The funeral of journalist, author, broadcaster, fearless civil rights activist and trailblazing feminist Nell McCafferty will take place in her hometown, Derry, on Friday.
McCafferty, who had been in poor health for several years, died early on Wednesday morning at a nursing home in Fahan, Co Donegal, where she had resided for a number of years. She was 80.
Born in March 1944 to Hugh and Lily McCafferty, she grew up in the Bogside at a time when the city’s unionist minority controlled the council, housing allocations and dominated best-paid workplaces.
As secondary education opened up to Catholics in the 1960s, she was among the early cohorts of Catholics admitted to Queen’s University Belfast, where she studied arts and got involved in civil rights politics. She spent time teaching briefly before beginning her journalism career in The Irish Times in 1969.
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Among her first pieces, in December 1970, was a report from Dublin Children’s Court, in which she described the backgrounds of two boys, Mickey aged eight and his friend Patrick from Sheriff Street, up on charges of stealing Plasticine and lollipop sticks from the school.
Contrasting the outcomes for the poorest children with those who had solicitors, she commented the former were “just like that” sent “to institutions such as Daingean and Marlborough House” while others “walked away with, at most, probation sentences”.
It was among a series of pioneering articles, In The Eyes of the Law, reporting for the first time in Irish journalism on the struggles faced by some of Dublin’s poorest citizens as heard in the courts.
She was a founding member of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement and established herself by writing on women and women’s rights, poverty and social injustices in the Ireland of the late 1960s and 1970s.
Her books include A Woman to Blame, on the Kerry babies case; The Armagh Women, on woman republican prisoners and their hunger strikes in Armagh jail; Peggy Deery: A Derry Family at War; her autobiography; and a collection of her writings, Goodnight Sisters: Selected Writings of Nell McCafferty.
Dublin Lord Mayor James Geoghegan opened a book of condolences for McCafferty, which will be available to sign at the Mansion House on Thursday 10am-5pm, and online until Sunday, September 1st, on the Dublin City Council website.
Thanking those who had paid tribute to her, McCafferty’s family said there “aren’t words to convey the emotion that we feel at the loss of our Nell”.
“We are humbled and comforted by the outpouring of love, respect and admiration on this rainy August day. We once again rely on the woman herself to express the depth of our feelings in just two words: goodnight sisters.”
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