NELL McCAFFERTY, journalist, author, women’s rights activist, feminist and civil rights campaigner, has died at the age of 80. She passed away at a Donegal nursing home after a long illness.
McCafferty was born in 1944 in Derry’s Bogside, one of six children.
After school, she graduated from Queen’s University in Belfast, working as an English teacher, briefly, in Belfast before studying in France.
McCafferty was a founding member of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement. Her writing on women and women’s rights came at a time when the status of women in Irish society was beginning to be re-evaluated and slowly beginning to change.
In 1971 — in an incident that attracted international coverage — she travelled to Belfast with other members of the feminist movement to publicise and protest the prohibition of the importation and sale of contraceptives in the Republic. The incident, which attracted extensive publicity, became known as the Contraceptive Train.
She became an outspoken advocate for women’s rights, the poor, the marginalised and for people who suffered injustice.
She was also a steadfast critic of the Catholic Church.
In 2009, after the publication of the Murphy Report into the abuse of children in the Dublin archdiocese, McCafferty confronted Archbishop Diarmuid Martin asking him why the Catholic Church had not, as a “gesture of redemption”, relinquished styles of address such as “Your Eminence” and “Your Grace.”
The archbishop replied that he did not require anyone to address him with honorific titles. Nonetheless, McCafferty’s point was made — that the Catholic Church had received too much respect, and that had led to cover-ups of many issues that should have received the full glare of publicity, and in some cases the full force of the law.
Her work included ground-breaking reporting from the Dublin district courts as well as coverage of major national news stories. Many, including her lifelong friend and fellow civil rights activist Eamon McCann, believe firmly that she helped change Ireland, and bring it into the 21st century, a modern European nation.
She worked for several publications including the Irish Times, the Sunday Tribune and Hot Press and was a regular panellist on radio and television programmes.
A lifelong smoker and drinker, McCafferty had survived a heart attack in 2006.
She had been in a long relationship with the writer Nuala O’Faolain, but this ended amidst some acrimony in 1994.