‘ Mairead Farrell: Women & Irish Liberation’ by Donal Lavery

Every struggle known to man is usually carried and grafted by the resilience of women. During the Blitz in Belfast, my great-grandmothers put the fires and lights out when the bombs dropped and settled the children amid the death & explosions. Indeed, during the more recent conflict in the North many women bore arms against the brunt of British militarism in their country. As feminists, many recognised that a New Ireland could not fall victim to the same sexism which dominated the Old Ireland and Free State.

As a child, I always remember a really beautiful and haunting image of one woman. With her auburn hair flowing down her back like a dim Connemara fire and pale skin, she looked at times like Mother Ireland or the stuff of Kavanagh’s poetry.  I am of course referring to Mairead Farrell, who along with two others was executed by Margaret Thatcher’s government. The murders were a part of a shoot-to-kill policy administered by the British state to deter nationalists from resisting the mutilation of their country and oppression of their fellow citizens. And to date there has been no real and proper inquiry into the events of that day.

My sister and relatives visited the Rock that is Gibraltar and tearfully placed flowers/prayed at the death-scene, where Mairead and Dan were riddled with bullets while possessing no weapons. They did this against the advice of locals, who told them that Empire Loyalists living there generally kicked away such markers of respect left by Irish, Spanish and other peoples. Witnesses of the episode told of how they put their hands up defenceless against the SAS mercenaries who had tracked them down and were subsequently sprayed with rifle bullets. It was cold state-sanctioned murder, at point blank range.

The right-wing press smeared all those who came forward to tell of what had happened, branding them as “whores” and “quislings”. The undertaker who assisted with the bodies was driven out of business afterwards. And the funeral was attacked by a Crown assassin in Milltown Cemetery. It was one the saddest and most painful episodes of modern Irish history. When the bodies came through Dublin Airport, all the staff stopped with their heads bowed and prayed as a mark of respect.

Of course, the Thatcher Government came under severe criticism for how the whole thing had been handled. Former Tory Cabinet Minister, Enoch Powell, described the event as a “catastrophe”, as “there was at no time a car bomb in Gibraltar; Nevertheless, three human beings were shot to death by soldiers, when those human beings were neither in possession of arms, nor in possession of the means of detonating a car bomb had there even been one.” He called for the SAS and Crown to be prosecuted and held to account by the democratic process in Britain – neither of which has happened.

I walked along the cliffs of the Donegal coast a while back, with the ocean-breeze in my face and the air filling my lungs while Eleanor McEvoy’s song  ‘The Seabird’ played on my ipod. It felt like the finishing scene in the film Some Mother’s Son. There was a sense of liberation to it, to be on free soil and with a Celtic mist in your hair, bringing a sense of lore to the psyche. I hope and pray that the same feeling was evident in Mairead when she departed this life for the next. But this recent election has brought a renewal of that feeling; many republican women have been elected and I think Mairead’s memory and spirit burn within the hearts of any Irish women who want to right the injustice which exists within their country and towards their sex. One struggle within One Nation.

Connolly was right when he claimed that “working class men are slaves to their employers and women are treated like slaves to those slaves.” But for those who paid the highest price to end the oppression of Ireland and the oppression of women as one cause, we owe the most solemn debt of gratitude. Their memory and their struggle will always have legitimacy and place in the affairs/life of this country; made sacred by both the living and dead generations.