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The Old Guard
of the Celtic Tiger, all we really
cared about was houses, stuffing our faces, and
money. That and sitting on our arses watching –
on a ” flatscreen HD TV, naturally – overblonde,
overbotoxed mediocrities orgasming over houses,
nosh and money. Just minutes before the land
of Joyce and Beckett morphed irrevocably into a
vipers’ den, peopled by shysters and their barbie-
doll trophies, along came the Recession. Phew.
The shite houses are now worth nothing; the smug
bastards who ‘ruled’, i.e. milked, our little island in
the Atlantic for the past ten to years, are look-
ing serious, their mistresses bailing. The ortho-
doxy that bellowed Money is our God, and thou
shalt not - on pain of madness, social ostracisation
or exclusion from the social pages of VIP magazine
- question that, ever, ever, ever, ever, you fucking
hippie you, is no more. Yay for the fucking hippies
and the transnational liberté, egalité and frater-
nité of the s that spawned Black Power, the
Women’s Movements and Gay Rights.
Cue the Sisters of the Irish Women’s Liberation
Movement. The trail-blazers who smashed the
icy grip of Holy Catholic Hypocritical Patriarchal
Ireland, and frogmarched a loudly-complaining
system, into the th Century. But hang about,
the Sisters are getting on in years. Many of them
have died. Have the remainder – all clinking
zimmer frames, false teeth, and replacement
hips - lost their mojo? Won’t they have ditched
heartfelt feminism for twinsets, pearls and social
democracy? Have they heck. At the November
relaunch, in glorious hardback, of June Levine’s
eponymous Sisters, Nell McCafferty, barely out of
the operating theatre, lacerated the boys in Dáil
Eireann as they whip the Xmas bonus from those
on welfare, and cut Children’s Allowance, mean-
while simultaneously gladhandlling € billion of
our money to the smug bastards who caused the
problem in the first place. Nell excoriates a gov-
ernment suffering from “penile erectile dysfunc-
tion”. I want to weep. Grown men do weep. Tears
of joy. We may be getting older but we are still
here, and we can still give a bloody good bite.
Máirin de Burca, now in her s, says “of
course you mellow with age. You realise most
people are just trying to get along”, before artic-
ulating a detailed list of what remains to be done.
Yes it was brilliant, unreservedly so, that as a result
of the Women’s Movement, women, particularly
married women, for the first time had the choice
of working outside the home. De Burca remem-
bers her own mother, “miserable”; “imprisoned in
the home with small children. We were miserable
too”. Dr Emer Philbin Bowman, brought along to
one of the early meetings by her friend, poetess
Evan Boland, remembers being “flabbergasted”
at the gender inequality in medicine, something
that hadn’t even occurred to her as a problem hav-
ing known only her own mother’s ascent up to a
professorship in Trinity. She now lives her poli-
tics (“with a small p”) and feminism, as consultant
psychiatrist at the Well Woman Clinic. “Once you
become sensitive to the issues [of gender inequal-
ity] I don’t think you change”.
Of course there are difficulties. Women now
have three jobs, says Nell: the home, the family and
work. And in the rush to join the fun, women, says
de Burca, “adapted to male working conditions
without demanding changes, not just for women,
but for parents. Every sizable outfit should have
a creche for godsake’. But creches were far from
most of our minds in the early s. It was more
Let’s march on the Dáil! Yay! Let’s take over the
Gentlemen Only snug in Neary’s! Double Yay!
Let’s invade the Forty Foot! Treble Yay! The bril-
liant and sober among us – Mary Robinson, Mary
Maher, Maura Woods – smiled indulgently as
they drafted bills and articles that would crunch
through the societal and governmental bullshit
like a stilleto.
Sadly of course the ranks of the Sisters have
been seriously thinned recently with the loss in
the last months of Nuala O Faoláin, June Levine,
Nuala Fennell; not to forget Mary Holland, Mary
Cummins, Christina Murphy and Róisín Conroy.
As Mary Kenny puts it: “When young, your world is
built on theory; when older: on experience”. And
yet, far from being marginalised curiosities who
did something way back when, that made things
somehow better for women, the surviving Sisters
are still on fire. “Women are stronger than men”,
says Marie Mc Mahon. Huzzah! I say let’s throw
ALL of the current Dáil Deputies (male and female)
out on their arses (and their big fat expense
accounts, big fat bonuses and big fat cars after
them) and hand the controls of the MotherShip
to the Sisters, Mothers, Grandmothers, Aunties,
Godmothers and Daughters of the Revolution.
SMUG BASTARDS BEWARE.
When the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement
[IWLM] formed in 1970, the marriage bar
was in place, contraception was illegal and
women’s issues were just beginning to be
debated publicly. The women who formed
the IWLM - Máirin de Burca, Mary Maher,
Nell McCafferty, Rosita Sweetman and Mary
Kenny, among others - were some of the
most dynamic public figures of their time.
The IWLM’s accomplishments included the
publication of a charter of demands, com-
mandeering a special Late Late Show devoted
to women’s issues and organising the first
public challenge to the ban on contracep-
tives – the Pill Train to Belfast.
They triumphed and they never got complacent
r o s i t a s w e e t m a n
Mary Sheerin, Máirín Johnston, Anne Stopper,
Marie McMahon, Máirín de Burca & Rosita Sweetman.
PHOTO: DEREK SPEIRS
