Nell McCafferty, a hard-hitting Irish journalist whose outspoken reputation and outspoken views on women’s rights, gay rights and Irish nationalism helped her country move from an era of cosseted social conservatism to become one of Europe’s most progressive countries, died on August 21. In Fahan, a rural area of northwest Ireland. She was 80 years old.
Her death, at a nursing home, was announced in a statement from her family, who said she had been in failing health for several years after suffering a stroke.
Few non-fiction writers have captured the Irish public as tightly or for as long as Ms. McCafferty. Like a singer Sinead O’Connor And a handful of other public figures, she was known by her first name, loved and sometimes hated – everyone in Ireland had an opinion about Nell.
That’s largely because Mrs McCafferty seemed to have an opinion about everything in Ireland: big issues like feminism and gay rights (she was for them) as well as bans on public smoking (she was against them) and more mundane things like aging. matters (she was bilingual).
Ms McCafferty expressed her views as a correspondent for The Irish Times and later as a freelancer; As the author of six books, including the memoir, “Nel” (2004); and as a tireless speaker and broadcast personality.
“In Ireland trying to come out of the shadows and find who she was, Nell McCafferty was one of those people who knew exactly who she was and wasn’t afraid to enter every fight for gay and women’s rights,” Simon Harris, Chief Ireland’s minister, said in a statement.
She was a founding member of Irish Women’s Liberation MovementA group that pushed against the social and legal strictures placed on women in Ireland. In 1971 she and about 45 members of the movement took condoms and spermicidal jelly from Belfast, Northern Ireland, where they were legal, to Dublin, in the Republic of Ireland, where they were not – an incident Celebrated in Irish popular history as the contraceptive train.
Mrs McCafferty was equally adamant about Northern Irish independence. She joined early protests and was in the crowd during the violent conflict known as the Troubles that began in the late 1960s. Bloody SundayThe day in 1972 when British troops opened fire on Irish marchers in the city of Derry, killing 14 people.
The massacre took place in Bogside, the working-class neighborhood where Ms McCafferty grew up, and soon afterwards some protesters returned to their childhood home to regroup. The experience fueled her public support for the Irish Republican Army, a position that many feared was career suicide but which hardly gave Ms McCafferty a scratch.
A brilliant, nuanced writer of spare, arresting and, when appropriate, hilarious prose, Ms McCafferty excelled at drawing connections between seemingly disparate issues facing Irish society.
The opening lines of a 1980 The Irish Times piece about a strike by women political prisoners in Armagh prison in Northern Ireland, titled “Armagh is a feminist issue”, are considered among the most powerful words written during the Three Decades of Troubles.
“There is menstrual blood on the walls of Armagh Prison,” she wrote. “Flies and snails grow fat as they become thin. They eat and sleep and sit in this dim, electrified filth, without reading material or radio or television. They are let out for an hour every day, hoping to stand in the rain.”
She was equally adamant in her criticism of the Roman Catholic Church. She drew a line between its tight grip on Irish society, its mistreatment of unwed mothers and its attempts to cover up child sexual abuse by clergy, all of which saw evidence of a morally bankrupt institution.
“Reverend fathers did not just rob the manger and rape the child. “They robbed mothers and fathers of their families,” they wrote in the Daily Mail in 2009. And when they weren’t abusing children, holy men, inspired by the Vatican, banished unmarried pregnant women to Magdalen’s houses,” running a church-shelter system.
In the 1970s Mrs. McCafferty’s advocacy of gay rights began – although she considered her homosexuality a kind of open secret, neither hidden nor, mostly out of concern for what her mother would think, publicly expressed.
She was in a relationship with the writer for 15 years Nuala O’Faolain. It ended in 1995, but the two reconciled in April 2008 after Mrs O’Fallen announced she had terminal lung cancer. Mrs. McCafferty offered to help her end her own life, though she ultimately refused. Ms. O’Faolen died that May.
In her uniquely indirect way, Mrs McCafferty then became an advocate for medically assisted suicide, another point that Ireland’s religious orthodoxy was giving way to more progressive ideas.
“I offered Nuala euthanasia,” she told a TV interviewer. “I said: ‘I’ve got morphine, I’ve hidden it around Ireland. The minute you want to overdose, tell me.’”
Ellen McCafferty was born on March 29, 1944 in the Northern Irish city of Derry on the western border of Ireland. Her father, Hugh, was a clerk for the Royal Navy and, after hours, a bookmaker at a dog track. Her mother Lily (Duffy) McCafferty raised Nell and her five siblings.
She studied art at Queen’s University Belfast and graduated in 1965. After a few years of teaching, she moved to Israel to work on a kibbutz. She returned to Derry in 1968 after severe storms rocked the city, the days many say the Troubles began.
In 1971 she moved to Dublin, where she found a society with its own problems: women could not get birth control, children were institutionalized for minor infractions, and issues such as abortion and gay rights were not even discussed in public.
She made a name for herself by writing about all these topics. In 1985 she published “A Woman to Blame,” about a mother named Joan Hayes, who was falsely accused of murdering her child and another child—an incident, Ms. McCafferty argued, that showed how Irish society only allowed singles. Not only mothers are abused but how. Usually women.
Mrs McCafferty left The Irish Times in 1980 to write novels. It never came together, and she was never hired again. She later freelanced for publications including the Daily Mail, The Irish Press and The Village Voice.
She is survived by a sister, Carmel.
As Mrs. McCafferty grew older, her reputation changed from dangerous iconoclast to Irish national treasure. In 2014 The Sunday Independent fondly referred to her as “one of Ireland’s biggest grumps”.
After all, she was never an ideologue. She was a working journalist, game for any assignment. In 1990 she covered the World Cup, and in 2008 she covered the National Plowing Championships, in which she participated in a demonstration of a training device for artificial cow insemination.
“Model bums and wombs unveiled for the first time this year,” she wrote. The host and the crowd “quietly discussed how the situation had changed. A farmer insisted that 30 years ago, in Tipperary, they asked the bishop for permission to inseminate. Cows, that is.”
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