Liam Kennedy: Nell McCafferty was a pioneering journalist and a flawed advocate of social justice

The obituaries heaping praise on Ms McCafferty have been coming in all week. She was a champion for social justice, a pioneering journalist, above all a great campaigner for women’s liberation.

Few would deny that at the end of the 1960s women in Ireland needed liberation from an all-controlling Catholic hierarchy and from restrictive legislation relating to the control of their bodies. The position of women in Northern Ireland was better, being part of the more liberal United Kingdom state.

I did meet Ms McCafferty once. It was an Irish Women’s Liberation meeting in Cork City about 1971. My then wife, Judy Barry, had formed a women’s liberation group in Cork that pre-dated the IWL, so we both went along. As a student at University College Cork, I wasn’t particularly well-off. However, as an enthusiastic supporter of women’s rights I made a point of buying drinks for the speakers.

Ms McCafferty took the gin-and-tonic without a word. Just then a fellow male student – we were all socialists in those days – rather dogmatically asserted that the fundamental struggle was for socialism. Once that happy state was in place, the liberation of women would be more or less in the bag.

This was a standard left-wing argument, though hardly profound. Ms McCafferty’s reaction, delivered with force, was: ‘F**k you’. Followed by another ‘F**k you’. She then turned her back on the hapless student.

Of course, the argument was naïve but at least it was open to discussion, unlike the retort. I was disappointed because I had been an admirer of Ms McCafferty’s writings in the Irish Times, particularly her series ‘In the Eyes of the Law’.

This laid bare some of the many hypocrisies of southern Irish society. Judges knew that the reformatories to which they were sentencing young people, many of them institutions run by the Christian Brothers or other Catholic clergy, were notorious for physical abuse. As we later learned, sexual abuse was also commonplace.

Ms McCafferty was indeed an advocate for social justice, as many of the tributes to her attest. But there was a darker, more selective side to her politics.

She was reared in a city she would have known only as ‘Derry’. The writer Eoghan Harris once referred to her as one of the ‘Derry Diaspora’, a grouping of very talented journalists from that city who were under the sway of republican thinking.

At one time she was an open supporter of the Provisional IRA. At least she had the courage to say so, unlike others who concealed their identification with the ‘armed struggle’. She was also courageous in coming out as a lesbian, although a fellow female journalist found her predatory and slow to accept ‘no’ when her advances were declined.

I found her support for the IRA hard to reconcile with her concern for disadvantaged, anti-social Dublin youths, as portrayed in early columns in the Irish Times.

After all, so-called ‘punishment’ beatings and shootings, directed particularly at young people, were part of the repertoire of IRA repression within working-class Catholic communities.

Many of these attacks took place in the Bogside, her home community, under the overall supervision of the serial killer Martin McGuinness.

Human rights supporters would normally blanche at the thought of torture and mutilation as part of everyday life.

I wondered how someone who viewed herself as a fighter for social justice, and was seen by others as such, could reconcile implicit support for barbaric practices at home with apparent concern for troubled youngsters in far-away Dublin.

The reformatory system in the South was bad but it bears no comparison with the ‘kneecappings’ and bone-crunching injuries meted out by loyalist and IRA paramilitaries in the North.

Let us not forget that the first recorded instances of tarring-and-feathering took place in her home city, within a stone’s throw of her childhood home.

It was a night in November. The year was 1971, the year of the Cork women’s meeting mentioned earlier. A gang of women burst into the home of Martha Doherty, a 19-year old girl from the Bogside, dragged her across to some waste ground, and in the view of a crowd of some 80 vigilantes and spectators proceeded to cut her hair with scissors, then with razors, and finally poured tar over her shaven head. Feathers were then showered on her, sticking to the tar. The crowd taunted Martha with the cry: ‘Soldier lover’.

Here was a working-class girl, barely out of her teens, being assaulted, humiliated and traumatised. Other victims, mostly male but female also, were to follow. Irish feminist voices were noted for their silence.

In Northern Ireland a primordial nationalism trumped feminism, and indeed socialism, every time. At best, Ms McCafferty was a flawed advocate of social justice.

Liam Kennedy is Emeritus Professor of History at QUB