Margaret Gaj:MARGARET GAJ, who has died in her 92nd year, was a prominent figure in left-wing campaigns and the women's movement in the 1960s and 1970s.
She ran Gaj’s restaurant in Baggot Street, Dublin, a haunt of political activists by night and packed with civil servants and office workers at lunchtime.
Members of the Labour and communist parties, Official Sinn Féin, League for a Workers’ Republic, along with Christian socialists and revolutionary students, mingled with actors, artists and writers in the restaurant, described by Garret FitzGerald as “that place everyone is either going to or coming from”.
It became the venue for meetings of a group of women who went on to establish the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement, for which Margaret Gaj acted as treasurer and the history of which was appropriately titled Mondays at Gaj’s.
The fare was simple but good – burgers and chips, goulash and rice, bacon and pineapple on toast, accompanied by pots of proper tea – and reasonably priced. Many meals were served without any expectation of payment. A homely touch was added by a spray of fresh flowers on each table.
People were not hired at Gaj’s but taken on for a week on a probationary basis, after which the staff would decide collectively whether to ask the person to stay.
Advertising was mainly by word of mouth, though the occasional advertisement appeared in print with the slogan “All the best spies eat at Gaj’s”.
And indeed the Special Branch kept a close eye on the comings and goings at the restaurant.
Margaret Gaj retired in April 1980. She pinned a notice to the door thanking customers for their support, adding that she often felt like charging half of them twice as much if it wasn’t for the fact that the other half were usually penniless: “It’s not easy to be a socialist in a capitalist society”.
Máirín de Búrca wrote at the time: “A whole generation of political activists have reason to be grateful to Margaret Gaj – not just for her unfailing personal and, at times, financial support – but for the home-away-from-home atmosphere furnished by the restaurant.”
Mary Maher this week remembered a “kind-hearted and formidable” woman, who passionately believed in the right to protest.
From an Irish background, she was born Margaret Dunlop in Edinburgh in 1919, and trained in domestic economy. A member of the Independent Labour Party, she was a pacifist and when the second World War broke out she declared herself a conscientious objector.
She became a nurse in a hospital in Stirling, but was sacked for insubordination. She did not like the way the patients were treated, and made her feelings known.
She married a patient, Boleslaw Gaj, a Polish soldier who had been captured when the Germans invaded Poland but escaped and served as an electrician with the RAF. She decided in 1947 to use a legacy from an uncle to buy a farm in Baltinglass, Co. Wicklow. However, the farm, and a restaurant she opened, failed to prosper.
The couple moved to Dublin, where she opened a restaurant in Molesworth Street. She later moved to premises in Baggot Street.
She joined the Labour Party and campaigned for Noel Browne. In time she became disillusioned and thereafter steered clear of party political involvement.
She supported the Dublin Housing Action Committee, an alliance of left-wing groups and concerned citizens which highlighted the need to address the capital city’s housing crisis.
She became involved with Reform, which campaigned to end corporal punishment in schools. A member of the Living City Group, which sought to place communities at the heart of Dublin, she also was active in the Irish Voice on Vietnam.
In time she came to devote most of her energies to the Prisoners Rights Organisation, which worked to reform the Irish prison system.
She and her son Wladek, with others, were sentenced to a year’s imprisonment for picketing the court to draw attention to the plight of a prisoner who had made numerous suicide attempts. On appeal, however, they were given the benefit of the Probation Act.
Recognised as an excellent organiser, she also possessed a cunning inventiveness.
Once, she cosseted a motherless non-national through nine months of a first pregnancy and ran a lottery on the timing of the birth and the gender of the baby to raise £35 for striking cement workers.
Known for plain speaking, she said: “I have cut myself away from a lot of people because of my caustic tongue. One ceases to be asked to parties. Sometimes one is asked by people who want a little blood sport.”
In this newspaper in 1976 she named as her heroes Pope John XXIII and Mao Tse Tung.
Predeceased by her husband, she is survived by her sons Wladek and Tadek.
Margaret Gaj: born 1919; died June 26th, 2011