Nell McCafferty, Irish journalist and rights campaigner

On May 22, 1971, 49 women boarded a train from Dublin to Belfast on a public crusade to return with liberal supplies of contraceptive pills, condoms and spermicidal jelly, which were illegal in the Republic.
Nell McCafferty, one of 12 founders of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement several months before, stepped up to the counter of a pharmacist thinking it would be like buying Smarties, only to be told that she needed a prescription. Nothing if not resourceful, she ordered her “sisters” to buy aspirin instead, took them out of the packaging and told television crews from America, Japan and Ireland that they were contraceptive pills.
When the train arrived at Connolly station in Dublin, customs officers were waiting to intercept the contraband. As the women refused to give up the “contraceptive pills” and swallowed the aspirins in front of the cameras, arguments ensued and blown-up condoms sailed over the commotion. A large crowd gathered on the station concourse shouting, “Let them through, let them through”.
The women faced prison sentences, but the authorities, perhaps mindful of the need to defuse what was already a sensational publicity coup as quickly as possible, made no arrests. McCafferty later described it as the most joyous moment of her life. “It was massive that the crowd agreed with us because it was against the church. You just knew it resonated with women who thought ‘I needn’t get pregnant’.”
It would be another eight years until contraception was made available to married couples and 21 before it was fully legalised in Ireland, but from that moment McCafferty believed it would happen. And woe betide anyone, particularly men, who later described “the contraceptives train” as “the condom train”. “It was never a condom train. We were never going to give control of our sexuality to men.”
More than a leader, McCafferty was a storyteller about the struggles of Catholic working-class women in Ireland and Northern Ireland. Her books included A Woman to Blame, about a woman in Kerry wrongfully accused of killing her baby, and The Armagh Women, about protesting Republican prisoners at Armagh prison who smeared their menstrual blood on the cell walls.
The Irish writer and journalist Susan McKay said: “If you look back at journalism before Nell, ordinary people were never asked for their opinion. They were written about by gents who thought that they knew how best to analyse society. Nell went straight into working-class places, she talked to people who had experienced real hardships and afflictions in their lives, and she brought their voices alive.”
The Irish Times, for whom she worked from 1970 to 1980, described her as: “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.”
Nell McCafferty was born one of six children in Londonderry in 1944, to Hugh, a clerk, and Lilly. Her maternal grandmother converted to Catholicism to marry her grandfather. McCafferty made much of her working-class origins in the city’s Bogside, brushing aside the middle-class background of her family’s once prosperous pub-owning maternal side. She once admitted to a journalist, “We were publicans long before we were republicans.’’
McCafferty parted from communion with the church at 16 when she went to confession. Towards the end of her otherwise predictable teenage “shopping list” of venal transgressions, she took a deep breath and added in an almost inaudible whisper through the grille: “And Father, I’m madly in love with another girl at school.” He demanded she swear that she would never commit this sin again. She refused and was denied absolution.
It was the beginning of McCafferty’s complex, at times public and often bitter relationship with the Catholic church. Several issues were paramount to maintaining the secret of her sexuality. In the 1960s, overt homophobia was no stranger on either side of Ulster’s religious divide. The Rev Ian Paisley’s anti-gay mantra, “Save Ulster from sodomy”, found an accommodating, though less epigrammatic resonance in the ears of his Catholic counterparts in the province.
There was also McCafferty’s shame at being different from other girls in Londonderry’s Bogside. It was a place, predominantly Catholic and working class, where her family commanded immense respect. Finally, there was her close relationship with her mother, whom she felt would have been hurt by her daughter’s sexuality.
Having attended a grammar school, McCafferty watched as contemporaries got married and started having children, while she left to study for an arts degree at Queen’s University Belfast. She then trained as a teacher but struggled to find employment in Northern Ireland, which she attributed to discrimination against her as a Catholic.
On October 5, 1968, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association and the Derry Housing Action Committee invited citizens from both sides of Ulster’s sectarian divide to a civil rights march culminating at the Diamond in Londonderry’s historic centre. The Royal Ulster Constabulary’s subsequent baton charge of the protesters and the resulting bloodshed is now recognised as the moment when the Troubles began.
Standing on the barricades that day was McCafferty, despite feeling that her already ardent feminism was compromised by a male-dominated organisation. “We were tearing up the road and throwing it at the RUC, the unionist government at Stormont and the British government in London,” McCafferty recalled. “Generations of pent-up humiliation were unleashed … I felt completely at home.”
She did it again on Sunday, January 30, 1972, when she participated in the Civil Rights Association’s march to protest against internment without trial — one of the leaders of the campaign, Bernadette Devlin, was a regular visitor to the McCafferty family home.
As the march progressed, British soldiers, believing they were being fired upon, shot and killed 14 Catholic civilians. The event became known as Bloody Sunday. McCafferty later testified to the second inquiry into Bloody Sunday in 2010, known as the Saville inquiry, which placed culpability on the side of the British Army. She also wrote a book about Peggy Deery, a mother of 14 who was the only woman shot on Bloody Sunday. “It is limned in our blood” is how she described the impact of that day’s events on the people of Londonderry, or Derry as Catholics call it.
The streets around where she grew up were one of the terrorist organisation’s principal recruiting grounds. As a child she had known Martin McGuinness (obituary, March 21, 2017) and one of her early assignments for the Irish Times was to interview his mother, a leading IRA operative in Londonderry.
On moving to Dublin to work for The Irish Times, her first job had been to cover proceedings in the Dublin district court, the least popular job on the paper that was routinely given to new recruits. Typical of someone who could be nothing if not contrary, McCafferty embraced the task with relish. Her column “In The Eyes of the Law” became one of the newspaper’s most popular. She is rightly credited with turning court reporting almost into an art form. The most striking aspect of the column was how it turned district court judges into characters from the Commedia dell’arte and never named defendants. Defendants often sought her legal advice.
Regular appearances on RTE ended abruptly in 1987 when the writer Conor Cruise O’Brien asked her on a discussion programme if she supported the IRA, to which she responded, “Yes I do.” A day later 11 people were murdered when the IRA detonated a bomb at a Remembrance Day event at a war memorial in Enniskillen. McCafferty did not appear on the station again for some years.
Attesting to the fact that she remained in close personal touch with the Sinn Fein/IRA leadership was a recently declassified document recording a 1994 conversation between McCafferty and officials in the British embassy in Dublin in which she told them that beatings would carry on, though they would be less severe and that the IRA would not relinquish its stocks of Semtex.
She remained an ebullient figure who loved a drink and was kindhearted to a constant stream of waifs sleeping on her sofa. Closer friends detected the sadness underneath the bravado. Straddling and struggling to reconcile her Catholic upbringing and loyalty to the sectarian struggle with her sexuality and militant feminism, McCafferty had a “deep loneliness and a lifelong sense of exclusion”, according to her friend Kathy Sheridan.
A long relationship with the novelist Nuala O’Faolain ended in 1994. In her memoirs O’Faolain, glossed over their relationship and added insult to injury by claiming that she would “walk across 59 women to get at one man if she found him attractive”.
McCafferty countered with her own memoir Nell (2004). When McCafferty heard her old lover was dying, she offered her the option of euthanasia through morphine overdose. O’Faolain refused. McCafferty, devastated and broken at the suffering of her former lover, remarked: “People’s will to live, even in the most terrible pain, will never cease to amaze me. I hope I’m as brave when my time comes.”
Nell McCafferty, journalist and civil rights campaigner, was born on March 28, 1944. She died after a stroke on August 21, 2024, aged 80