Nell McCafferty, a pugnacious Irish journalist whose outsize reputation and outspoken views on women’s rights, gay rights and Irish nationalism helped her country move on from an era of cosseted social conservatism to become one of the most progressive countries in Europe, died on Aug. 21 in Fahan, a rural area of northwest Ireland. She was 80.
Her death, in a nursing home, was announced in a statement from her family, who said she had been in declining health for several years after having a stroke.
Few nonfiction writers captured the Irish public as tightly or for as long as Ms. McCafferty. Like the singer Sinead O’Connor and a handful of other public figures, she was known, loved and sometimes despised by her first name — everyone in Ireland seemed to have an opinion about Nell.
That’s in large part because Ms. McCafferty seemed to have an opinion about everything in Ireland: big issues like feminism and gay rights (she was for them) as well as more mundane matters like public smoking bans (she was against them) and getting old (she was ambivalent).
Ms. McCafferty expressed her views as a correspondent for The Irish Times and later as a freelancer; as the author of six books, including a memoir, “Nell” (2004); and as a tireless speaker and broadcast personality.
“In an Ireland trying to emerge from the shadows and find who it was, Nell McCafferty was one of the people who knew exactly who she was and wasn’t afraid to enter every battle for gay and women’s rights,” Simon Harris, the prime minister of Ireland, said in a statement.
She was a founding member of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement, a group that pushed against the social and legal strictures placed on women in Ireland. In 1971 she and about 45 members of the movement carried condoms and spermicidal jelly from Belfast, in Northern Ireland, where they were legal, to Dublin, in the Republic of Ireland, where they were not — an event celebrated in Irish popular history as the Contraceptive Train.
Ms. McCafferty was equally adamant about Northern Irish independence. She joined initial protests during the violent conflict known as the Troubles, which began in the late 1960s, and she was in the crowd on Bloody Sunday, the day in 1972 when British soldiers in the city of Derry fired on Irish marchers, killing 14.
The massacre took place in the Bogside, the working-class neighborhood where Ms. McCafferty grew up, and in the immediate aftermath several protesters retreated to her childhood home to regroup. The experience fueled her public support for the Irish Republican Army, a position that many feared as career suicide but that caused Ms. McCafferty barely a scratch.
An exacting, nuanced writer of spare, arresting and, when appropriate, hilarious prose, Ms. McCafferty excelled at drawing out connections among the seemingly disparate issues facing Irish society.
The opening lines of a 1980 piece for The Irish Times about a strike by female political prisoners in Armagh Prison in Northern Ireland, titled “Armagh Is a Feminist Issue,” are considered among the most powerful words written during the three decades of the Troubles.
“There is menstrual blood on the walls of Armagh Prison,” she wrote. “Flies and slugs grow fat as they grow thin. They eat and sleep and sit in this dim, electrically lit filth, without reading materials or radio or television. They are allowed out for one hour per day, hopefully to stand in the rain.”
She was equally lacerating in her criticism of the Roman Catholic Church. She drew a line connecting its tight hold on Irish society, its mistreatment of unwed mothers and its efforts to cover up child sexual abuse by priests, seeing in all of them evidence of a morally bankrupt institution.
“The reverend fathers did not just rob the crib and rape the child. They robbed mothers and fathers of their families,” she wrote in The Daily Mail in 2009. “And when they weren’t abusing children, the Holy Men, abetted by the Vatican, banished unmarried pregnant women to Magdalen homes,” a church-run asylum system.
Ms. McCafferty’s support of gay rights began in the 1970s — though she considered her own homosexuality a sort of open secret, neither hidden nor, mostly out of worry over what her mother would think, publicly expressed.
She was in a relationship for 15 years with the writer Nuala O’Faolain. It ended in 1995, but the two reconciled after Ms. O’Faolain announced in April 2008 that she had terminal lung cancer. Ms. McCafferty offered to help her end her own life, though she ultimately declined. Ms. O’Faolain died that May.
In her uniquely brash way, Ms. McCafferty then became an advocate for medically assisted suicide, yet another issue on which Ireland’s religious conservatism was giving way to more progressive views.
“I did offer Nuala euthanasia,” she told a TV interviewer. “I said: ‘I’ve got morphine in place, I’ve got it stashed around Ireland. The minute you want to overdose, let me know.’”
Ellen McCafferty was born on March 29, 1944, in Derry, a Northern Irish city on the western border with Ireland. Her father, Hugh, was a clerk for the Royal Navy and, after hours, a bookmaker at a dog track. Her mother, Lily (Duffy) McCafferty, raised Nell and her five siblings.
She studied arts at Queen’s University Belfast and graduated in 1965. After a few years of teaching, she moved to Israel to work on a kibbutz. She returned to Derry in 1968 just after intense rioting shook the city, days that many say marked the beginning of the Troubles.
In 1971 she moved to Dublin, where she found a society with its own troubles: Women could not get birth control, children were institutionalized for minor infractions, and issues like abortion and gay rights were not even spoken of in public.
She made her name writing about all these topics. In 1985 she published “A Woman to Blame,” about a single mother named Joanne Hayes who was wrongly charged with killing her child and another baby — an incident, Ms. McCafferty argued, that showed how Irish society mistreated not just unwed mothers but also women in general.
Ms. McCafferty left The Irish Times in 1980 to write a novel. It never came together, and she was not rehired. She later freelanced for publications including The Daily Mail, The Irish Press and The Village Voice.
She is survived by a sister, Carmel.
As Ms. McCafferty aged, her reputation shifted from dangerous iconoclast to something of an Irish national treasure. In 2014 The Sunday Independent called her, with much affection, “one of Ireland’s greatest grumps.”
She was, after all, never an ideologue. She was a working journalist, game for any assignment. In 1990 she covered the World Cup, and in 2008 she covered the National Ploughing Championships, at which she participated in a demonstration of a training device for artificial cow insemination.
“The model bum and womb was unveiled for the first time, this year,” she wrote. The host and the crowd “quietly discussed how things have changed. One farmer insisted that 30 years ago, down in Tipperary, they asked the bishop for permission to inseminate. Cows, that is.”
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