[For an excellent overview of abortion law in
What is so interesting about all of this is that
the situation for women has been changing incredibly slowly though this process
of having referenda - which have themselves been fuelled by cases which,we in
the pro-abortion and pro-choice movement have been saying all along: "These
are exactly the kinds of cases that will come about because the law and the
Constitution are so ambiguous…so unclear." The reason why it is so
unclear basically is because the Amendment we inserted in the Constitution
– I say "we"; I mean the Irish electorate inserted into the
Constitution in 1983 - technically gave an equal right to life to the woman and
the fetus, or, as we call it, "the mother and the baby." But, you
know, a woman who is carrying a fetus may not necessarily be a mother; she may
be because she may have other children but she’s not necessarily, at that
stage, a mother. And of course, those rights will conflict. There will be
conflicting rights there. So it’s not possible always for rational
judgements to be made under those circumstances. And it’s not possible
for the law to be clear under those circumstances.
My own view is that abortion should be removed from legislative frameworks,
that there is no need to legislate for abortion. It certainly has no place
whatsoever in a Constitution. The only reason it’s in the Constitution is
because it became such a huge position issue in this country. I think that
abortion should be dealt with as any other issue in relation to women’s
reproductive health. We don’t have legislation for every aspect of our
health. For example, we have general parameters which are laid down which
entitle us to appropriate health care, given, in our culture, certain income
levels, and so forth, because we have a much more social-welfare oriented
system. And I think that abortion, and indeed contraception and any other
reproductive health needs that women may have can be dealt with within those
general health care parameters. There is no need, logically, to single out
abortion; there is no need to single out contraception either. And I do believe
that in the fullness of time — maybe not in 5 years in Ireland, but over
the next 10 years or so – all of those laws are going to become redundant
anyway when the Morning After pill, for example, is going to become much safer
and also much more widely available and accessible to women. So I think
abortion will disappear.
The reason why abortion, of course, has been such an issue in this country
— less so now, I think, but why it was in the ‘80s and the
‘90s - really has to do with that terrible grinding process of a society,
a culture, emerging from a very long almost gestation period, if we can use
that metaphor, where we were poor, emerging from a period of colonization,
extremely defensive, not turning outward to the world. We were very inward
looking for reasons which are absolutely comprehensible and which we
don’t have to criticize now. That was the way it was historically. But
that process of beginning to look outwards is actually a very painful one as we
know in personal terms when we go through a process of healing ourselves and
learning how to deal anew with the world. In a way that happens with cultures
and societies as well. I think the period of upheaval that we experienced in
Ireland from the late 1950s with the period of industrial expansion, moving
through the 1960s when we were beginning to feel ourselves as economically
independent and beginning to have an independent identity again as a nation and
a culture, beginning to become involved with Europe, leap-frogging over
Britain, our ancient colonizers and so on… All of that raised issues of
power and control in huge ways, and those issues of power and control were,
themselves, of course, were both part of the reason why the women’s
liberation movement emerged — not only here, but elsewhere —
but why here, for example, it went straight into the definition of Irishness.
What does it mean to be Irish? What it means to be Irish is to be beginning to
deal with a history which is very, very painful and not rocking the boat in any
other ways. Not pushing us too fast, too far. And dealing with a culture in
which, effectively, the control of women was fundamental to the economy and
fundamental to that notion of Irishness which was so bound up with Catholicism.
We could argue about this — and that’s a very broad generalization
— but it has a general kind of truth about it.
Of course, the Catholic Church was still mega-powerful here in the ‘60s
and ‘70s. I grew up through the days of that awful Catholic repression
and feeling I didn’t have a body; I didn’t have sexuality; I
didn’t know about contraception. I didn’t even know about
heterosex, never mind any other kind of sex, until I was about 17 or something.
I didn’t hear the word "lesbian" until I was 18. I sort of knew
about gay men. The notion that you could control your fertility — I had
absolutely no idea. And when I finally copped on, in my 20s, that you could get
the pill and trotted off to my GP and said, "You know, I have a very
irregular menstrual cycle and I think I need the pill," and he sort of
nodded and said, "Yes, yes, I’m sure you’re probably are
sexually active and this may not be making your menstrual cycle any more
regular. Would this be accurate?" and I’m saying, "Oh,
definitely, yes definitely," and getting the pill - that was very unusual.
