Clodagh Finn: Deleted tweet puts the invisibility of women back in the picture

The Lord Mayor of Dublin, Cllr Alison Gilliland, said system is skewed against women. Picture: Conor McCabe Photography.

All the talk has been of deleted texts, but it was a deleted tweet – highlighted by Dublin Lord Mayor Cllr Alison Gilliland on Sunday – that caught my eye because it tells the sadly familiar story of a deeply ingrained lack of awareness of women in Irish society.

On August 26, the Provost of Trinity College, Professor Linda Doyle, the first woman to hold the position in the university’s 429-year history, welcomed French President Emmanuel Macron on campus. The Lord Mayor of Dublin, Cllr Alison Gilliland, the 353rd Lord Mayor but only the 10th woman to hold that office, was there too, along with Taoiseach Micheál Martin and Higher Education Minister Simon Harris.

It was a happy occasion and that is reflected in the photograph that Minister Harris’s department later posted on Twitter. It read: “Minister Simon Harris and Taoiseach Michéal [sic] Martin welcomed President of the French Republic Emmanuel Macron to Trinity College Dublin today, ahead of a Q&A the French head of state was holding with students.”

In fact, it was the Provost who welcomed the French president but neither she nor the Mayor of Dublin were mentioned. There was, as might be expected, an immediate reaction and the tweet was deleted. A new version put the two women back in the frame.

In the scheme of things, it is not a scandal on the scale of the Zappone affair which continues to raise questions about transparency, the appointment process and accountability. And the department later acknowledged its error. When asked, it issued this statement: “The Department tweeted a photograph that did not name or tag all the people in it, including the Provost of Trinity College and the Lord Mayor of Dublin. This was a mistake and the Department has apologised to those concerned.”

After discussing post-COVID Europe, climate change and digital equality with students, Provost @LindaDoyle hosted a tour of @tcddublin for President Macron, outlining the history of the campus. pic.twitter.com/nNmdW0DSef

— Department of Further and Higher Education (@DeptofFHed) August 27, 2021

Who doesn’t make a mistake? We’ve all had bad days at the office and nobody wants to excoriate one individual. The omission, though, is worth revisiting because, as Lord Mayor Cllr Gilliland said on Sunday, it underlines an ongoing and deeply ingrained blindness and deafness to women, their work and their presence in society.

She posted the now-deleted tweet during a Labour Party Trade Union event to mark the 110th anniversary of the Irish Women’s Workers Union, making the point that there is still an issue with the visibility of women.

That is partly due to the fact that they are absent. 

“When you look at female representation in our Oireachtas, in our councils and in public and private sector leadership roles, we are not seeing … equality...[but] when we do make it to the top, we are not always visible,” Lord Mayor Cllr Gilliland said.

It is disheartening, too, to hear a Lord Mayor of Dublin describe the infernal juggling of work, childcare and eldercare that characterise so many women’s lives. 

“That really gnaws at a woman’s soul where you suffer that guilt of trying to raise a family and trying to progress your own career. The system is skewed against women,” she said.

More than a century after the Irish Women’s Workers Union was founded to give women a greater voice in the workplace and in society, there is still a lot more work to be done.

Though, the situation would be an awful lot worse had it not been for those early pioneers. 

On September 5, 1911, Delia Larkin, Countess Markievicz and Hannah Sheehy-Skeffington came together, uniting “the three great movements – “the cause of Ireland, the cause of labour and the cause of women”, to quote Dr Mary McAuliffe, historian and lecturer in gender studies at UCD.

It is both heartening and depressing to look back on the union’s fight to make the ideals of equality, so clearly set out in the Proclamation of 1916, a reality in the nascent Irish state. Some of those achievements are visibly celebrated. 

The work of Rosie Hackett, the indomitable fighter for workers’ and women’s rights, is commemorated in a bridge over the Liffey that bears her name.

She was only 18 years old when she helped rally hundreds of women at Jacob’s biscuit factory to withdraw their labour to support striking male colleagues. Together, they achieved better pay and conditions. She and Delia Larkin went on to set up the Irish Women Workers’ Union which, over its lifetime, had many successes which deserve greater recognition.

Dr McAuliffe recalls one of them – the 1945 laundry strike. All workers, men and women, can be grateful to the 1,500 women who went on strike for 14 weeks to secure a second week’s annual paid leave for everyone.

At the time, they didn’t get much coverage, a point made by the union in a letter to the Irish Times: “…you had nearly a page of a letter from New York telling how the girls there do their hair. But for all that you only have two lines or so for 1,500 Dublin women on strike and no word at all about the sort of work they had to do.”

That work included 13-hour days and conditions that caused “great fatigue, excessive perspiration and blistered feet”.

The union also opposed Article 41.2 on women’s place being in the home – a constitutional clause that is still with us – though it succeeded in persuading then Taoiseach Éamon de Valera to delete a phrase from the draft constitution referring to “the inadequate strength of women” (in clause 45) on the basis that it could be used to bar women from certain jobs.

The effects of those campaigns still resonate today, even if they underline a persistent lack of equality. Unions continue to negotiate better pay and conditions and play an important role in delivering paid IVF and miscarriage leave, a four-day week and domestic violence leave, as Lisa Connell, chair of Labour Trade Unions, points out.

Too often, though, the system is woman-blind. That is depressingly clear when you hear Jesslyn Henry, special needs assistant and Fórsa representative, talk of the lack of respect shown to many of the 17,500 mostly female special needs assistants working in our schools.

They have been asked to cut grass, paint railings or wash dishes belonging to teaching staff, she says. All they are looking for, she adds, is respect and recognition of the important job they do. That request could be repeated across many different feminised sectors from retail and community work to teaching and healthcare.

Then there is the ongoing issue of visibility. As the Provost of Trinity, Professor Linda Doyle, comments: “Women can be and are rendered invisible at times. I think that we, through our own unconscious biases, render lots of things in society invisible – age is another thing that comes to mind. Older adults can, for example, be excluded. It makes me think of the phrase, ‘If you want to commit a crime get a middle-aged woman to do it – she is invisible’.”

The deleted tweet with its unfortunate omissions was an honest mistake, but it does show that we really have a visibility-of-women problem.