Irish female politician who fought all her life to break the mould

Kit Ahern felt it would have been hypocritical of her to decline the invitation to enter politics given that she had spent so much of her time cajoling women into getting involved in politics.

This remained a problem for the ICA throughout the 1960s and 1970s

THERE was something special about Kit Ahern, who passed away just after Christmas.

She had been the oldest surviving former member of the Oireachtas.

A small, beautiful and formidable woman who did not suffer fools, she spent much of her life promoting the welfare of rural Ireland and in particular the quality of life of women, and she had a strong commitment to arts, culture and language.

She came to prominence as president of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association (ICA) from 1961-’64, and became a Fianna Fáil senator and TD who ultimately defected to the PDs at the age of 70.

In 1994, I spent a weekend with her in Ballybunion in Co Kerry while I was working on a history of the ICA. I was impressed with her memory, her frankness and her criticism of the lack of vision that she felt blighted contemporary Ireland.

She was intensely proud of her humble roots, particularly given all that she had achieved, and she described herself as “the first pleb” to be elected president of the ICA, staking her claim to be one of the few presidents who could make a genuine connection with the grassroots membership. She had harsh words for the modern ICA which she found too urban and image conscious and lacking in vision.

On the train home after my visit I wrote an account of the interview and rather than publishing it, I placed it in the ICA archive and gave it the needlessly provocative title ‘The visionless reign of the urban spindoctors’ to highlight the central points Ahern had made about an organisation she felt had become far too snobbish and preoccupied with how it was being portrayed in the media.

Her message, she said, had always been “from small things come great things”, and she felt that herself and her colleagues in the ICA in the 1940s and 1950s had shown considerable vision by building up the organisation. She remarked that she had not “fallen into a ready-made ICA”, unlike many of her successors.

She spoke about the bleak post-war years, an ICA that was solid but immobile, and of her determination and that of like-minded women to recruit new members and instil a sense of optimism about the future of rural Ireland.

When travelling the rural hinterland to promote the ICA, they stayed in members’ houses rather than in hotels, which kept them in touch with the grassroots who were the people that mattered as far as Ahern was concerned.

They sought to supplement their income by making the most of what they owned and by promoting their own localities. She was particularly proud of this, maintaining “we were there long before Bord Fáilte, even though we were doing the same thing they are doing now”. She and her ICA colleagues were also involved in the frontline battles to bring running water and electricity to rural Ireland.

She was entertainingly dismissive of a colourful Kerry county councillor, Jackie Healy Rae, who at the time of the interview was in the news because of his comments defending the idea of a nudist beach at Ballybunion. As far as she was concerned, Healy Rae knew nothing about Ballybunion or its needs and was a shameless self-publicist.

It was also refreshing to hear her being so frank about the differences of opinion that existed in the largest women’s organisation in the country — one that was, and probably still is, associated in the public mind with knitting-needles, fruitcake recipes and genteel chats.

Kit Ahern posed a challenge to the organisation when Fianna Fáil began knocking on her door. She was appointed to the Senate by Seán Lemass in 1964 and subsequently retained her seat on the cultural and educational panel.

She also unsuccessfully contested the general election of 1965 when attempting to win a seat for Fianna Fáil in North Kerry; she lost out to the McEllistrim dynasty which stretched back to the 1920s (she finally captured the seat during the Jack Lynch landslide in 1977, only to lose it again in 1981). She was also the first female chairperson of Kerry County Council.

When Lemass nominated her as a senator, Ahern was a vice-president of the ICA and did not think the two positions should be incompatible; she looked for leave of absence but her colleagues on the ICA executive sent her a letter: “As it would appear that you will be more and more involved in political affairs, would it not be more prudent to resign your vice-presidency in order to avoid possible complications in the future?”

Ahern was livid, and did little to hide her annoyance almost 30 years later when I asked her how she felt about this episode. She said she had accepted the Senate nomination for three reasons — “as a tribute to the women of Ireland, as a tribute to myself, and to try to create a base for a new North Kerry Fianna Fáil TD.”

But she also believed the ICA needed to change its constitution to allow office-holders to become involved in national politics.

She felt it would have been hypocritical of her to decline the invitation to enter politics given that she had spent so much of her time cajoling women into getting involved in politics. This remained a problem for the ICA throughout the 1960s and 1970s. At a time when women were beginning to mobilise and demand change under the auspices of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement, there were some caustic debates within the ICA about how they should approach politics.

In 1969, another president, Peggy Farrell, precipitated a constitutional crisis for the ICA when, having been nominated to the Senate by Fianna Fáil, she resigned her ICA position only to withdraw the resignation after it had been accepted. The issue was then sent to the ICA guilds for voting.

AFTER advice from lawyers, the executive decided that as a result of her actions, she was ineligible for the position of vice-president. The following year Farrell wrote a highly-charged letter to an ICA member who criticised the stance she had taken in voting against an amendment allowing married women to become officers of the new health boards.

Farrell was emphatic that she was not answerable to the ICA for her stance in the Senate, adding: “Do you not think our association should put its own house in order by not discriminating against the members who are in public life before trying to straighten out the national scene?”

A similar complaint was made by Bea Trench, who served as ICA president from 1974-’76.

She lamented the fact that the association did not give enough support to women in public life and it was argued that the association’s activities could only be taken seriously at the parish level as long as it remained non-political.

That is an assertion that many former and current members of the ICA will dispute, but given the continuing dearth of women in Irish politics, it is worth remembering that Kit Ahern, a pioneering female politician, ultimately felt that the largest women’s organisation in the country did not do enough to encourage women’s involvement in politics.