Republicans must address gender equality
Today is International Women's Day and to mark the occasion we reproduce an edited version of a talk given to the recent Dublin Sinn Féin women's conference by former POW Ella O'Dwyer, in jail in England for 14 years. Here, she talks of the revolutionary struggle for the Republic.
``Twenty years ago I had a job for a while selling jewellery on O'Connell Bridge. This was Ireland at the begining of the 80s. Ireland of the recession. There were many children begging on the bridge, then, just as now.
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If republicanism has absorbed a culture of silence and anonymity, Irish women have practically absorbed a culture of invisibility.
Ella O'Dwyer
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The Traveller children and I developed a rapport, one which originated in the children's attempts to rob the jewellery off the board. A kind of liberalism on my part had me take the children occasionally to the shop - say at Christmas or Easter to buy sweets or whatever.
The kids used to kind of smile knowingly to each other, and the next day they would arrive to the stall on the bridge with about three or four times the few items I'd have bought. One day they asked me what size shoes I took! I tried to tell them that robbing was not a great idea because they would get caught, but they assured me that they could work away until they were at the legal age for being locked up!
I was standing on the bridge one afternoon when a little girl of about five came up and said `You stand there all day, every day selling jewellery. I said yes and she asked `Who minds your little sister?. She didn't say who minds your little brother. She sensed that the females were those most in need of protection. The comments put two things in mind - one that she was fearful for the women in her clan and that she thought I was one of her own people, a Traveller.
In recession Ireland, the gap between ethnic minority and the poor was not so glaringly obvious as today's screaming contrast between the zero zero brigade and those whose accommodation is a cardboard box. But it is almost always women who are most in need of protection. Women, at a time when there is no recession, are the face of oppression in Ireland.
You might well wonder where today's Ireland leaves the ideals proclaimed in 1916 to cherish all the children of the nation equally, regardless of their gender.
We are a very strong people and this particular period of republican engagement is about the challenge to turn events of earlier chapters and decades into victory. We are accustomed to the language of struggle, suffering, death and more defeat and our tone is often one of tragedy and pain. Our songs are sad and our stories sometimes are of bitter strife. This is hardly surprising given the duration and intensity of our struggle.
But the tone of tragedy has extended to a kind of silence. Republicans have absorbed a culture of silence and anonymity. Say and sign nothing has become our motto; an ethos emergent from an inadequate Treaties and from the experience of aggression in interrogation centres.
Silence and anonymity were strategies of struggle and vehicles of vision that allowed us to survive and overcome adversity and deliver the goods. But if republicanism has absorbed a culture of silence and anonymity, Irish women have practically absorbed a culture of invisibility.
Don't confuse your republican loyalties and postpone the issue of women's equality further. The story of republicanism is a revolutionary one, not simply the story of uniting a country. Now is the time to harvest our past and to turn it into victory.
The commitment as outlined in the Proclamation to equality regardless of gender has not been addressed in a serious way. If republicans can't address this core principle of republicanism, we will never secure justice for the person in the cardboard box.
Change is required in order to meet this responsibility.''
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