During the last recession, it became a truism—and the subject of many a think-piece—that Irish people don’t really do protests. Watching the news at that time from Athens or Madrid, with their general strikes and mass demonstrations against austerity lasting for days, it sort of made sense. Some organised efforts notwithstanding, there was never anything here on the same scale as in other bailed out capitals, or at the same furious pitch.
Last month, Israel transferred the European sale of its government bonds, used to finance slaughter in Gaza, from the Irish Central Bank to Luxembourg, following months of protests at the Central Bank by a committed group of activists. Many people shared Sinn Féin deputy leader Pearse Doherty’s assessment that ‘this has been stopped by the hard work of campaigners’. Yet when the Irish government announced in late 2023 that it would formally back South Africa’s International Court of Justice case against Israel under the Genocide Convention, and when it formally recognised the Palestinian State in May 2024, most media coverage did not draw a link with public protest. This is despite some of the largest demonstrations of recent memory in the capital and in other cities, week in, week out.
This is all to say that it may be time to revisit this story we’ve told ourselves about the Irish public’s passivity, complacency or dismissiveness towards protest. In fact, perhaps the persistence of this story in our public discourse is part of the reason why there is so little popular understanding in Ireland of how exactly many of the rights and freedoms we now enjoy were won. The social liberalisation of the past 50 years was neither an automatic process ushered along by the passage of time nor an outworking of electoral politics alone. Ordinary people—especially women—took action.
After the Train: Irishwomen United and a Network of Change is a timely new collection of essays that opens up a moment in this hidden history of resistance, edited by women’s studies and Irish studies scholar Rebecca Pelan and novelist and memoirist Evelyn Conlon. The title is ‘a playful and respectful response to the 1971 “contraceptive train”’—the high-profile direct action in which members of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement (IWLM) travelled to Belfast to purchase and distribute contraceptives illegal in the Republic, galvanising a generation of feminist activists. The introduction seeks to establish ‘links in the chain’ of women’s activism, what came before, and what came after: Irishwomen United was a more radical successor organisation to the IWLM, with free and legal contraception as its core demand. With After the Train, Conlon and Pelan have pieced together an eye-opening and evocative mosaic of first-person reflections on the 1975-1977 feminist collective by its members and those who were part of its wider orbit of women’s activism, publishing and writing in the 1970s and 1980s.
The collection captures the excitement and sense of awakening that characterised many women’s experiences in the organisation. Take writer and academic Ger Moane’s vivid recollection of attending her first meeting as a student in 1975: ‘We caught the bus into town and climbed the stairs of a Georgian house in Pembroke Street. We could hear the buzz before we entered the room. It was packed with women… The idea that contraception was a woman’s right was totally new to me. Stories of unwanted pregnancies and forced intercourse in marriage unfolded. If there was no contraception, that meant enforced motherhood. The phrase took the breath out of me, and set my heart pumping as a flush rose through my face and my mind raced.’ Turning their gaze back to the Ireland of the 1970s and its treatment of women, more than one contributor inevitably reaches for L.P. Hartley’s aphorism that the past is a foreign country. Writer Mary Rose Callaghan adds wryly: ‘which is just as well’. Contraception, divorce, abortion: all were illegal, as is well known. Those of us born later than the 1970s may assume that through some vague process of cultural osmosis we already know the story of how Irish women’s rights were denied and incrementally gained; we don’t. For every familiar example in this book—from direct actions promoting contraception to the earliest days of the campaign for the decriminalisation of homosexuality—there are many others that have not yet become part of our shared national story.
