‘Fierce, fearless and fiery’ Irish campaigner and writer Nell McCafferty is laid to rest

Nell McCafferty, the leading Irish feminist campaigner and outspoken writer who “changed Ireland for the better”, has been buried after a funeral mass in St Columba’s church in Derry.

Friday’s service in the Bogside church was attended by Northern Ireland’s first minister, Michelle O’Neill, along with representatives of Ireland’s president and taoiseach, Michael D Higgins and Simon Harris.

Also in attendance were Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, who, like McCafferty, was an activist in Northern Ireland’s civil rights movement during the late 1960s, and McCafferty’s friend and fellow Derry journalist Eamonn McCann, whom she had known for 70 years.

People held LGBTQ+ rainbow flags on the way into the church. Her remains arrived and left the ceremony in a simple wicker casket.

The congregation broke into applause after McCann read out extracts from an newspaper article McCafferty wrote about Bloody Sunday, headlined “There will be another day”; a powerful reaction piece on the news that 13 people had been shot dead after soldiers opened fire on a civil rights march on 30 January 1972.

“I remember Nell holding Bernadette’s elbow as she was taking the names of the Bloody Sunday dead, and she just kept on writing,” McCann said. “And so there will be another day, but there will never be another Nell McCafferty.”

Her huge influence in the shaping of modern Ireland was recognised in countless tributes from politicians, journalists and friends after her death on Wednesday in a Fahan nursing home at the age of 80.

Higgins described her as a courageous woman and “a pioneer in raising those searching questions which could be asked, but which had been buried, hidden or neglected”.

“Nell had a unique gift in stirring people’s consciousness, and this made her advocacy formidable on behalf of those who had been excluded from society,” he said.

Born in Derry in 1944, McCafferty went on to study arts at Queen’s University Belfast and by her own account followed the advice of Jack Kerouac and went on the road 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, later moving to Dublin to pursue a journalistic career.

She was a founding member of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement in 1970, emerging as an unflinching and fearless critic of the Irish state, whose laws were intrinsically linked to the Catholic church – with contraception banned until 1980, divorce illegal until 1996 and homosexuality not decriminalised until 1993, which was almost 30 years after McCafferty had come out as gay.

She campaigned for the legalisation of contraception in Ireland, famously bringing packets of pills back from Belfast to Dublin and handing them over to customs officials in the capital to highlight what she – and her supporters – felt was the absurdity of Dublin’s policies.

Ireland’s taoiseach described her as “fierce, fearless and fiery” and said she had helped define the modern state.

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“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 she wasn’t afraid to enter every battle for gay and women’s rights. We all owe her a great debt for this,” Harris said.

McCafferty was the author of several books, including A Woman to Blame about the treatment meted out to a young unmarried mother whose baby had died, leading to what was for decades referred to as “the Kerry babies scandal”.

She squarely blamed the police and judicial system, the “all-male squad of men sitting in judgment of a woman”.

McCafferty also spoke up for the dead. In an excoriating piece on the sale of property owned by nuns in Drumcondra in Dublin to property developers after the exhumation of 155 bodies women at a Magdalene laundry, McCafferty called out wider society for allowing these young women to be “locked away” in the 1960s – often because of pregnancy – then used as unpaid labour, treated like “lepers” and then buried in unmarked graves.

In 2004 she published a memoir titled Nell in which she recounted her upbringing and relationship with her long-term partner, the late novelist Nuala O’Faolain.