Examiner 180: A history told through her eyes

Maureen often wrote about Daphne in her hugely popular column, charting her friend’s multiple adventures, her latest books and her singular achievement in becoming Ireland’s first female flight instructor. 

In 1995, for instance, she wrote about Daphne’s new book, Flying Start: “It is a short, comprehensive and easily understandable handbook for those who have just taken up flying – it’s a first I’m sure.” 

Whatever about the book, Daphne Pochin Mould and Maureen Fox were both firsts; women pushing the boundaries and showing what was possible. I remember being struck by that and uplifted by that magical lunchtime interlude in 1992.

Even at that late stage, there were few female reporters in the Cork Examiner, as it was then, and just one female sub-editor (Margaret Jennings, a pioneer in her own right). Things were changing, but slowly. Ireland was still a conservative place where it was hard to be a young female reporter.

Maureen Fox, however, was a beacon of light. Her journey from copytaker to woman’s editor and first Irish print journalist to win the Friendship Force International peace award tells part of the story. Her overflowing mailbag, however, is the better indicator of a woman who struck a real chord with her loyal readers.

She was a weather vane of the social change that was affecting so many ordinary people’s lives. In the 1990s, for example, she put out a call to hear from house husbands and heard from one, who wrote this: “I don’t believe for one moment that being a house husband is unmasculine – anyone who thinks that obviously isn’t masculine enough to try it.” 

It was what she wrote afterwards that gives you a flavour of the kind of woman she was: “It takes confidence in oneself to be ‘different’ and this applies not only to house husbands but to women who are not domesticated, those who have absolutely no desire to become mothers – the list is endless.” 

She provided a space for those differences in her column and was a fantastic ally, willing to share her own moments of doubt and difficulty. When she died, in 2010, Feelgood editor Irene Feighan, another early woman editor at the Examiner, said, “She had a unique, confident voice and was not afraid to tackle any subject.”

Daphne Pochin Mould had the same pioneering spirit and, in her 93 years, packed in many different careers – geologist, author, pilot, broadcast, flight instructor and photographer.

Remembering them now, as the Irish Examiner celebrates 180 years is a reminder that social change is reflected in the lives of the women who experience it. In that spirit, here are vignettes of some of the women who featured in this newspaper over the decades.

Bridget Ryan (Murray)

Like some 4,000 other famine orphans, Bridget Ryan (13) was given a regulation kit of petticoats, stockings and utensils as she left Listowel workhouse in 1849 to make the four-month sea voyage to Australia, a colony in desperate need of women.

The pages of this newspaper regularly featured adverts announcing free passage to Australia as the Great Famine (1845-1852), “one of the greatest social disasters in 19th- century Europe, to quote John Crowley of UCC”, devastated Ireland. One million died and over a million emigrated, among them some 4,000 “morally pure” orphan girls taken from Irish Famine workhouses under the Earl Grey emigration scheme of 1848-1850.

Bridget Ryan turned 14 on the journey to the other side of the world where Irish adolescents were often described as dirty and lazy. The Sydney Morning Herald was blistering in its attack on these “ignorant creatures, whose knowledge of household duty barely reaches to distinguishing the inside from the outside of a potato”.

Yet despite the hostility, many of them got jobs, married and went on to have better lives than they might have had here. Unlike many others, Bridget Ryan could read and write and her state of “health, strength and probable usefulness” was listed as “good” when she arrived.

She went on to marry James Murray, from Scotland, in 1851 and the couple had 13 children.

She converted to Presbyterian and worked a successful dairy farm on Oxley Island where she and her husband were well-respected members of the community. Her legacy certainly lives on. Her great-great-granddaughter Julie Evans estimates that Bridget Murray has accumulated more than 5,000 Australian descendants in the 170 years since her marriage.

The O’Halloran Sisters

On 11 June 1887, the Examiner reported on the Bodyke evictions under a headline that read ‘Exciting scenes’. It went on to remark on the “pluck and daring” of Mrs O’Halloran, her two sons and four daughters who threw boiling water on the bailiffs trying to evict them from their Co Clare home.

Landowner Colonel O’Callaghan had called in an eviction party when a number of tenants were unable to pay the rent. It included the acting sheriff, a Resident Magistrate, the RIC, the 2nd Royal Welsh Fusiliers, bailiffs and 14 emergency men.