I was a highly educated woman. I had my post-graduate qualifications at that
stage and I was as green as they come. Facing into marriage at that point,
thinking, "My God, I don’t want to get pregnant. I’ve got to
do something about this." And there was no structure.
So that very, very repressive situation that we experienced as women meant that
we knew and understood very, very little. And, when we started to protest, when
we stared to say, " Well, actually we do want the pill; we do want
contraception; we do want abortion; we do want to decide," that caused
huge turmoil and uproar - because it was about saying, "Actually, frankly,
we don’t give a damn what the Catholic Church says."
The Pope came to visit
But those years around abortion were very difficult and very painful years
because it was very much about an ultra conservative traditionalist view of
this country, this society, this culture. And, [the emergence of] a much more
modernizing — and, in many ways, much more radical and human rights oriented
kind of culture. And one in which women were very determined to be free.
There’s no doubt about that, whatever some people think about the
women’s movement, it has brought about a huge psychic shift for women
everywhere. Women are not free but women know that freedom is a human right.
MM: With the rise in the immigrant population
coming to
AS: There’s no doubt that the increase in immigrants to this country
— non indigenous people coming to this county — is changing a lot
of our perceptions and structures. I think the fact that immigrant women are
likely to have larger families than the norm now for native women in Ireland -
I don’t know what the rate is but at least twice that number of children
– it’s certainly making us reconsider meanings of family, diverse
meanings of family, which I think is very interesting and very timely.
It’s very important. There’s been a lot of re-configurations of
family and families in this country, partly through lesbian and gay families,
partly through women working full time or part time in the labor force, partly
through and therefore the drop in numbers of children, partly through the
breakup of communities and so on. And I think that different kinds of familial
formations literally, physically coming into the country is already raising a
lot of questions.
I don’t think that’s in the least bit problematic for feminists and
those active in the women’s movement because there has, of course, for a
long time been a recognition that women experience their fertility and have different
kinds of needs and desires and aspirations. And also different economic needs -
for women who come from agricultural economies, economies that have been
primarily agricultural or agrarian, relatively high numbers of children have
been considered of course extremely important in terms of economic
sustainability of the family structure - and also in terms of being cared for
in old age where there aren’t any social welfare structures and so on.
Family has, in so many instances - I’m thinking now of understandings
that we have from Black and Asian women, for example, in the UK from
African-American women in the States and Canada and ethnic minority women in
other countries - that family is construed by many women as a very positive
refuge, haven type structure. Family acts as a bulwark against the racism and
other forms of oppression and discrimination that they experience in their
lives.
And I think that my understanding and politics and practice of feminism has
always — well, not always, I have to be honest, but since the 1980s
— been aware of the different ways in which family is understood and
lived. And that therefore, the fact that you campaign for abortion, for
example, in this country, is not to say that you impose abortion on women everywhere
- but rather that there is an absolute recognition that that’s one need.
Another need, at the same time, is going to be family support structures. Is
going to be proper child care facilities for women. Is going to be the kind of
levels of social welfare payment that mean that women are not penalized for
having children. For the two poles are equally absurd: that women have to have
children and that women are penalized for having children. And they are both of
course connected. So what we are talking about is at either end of that scale
is women’s right to decide about their families. That’s
fundamentally what feminists are campaigning for and fighting for and
struggling for in one area of our activism. I do think that that is certainly
there in
But
I don’t see contradictions. I don’t see conflicts forthcoming. What
I do certainly see is that racism
has hugely, massively increased in this country. It’s not that previous
generations of Irish people, or even 10 years ago, that we weren’t
racist. It’s because we had, as the children’s stories say, no
string beans to practice on. Because it was very largely a white, homogenous
population, we simply did not encounter people of other ethnic groups, other
racialized groups, in this country. There was not a perception that immigrants
were coming to this country and creating different kinds of cultures and
"taking our jobs". So of course as soon as that started to happen,
and as soon there was any sense of materialist and cultural threat, that
racism, which is inherent in all white cultures, that racism emerged. It
emerges quite violently, virulently.
