Humour, anger and compassion — all there on the page
At the corner of Westmoreland Street and Aston Quay, I stopped on my way to work and stared as Nell McCafferty crossed the road. I could guess where she was heading, notebook in the pocket of her duffle coat. She was on her way towards the Four Courts.
This was long before I had any intention, or prospect, of getting into journalism. I was a fan.
It was the equivalent of watching Roy Keane inserting his shin guards, of watching Rory Gallagher tuning up.
Nell’s Irish Times column, ‘In the Eyes of the Law’, was magic. She simply chose a courtroom — one dealing with the everyday work of the courts, not the big, headline cases — and she sat down, opened her notebook and went to work.
By calmly, accurately recording what was said, and laying it out plain and simple on the page — a ferocious thing to do — she opened up the courts to show us the vanity and pomp of the judges, the fear and bravado of the defendants, the anguish of parents accompanying young ones facing a jail sentence.
Nell’s work showed us how the law worked, and everyone knew it had to change. And back then, she had barely begun.
Years later, we were both in Tralee, covering the Kerry Babies Tribunal. That tragedy brought forth two great, sustained works of journalism — Deirdre Purcell’s unmissable weekly reports in the Sunday Tribune, and Nell’s book
on the case, A Woman to Blame. The book not only made the feminist case, it was also a damning analysis of the police view of the forensic evidence. Humour, anger and compassion — it was all there on the page. And all based on deadly accurate reporting.