THE GREAT FEMINIST, activist, and campaigner journalist Nell McCafferty has left us.

On hearing the news, I looked to my bookshelf at the numerous books she had written. In 1984 the feminist publishing house Attic Press published The Best of Nell; A Selection of Writings over Fourteen Years, with an introduction by another great writer and feminist, the poet Eavan Boland.

Nell, one of the few people whose first name is immediately recognised, was already by then a well-known activist and journalist. As Boland put it, Nell “was born to be an eyewitness. It [was] her first reflex”.

Not only was she an instinctive eyewitness, but it was also the issues to which she bore witness that is the key to the fundamental importance of Nell to women’s rights and social justice in contemporary Ireland.

In one of her earliest newspaper columns, In The Eyes of the Law (1974), Nell revealed the poverty, violence, destitution as well as the class and gender prejudice of their honours in the courts, particularly the injustice delivered to working class women who found themselves before their honourable justices.

Never one to stand on dignity she didn’t seem too put out that the judges were “in a sense, upset at [her] recording of them, day after day, in all their majesty”.

Prominent in the women’s movement from the early 1970s, Nell was a real pioneer, using all her skills as a journalist and public speaker to raise issues of inequality for women.

She was one of the founder members of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement which was the first Irish feminist, direct action, activist group which, inspired by civil rights and feminist movements elsewhere was, like Nell herself, youthful, fierce, loud, and determined.

Perhaps their most famous action was the contraceptive train, but they also conducted other operations, including the pubs campaign. 

Through it all Nell, used her incisive, deeply considered writing skills to foreground issues of inequality and social injustice. As Eavan Boland wrote, Nell’s writing at its best “celebrates those precious fragments of human dignity which societies crush so easily and bewail so falsely”.

And it is in the pages of this book, and in her other writings we find the authentic Nell, fiercely intelligent, brilliant, incisive, railing against the many injustices and inequalities she saw around her.

Her powerful essay on the death of Ann Lovett excoriates all those who could have protected the young girl but did not.

Later her book on the Kerry Babies, A Woman to Blame, similarly excoriated the patriarchal police and legal systems. At the Kerry Babies tribunal, as Joanne Hayes, surrounded by self-important, professional men, was questioned for days about every aspect of her reproductive and sexual body, Nell asked a most pertinent question, “What sort of men are we dealing with here?”

Nell never forgot her Derry and republican roots and her most powerful writing was on the Armagh Women; those republican women imprisoned in Armagh Jail. Her powerful opening sentence in her 1980 essay ‘It is my belief that Armagh is a feminist issue’ grabs the reader: “There is menstrual blood on the walls of Armagh Prison in Northern Ireland.”

The Irish feminist movement was divided on the issue of paramilitary violence and many activists chose to ignore the issues faced by women in Northern Ireland; however Nell, brave and stubborn as ever, did not hold back from confronting many concerns including the violence against republican women in Armagh Prison and challenging the silences from her southern feminist comrades – the menstrual blood on the walls stinks to the high heaven, she wrote, shall we turn our noses up to it?

There is so much more I could write about Nell.

She was someone I admired and was slightly terrified of, as she had taken me to task as a young feminist about something I said in a pub in Fleet Street. Once the telling off was done, however, she bought me a pint, something she could do because she and her feminist comrades had campaigned in pubs to allow women drink what they wanted, and, indeed, drink pints!

Her lifelong activism, her writings, her autobiography, her coming out as a lesbian, all her public actions are already in the history books.

I’ll leave the last words to another great feminist, Margaret MacCurtain, who wrote a foreword to The Nell McCafferty Reader (2005).

“Nell has been teaching women to unlearn the habit of holding their tongues … she never flinched from verbal confrontation, and provided many lessons in moral courage and truthfulness that many of us took to heart.”

Nell always ended her segments in RTÉ’s 1980’s Women’s Programme with a knowing wink and a “Goodnight, sisters”.

Now her family, friends, feminist comrades and admirers say, ‘Goodnight, sister’, to a powerful, courageous, witty, brilliant woman and pioneering feminist no one will ever forget.