The recent nurses' dispute did an enormous amount for women's rights, Dublin-based academic Ms Marnie Holborow has said. Ms Holborow, a lecturer in DCU, said the dispute had achieved more than the gender-proofing of committees or positive discrimination in favour of women.
"The strike changed, on a massive scale, the perception of women in Irish society. The nurses ran a strike, against all the odds, with superb organisation on the ground, defying the traditional roles of women. They said they were doing a job which was valuable to society, and not just a badly-paid caring job."
She said that women were still oppressed in areas such as income and child care, with class a determining factor. "Better-off women are able to alleviate their oppression quite considerably," she said. "A concrete example is the crΦche in DCU, which costs £90 a week. This means that only people earning better money than others can afford to send their children there."
Ms Holborow, speaking at a seminar in Trinity College on Marxism and the millennium organised by the Socialist Workers' Party, asked why women's rights were not higher on the political agenda.
It was sad, she added, that many former feminists were no longer involved in fighting for basic women's rights.
