Jennifer Horgan: Cork nun Kate McCarthy deserves better

In a small French town, she befriends two women, one who has taken over her deceased husband’s garage, and another who runs the local café. I know it sounds like a joke: A nun, a mechanic, and a café owner walk into a bar… It isn’t that. It is a story of friendship, sacrifice, and resilience against all odds. As the film unfolds we watch as these three inspiring women work together to transport at least 200 British soldiers out of occupied France and into safety, into the rest of their lives.

Their modus operandi is genius. The Irish nun returns the men to reasonably good health in the local hospital, then moves them to the safety of her friend’s café, transformed into a kind of safe house. Finally, the mechanic, who drives her own car, smuggles them out and over the border, under the pretence of buying parts.

The wily three later become even more pivotal in the resistance movement, passing vital information from their patients back to the Allies. When they are captured by the Gestapo, their commitment to the cause, and one another, never wavers.

Sylvette Leleu, the garage owner, and Sister Marie-Laurence, and the Cork-born nun Kate McCarthy are reunited in captivity and manage to talk to each other by banging out Morse code on the pipes. They eventually meet up with the third member of their courageous trio, Angèle Tardiveau, the café owner.

We follow McCarthy up until her eventual release from Ravensbruck concentration camp. She weighs less than 30kg. Ravensbruck was the only major Nazi concentration camp for women and Sr McCarthy, always the rebel, is sent there for refusing to make gas masks in captivity. She watches as women are forced to stand for hours until they collapse from hunger and exhaustion. She is beaten and forced to do hard labour for 12 hours a day, miraculously avoiding the gas chamber.

After the war, we watch this brave and diminished woman arrive back in Cork.

I hate to disappoint, and perhaps you’ve already guessed, but the film doesn’t exist. And I can tell you this, in a year of nonstop male biopics ( Oppenheimer, Maestro, Napoleon, and Ferrari) I wish it did. I would love nothing more than to flick down a cinema seat to watch Kate McCarthy on the big screen.

If it ever did get made (let me fantasize a little longer here) it would need a director who isn’t going to reduce these women to what academic Dennis Bingham describes as the "madness, hysteria, sexual dependency, the male gaze, and a patriarchal authorship: that is the classical female biopic".

Maybe it could be directed by the husband and wife duo, Jimmy Chi and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhely, who directed the wonderful film, Nyad. Because Nyad is a wonderful film, one that stands out for celebrating the fierce, ageing beauty of two real-life, flesh and blood women. A film that also celebrates friendship, sacrifice, and resilience. Elements I’m also enjoying in the latest series of True Detective, 'Night Country', directed by the female Mexican filmmaker Issa López. Another welcome break from the ‘male genius’ diet I’ve been force-fed my whole life, in the classroom, in the lecture hall, and in the media.

With no such Kate McCarthy film in sight, I plan to see the biopic One Life this week starring the magnificent Anthony Hopkins. About a man, yes, but at least a film devoted to something a little bit different. Not scientific, military, musical, or sporting genius, but kindness, empathy.

But the very existence of the film One Life does make me further lament Kate McCarthy, this fascinating Irish nun who has faded into obscurity despite saving hundreds of lives too. It compels me to print her name as often as I can here, in the Irish Examiner, at the very least.

Her name is Kate McCarthy.

She was born in 1895 in Drimoleague. She was our very own, and from what little is known about her, she was spectacular. According to historian Catherine Fleming speaking on RTÉ radio in 2020: "She was very feisty and had a brilliant sense of humour. These three women managed to get through this system by their comradery and love of each other and the idea that they would survive at all costs."

I am not the first journalist to mention Kate McCarthy, of course. Back in 2015, a journalist for the Southern Star wrote: “Only one question remains about the extraordinary heroism of West Cork woman Kate McCarthy — why hasn’t Hollywood made a movie about her life?”

Well, I’m asking the same question, nine years later. Quelle Surprise!

In truth, what is far more shocking than the absence of a Hollywood film about this woman is the absence of any official commemoration of her.

But we can’t commemorate what we haven’t been told or shown.

Because, again and again, we are shown only men. There are no statues of women in Cork City, besides the generic ‘onion seller’, ‘girl dancer’, and ‘apple woman.’ Is Dublin much better? Galway? I can only think of poor, regularly molested Molly Malone. There’s Countess Markievicz of course.

Maybe we Irish women are meant to be satisfied by reiterations of Countess Markievicz?

Here in Cork, Michael Collins appears twice during my regular walk along South Mall down to Grand Parade. Then there’s Terence MacSwiney, Thomas McCarthy, Thomas Kent. And the streets, of course, all named after men. No, there is certainly no shortage of men, men, men.

As Simon Tierney wrote in this paper in July of last year Dublin is a ‘penis parade,’ referencing Geographer Conor O’Neill who mapped the origins of Dublin’s street names and found just 27 of the 936 streets in the city centre are named after women. Honestly, I’m surprised there are any.

Thankfully, I also walk across Mary Elmes Bridge in Cork City on occasion. I’m grateful to writers like Clodagh Finn for raising the Cork-born aid worker from the footnotes of our history books. Mary Elmes who, like Anthony Hopkin’s character, Sir Nicholas Winton, saved hundreds of children from death, deserves her bridge, deserves every inch of recognition laid down in stone and steel.

But she is only one of many women whose legacy has been sidelined in, and I would argue by, our city. Even a plaque or an award named in her honour would be a nod to the great work of Kate McCarthy.

She is commemorated elsewhere, embarrassingly enough. She was awarded the Médaille de la Résistance by Charles de Gaulle and the Palm to Victoire from the British government. In 2014 there was a plaque unveiled in Paris in the Irish College and Sister Kate's name was added to that.

What is there in Cork? In Ireland? Only her grave in St Finbarr’s Cemetery. Whatever about that Hollywood film we’ll never see, Kate McCarthy, like so many women, deserves better.