understand her position, coming as she did from a community subject to everyday harassments, and worse, from British soldiers. McCafferty's evocative description of her experience on Derry streets on Bloody Sunday, for instance, makes more understandable her refusal to condemn those "neighbours' children" who subsequently became active in the republican movement. But as she writes herself, it was at the very least unfortunate that the day after she publicly declared support for the IRA in 1987, the brutal Enniskillen bombing took place.
McCafferty's passion for equality certainly informs her writing about the North, and this passion also fuelled her long commitment to the women's movement. There are riveting descriptions of her early days in feminist campaigning; the drama of the Contraceptive Train in 1971, and later escapades with the radical group Irishwomen United, who successfully challenged the astonishing ban on women being served pints in pubs. We take so much for granted now!
Undoubtedly, McCafferty has made a vital contribution to feminism in Ireland, making critical interventions at critical times. Her support for Joanne Hayes during the appalling "Kerry Babies" case was utterly vindicated. Her writing, television and radio appearances kept hope alive for many during the bleak "amendment years" of the 1980s, when progress for women seemed far off.
More recently, she made an especially critical intervention in the 2002 abortion referendum, appearing at a press conference called by the Masters of the maternity hospitals, and with characteristic audacity demanding to know how the male Masters would deal with women patients pregnant with a foetus incapable of being born alive. Their response that, in such cases, best medical practice would mean termination of the pregnancy wholly undermined the outrageous case the Government was making in seeking to further restrict abortion rights. As McCafferty writes, this played a key part in the welcome defeat of the referendum.
Even during serious political moments like these, Nell McCafferty has a lovely sense of divilment. Her ambition, she announces, is to "laugh and be a disorderly woman". She appreciates the funny side of life during her many adventures, travelling after graduation through France, Greece, the Middle East; working on a kibbutz in Israel; living in a "lesbian ghetto" in the 1970s, and later in a "gilded tower" with O'Faolain. Her humour throughout is pithy and often earthy.
Notwithstanding the bawdiness, a strong sense emerges of McCafferty as a deeply shy, often innocent person. She is a powerful writer, and a captivating public speaker - yet retains a genuine naïveté. She responds to praise with almost childlike delight, but is easily hurt by criticism. Perhaps because of this, she has never formally entered politics, but has had great political influence as a laughing, disorderly thorn in the side of the establishment. In this book she attempts a tidy ending, writing with finality that "all my battles in love and war are now over". I am not so sure.
Ivana Bacik is Reid Professor of Criminal Law at Trinity College, Dublin, a practising barrister, and author of Kicking and Screaming - Dragging Ireland into the 21st Century (O'Brien Press, 2004)
Nell by Nell McCafferty Penguin Ireland, 437pp. £17.99