Many tenants fought back, however, as crowds of thousands came to watch and support them. The O’Hallorans put up such spirited resistance that their house became known as O’Halloran’s Fort. Frank O’Halloran described how his sisters threw cans of scalding water on the bailiffs. One of them, Honoria, grabbed a policeman’s weapon as he came through the window.

Frank wrote: “My sister was then in full possession of a rifle, bayonet and all, and sure she did use it. She rushed to the window and scattered the police outside right and left, and cleared the ladder outside, which was crowded.” 

Some 28 tenants out of 57 were evicted but they returned to their homes at nightfall. The Pall Mall Gazette reported: “After the [eviction] forces had gone, however, the crowd rushed in, forced the door, relighted the fire, replaced the furniture, and a score of willing hands rebuilt the wall. So much for O’Callaghan’s victory and the supremacy of the English law.”

Professor Mary Ryan

Jacinta Ryan tells a wonderful story about her great-aunt Professor Mary Ryan who was so engrossed in debate with her nephew one evening that they found their supper on the ceiling – exploding boiled eggs.

They were probably talking about philosophy but Mary had to secure her degree without ever setting foot in a university. Queen’s College, as University College Cork was then, might not have actively excluded women but they were far from encouraged. Mary Ryan studied for her university exams at St Angela’s School in Cork where the Ursuline sisters helped women follow the university curriculum.

In 1908, the National University of Ireland Act recognised gender equality, a principle that was included in the charter when Queen’s College became University College Cork. 

Two years later, Mary Ryan was appointed professor of Romance languages at UCC, the first woman professor on the island of Ireland and Great Britain. She sent many of her postgraduate students to the Sorbonne in Paris and later became the first Irish woman to receive the Légion d’honneur, the highest French decoration.

Sheila and Nora Wallace

When Nora Wallace died in 1970, the Cork Examiner ran a story about her activities during the War of Independence under a headline that read: “Her little paper shop was I.R.A rendezvous’. The article, however, did not recognise how central she and her sister were in the War of Independence campaign in Cork.

Their shop on St Augustine Street sold newspapers, sweets and cigarettes but it also acted as an informal headquarters for the IRA.

In recent years, the central role played by women from 1916 to 1923 has been highlighted thanks to the work of historians and the release of files detailing their service during all stages of the revolution.

In one such file, Seán O’Hegarty, former IRA commander, wrote: “The shop in Augustine Street became the centre for the receipt and issues of despatches, the point of touch for verbal messages, and, you might say, the Brigade headquarters for operations in the city area.”

The sisters’ contribution was recognised in a documentary last year and also in a report in this newspaper which puts them back in the limelight. 

Richard Fitzpatrick wrote: “The Republican movement’s greatest figures knew [the sisters], including James Connolly, Éamon de Valera and Michael Collins. Terence MacSwiney served behind the shop’s counter.”

Timeline

Here are some key moments over the last 180 years.

• 1870: The Married Women’s Property Act allows married women to keep the profits of their labour and to inherit property.
• 1886: The Contagious Disease Acts, which forced women arrested for prostitution to be examined for venereal disease, are repealed. Belfast-based suffragist and journalist Isabella Tod actively campaigned to abolish “the sexual double standard”, arguing men would never be treated in such a way.
• 1902: The Irish Women’s Franchise League is formed to secure votes for women.
• 1908: The National University of Ireland Act allows women to enter universities as students and staff.
• 1918: Women get a limited right to vote.
• 1922: All women get the right to vote.
• 1932: The Marriage Bar is introduced, preventing married women from working in the public sector.
• 1935: The importation and sale of contraceptives is made illegal.
• 1937: Divorce is banned. The new constitution also says the State shall “endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home”.
• 1969: The Irish Family Planning Association is founded.
• 1971: Some 46 members of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement import contraceptives to Dublin from Belfast on the famous contraceptive train.
• 1973: The Marriage Bar is removed.
• 1977: The Employment Equality Act is passed.
• 1983: The Eighth Amendment is written into the Constitution. It recognises that the unborn have an equal right to life as that of the mother.
• 1985: The sale of non-medical contraception without a prescription is permitted, but only in pharmacies and to those over 18.
• 1990: Mary Robinson is elected the first female President of Ireland.
• 1993: Homosexuality is decriminalised.
• 1995: The constitutional ban on divorce is lifted by the slimmest of margins with 50.3% voting in favour and 49.79% against.
• 2015: Ireland votes to introduce same-sex marriage by 62% to 38% 
• 2018: Ireland votes by 66.4% to 33.6% to repeal the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, which granted equal right to life to a mother and her unborn child.