Derry journalist and campaigner Nell McCafferty has sadly died. She was aged of 80.
She died in the early hours of Wednesday morning at a Co Donegal nursing home, her family said.
Born in Derry in 1944, she was a founding member of the Irish Woman’s Liberation Movement and wrote for the now defunct Sunday News and the Irish Times.
She campaigned for the legalisation of contraception in Ireland, including staging a protest where she and other women brought contraceptives over the border from Northern Ireland by train from Belfast to Dublin.
She was the author of several books, including a A Woman to Blame, about the Kerry Babies Case and The Armagh Women, about a hunger strike among female republican prisoners in Armagh jail in 1980.
In an article published in the Irish Times in March to coincide with her 80th birthday, Derry activist and journalist Eamonn McCann paid tribute to Ms McCafferty.
Mr McCann wrote that “there hasn’t been a significant battle for women’s or for gay rights in more than half a century that Nell hasn’t played a key role in”.
In 1972 she interviewed the mother of Martin McGuinness who was the commander of the Derry IRA brigade.
In 2024 declassified government files reported on by the Belfast Telegraph, include a record of a conversation in 1994 between McCafferty and officials in the British embassy in Dublin.
Ms McCafferty was described in the report of the meeting as being “in close personal touch with the Sinn Féin leadership and specifically with Martin McGuinness and Mitchel McLaughlin”.
In 2004 she published a memoir titled Nell, in which which recounted her upbringing in the Bogside and relationship with her long-term partner, the novelist Nuala O’Faolain.
McCafferty also spoke out against homophobia in the Catholic Church.
In 2004, she told RTÉ’s The Late Late Show that being gay was the last great taboo in Ireland.
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