Women’s stories dragged Ireland kicking and screaming into a better future

An extract from the preface of Irish Times columnist Justine McCarthy’s new book An Eye on Ireland: A Journey Through Social Change

When I had first resolved to become a journalist, reporters were regarded as muckrakers lurking on street corners in upturned raincoat collars and a press pass jammed in the hatband, barely able to scrape together the price of a pint in the early-hours dockers’ bars down on the quays. Being scorned by the establishment was part of the allure. Journalism had its own unique ecology, its own lingo and way of life. The smell of the newsprint and the cacophony of the newsroom were intoxicating.

In the days before LinkedIn and the Freedom of Information Act, telephone operators, postmistresses and postmasters in towns and villages dotted all over the country were primary sources of reliable information. Ours was a boisterous world filled with shouts of “copy”, “reverse ferret” and unprintable catchphrases.

Now those Corybantic rhythms have been stilled by the hush of emails, texts, computer keyboards and dodgy Wikipedia sourcing. Technology delivers information in the blink of an eye, accelerating the news cycle. In the late 20th century, yesterday’s news was deemed only fit to wrap today’s fish’n’chips. Now yesterday’s news is ancient history.

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The arrival of Google and social media, of camera phones and roaming wifi, of online publications and newspaper apps has increased journalists’ workload and the public scrutiny of the job we do. The benefit is that it has made the trade more professional, necessitating stricter ethical rules and fact-checking standards. The Press Council, the Ombudsman and the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland are all keeping a beady eye and new academic courses are providing alternative routes into journalism for some stunningly smart graduates.

All of this is good. But it has its disadvantages too. The immediacy of news has intensified the competition for scoops, generated an insatiable appetite for celebrity tittle-tattle and popularised clickbait, contributing to a general dumbing-down of society. Journalism has come to be seen by some school-leavers as a stepping stone to fame and an entrée to the social whirl of movie premieres and the in-crowd. Some journalists fancy themselves as players in their chosen fields of specialism. Others expect to become television presenters or war correspondents overnight but it is those graduates with that indefinable thing in their genes that makes them just want to be journalists who tend to stay the course.

Though its razzle-dazzle had not been the attraction for me, journalism has brought me to places and to people beyond the frontiers of my dreams. When Mary Robinson made the first official visit by an Irish president to Buckingham Palace and the Irish Guards regiment played Amhrán na bhFiann in the courtyard, I looked across at the tánaiste, Dick Spring, and saw his chin tremble with emotion, and the hairs stood up on my neck.

During the Somalian famine, while Robinson was visiting an orphanage in Baidoa, I watched as an emaciated man lay slumped beneath a tree and realised he was dying. Vincent Browne, whose passionate soapbox appearances on The Late Late Show years before had convinced me I was right to want to be a journalist, told me I could not help the dying man but that my job was to write about what was happening in that wretched country, with its omnipresent stench of human decay.

In Rome for the 1990 World Cup draw, when 1,100 journalists from all over the globe, except me, had their laminate press passes, I wangled a seat in the sponsors’ section beside a businessman from Naples who elbowed me excitedly in the ribs every time the still-smouldering Sophia Loren mentioned his home city from the stage.

Back in the Eternal City a few years later for the beatification of the Christian Brothers founder Edmund Rice, an electrical storm rocked our homeward-bound plane so ferociously that the bishops up front with the politicians led the first-class passengers in a rendition of Nearer, My God, to Thee. At the foot of Mount Sinai, where Moses found the Ten Commandments, it rained in the desert for the first time in 15 years, so the locals said.

In New York, I accompanied Marion Serravalli, the purchasing manager for a New Jersey paper mill, on a shopping expedition to buy kohl eyeliner for her first visit as wife to her erstwhile pen pal, Paul Hill, having married the Belfast man, who was wrongly convicted of the Guildford pub bombings, in England’s Long Lartin prison.

In Berlin, I hired a hammer and chisel from a hawker to carve a piece from the wall as it was coming down to bring home to my mother and then followed the sound of singing to a square off a side street where about 100 East Germans were celebrating a religious feast day in the open for the first time in their lives. Their liberation from behind the Iron Curtain wetted their cheeks as they sang hymns of praise.

In Israel, I waited out the Jewish Sabbath in a grotty hotel on the border until I could obtain a press pass to cross into Lebanon. My assignment to write a feature about Irish peacekeeping soldiers had begun ominously when my luggage failed to arrive with me on the British Airways flight to Jerusalem. My wait was interrupted by the arrival of a dashing Irish captain at the hotel, complete with a plastic carrier bag filled with toothpaste, toothbrush, deodorant, several pairs of hideous bloomers, a pair of 501 denim jeans and an oversized, shocking pink T-shirt saying “Don’t Let the Bastards Get You Down”.

