Nell McCafferty, the leading Irish feminist activist and outspoken writer who “changed Ireland for the better”, was buried following a funeral mass at St Columba’s Church in Derry.
The service at Bogside Church on Friday was attended by Northern Ireland’s First Minister, Michelle O’Neill, and representatives of the Irish President and Taoiseach, Michael D. Higgins and Simon Harris.
Also present were Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, who like McCafferty was an activist in the Northern Irish civil rights movement in the late 1960s, and McCafferty’s friend and fellow journalist from Derry, Eamonn McCann, whom she had known for 70 years.
People held LGBTQ+ rainbow flags as they made their way into the church. Her remains were delivered in a simple wicker coffin and left the ceremony.
The congregation erupted in applause after McCann read excerpts from a newspaper article McCafferty had written about Bloody Sunday. The article was headlined “There Will Be Another Day,” a powerful response to the news that 13 people had been shot dead on January 30, 1972, when soldiers opened fire on a civil rights march.
“I remember Nell holding Bernadette’s elbow as she wrote down the names of those killed on Bloody Sunday, and she just kept writing,” McCann said. “And so there will be another day, but there will never be another Nell McCafferty.”
Her enormous influence on shaping modern Ireland was recognised in countless tributes from politicians, journalists and friends after she died in a nursing home in Fahan on Wednesday at the age of 80.
Higgins described her as a courageous woman and “a pioneer who asked those profound questions that could have been asked but had been buried, hidden or neglected.”
“Nell had a unique ability to raise people’s awareness, and that made her commitment to the interests of those marginalized in society a powerful experience,” he said.
McCafferty was born in Derry in 1944 and went on to study art at Queen’s University Belfast. She says she followed the advice of Jack Kerouac and began travelling in 1965, spending time in France, Turkey, the Middle East, on a kibbutz in Israel and in London.
She returned to Derry in October 1968 and later moved to Dublin to pursue a career as a journalist.
She was one of the founding members of the Irish women’s liberation movement in 1970 and was a bold and fearless critic of the Irish state, whose laws were inextricably linked to the Catholic Church: contraception was banned until 1980, divorce was illegal until 1996 and homosexuality was not decriminalised until 1993, almost 30 years after McCafferty came out as a lesbian.
She campaigned for the legalisation of contraception in Ireland and famously brought packets of pills from Belfast to Dublin to hand them over to customs officials in the capital, thereby drawing attention to how absurd Dublin’s policies were perceived by her and her supporters.
Ireland’s Taoiseach described her as “fierce, fearless and fiery” and said she helped define the modern state.
“In an Ireland trying to step out of the shadows and find out who it is, Nell McCafferty was one of those people who knew exactly who she was and she was not afraid to get involved in any fight for gay and women’s rights. We all owe her a lot for that,” Harris said.
McCafferty is the author of several books, including “A Woman to Blame,” in which she describes the treatment of a young, unmarried mother after the death of her baby, leading to what was known for decades as the “Kerry baby scandal.”
She clearly blamed the police and the justice system, the “all-male force sitting in judgment over a woman.”
McCafferty also championed the dead. In a scathing article about the sale of nuns’ property in Drumcondra, Dublin, to property developers following the exhumation of 155 bodies of women at a Magdalene laundry, McCafferty accused society as a whole of “locking away” these young women in the 1960s – often because they were pregnant – then using them as unpaid labour, treating them like “lepers” and burying them in anonymous graves.
In 2004, she published her memoir, Nell, in which she describes her childhood and her relationship with her long-term partner, the late novelist Nuala O’Faolain.
