Gemma was the leader, and, while she might not have wanted to watch herself on TV — all her life she hated her own appearance — she was perceptive, confident and insightful when it came to assessing the performances of her colleagues.

This was when Women’s Liberation was synonymous with bra-burning and Ireland was still in the relative dark ages: when women needed their husband’s signature in order to get a library card. On the second day of the training programme, one of the women suggested the group needed a single, achievable, highly visible goal. 

Like? “Like getting a female newsreader on Telefís Éireann,” said Gemma Hussey.

Silence ensued as every woman present realised that the national broadcasting station — the only national broadcaster at the time — did not have a single woman in this key, even pivotal role. No woman ever looked up from the news desk to the camera when a major bulletin was about to start. 

That was the prerogative of guys like Charles Mitchel. Of course it was. You couldn’t have a woman in such an important position. For heaven’s sake, if you had a woman reading the news, viewers would spend so much time looking at what she was wearing, they wouldn’t remember what she had said. You couldn’t have that. It was obvious. It was a given.

It was a given until Gemma Hussey decided otherwise. She had an acute sense of the symbolism involved, but no idea how to change the situation. Someone suggested the group craft a video and hold public meetings drawing attention to the issue and to the unbelievably sexist rationale behind it. Suddenly, the training took on a whiff of reality, as members of the group accepted briefs to do research, learn how to interview, develop scriptwriting skills, and nerve themselves to speak to a camera. 

A few weeks later, a highly professional video — for the time — had been created and the campaign started. Within a year, RTÉ had its first female TV newsreader. And because it was such a game-changer, as Gemma had foreseen, it made people, indeed, it made a whole generation of women begin to rebel against the constraints of an Ireland deeply hostile, not just to “errant” women, but also to “uppity” women.

Gemma Hussey was the definition of an uppity woman, central to the development of a feminist understanding in Ireland. Inevitably, this led her into politics. Her husband Derry and herself had a firmly middle-class belief that because they were what would have been dubbed, back then, “comfortably off”, they should give something back to a society that had been good to them, and giving back meant running for election.

If that sounds like posh high-mindedness, it was the opposite. Gemma Hussey won a Senate seat and in due course a Cabinet at a time when her husband was regularly and publicly sympathized with for having such an opinionated wife, a time when the notion of a balance between home life and a career was laughable. A woman who wanted to be a government minister had to do everything that the guys did — and tolerate the status quo. Women were prominent in politics because they had inherited a seat from a father or dead husband. They were treated like extras of minor annoyance, expected to place-hold but not policy-drive.

Gemma challenged all that. She hated being talked over and ignored, not for her own sake but for the gender she represented. She loathed media coverage which commented raucously if she put on a few pounds. 

A non-believer, she refused to pretend to be otherwise — and remember, the Catholic Church had ways, in those years, of demonstrating its disapproval of agnostics and atheists.

Gemma Hussey’s unpublished diaries, which she recently let me read, are a daily sequence of battles, shames, arguments and defeats. Also admiration for her boss Dr Garret FitzGerald, although Garret, despite his reliance on her, managed to literally forget her when forming one government, ending up creating a mortifying half-job for her.

Throughout it all, she managed to be hospitable and generous. She helped a generation of Eastern European women grasp democracy before their states joined the EU. She wrote authoritative books about Ireland.

Once, in a radio studio, years after she had left politics, a new minister of state said something on air which made it clear that she had no clue that Gemma had ever been a Government Minister or been at the centre of breakthrough advocacy for the advancement of women. 

The programme presenter quickly corrected the minister of state, but what was striking was how generously Gemma let her off the hook.

“It’s not an insult to have the struggle forgotten,” she said gently. “It’s a triumph that this generation of women can take their rights for granted.”