The journalist and campaigner Nell McCafferty has died at the age of 80.
Born in Londonderry in 1944, she was a founding member of the Irish Woman’s Liberation Movement and wrote for the Irish Times among other publications.
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.
The SDLP leader and Foyle MP Colum Eastwood described Ms McCafferty as “a mould breaker and establishment shaker”.
He added that she would be “sadly missed” but said her “activism will endure”.
In an article published in the Irish Times in March to coincide with her 80th birthday, several figures including Irish President Michael D Higgins and activist Eamonn McCann paid tribute to Ms McCafferty.
President Higgins described her as a “friend and ally” who had “enduring courage that was delivered with a curiosity that was ethical and fearless on the side of those without power”.
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 McGuiness at the time that he was leading the IRA’s operations in Derry.
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 and Irish society.
She told RTÉ’s The Late Late Show in 2004 that being gay was the last great taboo in Ireland.
McCafferty died aged 80 at a nursing home in County Donegal.
