A Word to Students: On the Legacy of Nell McCafferty

Nell McCafferty has died. Her name is the next in a growing list of towering Hot Press writers who have bid the world a last and final farewell. In a moment like this, I think of Peter Owens, of Bill Graham, of George Byrne, of Fiona Stevenson aka Faye Wolftree – of people whose names are written indelibly into our hearts.

Those four heroes of the frenetic race to meet deadline after deadline all died relatively young, some in especially tragic circumstances. We remember them individually and collectively when old comrades get together or when we – or indeed just I – occasionally slip into a reverie of recollection, the gloaming gathering darkness and density outside.

Now, Nell has joined that tribe of greats that are out of reach.

Compared to those that went before, her parting has less of an air of catastrophe. She ran a fine race and lived to a good age. For sure, in 2024, 80 no longer looks as imposing a number as it might have even twenty years ago. But Nell was old school. She smoked like a demon – or that’s certainly the image that lingers for many us – and she drank hard liquor when she felt like it. She’d had a heart attack in 2006 and lived to tell the tale, courtesy of a triple by-pass. Because she reacted quickly and smartly that night to the pains in her chest and down her arm, and called a doctor, she got a bonus of 18 years that neither Bill nor George were afforded.

Well done, Nell. But she was also old school in other ways too that remain impressive – and from which many of us now might more than usefully learn just a little bit. We’ll come back to that...

VOYAGE OF SELF-DISCOVERY

It is the start of another academic year and students are getting ready to walk the walk and talk the talk. Those who go to college in the place where their family lives are lucky. The rest will have to sort out a house-share, an apartment, digs or couches to surf on. More likely than not, they’ll pay through the nose for the privilege of having a roof over their heads, and have to take on part-time work to cover the outgoings.

You could say that it is a harsh lesson to digest at the start of journey that will likely take three, four or five years and even more if you are a medical student. Unless your family is wealthy, the cards are stacked against you. There’ll be lots of stress and strife. Especially for first-years, it shouldn’t have to be that way. But you can’t fight this dragon alone. You have to play the hand that’s dealt you. And so you do...

That doesn’t mean going with the flow uncritically. But the first stage for college debutants should be, as far as possible, to start out in a spirit of adventure. Keep your eyes wide open. Try to avoid doing anything unnecessarily risky. But remember: this is a moment to savour. You are stepping into adulthood. Joining a much bigger, wider world. In a position to meet unfamiliar people and make new friends.

You are, of course, entitled to be a grouch and a moan, if that is what you prefer. But in a moment like this, that seems self-defeating. One of the most important things we can do – and this is true in life generally – is to listen well. What is that lecturer saying? Do I agree? If not, why not? Am I being honest with myself in the way I am responding? Is there a prejudice at the root of my scepticism?

There is nothing wrong either with being an observer. Do it well and there might be a novel in it, down the line. What’s important is that you are being offered the opportunity to see and hear and learn in a different way. You have a level of freedom, and the latitude to practice it, that isn’t available in secondary school.

That is true intellectually and politically. It is true also in terms of how you approach both study and learning.

Once you’ve found your feet, there will likely be time to stretch out in other ways too. In college, I wrote for student newspapers, directed plays, helped to run the film society, launched an independent commercial publishing enterprise with fellow students and played in a reasonably successful rock band. If you use your time well and have an appetite for hard work, there is almost no limit to what’s possible.

But it is also true personally, emotionally and sexually. Remember, you are your own boss. You don’t have to put up with anyone else’s boorishness or stupidity. That said, there is space for kindness and empathy. These, too, are qualities to be nurtured and developed – and the best time to start is now.

College gives us the opportunity to embark on a voyage of self-discovery. Liberated from the chains of secondary education, and the albatross of chasing points in the Leaving Cert, we can try fresh things. We can explore our thoughts, feelings and desires. We can bring other people into our lives and embark together into what might – for us and maybe for them – be uncharted territory socially and sexually, remembering of course that consent is at the heart of all good relationships. I do this for, or with, you because you want and like it. And vice versa.

