Hope in the face of despair

The year 1974 was a bad one for Irishwomen. It was four years since the short-lived Irish Women's Liberation Movement had jolted Irish conformity and grabbed headlines about the poor and unequal status of women, and two years since the dedicated women of the AIM group had begun campaigning for family law changes.

What had we to show for months of organising, public meetings, fund-raising, signatures and resolutions, visits to Leinster House, media campaigns? Nothing, with the single honourable exception of Thekla Beere's Report of the First Commission on the Status of Women. It was a charter of wonders and rights, just waiting for a political priority. For women in 1974 this was a vague aspiration.

At that time, women faced insoluble problems when a marriage broke down. A deserted wife had to wait six months before qualifying for an allowance and had to prove that she had tried to trace her husband. The family home was often sold over her head without her knowledge, and she had no statutory entitlement to maintenance from her husband. Even the children's allowance was vested in him.

In incidences of family violence, there were no barring or protection orders, assault cases were heard in open court, with the alleged injuries exhibited to the court; the husband, not the wife, may have had a solicitor, and all details were duly published in the next day's newspapers. The result was usually a fine or a suspended sentence, which left the family intact, and so often led to further brutality for a wife who no longer had confidence in the courts.

Irish Women's Aid was born out of desperation in summer 1974. Wife battering had become a crushing responsibility for me because of my work with the Aim Group and as a freelance journalist. Hundreds of sad, grim letters rolled in: desperate women prepared to relate lives of fear and suffering to a stranger. The texts always told a story of helplessness in the face of horrendous abuse. Wife beating was, like so many other Irish social problems in the past, either denied or exported.

For me, two events brought matters to a head. Firstly, a phone call from a Mount Argus priest seeking help with accommodation for a mother and six small children illustrated just how firmly doors were shut 26 years ago. The mother was hospitalised, having been thrown down the stairs by her drunken husband, and the children were divided among neighbours. Though the mother was being discharged, it was not safe to return to the family home, and they wanted and needed to be together.

This was what made accommodation so difficult to get. None of the 10 residential hostels I phoned would take the entire family - some could take the children, or the baby, others the mother alone. To separate this family would only compound the abuse they had already suffered. Just as my husband Brian and I felt we had drawn a blank on hostel space, and had decided to book them into the Montrose Hotel, a message came that accommodation was available in a convent in Dun Laoghaire, and there they stayed safely for the next three weeks.

Secondly, shortly after this, I watched a BBC Panorama documentary, called Scream Softly or the Neighbours will Hear, on Erin Pizzey and her work in the Chiswick Women's Aid Centre, and heard two Irish mothers speak of the lack of protection from their violent Irish husbands. England, they said, was the only option available for women like themselves and their children.

My letter commenting on the programme, written the same evening, was published in The Irish Times of March 1st, 1974. The overwhelming response I received, from lay people and professionals alike, confirmed a public awareness of the reality of wife beating here and that a sufficient number of people wanted to do something about it. Next came meetings of interested people in Buswells Hotel, after which the requisite committee was formed, including Mary Banotti, Jane Tottenham, Muirinn Wilson, Susan Donnelly, Cecily Golden, Mary Gormley, Sasha Kenny, David Murphy and my husband Brian. A visit to Chiswick Hostel followed, and there we realised the scale of the task ahead.

For most social causes 26 years ago, fund-raising was a slow, tedious graft of organising functions, and begging from friends and acquaintances. Needless to say a social cause, which involved (as was perceived) breaking up family life, was not a popular one. In those days few wished to open the Pandora's box of the Irish family, an institution honourably recognised in our Constitution but effectively forsaken by the laws and institutions of the State.

To help us get established, Erin Pizzey came to Dublin in May 1974 and appeared on the Late Late Show. In those days she was a very large and formidable woman, in long, brightly coloured clothes; she was extremely self-confident and had an infectious sense of humour. She had put the problem of wife-beating firmly on the UK agenda, for others to follow. On the needs of battered wives she was unequivocal and took no hostages. She was a skilled communicator, and the public responded generously to her appearance with offers of money, clothes, furniture and other kinds of help.

Then I got a call from a businessman called Joe McMenamin, offering us a big house in Harcourt Street, and we thought our difficulties were all over. Unbelievably there were no strings attached to the house, which was, for those who remember the old streetscape, beside the Four Provinces ballroom and opposite the old railway station. The fact that it was old, shabby, cold and drafty, did not deter us. It was central, near a Garda station and could be made secure for families.

For people who wanted to help, the house became a focus of intense activity. Frank Crummey got a truck and collected old furniture, Nora Owen arrived with a bucket and scrubbing brush to clean the floors, Dr Paul McQuaid offered to work with the children, as did the late actor John Molloy. And Women's Aid committee members metamorphosed into everything else, from cooks to child carers.

Even before repair work was complete, families moved in. I am not sure quite how we escaped prosecution, because we broke every rule in the planning and safety rule book. Within weeks there were 50 women and children, taking refuge from serious violence. Because one very angry husband smashed his way in to the house, demanding to see his wife and traumatised everyone, members of the committee had to take turns sleeping in as we could not afford paid staff.

Eventually a house mother, Barbara Horgan, was recruited; her pay £100 a month. Like us, she had no experience in social care or organisation; we were all amateurs doing our limited best. But against an army of 40 small children, (our family average was five), many of them disturbed, the boys wild and aggressive, things often got out of hand. From boredom on one occasion, they dug a hole through the wall into the nurses' home next door, and on another used jars of baby food as missiles, to paint the back wall pureed carrot.

Overall, we had simple expectations: firstly to give protection to women and children, and to win official acceptance of the need for refuges. But other synergies happened: attitudes of welfare officers and of the courts to beaten women were put under scrutiny; bullying men realised power was shifting from them, and victims of domestic violence outside Dublin began speaking out.

A husbands' support group was set up by Brian Fennell and Chris Crowley of Whitefriar Street to help the men. But it was short-lived, because the men's sense of dominance and control over their wives proved unchallengeable. On two occasions husbands phoned us instructing us to confiscate their wives' contraceptive pills while they were with us!

Many of the women did not return to their husbands, helped by the generosity of men such as Tony Byrne and Jack Curran, who made small, second-stage homes available to Women's Aid, and enabled them to get their lives in order.

I commend those who down the years have kept the commitment to Women's Aid alive. But in a transformed society for Irish women, where rights have been secured to maintenance payments, contraception, legal aid, housing, education, work, re-training and divorce, we have to ask ourselves why are refuges still essential?

Male attitudes have changed. Society condemns abusive men, and our courts punish them, and women with children can walk away from violence. Yet women are still being killed and injured by husbands and partners. What hope is there that in another 25 years from now that this will have changed?

Women's Aid celebrates the anniversary of its foundation with a meeting at Dublin Castle tomorrow. The guest speaker is President Mary McAleese