The times we lived in

Jail birds Published on June 2nd, 1967 Photo by Gordon Standing

THE SIGN, you might think, says it all. The Swinging Sixties are nearly over, yet Irish women are still wearing placards on their backs to the effect that they know their place in the pecking order – and it isn’t at the top. But take a closer look.

The woman on the extreme right has the confidence of an aristocrat at a garden party, complete with hat, handbag and leather gloves.

The woman wearing the sign, meanwhile, is straight out of a 1960s fashion shoot: her check immaculate, her waist nipped, her heels impressively high for a woman on a National Farmers’ Association protest march. These are top-notch ladies. No wonder the newspaper sellers are gawking.

The main report explains that 2,000 women turned up in Merrion Square to protest at the incarceration of more than 40 farmers in Portlaoise and Limerick jails “for refusing to pay fines and sign bonds arising out of an NFA road blockade”. They have come specifically to plead with the taoiseach, Jack Lynch, to release their husbands and sons; but also to register a more general protest at “the sad state” of provincial Ireland.

Alongside that suitably sober account is a colour story by Mary Maher – one of the leading feminist voices in Ireland at the time – which captures the mercurial mood of the day. Maher describes how, detained by a line of gardaí determined to keep them away from the Dáil, the women vented their frustration on a pale green Ford Consul, which had innocently driven into the midst of the fray.

A “stout grey-haired woman” sat on the car’s bonnet, to the delight of the protesters, who called out, “Good woman, Mrs Baxter!” and explained that two members of the Baxter family were in jail.

The driver of the car was not amused. She drove off in tears, Maher concludes, “her car now plastered with NFA stickers. The child in the back seat continued to sleep through it all.”

The protesting women eventually got to meet the taoiseach. But although three of the men were released on the following day, the rest of the farmers spent five weeks in jail. They were finally freed on June 12th.

Arminta Wallace

[ irishtimes.com/archive ]