I don’t think it’s unexpected. I think it’s disgraceful. But
it is completely naïve to be surprised by it. What we do as white people is to
protect our interests, just as patriarchy — i.e. men — will
function to protect their interests. Just as heterosexist culture will strive
to protect its interests. Whenever the hegemonic dominant group is threatened
by what it perceives as the "other," it will move to protect. And how
does it move to protect itself? By vilifying the other.
So, of course, racialized groups, and also ethnic minority groups, for example,
Eastern European immigrants who come here, are subject to vilification,
discrimination. We’ve been doing some big research in my center on the
labor market experiences of refugees
and asylum seekers. And discrimination is experienced by both white
immigrant populations and black immigrant populations in this country. I think
it is very interesting and important that what’s happening here is that
there’s a perception of a threat. So, Romanians are othered; the Roma are
totally othered; Nigerians are completely racialized and very othered on that
basis. I’m not saying it works identically. But there is extreme
discrimination [for each group].
A lot of that racism is actually quite hidden because we choose as white people
and as a society not to acknowledge it. It’s often dealt with, I think,
poorly, incompletely, and in a somewhat distorted way by the media. The
experiences of people who come to this country in search of a decent life are
absolutely appalling. And they are produced by the kinds of structures and
systems that we have in place to make sure that we continue to be OK.
And I think that there’s a new factor that plays into that in this
country. Over the past 10 years, with an economic prosperity - which is itself
now under threat because of a world shift - we have undoubtedly become much
less communitarian, much more materalistic, much greedier and much more
selfish. That, again, I don’t wish particularly to sound judgmental, but
these are the features of highly consumer-driven and commodity-driven societies
in the contemporary world. And that’s happened in
So, while the racism
that exists in this country will often look the same as racism elsewhere, as is
always the case, there are somewhat different kinds of strands that go to
create that here in this country. We have to be attentive to our own particular
strands and deal with those really very carefully. And I think that the
women’s liberation movement and all social movements in this country have
an absolute responsibility to integrate anti-racism into our ways of working
and thinking, into our politics. I think that our politics have to be much more
transectral, that we have to be very much more coalitional. It’s not
about forming coalitions; it’s actually genuinely integrating anti-racist
as well as anti-poverty as well as anti-homophobic thinking into the kind of
politics that we do, whatever our particular social movement or radical base
is. And that’s certainly one of the things that we try to do in the
center [WERRC]
I’m involved in at UCD. Because I think that you cannot really just take
one issue at a time. There is a movement here against racism, quite a sizeable
movement against racism, but I think we all have to integrate that into other
aspects of our politics.
Just on that point by the way, I think that our social movements and radical
politics are actually quite sizeable here. People sometimes say, "Oh, you
know there were only 900 people, or 700 people, or 1,500 people out on that
anti-racist march or on anti-war march or feminist march." And I’m
saying, "Yeah, but this is a population of 4 million." Actually,
proportionately, our numbers hold up very well. So activism is quite healthy,
surprisingly in this country, despite the fact that we live nearer to supreme
depoliticization.
I do think that Ireland is in thrall to the European Union and to the USA,
through our cozying up to the President of the United States of America, George
W. Bush and his war mongering. And that we need to be very much more clear
sighted about these things, and to say that those locations that we have in the
world are actually imperialist positions. They do produce racism. They are
designed to produce inequality. So we can’t have a rhetoric as we do in
this country of having great equality legislation while at the same time
remaining embedded in these locations. There’s a big contradiction.
I think the small countries can be quite helpful, because the scale is so
small, in showing up the way things happen, the kinds of contradictory strands
there are. I think it’s often useful for us to stand back and not say
not, "Oh, how great little Ireland is," but to say, "Oh, how interesting
it is to see the ways in which certain global trends are really very visible
here." And to look at what they produce, to look at the injustices, to
look at the experiences, to look at the trouble that we’re shoring up for
ourselves in this current global climate. To look at that trouble because we
can often see it here quite starkly. That clash between incoming populations
and the indigenous population is quite visible here, and there is much that we
can both learn from that and demonstrate to others. I find it quite fascinating
at the moment. The fact that I intellectually find it fascinating, of course,
that’s no help to people whose lives are absolute hell.
MM: Let’s talk about women’s community work. It’s obviously
very valuable work, so why do you think it’s undervalued by society?
