10 - Feminism and Irish poetry

Summary

In December 1992, a conversation between Medbh McGuckian and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill was facilitated by Laura O'Connor in the suburbs of Dublin; it was recorded and later published in 1995. In several important ways, the text bears witness to the extraordinary upheavals that took place in Irish society since the 1970s as a result of feminism. The first important events were the formation of the Ad Hoc Committee of Women's Organisations in 1968, and then, two years, later the formation of the Irish Women's Liberation Movement (one member of which was the future President of the Irish Republic, Mary Robinson). Among the immediate issues were pay discrimination and contraception, but to restrict the feminists' impact to those areas would be to underestimate the force of their critique of Irish society in general. Ailbhe Smith argues that:

Feminism has not been the only movement for social change, but has launched the most enduring, widespread and resonant challenge to the ideology and politics of our nation-state. I don't mean that feminist challenges to the institutions and practices of the state are necessarily explicitly articulated as challenges to nationalism, but their effect is to undermine the ideological bases of the ‘nationness’ on which the state was founded.

Because certain ideas of gender are enshrined in nationalist ideology and Irish Roman Catholicism, arguments about contraception and pay necessarily precipitated revaluations of the political and religious roles of women.