Sir, - I would like to second and endorse the tribute paid to the late Mary Cummins by Nuala Fennell. Mary's was a significant voice in Irish feminism: radical, sometimes anarchic, but vivid, passionate, brave and humane. I hope that some of the younger feminists now compiling archives for women's studies will collect Mary's work and include it in texts to be read.
But Mary Cummins would not, I think, have agreed with Nuala's description of the 1960s and 1970s as "grim days". For some women, perhaps, they were grim days, but for some women today, these are grim times, and Mary pitied some of the problems facing young women today: the struggle to meet a mortgage, the pressure to keep working and earning, the competitiveness, the stress, the utter impossibility now of ever owning a home in Dalkey, short of becoming a millionaire. She deplored the disappearance of Bohemianism and the way in which journalists and writers are also drawn into bourgeois obsessions with money and status.
Mary Cummins and I looked back on the 1960s as a time of tremendous opportunities for young women journalists, a time when you could be hired because you were wild and cheeky, when you could make your way in the world reasonably successfully after leaving school at 16 without any diplomas, certificates, connections or any other visible means of support. We were both helped and encouraged by men in journalism such as Donal Foley, Douglas Gageby, Tim Pat Coogan and Sean McCann - as was Nuala herself.
Change is a cycle in which some things get better and some things get worse. There is a prevailing lack of judgement in describing the past in Ireland simply as a dark, grim place: it just ain't that simple. - Yours, etc., Mary Kenny,
The Reform Club, Pall Mall, London SW1.