On the day that 40 women’s rights activists took the train from Dublin to Belfast in 1971 to buy contraceptives that were banned in the Irish Republic, it was Nell McCafferty who marched up to the chemist’s counter and asked for the pill. The protest, organised by the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement, was a public challenge to the socially conservative state and the authority of the catholic church. McCafferty, who has died aged 80, having endured ill health following a stroke, was a founding member of the group.
The expedition might have failed but for her quick thinking. When she asked the pharmacist for contraceptive pills, he told her she needed a prescription; nor would he sell her a coil without a doctor’s request. McCafferty realised that the Irish customs officers awaiting their return would never have seen the pill, either. So she bought aspirins and removed their packaging.
Other women paid for condoms, blowing some up like balloons on the journey back. At Connolly railway station in Dublin, the customs officers demanded they hand over their illegal purchases. The women refused. There were shouts of “Let them go!” from supporters beyond the barriers, as Irish and international television crews filmed the demonstration.
Publicity over what became known as the Contraceptive Train highlighted the restrictions imposed on women’s lives in Ireland. McCafferty’s role at the forefront of campaigns over equal pay for women, gay rights, support for lone parents, as well as the availability of contraception, brought her national prominence.
She was “fierce, fearless and fiery”, Ireland’s taoiseach, Simon Harris, said in tribute to her pioneering role. The former Newsnight presenter Olivia O’Leary said that she and other women had benefited from “the gap in the hedge that Nell’s generation had made for us”.
Curly-haired and barely 5ft tall, McCafferty had a combative and compassionate presence that made her impossible to ignore. Her close friend the Derry activist Eamonn McCann described her as being “as spiky as a bag of porcupines”.
McCafferty was born in Derry, where the family lived in the nationalist Bogside area of the city. Her father, Hugh, worked for the admiralty, her mother, Lily (nee Duffy), brought up their six children. Nell won a place at Thornhill college, a Catholic grammar school for girls, where she discussed being lesbian with the head nun, who did not condemn her but counselled her.
At Queen’s University, Belfast, McCafferty studied arts, discovered a passion for writing and became involved in the 1960s civil rights movement. Teacher training followed in 1965, but she set off travelling around France. Back home she failed to find a classroom job and two years later departed for an Israeli kibbutz.
She finally returned to Derry in October 1968, the day after RUC officers had clubbed civil rights protesters to the ground in front of television cameras – violence often cited as marking the start of the Troubles.
Her mother welcomed in visitors to the Bogside, including McCann, Bernadette Devlin, later a republican MP, and the Observer journalist Mary Holland. McCafferty was advised to take up journalism and began filing stories for the Irish Times. She moved to Dublin, where her groundbreaking reporting exposed the disadvantaged lives of those passing through the district courts, experience she later turned into a book, In the Eyes of the Law (1981).
She was present on Bloody Sunday in 1972, when paratroopers shot dead 14 civil rights protesters in Derry. “It is not a myth that all of us there were changed for evermore by the experience; it is a fact,” she wrote later. “It is in the Derry air. It is limned in our blood.”
McCafferty wrote for many Irish papers and magazines, including the Sunday Tribune and Hot Press. In 1980, she began a relationship with the writer Nuala O’Faolain. They broke up acrimoniously 15 years later, publicly trading insults about their time together.
She was a regular contributor to RTÉ radio and television. Her trademark sign off, “Goodnight sisters”, on the Women’s Programme became a shared expression of support for the oppressed. In 1987, she was banned from broadcasting after being asked on air whether she supported the IRA and replying “Yes”; the following day the Enniskillen Remembrance Day bombing killed 11 people. She was eventually reinstated: in 1990, the station sent her to Italy to cover Ireland’s World Cup games.
Other books included The Armagh Women, about the 1980 hunger strike and protest by republican female prisoners, an autobiography, Nell (2004); and A Woman to Blame: The Kerry Babies Case (1985) - an indictment of the criminal justice system and its prejudicial treatment of a young woman.
A smoker and drinker, McCafferty suffered a heart attack in 2006 and underwent emergency bypass surgery. In 2016, she was awarded an honorary doctorate by University College Cork, for her “unparalleled contribution to Irish public life”.
She is survived by her sister, Carmel.
• Nell McCafferty, journalist, author and social justice campaigner, born 28 March 1944; died 21 August 2024
