Ireland loves its strong women, as long as they’re dead or they never lived at all. It’s the walking, talking, breathing ones who are bothersome. There is hardly an Irish person who hasn’t heard of the sexually insatiable Queen Medb, famed for stealing her neighbour’s prized bull, or of Grace O’Malley, a real-life sea pirate, or of the darling of them all, Caitlín Ní hUallacháin, the mythical personification of Ireland.
Until a week ago, most people had never heard of Natasha O’Brien. The country had been going about its business contentedly thinking itself modern and progressive, unaware that a 22-year-old soldier had previously pleaded guilty in the circuit court to violently assaulting her. The 24-year-old had been walking home from her job in a Limerick pub when she happened upon Cathal Crotty yelling “faggot” at passersby on the city’s main street. When she asked him to stop, he punched her to the ground and punched her twice more until she blacked out. Then he ran away and gloated on Snapchat: “Two to put her down, two to put her out.”
What happened next has thrust O’Brien into the annals of Unforgettable Irish Women. At Crotty’s sentencing hearing last week, judge Tom O’Donnell described the crime as “utterly appalling” and then fully suspended his three-year jail sentence on the grounds that the convicted man had pleaded guilty and that a custodial sentence could harm his career in the army. The matter would have ended there, except that Crotty had picked on the wrong woman. O’Brien left the courtroom and, with exceptional eloquence, declared that the system had abandoned her.
Last weekend, thousands of men and women marched in protest in Ireland’s main cities to demand justice for victims of gender-based violence. The Irish Times reported on Monday that a naval officer, David O’Gorman, has remained in the service almost a year after he pleaded guilty to such a violent assault on a woman he left one of her eyes permanently displaced. Organisers of Dublin’s Pride parade withdrew the defence forces’ invitation to participate and, when O’Donnell retired on his 70th birthday on Wednesday, the traditional ritual of lawyers paying tribute to the departing judge had to be cancelled for fear of protests.
When O’Brien was invited to visit Dáil Éireann (the Irish parliament), she received a minute-long standing ovation from TDs (members of parliament). The next day, the defence forces sent a dossier to Micheál Martin, the tanáiste (deputy prime minister), chronicling 68 further cases of service members who have either been convicted of crimes or are currently before the courts.
For most of its existence, the Irish state has been a cold country for its women. The chief founding father, Éamon de Valera, set the mood with his supposed vision of an Ireland with “maidens dancing at the crossroads”. Over the ensuing decades, when Roman Catholic bishops ruled with a slap of the mitre, women and girls were consigned to live in draconian mother and baby homes or work in Magdalene laundries for the offence of pregnancy outside marriage – including by rape – while their babies were sold for adoption abroad or used without consent in vaccine trials for pharmaceutical companies.
Ireland reverberated with echoes of the Salem witch trials. In the 1980s, a young woman called Joanne Hayes was hauled before an all-male state tribunal where gardaí (police) tried to justify targeting her as the suspect in an infanticide investigation on the basis that she must have given birth to twins conceived by two different fathers and delivered in two different locations 50 miles apart. In a midlands village, a 15-year-old schoolgirl named Ann Lovett and her secret newborn baby were found dead at a Virgin Mary grotto. In the south-east, the schoolteacher Eileen Flynn was sacked for living with a married man, a decision upheld by the high court.
Formidable women who had fought for Ireland’s independence in the early 20th century were written out of the history books. The level of female representation in parliament was one of the lowest in the world, a likely factor underpinning the referendum in 1983 that led to a constitutional ban on abortion. Its implementation was so severe that British magazines sold in Ireland had blank pages where advertisements for abortion clinics appeared in the main editions, and yet more than 4,000 women furtively left the island each year to have their pregnancies terminated abroad.
Seedlings of change had started to appear in the 1970s with the indomitable Irish Women’s Liberation Movement, who took a train to Belfast one day and returned flaunting buntings of condoms to the republic, where contraceptives were outlawed. Along came Mary Robinson, elected a Labour party senator whose day job was a lawyer contesting human rights issues on access to the pill and gender-fair taxation in the courts. When she became the first female president of Ireland in 1990, many women thought we’d died and gone to heaven.
The momentum for change gathered force as women started telling their individual stories. When Annie Murphy, an American woman, revealed that she had had a love affair with the bishop of Galway and conceived a child he wanted her to have adopted, the church’s grip on Irish society began to loosen. It was accelerated by subsequent narratives about priests sexually abusing children and how they were sheltered by bishops.
It took almost a century but by the time Ireland became the first country in the world to recognise same-sex marriage by referendum in 2015 and, three years later, repealed the abortion ban in another referendum, there was a sense that the country had finally become tolerant and inclusive.
Natasha O’Brien’s experience has shown how misguided we were. The judiciary and the defence forces, both state bastions charged with protecting the people, have sent a message that a woman’s safety is secondary to a man’s job. There had been omens of a threatened regression to the old Tír na Fir (Land of the Men), with anti-immigrant protesters claiming to be safeguarding their womenfolk against “unvetted single males”.
Last March, Ireland held another referendum. This one was designed to repeal an antediluvian article in the 1937 constitution that enshrines women’s work in the home. It failed spectacularly. While the government botched the wording put to the people, there was an unmissable sexist undercurrent in the campaign that maintained mothers should stay at home and mind their children. When the result was announced, some male anti-referendum campaigners hailed it as a “victory for mothers”.
That referendum and what happened to O’Brien are stark reminders that, for women, Ireland has more prejudices to confront before it can legitimately see itself as the fair-minded and inclusive country it imagines itself to be.
Justine McCarthy is an Irish journalist and the author of An Eye on Ireland: Writings from a Changing Nation
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