Trailblazers
Philip Nolan’s verdict on the RTÉ series that had the nation talking
IN the lead-up to last month’s referendum on the Eighth Amendment, we heard a lot about the treatment of women since the foundation of the State. Added to the CervicalCheck scandal, what we were left with was a fairly grim picture, one of monumental failings at every turn. Those of us who are of an age (I’m in my mid-50s) don’t need telling about many of the restrictions that were placed on women to prevent them becoming full and equal participants in our society, but it still was shocking to see the entire litany of calumnies rolled into one. Anne Roper’s two-part documentary to mark the hundredth anniversary of women’s suffrage, No Country For Women, reminded us of the many grim impediments faced by women in the last century.
Hundreds of thousands were forced to give up work once they married, depriving the State of a vast talent bank that might have seen our country move much faster to inclusion, and a great deal slower to the profligate, testosterone-driven world of financial risk.
Women had no contraceptive rights and, without salaries of their own, no chance to exit bad or abusive marriages. Above all, though, it was in the area of sexual morality that women took the blame. The men who made girls pregnant faced little in the way of consequence, while the women were vilified, at best, or imprisoned at worst, doomed to live out their days in Victorian laundries.
The most moving contribution came from Samantha Long, who traced her birth mother, Margaret Bullen, to a laundry in Dublin.
It is hard to believe that as recently as the late Nineties, Margaret and other women depended on the heat from an open cooker just to stay warm.
There was a jolt of shock when Lavinia Kerwick appeared on screen. She was a Kilkenny teenager who went public about her rape at the hands of her boyfriend, electrifying the nation with her fierce determination to see justice served. For someone who did such enormous service, shining a light on yet another perpetual Irish secret, it was strange but delightful to see her as an adult woman still active in the fight against sexual violence.
It would be nice to say that I heaved a sigh of relief at the end of the second programme because
No Country for Women Ireland’s awful treatment of women was laid bare in this two-part documentary
everything now is perfect. As we have seen, though, there still is a very real gender pay gap, scandals in the area of women’s healthcare, and the MeToo movement that has highlighted the daily trials women face, from workplace pestering to rape.
Watching it as a man made me angry. As a female friend legitimately asked, though, how did women not just burn the entire country down years ago?
The physical state of the nation was under the microscope in RTÉ Investigates – Ireland’s Wild Waste, in which reporter Conor Ryan did a sterling job of identifying some of the country’s worst polluters, and exposed the sheer weight of the task facing the Environmental Protection Agency and the local councils struggling to regulate them effectively. One of the most extraordinary scenes showed the rubble from a demolished school in Clifden dumped near a children’s playground – not just reinforced steel and concrete from the building itself, but even copybooks the children left behind. I’ve always been an eco-warrior lite (making sure I recycle my own rubbish is as far as I usually stretch) but this programme did what all such investigations should do – it made me angry that some would put profit before propriety and destroy our country in the process.
Nothing made me angrier, though, than the Trump administration’s treatment of migrant children, separating them from their parents and caging them. On Last Week Tonight, John Oliver excoriated everyone – from Donald Trump to Jeff Sessions to Sarah Huckabee Sanders – using the Bible to justify evil.
Talking of heart, though, the moment of the week came when MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow attempted to read a news item about the children and just started crying, to the point where she could not complete the programme at all. In a world that often seems heartless – to women, to children and to the environment we inhabit – it was nice to be reassured that humanity and empathy haven’t entirely gone out of fashion.