For one thing, the women who gathered in 12 Pembroke Street in 1975 had no right to be paid the same as men for the same work. Were any of them to commit a crime, she would be tried by a jury of 12 men; as activist Gaye Cunningham recalls, women did not serve on juries until 1976, following a landmark Supreme Court ruling. Were any of them to be raped by her husband, he could not be prosecuted. Looking back to the mid-1970s when she was a member of Irishwomen United, socialist and UCD Emeritus Professor of Gender Studies Ursula Barry writes: ‘At the time, there was yet to be a recognition that rape within marriage was not only possible, but a very real threat in the lives of too many women, and needed to be criminalised, something that only finally happened in 1990.’ Other contributors note that any woman’s husband could deny her access to children’s allowance benefits, which were paid to men, or sell their home without her consent: she had a right to neither. If she had a baby, she did not have a right to her job back afterwards; if she did go back to work, she was unlikely to do so on the same pay. The 1977 Employment Equality Act, outlawing discrimination against women in the workplace ‘would not have existed without the combined actions of women and trade unions’, writes Cunningham, who after her activism with Irishwomen United went on to chair both the Irish Congress of Trade Unions women’s committee and the domestic violence organisation Women’s Aid.
In January 1976, members of Irishwomen United entered the Dublin offices of the Federated Union of Employers (FUE) and occupied the boardroom, where they demanded a meeting to discuss the FUE’s opposition to equal pay for men and women, on which it was successfully lobbying the Fine Gael-Labour coalition government. The protest was covered across the evening newspapers, television and radio, and members of Irishwomen United were invited to speak on The Late Late Show. Trade unionist Anne Speed, who appeared on the programme, recalls how her contribution—including her observation that she had never met a low-paid man lower paid than a low-paid woman—seemed to resonate with people across the country, who repeated her words back to her for many years afterwards. ‘We were part of a growing consciousness among women who knew they were oppressed by church and state,’ Speed writes. After the Irish government failed in its bid for an exemption from the European Economic Community’s equal pay rules, leaving its ‘liberal’ credentials damaged, women workers continued their fight, including several strikes for wage parity. This is a story, Speed says, that deserves to be told.
There were many other protests and actions, perhaps the most risky being a city-centre shop that openly and illegally sold contraceptives along with a stall that travelled around working-class communities for the same purpose. Members of Irishwomen United defied the ‘gentlemen only’ rule at the Forty Foot, Dublin’s best-known sea swimming spot, and daubed graffiti in the men-only Fitzwilliam Lawn Tennis Club. Between 1977 and 1979, members of the group worked to establish the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre. Activists who had cut their teeth in the organisation went on to be central figures in lesbian activism and in campaigns for reproductive rights and against domestic violence.
The essays in the collection also move beyond the 1970s and the immediate context of Irishwomen United. Ruth Riddick’s essay revisits her pioneering work in the 1980s with non-directive pregnancy counselling services, which were aggressively picketed and hounded through the courts by anti-abortion campaigners for most of the period. The legal case against Open Door Counselling progressed to the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled in its favour in 1992, affirming that the right to freedom of expression also applies to information, even information that offends the state. Riddick explains the many ways in which feminists shared information with women who needed it, in magazine ads, on the phone, on the back of toilet doors. The influence of Irishwomen United’s assertion that ‘information is power’ is also carried forward into the 1980s in a fascinating essay by Mary Flanagan and Marianne Hendron on Women’s Community Press, a radical imprint they co-founded with three other women in 1983 with the aim of ‘opening up expression to groups and individuals hitherto denied access’. They produced and sold feminist, lesbian and gay books in the face of censorship laws and the refusal of some bookshops to stock them at a time when homosexuality was still illegal. ‘The law dictated and enabled a culture of exclusion, stigma, fear and silence,’ they write.
The editors have chosen not to trammel these diverse accounts into a single-track, unified narrative. The book mirrors the form of the collective itself where, as contributors recall, disagreement and fierce debate were considered essential, rather than something to shy away from, and multiple working groups with different agendas were always on the go. Some essays are by individuals, some are joint projects. Some take an academic approach, others collect impressions painted in rich colour. Playwright and gay rights activist Joni Crones recalls attending her first meeting on Pembroke Street: ‘Dilapidated walls, an old sofa with the stuffing hanging out, mats and newspapers on the floor, a squat.’ Mary Flanagan and Marianne Hendron of Women’s Community Press remind us that: ‘Memory is sensory: the sights, sounds, and smells of the location, the long, long stairs leading to our offices on the top floor of the Irish Women Workers’ Union Building, the bentwood chairs, the timber floors, the sounds of the CIÉ buses creaking down the cobbled street to the depot in Essex Street, the smell from the Guinness brewery.’
