Living Women’s Liberation

“Living women’s liberation’ is how the role of Belfast women was described by a street leader in the Turf Lodge. This aptly sums up the role which women have adopted in Northern Ireland now.

With increasing British Army repression, intensive raids, arbitrary arrests, internment and imprisonment for political offenses, with many men on the run and others killed by the British occupation forces, the Catholic areas are being drained of men. With husbands, fathers and sons away, it is falling more and more to the women to organise the defence of the Catholic ghettoes.

Catholic working class women in Northern Ireland have, for the fifty years of the Orange state, suffered exploitation not only as a class and as a nationalist minority, but also as a sex. Up to the present crisis, though individual women have played an important part in the Republican and Civil Rights movements, the general role of women was relatively passive. In a situation of chronic unemployment (up to 20% of the adult male population) of job discrimination and housing shortage, it was the women who held together the frayed fabric of Northern Ireland society. It was they who bore the burden of keeping the family together, of bringing up the children and of budgeting on inadequate wages or social security.

The current situation has galvanised women into action. From being a vital stabilising force within the Oringe state, they are now actively working towards its destruction.

Since the introduction of internment, women have played the leading role in the Civil Disobedience Campaign, which involves more than ninety per cent of Catholic housewives and has cost the state tens of thousands of pounds. An article in the Dublin magazine Hibernia(INTERNMENT, Women next? 17.12.1971) describes the importance of women in this campaign. It is coordinated by Mrs. Kitty O’Kane from her home-—so effectively that a British army sergeant and a captain Smith, under the command of the local army commander, recently called to destroy her duplicating machine, Women are emerging as the leaders in the to search an area. course of the present struggle. defence of the Catholic communities. They initiated the Hen Patrols which counter the “Duck Patrols”’ of the British Army. Their warning of imminent British Army raids, with the now traditional whistle blowing and dustbin-lid banging, has allowed many men to escape the British Army. These warnings have forced the Army to tie down large numbers of soldiers in order But women are now moving from a supportive role to actual participationin the armed struggle. Many IRA operations are now carried out by teams of both men and women. The Official IRA recruits women directly into its ranks, though the Provisionals still maintain Cumann na mBan as a separate women’s organisation. Rose Curry was the first female IRA officer to be killed in the No women have as yet been interned, though this is a possibility which they may now have to face. An extension has recently been built on to the women’s prison in Armagh,and there are rumours that a new internment camp is being built to accommodate women. So far the security forces have maintained the fiction of Orange justice in relation to women—more than 50 women are presently in jail, after being tried in the Court for political offences. Rita O’Hare is one of those against whom the state has framed an attempted murder charge in order to impose its judicial internment.

However, the method of getting rid of political women through the courts is too cumbersome to deal with the numbers of women involved, and internment of women is probably not far off. The British press has been softening up British public opinion for this move. An example of this was the ‘Terror Girls’ attack on the Maguire sisters who were shot by British soldiers for sounding a car horn during a British army attack. The active participation of women marks the turning point in the struggle—it is a participation without which the Irish struggle for national liberation could never succeed. And it has itself involved a revolution which has already destroyed the basis for the continued existence of the Orange State. Rosemary Sales