Born: March 28th, 1944
Died: August 21st, 2024
“Nell”, she called her autobiography, and that was how she was known. Small, fierce and feisty. That mop of curls, the waft of cigarette smoke, the tongue in cheek smile and her distinctive walk, like a sailor ashore. Everyone soon knew her smoky Derry voice, laconic, challenging, always ready to break into laughter. You never knew what Nell was going to say next. It was often outrageous. She was a character, and she loved to play herself to the hilt. She was also one of the most important Irish journalists of the latter half of the twentieth century. She listened. She paid attention. She told the truth.
She was, wrote her friend, the historian Margaret Mac Curtain, “unequalled in the extraordinary breadth and fearless candour she has brought to bear on controversial subjects.” Her journalistic career started in The Irish Times in 1970, when the paper’s late Northern editor and editor, Fergus Pyle, commissioned her to write about the new bathroom in her family home in Beechwood Street in Derry’s Bogside.
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Home was her touchstone. She vaunted her street-cred. She was part of a Bogside aristocracy that included Martin McGuinness, Eamonn McCann, Seamus Deane, Paddy Doherty, John Hume, Dana and Phil Coulter. Her mother was her biggest fan and harshest critic.
McCafferty was born in 1944. Her father, Hugh, was a clerk for the British admiralty by day and a bookie’s clerk at the dog track at night. Her mother, Lily, reared six children. Another daughter died at birth.
Her parents had to work hard to keep poverty at bay. She was fascinated and frightened by the poverty of the tenements where her father was raised. One of his brothers had died as a British soldier at the Somme. Her mother’s parents were Sergeant Duffy, a Catholic RUC man, and his wife Sarah, a Protestant who “turned”.
[ Nell McCafferty at 80: ‘Celebrating eight decades of enduring courage’Opens in new window ]
She grew up traipsing about the streets with her friends – she favoured boys – with trips to the seaside across the border in Buncrana, and endless hours in the company of women to whom she listened, always, intently. “Life was what you heard about when the women of the street gathered round Ettie Deeney’s door ...,” she recalled. She was often sick, with rheumatic fever, asthma and a heart murmur, but enjoyed being at home and fussed over. She discovered the public library, a “place of wonderment.” After sailing through the 11 plus in 1955, she went to grammar school, marching past the girls who were off to the shirt factories, her Thornhill blazer “an announcement that I was a step above the common cut”. The school was an “erotic hothouse”. She read Radclyffe Hall’s novel, The Well of Loneliness which worried her with its warnings about the persecution and shame that awaited her as an “invert”, but she fell in love with a girl anyway. They spent a summer in London, working in Liberty’s, hanging around Carnaby Street, sharing a single bed. She confessed her lesbianism to a Derry priest in 1960, he told her to swear she would never commit this sin again. She refused and never returned to Confession. She told her parents, and they sent her to a nun. “They turned me over to silence and to God.” The nun was kind.
Thanks to the British Labour government’s introduction of free university education, McCafferty was able to go to Queen’s University in Belfast to do an arts degree. She scraped through her exams, and “went unkissed” for the duration. Teacher training in 1965 coincided with a new taste for poker. She travelled around France, returned to Derry, failed to get work as a teacher, and, in 1967 took off to a kibbutz in Israel. Back in London, she was “unbearably lonely”. She returned to Derry the day after the riots of October 5th, 1968 and plunged into the strife: “We were tearing up the road and throwing it at the RUC, the unionist government at Stormont and the British government in London ... generations of pent-up humiliation were unleashed ... I felt completely at home.” McCafferty’s mother kept an open house. Those who gathered to talk about everything from Marxism to petrol bombs included McCann, Bernadette Devlin and, over from London for the Observer, Mary Holland. McCafferty’s first articles appeared in the local labour magazine, Ramparts. It was the Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist Jimmy Breslin, whom she met on a trip to New York, who advised her that journalism was for “bringing in the bucks.” Soon after this Holland introduced her to Pyle. Her leftwing comrades considered the bathroom article sentimental and not at all Marxist, she later noted drily.
Her peers at The Irish Times included Mary Maher and Maeve Binchy.
Her early articles vividly conveyed to a largely middle-class southern readership the day-to-day reality of working-class life in Derry as the Troubles flared up and blazed. She anticipated the moral revulsion of her readers and challenged it, as in, for example, an anguished examination of the IRA’s practise of “tarring and feathering” girls who went out with British soldiers. She was an eyewitness to the slaughter on Bloody Sunday in 1972. It “altered our entire world”, she later wrote. “It went deep into us. It is in the Derry air. It is limned in our blood.” She sympathetically profiled her “neighbour’s son”, the young IRA leader, Martin McGuinness.
[ Nell McCafferty: We need to talk indoors, not shout outdoors about abortionOpens in new window ]
The journalism for which she became famous, though, is mostly about the Republic. Her In the Eyes of the Law series broke new ground between 1970 and 1980. In vivid, searing and humorous prose she described an “astonishing parade” of “demented women, vague men and wandering children”, entire families “decimated and estranged”, neighbours and friends, winos and beggars. Presiding over this “bedlam”, she described judges, some of whom were fair and some of whom were Victorian cranks. She learned that there was “a clear distinction between law and justice.” McCafferty was meanwhile deeply involved in the ferment of the women’s movement, along with people like Anne O’Donnell, Nuala Fennell, Mary Kenny, June Levine and Mary Robinson. She was seduced by a flamboyant journalist who brought her breakfast in bed and left her for a man, and by several other high profile feminists who remained nameless in her autobiography. She marched and spoke at public meetings all over the country. She was on the famous contraceptive train which brought condoms and pills from Belfast, where they were legal, to Dublin, where they were not, in 1971. A constant stream of visitors slept on her floor, and she was in demand as an ad hoc social worker and one woman charity.