In Tenerife, an Aer Lingus executive treated me to lunch on a yacht while I tried to extract answers from him about the then State airline’s “white elephant” purchase of a banana plantation that was causing political ructions at home. In Finland, I declined an invitation to join a group taking a naked sauna followed by a roll in the snow, explaining that I was an Irish Catholic and it was against my religion.

In Belgrade, Nato-bombed buildings gnawed the skyline in the background of the daily vigils at twilight celebrating the Serbian war criminals Slobodan Milošević and Radovan Karadžić, who was still on the run from the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. On a flight to London during the 1987 general election campaign to cover Garret FitzGerald’s appearance on the BBC’s Wogan show, the outgoing taoiseach sipped a Buck’s fizz because it was his birthday and promptly spilled the rest of it over his stockinged feet. “Please don’t write that,” he asked. “It’s bad enough everybody knows I wear odd shoes.”

A distractingly bare-chested Pierce Brosnan consented to an impromptu interview on a blazing summer day in the Wicklow Mountains before he was James Bond and during a break while he was filming Taffin, a movie destined to bomb at the box office. In Hollywood, I interviewed Tom Selleck, Ted Danson and Steve Guttenberg when Three Men and a Baby went on release in cinemas.

I met writers whose fiction I had devoured. John McGahern showed me the spartan room in his lakeside Leitrim cottage where he wrote That They May Face the Rising Sun. Over tea in the Shelbourne Hotel, Belfast native Brian Moore described his new life in the Malibu sunshine, a stark contrast to the unremitting greyness suffusing The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. In Manchester, another Belfast man, the footballer George Best, sat beside his latest girlfriend on a hotel sofa and said, this time, he had found true love. It didn’t last. I interviewed the still-handsome Seán Ó Faoláin in the nursing home where he lived out the end of his life and I still have the late Harry Belafonte’s number in my phone contacts since interviewing the singer, movie star and activist in his role as a Unicef goodwill ambassador. In Sandymount, Paul Durcan discussed his poetry and his blood connection with one of the Easter Rising leaders, John MacBride.

It wasn’t lost on me that the overwhelming preponderance of politicians, artists, business representatives and famous people I interviewed were men. That’s the nature of patriarchy. Yet the most transformative stories of the times were all about women and girls.

There was the High Court’s upholding of Eileen Flynn’s sacking from the teaching staff of a Wexford convent school over her love life with a married man. Joanne Hayes was hauled before a tribunal and proverbially stoned over her love life with Jeremiah Locke, another married man, in the landmark Kerry Babies case. Ann Lovett died at the age of 15 after giving birth at a holy grotto to a son who never lived a day.

For anyone who did not experience that Ireland, the momentousness of Mary Robinson’s election in 1990 as the State’s first woman president is hard to appreciate. A searingly smart lawyer who had doggedly established various rights for women in the courts, she bowed to no man. Her election slogan was “A woman’s place is in the Park” and when the count confirmed she won that place in Áras an Uachtaráin, euphoria erupted in homes and hearts and minds where tapers of discontent had flickered for generations of women. “The hand that rocked the cradle has rocked the system,” Robinson declared. Women celebrated and feminist men bought them red roses, both as a reflection of her Labour Party’s emblem and as a gesture of “welcome to our world”. That was the turning point.

Seeing was believing. Other women started speaking out. Christine Buckley poured out her soul on Gay Byrne’s radio show about the abuse she suffered as a child in Goldenbridge orphanage. Louise O’Keeffe beat the State in the European Court of Human Rights in her quest for redress after being sexually abused when she was a child by Leo Hickey, her school principal in Dunderrow, Co Cork. Teenager Lavinia Kerwick met the minister for justice to demand law reform after she became the first rape survivor to abandon her anonymity.

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Vicky Phelan refused to sign a gagging agreement so she could warn other women with terminal cervical cancer that the authorities had withheld information about their health from them. Miss D won her case in the High Court when the Health Service Executive (HSE) impeded her from going to England for an abortion after she and her boyfriend were informed that their hoped-for baby would not survive after birth. Symphysiotomy survivors gave account after account of the excruciating pain they endured until the United Nations called for a criminal inquiry into the practice and the establishment of a compensation scheme. Philomena Lee helped make a movie about how her baby son was taken from her in Roscrea’s Sean Ross Abbey and exported to adoptive parents in the US.

Catherine Corless was proved correct when she claimed that 796 children who died in a Tuam mother and baby home had been buried in a part of a sewerage system. Former residents of the Magdalene laundries for “fallen women” wept as they recalled being deprived of their names and given numbers instead and how their children were used without their consent for vaccine trials for rich pharmaceutical companies. On and on it went, girls and women telling their stories of the injustices, cruelties, abuses and violence perpetrated against them until the momentum reached a point of no return. Women’s stories dragged Ireland kicking and screaming into a better future.

An Eye on Ireland: A Journey Through Social Change – New and Selected Journalism by Justine McCarthy is published by Hachette Ireland in hardback, €20.99 from Eason