Journalism: Mary Holland's incisive writing reveals how we have changed - and how much remains the same.
This is a truly wonderful collection. Sixty of Mary Holland's best Irish Times columns; thoughtful, provocative and elegant. Spanning three decades, they provide a fascinating insight into the development of the Northern Ireland peace process, and into the development of Irish society over that time. The themes covered are many and diverse, ranging from religion, racism and neutrality to poetry, childcare and taxation.
Holland's incisive commentary on each theme provoked two conflicting reactions as I read. The first, how much Irish society has changed over the years. The earlier columns, from the mid-1980s, are dominated by the stark tragedies of bombings and brutality in the North; and by the more everyday tragedies of unemployment and emigration down South. These things once dominated our lives.
Now, it is easy to forget how unthinkable it was then that Ireland could ever be peaceful or prosperous.
But the book also inspires a second reaction - how much has not changed. The very first column, on the 1985 Eileen Flynn case, deals with Catholic Church control over education. Holland pointed out simply how wrong it was that teachers should be "more likely to be employed and promoted because they are good Catholics rather than for any talent they may have for educating children". As another journalist, Mary Raftery, has recently noted in this newspaper, to this day the Catholic Church retains immense power in the running of schools and the hiring and firing of teachers.
The columns also trace the slow rate of positive change for women over the decades. Writing about the Kilkenny incest case in 1993, Mary Holland quoted poet Mary Dorcey's assertion that "we are fated to mark out our progress in terms of cases - the X case, the Kerry Babies case, now the Kilkenny case". Unfortunately this still remains true, and there have been more cases since.
However, during all this time, Mary Holland played a vital role. She influenced public reaction to individual cases and helped to bring about social progress, through her writing, her speeches and her input into so many critical debates.
Writing in 1990 about the need to change the law to allow information on abortion, for example, she expressed anger that "student leaders at Trinity and elsewhere" were being taken to court for publishing this information. I was one of those students, and I remember Mary's calm and powerful advocacy on our behalf with immense gratitude. That was at a time, before the X case, when few journalists or politicians would publicly admit support for such an unpopular cause. Allies such as Mary were rare and remarkable.
Despite the positive changes on information law, I know she regretted the lack of progress more generally on reproductive rights. In 1995 she wrote "It would be an enormous relief if some younger woman or women were to start writing about the issue of abortion from personal experience and leave me to the relatively easy task of analysing the peace process. Please". Another change yet to come.
The strongest theme emerging from this collection, of course, is the welcome progress of peace in the North. Her columns chart its slow spread, recording her sorrow over the many setbacks, and reminding us of tragic atrocities like Enniskillen, Warrington, Omagh.
Over many years she wrote honestly about this part of Irish life where hypocrisy and double-speak can be so prevalent, and for this she often received hate mail from readers on both sides of the sectarian divide. Yet she still believed fervently that one day we will "create a society where no teenager places his or her hopes for the future in making or carrying a bomb".
In her introduction to the collection, Mary Maher quotes from her favourite column, the last in the book. It is dated May, 2002, a tribute to Roy Keane, to the wonder of individual genius and to "great performances by those whom we rightly call stars because they shed light upon our lives for years to come and in ways that we cannot fully comprehend".
Unlike Mary Maher but like Mary Holland, I took Roy's side in the debate, and found her vivid description of the star quality that he and other great performers possess particularly moving.
This column is a strangely fitting way to end such a powerful collection. Notwithstanding her untimely death just a few months ago, its publication means that Mary Holland's voice has not been silenced.
How Far We Have Travelled: The Voice of Mary Holland, Edited by Mary Maher, Town House, 257pp. €12.99