For the first time, you are in command of our own schedule. There are lectures and tutorials to attend. But there’s plenty of free time and, besides, if you develop the right kind of academic relationship with your teachers, there are workarounds. So use the opportunity to listen, learn, experiment – and discover.

CONSTRUCTIVE DEBATE

People might have heard Jessie Ware singing “You gotta be yourself/ Come free yourself.” Or John Lennon before her: “She got to be herself/ To free herself.”

But the corollary also applies. As U2 put it in ‘Lights of Home’, you have to “Free yourself to be yourself.” And college is a very good place to begin that voyage.

The aspiration is to be free from hang-ups. Free from shibbolleths. Free from prejudice. Free from bigotry. Free from what has been handed down to us...

We should be capable of asking: why, really, do I believe this, that or the other? And to be open to discussion, to argument and to debate.

Within academia, right now there is a real issue about one faction or another insisting that they are right and refusing to hear what anyone else might have to say. That instinct to shut everyone else up or bully them into submission is amplified by social media and the way algorithms select what we are most likely to see and hear.

It is deeply misguided.

To be clear, I have no time for the sleazy suggestion that we need to start listening to the violent far right bigots who are currently engaged in a campaign of intimidation and arson, designed to frighten and hurt those who are under the protection of the State in direct provision centres; or to those who are attacking muslim-owned businesses, as happened in Belfast recently.

To imply that there is any legitimacy whatsoever to their vile aggression is utterly wrong. The full force of the law should be applied to ensure that they can’t continue to threaten innocent people.

But there is a world of difference between this thuggish activity and the arguments that are grist to the democratic mill, as to what is the correct way to shape public policy on important current issues.

A good example is the debate about anti-semitism and what it means. There is an attempt to impose a single, sectarian version of this on everyone, which insists in effect that any criticism of the actions of the state of Israel, or of Zionism, is anti-Semitic.  This is a lie that needs to be contested effectively, through argument and persuasion – not just because it is wrong but because it involves a form of intimidation.

On the same theme, it is important to think politically, and to analyse properly, for example, what is happening in Gaza. The genocidal butchery is clear and so I find it hard to believe how language itself is being so thoroughly undermined by Israeli lies and the supporting see-through expressions of ‘concern’ by the US, while they continue to supply the arms that have been used to kill over 40,000 people so far – with thousands more likely buried under the rubble. But if someone wants to debate it, by all means they can, as long as they do it civilly.

That freedom to argue applies to many other things that people think of as ‘beliefs’.

Hot Press has always been an advocate for women’s right to control of their own fertility. I believe that it is a woman’s right to choose.  In the UK there is a limit of 24 weeks beyond which a termination cannot be carried out. In Ireland, the current limit is 12 weeks.

However, the way it is defined in the Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018, twelve weeks of pregnancy is around ten weeks since conception. As the Abortion Rights Campaign puts it, “Some people could be close to this time limit or beyond it when they find out they are pregnant.”

Which is why, I support the campaign to have the time-limit increased here. I also believe that the current three-day wait between being ‘certified’ and having the procedure carried out is unnecessary and poses risks.  But it is perfectly legitimate, nonetheless, to have a reasoned and constructive debate about what the time limit for abortions should be. And the same applies across all areas of public policy, philosophy, religion, ethics, politics and morality.

Bullying people and attempting to ‘cancel’ them is certainly not the right approach. Discussion, debate and argument – supported by facts, information and reliable, truthful, verifiable and ideally scientific references – are an essential part of academic life.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to see first-years – and indeed all students – approaching the academic term ahead in that spirit.

TRIGGER WARNINGS

Which brings us back to Nell McCafferty. I had read her writing for years before I met her, beginning with her sketches from the courts in the Irish Times, written during the 1970s and titled In The Eyes of the Law. They were great, and ground-breaking in that they casually, but effectively, punctured the awful pomposity that riddled the legal system in Ireland at the time – and in many ways still does.

Those dispatches were often very funny. But they were also heartbreaking, in that they identified the essential reality that inequality, deprivation, broken homes and lack of education are more often than not the real reason why people end up being hauled before the beak. Nell was always on the side of the poor and the marginalised. Or, as Eamonn McCann put it in his tribute at her funeral: “Nell was always on the side of the downtrodden, on the side of the outlaws.”