Her 1980 polemic, Armagh is a Feminist Issue, about the republican women prisoners on dirty protest, ended with the challenge: “The menstrual blood on the walls of Armagh prison smells to high heaven. Shall we turn up our noses?” She complained later that The Irish Times failed to publish all the letters from people who supported her. At around this time, she decided to go and write “the great novel”. She moved to Cork with her lover, but the novel, when it was done, was, by her own admission, boring. To her great shock, The Irish Times declined to take her back.
By this stage, McCafferty had met the “love of her life”, Nuala O’Faolain.
Though money was a worry, she was “deeply happy”, her public life and private life finally at one. This contentment fortified her, she later wrote, “against the anti-woman virus that had poisoned the country” during the early 1980′s. This was the era of the constitutional amendment on abortion, of the death of teenager Ann Lovett while giving birth in a grotto, and the humiliation of Joanne Hayes during the “Kerry babies” tribunal.
McCafferty wrote brilliantly about all of these events, and was given great freedom by In Dublin. Her Golden Balls article for that magazine is a hilariously incisive and classic piece of political satire. Her book about the ordeal of Joanne Hayes is devastating in its clarity and its compassion. The Best of Nell, a collection of her pieces, was published by the feminist Attic Press in 1984. She began to appear on RTÉ’s short lived Women’s Programme where her trademark wink and her “Goodnight sisters” soon became a code for women who found themselves silenced. Another collection of her articles appeared under that title in 1987.
In 1987, Conor Cruise O’Brien asked McCafferty at the start of a current affairs programme if she supported the IRA. It was a ritual question, at a time when a positive answer was regarded as political suicide.
She replied, “Yes, I do.” The next day, the IRA blew up 11 Protestants at the War Memorial in Enniskillen. McCafferty was banned from RTÉ. She was also distraught, offering wildly to give up her Irish passport to prove to unionists she didn’t want to force them into a united Ireland. During this time she wrote her book, Peggy Deery An Irish Family at War about a neighbour in Derry who had been wounded on Bloody Sunday and never recovered.
[ Nell McCafferty: ‘that wee Bogsider who hangs out with burglars’Opens in new window ]
By 1990, McCafferty was back on RTÉ. She won a Jacob’s award for her ecstatic coverage of the partying side of the World Cup. She was well aware that some saw this as her first stint as “Nell, the clown princess”. Life with O’Faolain was becoming strained, and they finally and painfully separated in 1994. McCafferty was deeply wounded by the way O’Faolain wrote about their relationship in her bestselling memoir, Are You Somebody? She was “undone” when she read an interview in which O’Faolain wrote that she had “never thought of Nell as a woman” and that she would “still walk across 59 women to get to one man”.
McCafferty worked for the Sunday Tribune from 1988 to 2003. She described her final years there as the most miserable of her career, and her better work from this period was published in Hot Press. At a 2002 press conference, she pushed the masters of the three national maternity hospitals into admitting that if the proposed new amendment on abortion was passed, they would not be able to offer the best treatment to women carrying babies which could not survive outside the womb. It played a significant part in the defeat of the amendment, but the Tribune declined to let McCafferty write about it.
Her mother was increasingly frail and McCafferty divided her time between her home in Dublin and her old home in Derry.
Her memoir Nell was published in 2004. Writing in The Irish Times, Ivana Bacik described McCafferty’s “passion for equality” and her “vital contribution to feminism” along with her “lovely sense of divilment”. A strong sense emerged, Bacik wrote, of a “deeply shy, often innocent” woman. Kathy Sheridan noted a “deep loneliness and a lifelong sense of exclusion”. Some felt that McCafferty’s mother emerged as the true love of her life.
McCafferty’s own concern was the “revelation” that she was gay and its impact on her mother in particular. Her mother, like everyone else, had known for years. In 2004, Nell wrote a new ending for her book which included the statement: “The only thing I am sure of is that I am at total ease in my metaphorical skin. Normal heartaches apart, there is no shadow over my life ... That is pure wonderful.”
A lifelong smoker and drinker of strong liquor, McCafferty just about survived a heart attack in March 2006 followed by an emergency triple heart bypass.
Some of her comments during the campaign to repeal the 8th Amendment alienated many younger feminists. She would sometimes play to the worst element in an audience. She lost friends. Others felt she was exhausted. Her brilliant mind was beginning to fray.
Her last years were spent back in Derry, and latterly in a nursing home overlooking Lough Swilly in Co Donegal. Along with her family – particularly her devoted sister, Carmel, and niece Muire – many of her old friends, including some from whom she had been estranged, visited her there. There were moments when her brilliance still flashed. McCann, her lifelong friend and fellow civil rights activist and writer, recalled her response to his bedside reminiscences about their childhood football games. He told her she was a very dirty player. She replied, “And you were useless.” She was not smiling. She remained, he noted, “spiky as a bag of porcupines”. McCann said of her work that she had changed Ireland.
His comments were included in a collection of pieces published in The Irish Times to celebrate McCafferty’s 80th, and as it would turn out, last birthday. In his contribution, President Michael D Higgins praised her for journalism across “eight decades of enduring courage that was delivered with a curiosity that was ethical and fearless on the side of those without power”. Writer Seamas O’Reilly, also from Derry, commented that “for many years, the price she paid for being on the right side of history was to be reviled in whatever present she stood”. Her legacy, he said, was that she “helped build the future.”
She has died at the age of 80 after a long illness.