If one theme emerges from these multifarious essays, it’s the uncanny mix of proximity and distance the essayists feel between their radical younger selves and the present day—less that their past was a foreign country, more that this future is. ‘Looking back now… it all seems like another world,’ writes Anne Connolly, who opened the Dublin Well Woman Centre in 1978. ‘Back then, despite our ardent campaigning, I don’t think any of us really believed that we would live to see an Ireland benefiting from relatively liberal abortion laws.’ The phrasing of some of the demands in Irishwomen United’s radical 1975 charter document, such as ‘worker-determined flexible hours’, feels extraordinarily modern, almost prescient, but several contributors recall thinking the charter was pie in the sky, its demands outrageous. The madder elements, as they were considered, included legal and free contraception, a move that alienated some of the more middle-class sections of the women’s movement. The charter also called for free, legal and safe abortion; employment rights for pregnant women and mothers; free, state-provided childcare; secular, co-educational schools; ‘the essential right of women to self-determination of our own lives’. ‘I do remember looking at [it] and thinking “yeah, right” as we outlined the need for free contraception,’ editor Evelyn Conlon writes. Ireland’s free contraception scheme, launched in September 2022, was recently extended to all girls and women aged between 17 and 35. How long we will wait for free, state-provided childcare remains to be seen.
As well as reflecting on what future their younger selves thought possible, many contributors consider alternative pasts closed off by conservative forces in Irish society. ‘By the early 1970s, we had won the right to vote and not much else,’ Anne Speed writes. ‘We measured what had been achieved 50 years after the 1916 uprising, which women had fought in, only to find that progress had been pushed back.’ The Rising and its unfulfilled promises of equality were not that remote to them: the contraceptive train of the book’s title is as far away in time from 1916 as we are from it. When four single mothers came together in 1972 to support other women in their position and to campaign (successfully) for a social welfare payment for single mothers and the abolition of the legal status of illegitimacy, they chose the name Cherish in reference to the Proclamation of 1916’s commitment to ‘cherish all of the nation’s children equally’. Cherish co-founder Mary Higgins notes that the key issues of poverty and lack of housing that affected single families 50 years ago persist today. Other inequalities also continue. Betty Purcell, who went on to produce Marian Finucane’s groundbreaking Women Today on RTÉ Radio 1, recalls a pamphlet by Irishwomen United’s education committee noting that girls, who outperformed boys in the Leaving Certificate, nevertheless ended up in less well-paid jobs, often in the caring professions; no change there. In its depiction of a milieu of somewhat out-there, young, politically engaged people, After the Train has echoes of Vivid Faces, Roy Foster’s group biography of Ireland’s ‘revolutionary generation’ between 1890 and 1923. We have just come out of a ‘decade of centenaries’ commemorating and comprehensively analysing that period. We stand to learn much about ourselves by giving the same attention to tracing the subsequent story of Irish radicalism, particularly that led by women, and its influence and enemies, through the 20th century and beyond. This collection serves as a prompt to ask ourselves why, as a society, we have met some demands for progress and change, but not others.
A final note: the publication of After the Train comes at a time when, just across the Irish Sea, the act of protest is being criminalised and suppressed. What started with the British government’s introduction of new policing and public order powers in 2022 and 2023 aimed at climate protestors has escalated to the proscribing of Palestine Action and mass arrests of its supporters. After the Train is a timely reminder that many of our rights today were hard-won by activists of the past. We must now defend the right to protest itself.