An Eye on Ireland: A Journey Through Social Change by Justine McCarthy - Women at the forefront of a revolution

Journalist Justine McCarthy was on the Aer Lingus jet that was carrying the fugitive Eamon Casey to New York after his shocking and peremptory resignation as Catholic bishop of Galway in May 1992, but the cabin crew denied that he was on board and refused to let her approach him.

Next day, while Bishop Casey was bound for prolonged exile in Chile, McCarthy was ensconced in the kitchen of his inamorata, Annie Murphy, in Ridgefield, Connecticut, filing jaw-dropping revelations from Annie and from her son, Peter Eamonn, fathered by Casey, who was born in the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin 17 years earlier.

Within 10 months of filing that report, McCarthy was in the “dingy flat” of the young woman who became known as “the Kilkenny incest victim” only weeks after a Mayo child, 15-year-old Kelly Fitzgerald, died following what minister for justice Máire Geoghegan-Quinn called “the most horrific abuse case in the history of the State”.

Kellie Fitzgerald, Annie Murphy and the anonymous Kilkenny woman – a mother at 15 after being raped repeatedly by her father from the age of 10 – are central to some of the more than 70 articles from McCarthy’s decades of award-winning frontline journalism for Irish newspapers that are reprinted in full in this book.

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“The most transformative stories of the times were about women and girls,” McCarthy writes in her 33-page introduction. “On and on it went,” she adds, “girls and women telling their stories of the injustices, cruelties, abuses and violence perpetrated against them until the momentum reached a point of no return. Women’s stories dragged Ireland kicking and screaming into a better future.”

Beginning with two articles on the election of Mary Robinson as president of Ireland in 1990, the collection compellingly covers the three decades of social revolution that followed.

Two personal pieces – on the fate of the older sister that McCarthy idolised and on their grandparents’ War of Independence experiences – are as moving and as era-defining as any in the book.

The 1890s Skibbereen Eagle warning that it had its “eye on Russia” is still remembered. This collection, from another west Cork journalist, deserves similar longevity.