Clodagh Finn: Nell McCafferty was a ‘wee outlaw’ who made Ireland a better place

“There’s nothing like keeping them laughing all the way to your point of view,” she told me during an interview in 1985. I was an 18-year-old student of journalism at the time and it was an enormous honour — a scoop, even — to have Nell McCafferty agree to talk to me for Metro, the student magazine at Rathmines College of Commerce. I had seen her walking around the Dublin suburb and approached her with, I must admit, huge trepidation. I couldn’t believe it when she agreed to chat and gave me her address.

I arrived on the appointed day and found a note on her door to say that she had been called away unexpectedly and was very sorry. She left her phone number so I could make another date. I was impressed by that. When I finally arrived at her house, she was sitting at the table with a manual typewriter, smoking.

“I hate the deadlines,” she said, directing me to the kitchen to make coffee for both of us. There was a filter coffee maker on the counter-top. Panic. I was a child raised in the land of Maxwell House granules who had never seen such a thing. I figured it out, though, and spent more than an hour in the company of a woman I already admired hugely.

I had devoured The Best of Nell, published the previous year by Attic Press. You’ll find her piece on Golden Balls in that. First published by In Dublin in 1983, she observed that Irish men were more than willing to wear golden pins of tiny feet which, at the time, signified respect for the unborn foetus.

Yet, she argued, there would be no issue with unplanned pregnancy if those men added a golden balls badge to the wide range of badges they were already so happy to wear. They had badges announcing their football club allegiances, their blood donations or their prowess in Gaeilge (remember the Fáinne).

Why not add a Golden Balls badge to the collection? She wrote: “Before presentation [of the badge, at the age of puberty] they will naturally have to undergo a simple sex education course in which they will be instructed on such matters as sperm count, menstruation, zygotes, implantation, nappy-washing, the 4am feed, the length of the Dublin Corporation housing list, and the factors influencing repayment of our foreign borrowings which in turn influences our ability to feed all-comers.”

I’m quoting it in detail, not only because it’s an inspired idea, but because this fearless woman from Derry applied her own version of it during the outrage that became known as the Kerry Babies Tribunal.

The tribunal — witch hunt is a better word — was initially set up to examine Garda behaviour during an investigation into the murder of an infant whose remains were discovered on Cahersiveen beach, Co Kerry, in April 1984. Joanne Hayes, who had been pregnant at the same time, was arrested. She pleaded guilty to the murder, but later withdrew her ‘confession’ and admitted that she had given birth to another baby who had subsequently died.

Instead of investigating why the gardaí had forced a false confession from an innocent woman, the tribunal tried to pin two baby deaths on an innocent women.

It was a particularly bleak time in Ireland, one that had particular resonance for me because Joanne Hayes worked seven doors away from my childhood home. I knew her as the kind, soft-spoken woman who worked at the Sports Complex in Tralee.

If she could be excoriated in such a fashion, it could happen to any of us.

But it did not happen to any of us (not in that form, anyway) thanks to the women of Ireland who rallied around her — and Nell McCafferty, a “wee well-paid outlaw” on the fringes of society, as she once called herself.

If you get a chance, read her pieces from that time — but let me quote a few paragraphs from the introduction of her book on the case, A Woman to Blame.

“In the opening days of the ‘Kerry babies’ tribunal a married man went to bed in a Tralee hotel with a woman who was not his wife. He was one of the 43 male officials — judge, 15 lawyers, three police superintendents and 24 policemen — engaged in a public probe of the private life of Joanne Hayes.

“When this particular married man was privately confronted with his own behaviour, he at first denied it. Then he crumpled into tears and asked not to be exposed. He had so much to lose, he said. ‘My wife… my job… my reputation…’ He was assured of discretion.

“No such discretion was assured to Joanne Hayes as a succession of professional men, including this married man, came forward to strip her character.”

It was that calling-out of double-standards and hypocrisy that made Nell McCafferty such an effective journalist and campaigner.

She blasted a hole through the thick blanket of oppression — and its attendant shame — that hovered over 1980s Ireland.

But as she said herself, she was not alone. At The Irish Times, she joined other female journalists such as Maeve Binchy, Mary Cummins, Mary Maher, and many more, to shine a light on the reality of women’s lives.

Her involvement in the women’s movement, with such women as Nuala Fennell, Mary Kenny, Mary Robinson, June Levine, and Anne O’Donnell, is well-known, although I wonder if we appreciate enough how much they changed Ireland for the better.

And here’s just one small example. Condoms were illegal in Ireland when some of those women took the so-called contraceptive train to Belfast in 1971. I love that celebratory black-and-white photo showing the triumphant travellers with their forbidden booty held aloft as they disembarked at Connolly Station in Dublin.

Decades later, on the very day that Nell McCafferty left us, Health Minister Stephen Donnelly said he wanted to extend the free contraception scheme to include all women from the age of 16, not just those aged between 17 to 35.

That’s what I call a result.

It is heartening to see that Nell — she was so well-known that the country was on first-name terms with her — has prompted so many warm tributes over the last few days.

I’ll leave you with this glorious reminiscence.

When asked by Miriam O’Callaghan in 2011 if she believed in an afterlife, she said she would come back as a migratory bird. “I’d fly around on the wing... and I could shit on a few heads [cue the best laugh ever] ... I would fly right over the Vatican”.

Fly high, sister.