Nell McCafferty showed the power of compassion and the little things

Any of us might wonder how we will be remembered when we die, but would Nell McCafferty have had any idea of the national outpouring after news of her death was announced?
Very few people will command the front pages of newspapers the day after they have died. The number of such women is even smaller.
You’d hope she had some idea. But for all her extraordinary talent and courage there did seem, perhaps only in later life, a vulnerability of sorts about the Derry woman and how she was perceived.
There is an extraordinary skill in telling something exactly like it was. Looking back on Nell’s work in recent days, that is exactly what she managed to do in her way of telling a story, of saying things, picking out the everyday observational details, knitting it all together into a compelling reflection of society. I only read her book on the Kerry babies case, A Woman to Blame, in 2018. A masterpiece on the place of women in Irish society at that time, and the utter barbarity of the treatment of Joanne Hayes.
Much has been written about how Nell blazed a trail as a feminist, and about her actions on behalf of Irish women. Rereading some of her journalism, though, was a sharp reminder of the truly exceptional quality of her work.
It was her reporting from courtrooms that made an early mark, after she had moved from Derry to Dublin. In the 1970s her Irish Times column, In the Eyes of the Law, appeared for six years, reporting from the district court in the dilapidated Bridewell Court.
In 2015, she spoke to an Irish Times podcast about it. Using the public lavatory there one day, she recalled, her stomach heaved at the horribleness of the facilities. Thinking of the people who normally used them, those before the court, she felt, “this is really rubbing their noses in it”. She decided to write about them in her column.
“I started off, ‘the walls are covered in shite, there is shite everywhere. There is the smell of shite.’”
She was told that she couldn’t write that. She went to the editor, Douglas Gageby. “I said, ‘Mr Gageby it is shite. It is brown … it is smelly. I have to work there too. We’re all working there, even the guards have to go in there.’
“‘Shite it is, Nell,’ he responded.” She laughing heartily as she recalled it.
Her decision never to name defendants had its roots in her experiences back home in Derry, where the British government had just introduced a mandatory six-month sentence for rioting. A police officer would decide whether you were rioting. She was struck by the distraught parents outside the courthouse when she went up to report on these cases one day. “He’s got a conviction. Jesus he’ll never get to America, which in Derry in those days … They were also thinking, ‘our name’s in the paper, our family is ruined’. And I remembered that.”
She did decide to name the judges, though, and report exactly what they said. “Unfortunately for the judges, the fools, the fools, they thought they were becoming famous.” But then, in classic Nell fashion, she spoke of how, after a while, she would recognise a defendant coming in for maybe the sixth time. When the judge was saying six weeks in jail, she laughingly remembers herself muttering: “Six months, and I began to see it from the judiciary’s point of view”. Despite those moments, though, she realised quickly that there was so much wrong in the system. It was not enough just to sentence people, the majority of them living in poverty, and not offer other support.
I came across something Nell wrote for current affairs magazine Magill in 1983. Another courtroom, and the appearance of the IRA informer Raymond Gilmour. At his trial he gave evidence against 31 Derry men and women. It was an utterly stunning piece of writing, knitting together the minutest of details to show a community torn apart after being turned on by one of its own. It took you into that room on that day.
“If you came from Derry, as all the defendants and their relatives did, and all the defence solicitors did, and two of the journalists did, and Raymond Gilmour did, his halting evidence was like a slow and gentle journey round the town,” she wrote. “First he went to Hugh Duffy’s house in Lislane Drive — of course you mentally nod, there’s Hugh sitting over there, know that street well, know his mother too, a widow woman, worked as a cleaner for a while in the schools, what’s she doing now, you wonder — and then Raymond says Hugh sent him over to Ducksie Doherty’s house … hello Ducksie, instinctively your head nods in greeting to him, grand nickname that, terrific smile Ducksie, he’s all teeth … and then Raymond ended up in McCann’s fish and chip shop down in the Brandywell. McCann’s, a location to conjure with, the place where you go after bingo or a dance in the Lourdes Community Hall, a terrific place to hang around on a mild late summer’s night, its glass window comfortingly lit up during the winter.”
Her observations on the agony of the Gilmour family, including his mother, sitting in the courtroom as they awaited his evidence, were utterly compelling. He was the youngest of 11 children. The tension of the moment for them all was palpable from her report. Nell wrote of his brother trying to hold himself back as some of his sisters were involved in an altercation with the RUC outside the door.
“John Gilmour looked like a man at bay, a rabbit in headlights, both these things. Then the door swung open again and the yells and screams of his sisters and knockabout noises came from the passageway beyond. There issued then from his mouth a sound that bore no resemblance to the spoken word. It was a loud long bellow, and as it came forth he launched himself headlong into the scrum of police below. They caught him and passed him over to the aisle, but he regained his feet there and stood bursting against them, resisting the downward pull, and there were seven policemen draped somehow, anyhow about his person, two on their knees clasping his knees, two around his waist, two on his arms, and one behind him pulling his neck back in a forearm lock.
“They tumbled punching each other down the stairs and out the door. All the Gilmours were gone.”
That article has stayed with me. I think it qualifies as one of the best pieces of Irish journalism I’ve ever read. It’s definitely worth your time.
This year, on Nell’s 80th birthday, Eamonn McCann paid a lovely, affectionate and honest tribute to his friend. He said he had known her for more than 60 years but could still be frightened of her, “in case she turns on me”. He fully realised her value.
“Nell McCafferty from Derry changed Ireland,” he concluded. You can only agree.