Clodagh Finn: Three windows on the good, the bad, and the ugly of Irish justice

As we embark on the next 100 years of the Irish State, three vignettes offer valuable lessons on how we might work together to shape a better next century

An image of Averil Deverell and Frances Kyle, the first female barristers to be called to the Irish Bar 100 years ago, which graces the Bar of Ireland offices on Church St in Dublin.

On Monday, two milestones caught my eye. The first was the uplifting celebration of the first female barristers to be called to the Irish Bar 100 years ago.

An image of Frances Kyle BL, from Belfast, and Averil Deverell BL, from Wicklow, graced the Bar of Ireland offices on Church St in Dublin as part of a wider project to honour these pioneering women who paved the way for generations of female barristers.

There was a certain irony — or pleasing symmetry, depending on your viewpoint — to the timing of the second historic moment: the return to work of Justice Minister Helen McEntee after a six-month maternity leave. She is the first minister to give birth while in office, and the first Cabinet minister ever to take formal maternity leave.

I wonder what the first female barristers would have made of the fact that Ireland would be an entire century into independence before an Irish minister took maternity leave? 

The nation started with such potential but failed to deliver on so many of its promises.

Worse, it harmed its own citizens in the process, as this week’s third, though under-the-radar, justice-related milestone spells out in stark detail. Tomorrow, Ireland and the Magdalene Laundries, a book telling the story of the campaign for justice for the 10,000-plus girls and women imprisoned in those places from 1922 to 1996, will have its American launch.

Its opening sentence stopped me in my tracks. “I’m still here,” it reads. Those words were spoken by Charlotte, a Magdalene survivor who, in 2018, was still living on the grounds of a Magdalene laundry in the nuns’ ‘care’, almost 25 years after the last laundry closed.

There are 115 other Charlottes living in Ireland today, women so institutionalised that they can never live independently.

These three very different milestones open a very interesting window on justice in Ireland over the last century. They represent layers of different truths and shine a light on the good, the bad, and the ugly, not just of Irish justice but society.

To return to the first event, on Monday, the Bar of Ireland tweeted: “100 years ago today, two women stepped forward, breaking through to be the first female barristers to join the profession.” What a happy announcement.

The Law Library details their lives and careers on its website, but here are two snippets to give you an insight into these early trailblazers. During the First World War, Averil Deverell worked as an ambulance driver in France and Flanders, notably cutting 12 inches off her cumbersome long skirt. In the Second World War, Frances Kyle, a gifted linguist, learned Czech so that she could provide support to Czech airmen living in foreign countries.

It is heartening to see them honoured and visible. That, I think, represents ‘the good’, not only then, but now.

‘The bad’ was accentuated by timing. Ms McEntee’s return to work a century, to the day, after Kyle and Deverell’s achievement served to highlight the staggering lack of progress. Who could have foreseen that we would be 100 years into independence before acknowledging that female politicians need maternity leave?

There is hope

There is hope in Ms McEntee’s historic first, though, as it forces a slow-coach Government to recognise the need to ensure all women in Irish politics are guaranteed paid maternity leave.

There is also hope, though unexpected, in the story of the very ugliest side of our history — the imprisonment of over 10,000 girls and women in Magdalene laundries because they were unmarried mothers, victims of sexual abuse, or considered a stain on the upstanding moral fibre of the new nation. Others were transferred from industrial schools, placed there ‘on licence’, in part to prevent a potential pregnancy, in part due to the absence of alternative State services.

I thought I would find the account of their lives and the subsequent campaign for justice outlined in Ireland and the Magdalene Laundries a harrowing and depressing read. It is, but it is also uplifting and deeply inspiring because it shows what can happen when you lay bare the political and legal systems — many of them still with us — that allow prejudice to flourish.

The five authors, Claire McGettrick, Katherine O’Donnell, Maeve O’Rourke, James M Smith, and Mari Steed, cast an unforgiving searchlight over the last 100 years and flesh out an important history that is still not fully told. It is vital work in this ongoing Decade of Centenaries.

They also honour the survivors of a past that is still very much alive — as clearly shown by Charlotte — and show how a new State developed mechanisms that cast out and ‘punished’ so many of its own citizens.

They explain how these institutions were not an aberration, but a clear expression of the ideology of an Irish establishment that wrote laws and drafted policy that purposefully and systematically controlled and exploited women.

Most importantly of all, though, this account puts survivors at its very heart, unlike report after governmental report into our institutions of incarceration.

As one survivor of High Park in Drumcondra, Dublin, said, “nobody heard me, nobody listened” when she reported her abusive father to gardaí. “It was my fault I was in there because I made ‘behavioural suggestions’… towards my father… I don’t know how many times I went up to the police after Mum died. And told them what was going on, and they still ignored it. And he got away with it. Yet I’m the one who’s punished for telling the truth.”

This book is also a much-needed exercise in truth-telling; the kind that blasts a puncturing hole through the continuing official culture of silence that, to this day, continues to deny how it hurt so many people.

If you care to look, the evidence is there in the archives, the Dáil record, FOI requests, and human rights assessments, to name a few of the sources the authors drew on to challenge what they describe as the Government’s ongoing “belligerent ignorance”, which is still throwing up blocks to restorative justice.

What is most impressive about this book, however, is that it shows what can happen when people come together to push for social justice by challenging an Irish political establishment that “delayed, deferred and denied our pursuit of justice at every turn”.

As we embark on the next 100 years of the Irish State, these three vignettes offer valuable lessons on how we might work together to shape a better next century.

If I had the wherewithal, I’d write the words of this Magdalene survivor on three billboards outside every town in Ireland: “The younger people will be studying this, we could be a light or a torch down that path to let them see what’s down there… so that if they see, when they’re old enough and mature enough, if they see an injustice starting to happen, before it gets out of control, they can look at that light and say, ‘hold on, hey, stop, this happened before’.”