Nell McCafferty “changed Ireland for the better”, mourners at her funeral have been told.
Delivering an elegy in advance of her funeral Mass in Derry’s Bogside on Friday, the veteran civil rights campaigner and journalist Eamonn McCann said it was “given to very few of us to actually change the world”.
“Nell did change the world, and in the course of that she entranced as many women as she alarmed men ... they had never seen or heard the like of her”.
She fought “for women’s rights, for the rights of gay people, for the rights of downtrodden”, he said.
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“Nell McCafferty changed Ireland, and changed Ireland for the better, and she came from the Bogside to do that.”
McCafferty, who died on Wednesday aged 80, became involved in civil rights politics as a student at Queen’s University Belfast, in the 1960s, and subsequently became a journalist with The Irish Times and a founder member of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement.
She sought to give women a voice through her writing, and focused on women’s rights, poverty and social injustice and wrote a number of books, including A Woman to Blame, about the 1984 the Kerry babies case.
Among those who attended Requiem Mass at St Columba’s, Long Tower, on Friday were the aides-de-camp of President Michael D Higgins and Taoiseach Simon Harris, as well as the North’s First Minister, the Sinn Féin vice-president Michelle O’Neill.
Fellow civil rights activist Bernadette McAliskey was also present, as was the mayor of Derry, the SDLP councillor Lilian Seenoi-Barr; the former Foyle MP Mark Durkan; the Bishop of Derry, Donal McKeown; the writer and journalist Denis Bradley, and members of the Bloody Sunday families.
A number of current and former journalists were also there, including Olivia O’Leary, Susan O’Keeffe, Irish Times features editor Mary Minihan, the press ombudsman Susan McKay and Darach MacDonald, who attended on behalf of the Derry and North West branch of the National Union of Journalists.
Friends and comrades from the civil rights, feminist and LGBTQ+ movements formed a guard of honour of rainbow flags as the wicker coffin was removed from the hearse and carried into the church by family members, including McCafferty’s sister Carmel.
In his address, McCann described how he first got to know McCafferty at the age of 11, when they used to play football together. “Your ankles would be knackered by the end of it ... she had a great sliding tackle.”
They ended up at Queen’s together and became involved in the civil rights movement; McCafferty “was always on the side of the downtrodden, and she was always on the side of the outlaws”.
“If somebody asked me, ‘how did Nell McCafferty influence you?’, that’s what I’d say. She made it okay for me to be one of the outlaws, on the outside of the mainstream, say uncomfortable things.”
She was, McCann said, “as spiky as a bag of porcupines”; there were “very many people she had sharp words with”.
“I’m still frightened of Nell,” McCann admitted. “I love her, but I’m still terrified of her.”
He spoke of how in recent days there had been an “outpouring of praise” for McCafferty, “but it wasn’t always there”. She put her head above the parapet; he said, “although the newspapers are full of praise for Nell now”, this was not always the case.
In Derry, “we can call her our Nell, because Nell was a Derry woman, she never lost her Derryness”.
“I think that Derry fell in love with Nell, even after years of not being quite sure what to make of her,” he said.
“Ireland is a different and a better place for the fact that Nell McCafferty was in it. At last, she gets the recognition she deserves.”
McCann unfolded an old, faded newspaper clipping on top of the coffin; the front page of the Starry Plough, put together in Derry late on the night of January 30th, 1972: Bloody Sunday.
“Of course, Nell wrote the front page piece.”
Bloody Sunday “defined us all”, he said; describing how that evening “we made our way to McCafferty’s house”; she held Bernadette McAliskey’s arm as the names of the dead were dictated to her over the phone from the hospital.
“Bloody Sunday had a big effect on Nell, it affected the way she thought about politics, it affected the way she thought about Derry people,” he said.
At midnight, she wrote the article; McCann read from it. “’Thirteen men were murdered ... let it be said of them with pride, that they died on their feet and not on their knees. Let it not be said of us that they died in vain.’
“‘Stay free, brothers and sisters, there will be another day’,” he read.
“And so there will,” McCann concluded. “There will be another day, but there will never be another Nell McCafferty.”
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