Sarah Harte: Edna O’Brien has passed the baton on to other brave, brilliant women of Ireland

Before the big race, I went for a swim. Floating around looking at the blurry horizon where the sky and sea meet, I lost track of time. The water was uncharacteristically warm, and I stayed in for too long.

On the beach, I checked my phone and realised with a jolt that it was only 25 minutes to the race. Cue a speedy dash home in wet togs, driving up the narrow winding roads that net West Cork with a roar of the clutch.

There were blazing bursts of yellow furze and patches of purple heather. The hedgerows exploded with intensely red fuchsia, burnt orange montbretia, creamy clouds of meadow-sweet, dog daisies, and tall, bright purple foxgloves, with wheaten arrow grasses barely moving their pointy heads in the still evening. On this occasion, I flew past the flora, pleased not to meet any mechanical Leviathan tractors which are a feature of country life and be forced to reverse inexpertly, because I had a date with the sofa.

The sofa, as I alluded to last week, has a permanent indent because over the last fortnight, along with most of the country, I have done some Olympian lounging as we watched Team Ireland do us proud.

So, we know what happened then in Paris when these warrior women ran out of their skin both on an individual and collective level. It was clear in the post-race interview that, even in the heightened emotion of coming fourth they were, at that painful moment, down but not beaten, already looking ahead.

Listening to these professional, intelligent champions was weirdly moving. They are so young, born between 1994 and 2002, and yet so inspirational. It felt so much more than a running race, it felt like a life lesson.

Those four have it all — supreme athletic talent, spirit, and fantastic hairbows. For some reason, the hairbows slay me. They seem to me to say hi, we’re the women who are going to knock it out of the park with our guts, hard work, and esprit de corps and make no mistake we are coming for you, but we like to bring it hair-bow-wise. 

I hope that every little girl in Ireland watching these young women thought I could do something great whether in athletics, another sport, or another context.

As both Sonia O’Sullivan and Derval O’Rourke said on RTÉ 1’s fantastic coverage of the Games, you have to see it to be it. And in the new Ireland, what is so exciting, and bittersweet for women of my era, is to see the increasing range of role models for young girls.

A flick over to the nine o’clock news meant going from the track to a beautiful image of Edna O’Brien’s coffin being borne back by boat to the monastic site on Holy Island, where the River Shannon broadens into Lough Derg, where she was buried. 

O’Brien was a trailblazing woman who ran a long, admirable race with many milestones and also many lows. She smashed all sorts of literary records, and while she became a superstar, at times her race was lonely something she acknowledged in many interviews.

As Fr Donagh O’Meara said during her funeral Mass, Edna O’Brien was a “speaker of truth” who held a mirror up to Irish society and “we didn’t thank her for it, we undermined her, we isolated her and rejected her message, and she must have deeply felt that”.

The much-garlanded East Clare writer had her debut novel The Country Girls banned and burned in 1960. Six subsequent books were banned. In The Country Girls, she chronicled the lives of Baba and Caithleen as they attempted to forge lives in a priest-ridden, narrow inward-looking 1950s society that was merciless for those who didn’t toe the line. 

It was no country for young women because men ruled, and women did not burn down running tracks for Ireland, with or without hairbows.

Women were largely expected to content themselves with home and hearth and to confine their sexuality to the narrow strictures of heterosexual marriage. O’Brien lifted the lid on women’s hidden desires, sexually and otherwise. This was both a grave sin in the culture of the time and a big departure.

As the writer Eimear McBride wrote: “ The Country Girls is not the novel that broke the mould, it is the one that made it. O’Brien gave voice to the experiences of a previously muzzled generation of Irish women.” 

After the race, I picked up O’Brien’s Country Girls trilogy, which I’ve been re-reading since she died. In my teens, I clearly remember being taken by the highly comic scene where Baba and Caithleen in an attempt to get expelled from their strict convent, write a ‘dirty’ note on a picture of the Virgin Mary, involving Sister Mary and where Father Tom would like to stick his “long thing”.

The note gets read out at assembly by Sister Margaret who, foaming at the mouth, beating all ahead of her with her strap, shouts out where are “those Children of Satan’’. Needless to say, our heroines are expelled and sent home in disgrace where they are the talk of the village, with people praying for their souls.

It’s strange when you revisit a book decades later how different things jump out at you. The violence of Ireland as a backdrop to The Country Girls strikes me now. In some ways, that hasn’t changed. Irish women continue to be raped, murdered in their own homes, coercively controlled, and they face new threats through technology and online pornography.

But what has altered is the sheer freedom girls and women have to chart their own destinies, to be champions and to excel in the public arena without asking permission of any man.

There’s more of a connection between runners and writers than you might think. Writing can be a slog, it’s highly competitive, you practice a lot on your own, you have more bad days than good, and you must be bloody-minded.

Speaking at O’Brien’s funeral, novelist Andrew O’Hagan drew a parallel between writing and running: “Edna combines social elegance with the loneliness of the long-distance runner and will remain as long as there are readers, as long as there is wonder, as long as an Ireland and human beings are longing for progress, there will be an Edna O’Brien and a glow around her memory.”

Turning the page of O’Brien’s book, in an emotional mood, I thought to myself how in some ways she had handed the baton to the fabulous four and to all the women and girls whose stars will blaze brightly in the future.