Remembering Mary Holland

The death during the week of the writer Mary Holland was a desperately sad occasion for her family, friends and colleagues. Mary had been ill for a long time with a degenerative disease, and so in the end her passing came as a kind of release – but that scarcely makes it easier for the people who loved, and still love, her dearly…

The reverberations of her death – as had been the case with her life – were felt far beyond the small and often insular world of Irish journalism. Mary was a lovely person of great character, who was always forthright and brave in her approach to her work. She was one of the most important witnesses, in the media, in the late 1960s, to the reality of discrimination against the minority community in Northern Ireland. She was a journalist who genuinely made a difference, and for that we owe her a huge debt of gratitude.
She, and her unique and powerful voice, will be greatly missed. Already, Ireland is a poorer place without her.

The pioneering work that Mary did in the Observer in the ’60s opened up the debate in Britain about what was going on in the backwater of the Six Counties. It was of enormous help to the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement, putting the injustices against which they were fighting onto the international agenda for the first time, and crucially giving heart to those who were part of that extraordinary movement for change.
She lived and worked here in Ireland since that momentous decade. Her contributions as a journalist, with The Observer and the Irish Times, among other publications, were always distinguished by an uncommon combination of intelligence and empathy. She was never afraid to express the views that she held strongly – but a light shone through her writing which had to do with an unwavering sense of our shared humanity. It was this feeling for people, and especially for the marginalised and discriminated against, that inspired her to go on fighting the good fight through a long and distinguished, award-winning career.
While she was a writer and a commentator first, she had strong political convictions and was prepared to put herself on the line when the occasion demanded it. This part of the country was almost as much a backwater as Northern Ireland, in some ways moreso – and Mary recognised it, becoming an important figure in the various campaigns on social issues, through which Ireland was dragged late, and sometimes kicking and screaming, into the 20th Century.
She was a feminist, and believed in the separation of church and State, the right of access to family planning, the right to divorce – and she campaigned on all of these issues. She was on the right side – the side of a woman’s right to choose – in the various over-wrought debates that took place here on the issue of abortion.
At a time when few people in Ireland were prepared to acknowledge it, she was courageous enough to stand up and be counted personally on the issue. She had had an abortion herself and refused to be cowed into hiding the fact.
Her bravery in telling the truth on a difficult personal issue of this kind was a mark of her integrity: it proved to be an inspiration to numerous other women, who had been forced to make the same tough decision, and who now felt that much more at home with themselves, as a result of Mary Holland’s honesty.

Mary’s death came at a moment when some of the painful progress achieved over the past thirty years on behalf of ordinary people here was being undermined in the referendum on citizenship. She was ill for a long time, and so had not written, that I know of, on the subject – but there is little doubt that her sympathies would have been with the ordinary people, new to this country, who were targeted by Michael McDowell’s offensive proposal.
Mary’s daughter, Kitty Holland – who is as fine and decent and lovely a person as her mother – made the point at the funeral that Mary had received wonderful care from the nurses in St.Vincent’s Hospital, many of whom are from The Philippines. In the week of the referendum, it was a pointed and telling association to make.
As a result of the Government victory in the referendum, if one of these nurses were to have a child here, for example with a Nigerian doctor working in the same hospital, then the baby would not be entitled to Irish citizenship. I don’t know about you but that thought makes me feel sick to the pit of my stomach.
It is depressing that the horrible, small-minded, self-serving thrust behind this constitutional amendment has been so emphatically endorsed by the Irish people. It is one of those occasions when it is impossible to share a slow-burning sense of horror – that this is what we have come to as a society. Eighty per cent of us voted like lemmings for something that was dreamt up on a whim, and argued on a tissue of lies by its chief proponents.
There is probably no undoing it now, but we’ll see. In the meantime, the fight has to shift to doing everything we can to ensure that all non-Irish nationals in this country are treated fairly, decently and with humility and generosity by the State.
It is possible still to fashion policies on this issue that are progressive and inclusive. Let’s see if we can force the politicians to do it.
It would be something to achieve in the memory of Mary Holland, something to be proud of…