STOLEN LIVES
A new series examines the changing plight of women in Ireland during the 100 years since getting the vote
SHE was a secondary school teacher who was notoriously dismissed from her post because she was living with a separated married man.
Eileen Flynn was finally sacked from the Holy Faith Convent in New Ross, Co. Wexford in 1982 when the baby son she had with her partner, Richie Roche, was just two months old.
She lost her unfair dismissal case at the Employment Appeals Tribunal, then the Circuit Court and finally the High Court on March 8, 1985.
In his judgment, Judge Declan Costello concluded that the nuns of Holy Faith were ‘entitled to conclude that (Ms Flynn’s) conduct was capable of damaging their efforts to foster in their pupils norms of behaviour and religious tenets which the school had been established to promote.
Her story is retold by one of her stepdaughters, Rebecca Roche, on RTÉ. As part of a new documentary series, No Country for Women, Ms Roche returns from England, where she’s lived most of her life, to find out about her beloved stepmother’s story.
The serie charts the journeys of a handful of Irish women in the 100 years since they got the vote. It aims to explain, particularly to younger women, about how women were treated here in the past, according to its director Anne Roper.
‘Unless we know our history, we don’t know how far we’ve come or how far we haven’t come. I chose a handful of women whose stories illustrate the way the laws seemed made to conspire against women.
‘So you had the wonderful freedom and equality promised in 1916 where women played such an action role. And then gradually with the foundation of the State, those freedoms were clawed back beginning in the 1920s with the Juries Act which disbarred women from serving on juries.
‘Then we had the Civil Service Act where women who married had to leave their jobs. Who did all of this serve? Men.
‘People say that the story of Eileen Flynn would never happen today but would it?’
‘Laws… conspired against women’
Other women with little voice when they were alive also feature in the documentary, not least Julia Carter Devaney who lived in the Tuam mother and babies home until she was 45.
Galway historian Catherine Corless, who uncovered the horror of the mass childrens’ graves at the home – brought to national prominence by the Irish Mail on Sunday – introduces viewers to a newly discovered 1970s audio recording of Julia herself.
Julia, who was born in 1916 and worked as an unpaid servant in the convent, is one of three women in the series who were confined to institutions due to poverty and not having families. However, unlike many others, Julia’s story at least had a happy ending.
Others featured in the series include Mary Magee, a young mother from Skerries, Dublin, who became an unlikely feminist hero in the 1970s when she successfully challenged the ban on contraception through the Supreme Court.
Ms Roper says the legacy of shame that Irish women were made to feel in so many aspects of their lives is still there today and is evident in young girls.
‘Mary Robinson says in the programme that if there’s one thing she would tell young women, it’s don’t be afraid to interrupt. If that’s the only thing that comes out of this programme, then I’m happy and I’ll second that too.’
No Country For Women, RTÉ One, 9.35pm, Tuesday news@mailonsunday.ie