Máirín’s punishable crime had been, along with others, smashing a bottle of animal blood on the steps of the American embassy. She also burned their flag in protest at the war in Vietnam.

A year earlier, she’d been nabbed for throwing eggs at US president Richard Nixon’s car.

She’d bought eggs in Findlaters, disguised herself in trenchcoat, sunglasses and scarf, and “got lucky”.

Normally unable to hit a barn door at 10 paces, her eggs smashed satisfactorily off the presidential windscreen. The car behind, stuffed with secret service men, went absolutely mental. “Someone is trying to kill the president!”

Máirín was arrested, an “auld wan” shouting: “Chuck her in the Liffey.” That time, she avoided prison — and the Liffey.

Horrible as prison was, Máirín said all you could hear at night was the sound of women crying. It gave her time to think. As soon as she got out, she set about founding the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement (IWLM). Pretty much every reform in women’s favour in Ireland has flowed from that decision.

Máirín’s life started in America. Not exactly a bed of roses. Her older brother, Patrick, died from pneumonia at the age of six — a tragedy from which her Irish Catholic parents never recovered.

Máirín was left to fend for herself.

No one gave a shit about me, quite frankly

Aged three, she cycled her trike home from playschool alone. For her First Communion, her mother put her in a white dress and veil, pushed her out, and closed the door behind her.

Salt in the wounds came with the arrival of another boy. Probably informally adopted, he became the apple of her mother’s eye.

“I was very aware of being a second-class citizen.”

Most people these days would feel the injustice had ruined their lives, but Máirín said of the neglect: “Maybe it stood to me in the end.”

Eschewing self-pity she turned to politics.

Back in Ireland at the age of nine, she read newspapers and got books twice a week from the local library.

Read and read. At 14, she left school — with no Irish, she couldn’t sit her Leaving Cert. She got a job in a local haberdashery for the princely wage of five shillings a week. Her main ambition, fuelled by all her reading, was to join the “freedom struggle” and Sinn Féin. If she had to marry, she told her mother, she’d marry a sailor. He’d be away most of the time.

Initially an enthusiastic supporter of the IRA and physical violence, after seeing Judgement at Nuremberg she had a change of heart. If the Nazis believed they were justified in using violence, where did that leave the IRA?

She became a lifelong pacifist, standing publicly against the Provisional IRA — even when it was extremely dangerous to do so — was on the side of the “leftists”, and believed bombing civilians up North was incredibly unlikely to solve sectarian hatred.

In Dublin, she founded the Dublin Housing Action Committee, agitating for housing for all, set up the Prisoners’ Rights Organisation (PRO), was a key figure in the anti-apartheid struggle, actively supported the Palestinian struggle, and ran official Sinn Féin’s head office in Dublin. The FBI said she was “the Republic’s leading woman political agitator”, adding that at first she’d been a “romantic idealist,” but now she was a “fanatic”.

Organise, protest, and leaflet

Not that it was all fun and games. Nell McCafferty wrote that in an 18-month period Máirín was arrested 17 times.

“I and my comrades,” she said, “have known what it is like to be attacked by guards dressed in riot gear, armed with iron bars, wooden staves and batons, being beaten down three flights of stairs, dumped into a hospital to be patched up before being brought back to spend the night in the Bridewell.”

For all of us in the Women’s Movement, Máirín’s part in setting up the IWLM — schooling us all in how to organise, protest, and leaflet — was what we most cherished about her.

What use was endless wrangling inside a political party? Or endless bombing in a military one?

In March 1971, the IWLM — under Máirín’s tutelage — published Chains or Change.

It was the first time women’s situation in Ireland was documented. Boy, was it dire.

A woman’s job was get a man, get married. Working-class girls worked in sweatshop factories. Middle-class girls manhunted

Everything from the education system upwards militated against us. Our toys were dolls. Our education was Irish and domestic science.

Our lady brains were thought to explode if exposed to maths, or Latin, or science, meaning all of the good careers were closed.

Careers that paid real money — such as airline pilots, police inspectors, bank managers, newspaper editors, judges, surgeons, doctors, higher civil servants, engineers and lawyers — were off limits.

A man could still legally rape his wife. A husband could still desert, go to England, divorce, get full custody of the kiddos, and force the sale of the family home — all legally.

There was no contraception. No sex education. No divorce. Absolutely no termination of a pregnancy, no matter what!

To say we had to fight with both hands tied behind our backs is putting it mildly.

The IWLM only lasted a year, but organisations like Cherish, women’s health centres, AIM, hostels for battered wives, the rape crisis centres, and women’s publishing houses, sprang from that impetus. Direct action was the hallmark of Máirín’s career. She dashed into government offices, bolted the door, addressed startled onlookers from balconies. She tore down flags, placed homeless families in squats, or friends’ houses, shouted in church, forced the judiciary to accept women on juries.

She apologised to one judge for smashing a window in the German embassy — she thought it was the British one

She rode to Bray on her moped, spent the night blowing whistles to keep the Springboks awake.

“In those days,” she said, “there was a feeling if you went out and protested you could make a change.”

Halcyon days perhaps, compared to the fascism now creeping, rushing, over the Western world — where even those out protesting the pitiful slaughter of the Palestinians are battered to the ground. Dictators and mad men running the world.

At 87, Máirín is still clear-eyed about her purpose: The patriarchy, and all those who support it, must be brought down.