Jennifer Horgan: Sisters (and brothers), we must continue to fight like McCafferty

She wasn’t upset over the death of McCafferty, but her upset related directly to McCafferty’s life, and her fearless, inimitable fight for justice and equal rights in Ireland.

My sister wanted me to listen to something she’d written — a letter to her local representatives about her continued frustration and
despair at what she perceives to be the judiciary’s unwillingness to adequately address gender-based violence in Ireland.

She had read about the release on bail, despite the objection of the gardaí, of a man who had been charged with sexually assaulting a woman.

My sister was struggling to hold back tears reading her letter, sharing her shock and frustration that women and girls are still so vulnerable in this country.

This was the call I received on the same day McCafferty’s death was announced, my nine-year-old daughter by my side, playing with her new dog, and thankfully oblivious to the realities of the world beyond our front door.

I’m not trying to be emotive here, mentioning my upset sister, my beautiful daughter. I am simply detailing exactly where I was, and what was happening, on the day the death was announced. And I am wondering how she might feel about it, albeit posthumously — and more importantly, what she might want me, us, to do.

Since her death, commentators, journalists, and friends have done McCafferty, her legacy, and her family, proud. Erudite women such as Terry Prone, Clodagh Finn, and Rosita Sweetman have detailed her trailblazing life and indefatigable spirit; they have helped the rest of us remember. On air and in print, they have shared their memories of her, and consolidated in our hearts and minds how “Nell” should be remembered.

Who am I to do any of that? There’s nothing meaningful I can add here, as someone who never knew or met McCafferty. I can only look to the future, considering less how she should be remembered and more how we can best honour the work that defined her.

We can best honour that work, I believe, by continuing her fight. In eulogising this woman, we must also be careful not to end up worshipping her, thereby placing a full stop at the end of her story. It may be appealing to do so, but her story is also our story, and it continues to be a grim one.

She certainly got us started. She held a mirror up to Ireland when we needed it so desperately. The hot air of moral judgement, silence, and shame clouded the glass in an instant. Nothing but hot air. And so, we began to wipe the mirror clean, so that we could see ourselves clearly, and recognise, without distraction, what our country was doing to women. Starting with the “nightmare of unremitting pregnancy”, as she so eloquently and truthfully put it.

But she was never self-congratulatory about her part in any of it, and she never gave any sense that we had come far enough. 

She knew it was a national journey, a movement in which she had played an important role — but there was no real ego in her. She acknowledged openly that she was learning and journeying too.

In an interview in 2018, she shared a story about a conversation she had once with her mother, when, as a young, unsurprisingly opinionated woman, she argued that abortion didn’t involve the killing of babies.

“It’s just a bunch of cells,” she
recalled saying.

Her mother led the young Nell into the scullery of their Derry home and pointed to the tiles where, some time before, she had miscarried a baby at four months. “Don’t you ever tell me it wasn’t a baby,” her mother admonished.

From then on, she changed her language around abortion, such was her wisdom and her compassion.

McCafferty championed a woman’s right to choose, but she believed in exploring the totality of a woman’s experience in pregnancy, including the fact that there is often ‘no room at the inn’ for her, no social support, no access to full education and care. She recognised the complexity and the expansiveness of social problems and their consequences.

I keep picturing that conversation between a mother and a child in a small room in Derry — the totality of that story, the pain and suffering and learning in it. How much Nell came to understand in her 80 years of life.

McCafferty’s passing last week makes me feel terribly sad this week, coming as the announcement did at the same time as my sister’s call. If McCafferty can’t change things, who can? I haven’t a shred of her courage or her strength.

But I do have her example.

“Between my finger and my thumb, the squat pen rests,” wrote Heaney. I certainly won’t be digging with my pen, to follow men “like them”, as the great poet did so superbly.

But I would like to continue to gnaw away at the establishment-mindset McCafferty so detested. I am lucky to have spoken with a few social activists here in Cork, inspiring people such as Mary Crilly, Louise Crowley, and Frank O’Connor, but I want to know and work with more of them, in whatever way I can.

I WON’T say I mourn McCafferty, because I never knew her. I have little to advise the country in terms of how we should remember her. But my intuition is that she wouldn’t care too much for any of that. We need the reminders certainly, and I welcome them all, especially from such wonderful women, but Nell herself would care far more about the work that’s left to be done.

I suspect she would want us to demand that society takes gender-based violence more seriously. More specifically, I propose that Nell McCafferty would want us to turn our gaze towards the courts, and how our judges deal with these cases.

She prompts me to ask my own questions: what training do judges receive on the true impact of these crimes? Is there enough emphasis on the impact of light sentencing on victims, and on wider society in general?

As I have queried more than once in this column, where are the mandatory therapies and treatments for such perpetrators? We know that violence builds on violence. Is it possible that certain judges are moving against the tide of positive change — the legislative oar or paddle going forward, the judicial one rowing back?

Only someone like Nell McCafferty would have the guts to name these judges without fear of the fallout, demanding better.

She is quiet now, but I will end this column with her voice, her trademark sign-off, from the television programme she worked on with her remarkable partner at the time, Nuala O’Faolain.

‘Goodnight sisters.’

I imagine her saying that to us now. But it is a goodnight only, a pause before the next day’s work begins. It won’t be Nell McCafferty doing the work anymore — it will be our work, my work, my sister’s work, my brother’s work, and hopefully, your work too.