As her profile grew, she was increasingly influential in the drive for women’s liberation. As far back as 1971, she was involved in what became known as the contraception train: a wonderfully cheeky escapade which highlighted the utterly absurd attitude of Irish politicians – and of course of the Roman Catholic Church to which they bent the knee – to women’s sexual and reproductive rights.

She wrote superbly and with great and righteous indignation, about the Kerry Babies case in 1984, and the appalling treatment meted out to Joanne Hayes and her family by both the Gardaí and the judicial system.

With all of that as background, I felt that she’d be a great fit for Hot Press.

When she finally became available in the early 1990s, it was a huge coup that she agreed to write a regular column for us. She was iconic even then: like Sinéad, she was one of those characters who everyone in Ireland knew by her first name. We had always been feminists in Hot Press – but she was the ultimate Irish feminist and it meant a lot to have that voice represented in every issue of the magazine, in such a singular and convincing way.

Sinead O'Connor at the "X" Case protest in 1992 / Pic: Paul Daly

She wrote a powerful piece on the X-Case, which erupted in 1992, that we turned into a cover story. Looking back over that article now is fascinating. Nell fully supported a woman’s right to choose. But she was also conscious of the real, human dilemmas that surrounded abortion then and often still do. I had remembered it as a great piece. But what I didn’t recall was that she had gone to an abortion clinic and insisted on describing what happened in detail in the article.

We may have flinched at the time, but this was Nell. What she had to say on women’s issues was important. She was the best-known Irish feminist of that era – and indeed since. If this was a story she wanted to tell, then – fully in the spirit of our belief that it was a woman’s right to choose – we saw it as Nell’s prerogative. Nowadays, there’d be a clamour for the piece to be festooned with trigger warnings. But that policy too is worth debating. Is it right to encourage people to live in fear of what might be written? Is it not an essential part of the human condition that circumstances and experiences can drag us out of our comfort zone anyway, and that – in a crisis – we are forced to dip into reserves we didn’t know we had? Might it not be better for us to be prepared for that, by being open to surprise in art, in literature and in journalism?

It is worth reflecting on.

REPRESSIVE COUNTRY

That cover story was just one among a series of fine contributions from Nell McCafferty that we published in Hot Press, all delivered in a hardcore journalistic style that was pure Nell.

She was a great pro, always filing her copy on time.

Eamonn McCann offered the humorous observation, in his oration in Derry, that Nell “was as spiky as a bag of porcupines.” This, indisputably, is true – but she was also great fun to work with. She loved being part of the Hot Press clan – and knowing, as a result, that she was being read by a new generation of young Irish women whom she hoped to, and certainly did, influence enormously. We had lots of good laughs together, and I remember feeling especially moved when she wrote a lovely tribute to Bill Graham, and by extension to Hot Press, in the Sunday Tribune, when Bill died suddenly in 1996.

Nell was, of course, gay – but she held that truth close to her chest for many years, not wanting to risk hurting her mother. So while she was, as has been said elsewhere, fierce and fiery, her relationship with her mother was a dominant influence on her life and how she lived it.

It is, I know, difficult for people to understand in 2024 – but the death of Nell McCafferty is a very good moment to remember that Ireland really was a desperately repressive and suffocating country to grow up in. We had to fight extremely hard to break free from the clenched grip that the Roman Catholic Church exerted on our collective wind-pipes. It took a long time, and a lot of agitation, and relentless advocacy, to get to a place where we could all breathe more freely.

But we did, and Nell was among the ones who really made a difference in that epic struggle – especially in relation to the battle for women’s rights. That campaign is, of course, ongoing. But we all owe Nell McCafferty an enormous debt – one that could never, ever be repaid – for everything that she did in the cause.

“Ireland is a different and a better place for the fact that Nell was in it,” Eamonn McCann said, and he added: “At last, she gets the recognition she deserves.”

Thank you, Nell. It was a privilege to know you, to collaborate with you, to publish – and to read – your unique and marvellously insightful and influential work. Slán leat.