From High Heels to Canvass Boots: 80’s through the eyes of a Labour woman
Issued : Wednesday 16 November, 2011
Niamh recently addressed the Labour Women's Council AGM where she recalled her fond memories of leading the Council in the '80s.
It was all Mary Frehill’s doing, really. She was in her element addressing the mainly twin-setted audience of the Women’s Political Association on the finer points of Labour’s Equality document when she snared a new member, me. That was the mid 70s.
Little did I know that the LWNC (Labour Women’s National Council) was way ahead of its Labour brothers on equality issues and that nearly a decade would pass before Labour Head Office would open its doors to our meetings, find places for women on the AC (Administrative Council), and adopt the policies of our little brown book “Equality” as our Party policy.
As the 80s dawned, Labour only had three women to public office. In the Dáil, Eileen Desmond, Dan Desmond’s widow, in the Seanad Evelyn Owens serving as its first women Cathaoirleach and Mary Robinson, although elected to the Senate on the Trinity Panel who had taken the Labour whip. I remember first meeting the maleness of the PLP when Jean Tansey, chair of the LWNC, during the time when referendum was following referendum, sought them out warning that supporting campaigns for life, and against divorce and more divorce could badly effect women. Here I realised the importance of having at least one women’s voice at that table, Eileen Desmond’s.
Which of us active women who as women citizens of this Republic had only gained the right to serve on juries, jump the marriage bar and collect our children’s allowance ourselves without the father’s permission, imagined a future then when the right to contraception, maternity leave and divorce would within a decade become part of Labour Party’s electoral message. It was acceptable then that Michael D was the feminist voice of the Party and we were very proud to have him and that the male members of our International Committee always represented Labour women at the overseas meetings of Socialist International, we were not so happy about that.
Jean Tansey was followed by Marie Woods, who was poached by Barry Desmond to work as an advisor to him when I became Chair of the LWNC. Twinned to the Socialist International Women, funded by the Socialist Group in the EU Parliament, we hosted public meetings, with crèche of course, produced more policy leaflets, wrote many letters to Sir in the Irish Times and took every opportunity to have the Labour women’s voice heard on the airwaves. But at that last election of the 80s, no woman was returned to the Labour benches in Leinster House. Eileen Desmond had left for Europe, Evelyn Owens left to retire and Mary Robinson had left the Labour Party, full stop. We were finding it very difficult to grow those roots that we had spent the ‘80s nurturing.
Back in 1985 the UN decade for women was launched in Nairobi. Although not in attendance we were watching. In an imaginative move, long before the calls to hear the 99%, the Council for the Status of Women under Frances Fitzgerald and Caroline McCamley, organised a women’s forum at the RDS to hear the voices and opinions of women on the adopted UN charter for Women.
I led our members into the public fray. Designed by Liz Allman, by now we boasted our own letter head, identified ourselves with our lapel roses, distributed well designed literature, and were heard. In this search for an audience for our policies, we even once gate crashed a “do” at the Mount Street head quarters of the Council for the Status, making our entrance with a bunch of roses only to be upstaged by a shrill delegation from the Workers Party led by Liz McManus demanding an audience for her Party too.
The LWNC had its internecine moments, this was after all the 80s. But at least by the closing years of the decade, Head Office allowed us meet on its premises. We had been thrown out by LIL, the Liason of Irish Lesbians, from its premises on Dame Street because we wanted Michael D (a man!) to address our AGM. From inside Head Office, with Eithne Fitzgerald spending a year in the Chair, we were successfully plotting to use our reserved places on the AC, become main players on that Council, and with great support from the LWNC I contested the Vice-Chair and succeeded to the Chair of the Party in 1990 making us the first Irish political party to elect a woman to this position; the glass ceiling was cracking.
The Labour women moved to address the need for gender quotas . Luckily, we had among our members Yvonne Galligan and thanks to Yvonne, now the Irish national authority on quotas, we put the issue on the Labour Party agenda., an issue Ivanna has succeeded on putting on the national agenda twenty years later.
The presence of Nora O’Neill, a retired civil servant from the Department of Labour, focused us on the need to review the Equal Status legislation. The late Nora, probably the only member of the Party to have a kind word to say for Michael O’Leary, had been one of his working civil servants. Michael has jumped ship to Fine Gael but not before he had served as Minister in the Labour ministry during the time when the Common Market, EU today, had insisted that equal opportunities for women be enshrined in national law. The Equality Acts of the 90s were rooted in this work. Mervyn Taylor would, as Ireland’s first Minister for Equality and Law Reform, introduce a much amended and extended edition of this Council’s work.
We had come a long way during this decade. We had on behalf of the Party, hosted many international women, from Kate Millett the American lesbian feminist author of Sexual Politics. We wined and dined Mdm.Papendreous, mother of George, Anita Gradin, Swedish socialist minister, women socialist MEPs, some who arrived in glorious purple. These visitors broadened our minds, raised the horizon of expectation and helped us propel the LWNC centre stage. To Alice, Eilis, Liz, Ita and Sheelagh, Peggy, Jean, Joan, and Eithne, Alicia, the Mary’s and all the women who contributed to this decade, thanks Thanks too from this group of women to Dick Spring who saw a role for women as he planned to take the Party centre stage in Irish politics starting by nominating a woman for President.
Cllr 
