McCann reflects on Derry journalist Nell McCafferty's life and work as a 'Community Champion'

Nell has entranced as many women as she alarmed men in her time. She was once described by a (male) admirer as ‘the first lady of Irish feminism’. The fellow who said this said it out of innocence and, more importantly, out of earshot. Nell would have roasted him. That was no lady; that was our Nell.

Derry people are allowed to call her ‘ours’. She wears her Derryness on her sleeve.I have known Nell for more than 60 years. I think we have ended up friends, even if there were times it was touch and go. She could be as prickly as an angry porcupine.

When it came to women’s rights, Nell was a streetfighter, broke up many an academic discourse, bare-knuckled, no backing down. There hasn’t been a significant battle for women’s and gay rights in Ireland for many a year that Nell hasn’t been centrally involved in. Through it all, despite her celebrity, she has maintained her membership of the masses. Her strength has come not from holding high office but from the high esteem in which she's held.

The hallmark of Nell's life has been her indomitable spirit, her crusading fervour, her fixity of purpose. It has never been in her to cool her ardour for appearance's sake, or dodge the difficulties she's inevitably encountered by swerving onto more comfortable terrain.

She is a formidable public speaker, blithely eloquent, deadly serious, on occasion brutally hilarious.

Her journalism has made a real difference to real lives. Her coverage of the Kerry Babies case in 1984 sent a shudder across the land. If you could gift only one book to an outsider intent on understanding Ireland in the 20th century, it would be Nell's "A Woman To Blame," the story of Joanne Hayes from Abbeydorney in the county Kerry, an unmarried mother who'd been charged with murdering two babies in different parts of the county on the basis of blindingly obviously fraudulent evidence. "A Woman To Blame" shamed the country.

Ms. Hayes was cleared by a Tribunal of Inquiry, which took evidence over 80 days.

A dozen other cases might be mentioned in which Nell's campaigning journalism was front and centre and arguably decisive in mobilising women to insist on their own truth and men to listen up.

She has been an ardent undogmatic socialist too, impatient of theory but always instinctively on the side of the men as well as the women of capitalism's underclass.

She has always stood straight. Her influence has been huge. Her aura is woman.

It’s long overdue that Nell McCafferty was getting proper recognition in her hometown. She’s been a major figure in Irish politics and, historically, she’s broken all sorts of boundaries, and brought people with her as she’s broken boundaries for all Irish women and people who are oppressed on this island. She’s an example to us all.