AS: Community, grass-roots, bottom-up… I like the term
"grass-roots." I think "community" is often used as a term
to contain grass-roots, bottom-up activism, which threatens to completely
destabilize, if not absolutely over-throw, the status quo.
"Community" keeps it sort of containable and manageable and you can
kind of "organize communities" and so on. But the term that we use
here is "community activism." It’s hugely important because it
is about people saying, "This is my life, and these are the things in my
life that are really not right, and I shouldn’t have to live my life like
this. My children shouldn’t have to live like this. My family or my whole
neighborhood shouldn’t have to live like this. And, I believe that I have
not only the right but the capacity to do something about it and to take on
structures and systems that control and disempower people."
I think that it would be very difficult to over-estimate the importance and the
power of grass-roots activism of that kind. But for that very reason, it tends
to be controlled, contained, and managed in ways that are highly effective. And
the first way in which it is controlled, and managed, and contained is by
calling it "community activism." That way, it’s just something
that happens in a locality; it doesn’t have any national significance;
it’s just people wanting better social infrastructure, better education,
better healthcare, better everything, but we’ll call it
"community" so it’s not going to get too far out of hand. The
second way in which it’s controlled and contained is by being constantly
under-resourced and under-funded. And, I suppose the third way - they’re
all part of the same strategy - is by more or less ignoring it. By pretending
it’s not happening. So that Government ministries, departments, will
often raise their hands and say, "We didn’t know this was going
on."
As we know, not just in this country but everywhere, real grass-roots community
movements for change in particular localities tend to be led by women. They are
about women saying, "We’ve really had enough. We don’t like
this. We’re not putting up with it anymore. We’re going to try to
take matters into our own hands. And we are going to make changes. And you may
think that these are small changes, but incrementally, they’re going to
add up to a great deal."
I actually think that grass-roots activism in this country has been massively
important in enabling people to live lives which they perceive as having more
value, more meaning, and which are materially, culturally, politically, and
economically, and in every way, more satisfying. And also been important in
pushing back the controlling bureaucracies that we live under, even in our
so-called democratic societies. But that’s always a tug of war.
There’s always a kind of balancing thing going on. And it’s very
difficult to say that community activists win out all the time because, of
course, that’s absolutely not the case. But, let me put it this way:
without community activism, people’s lives would be much diminished. They
would be much less rich. And they would be materially more impoverished.
The grass-roots activism that I’ve had most contact with and been most
involved in is women’s education, feminist education specifically. Because
I am an educator - I may be an academic but I’m really an educator. So
there has been very strong commitment to saying, "Well, if I have been
privileged to have the education that I’ve had and to raise questions
about it and critique it, that privilege should be equally available to all
women." So that’s always meant working with groups in neighborhoods,
in local communities, to try to develop the kinds of structures that enable
them to decide what it is they want and need to know, and why they want and
need to know it. I ways tend to say that at the beginning of my classes:
"Look, what are we here for? What is that that you feel you need to know?
Why do you want to know these things? And how do you think you can best learn
them?" And then, the fourth thing is equally important: "What are you
going to do with that knowledge then? Are you just going to leave it in a
drawer or are you going to get out there and do something with it?" And,
of course, people say, "But, gee, how can we know what it is we need to
know until we know something?" And you say, "Well the fact that
you’re here means that you do know that already."
I think that developing the kinds of skills and capacities that you
acquire through education has been absolutely central to the development of
women’s community activism in this country. All of the women that I know
who define themselves as community activists will say that. It’s been a
very, very, powerful movement here. There is an absolute hunger for, not just
received knowledge, but for making useful knowledge and for capacity- building.
That of course is both fed by activism and feeds right back into it. It is in
its own right a very important form of activism.
I was talking to a young woman just yesterday who has been doing a course in
women’s studies. She lives in an area which would be seen as economically
deprived and disadvantaged - certainly, educationally, highly disadvantaged.
There’s no kind of third level institution within anything like shouting
distance. During the program, she herself says that she has become very much
more aware of the ways in which her life and that of her family are really
unacceptable and intolerable. And that many other people in this country are
not living like that. And that she feels entitled for herself, and particularly
for her family and those around her, to agitate for improvements, both in a
general way and also in a very specific way. She’s done very, very
practical things.
I think for everybody everywhere, in becoming politically active, there will so
often be a personal motive as well as a more general one. People will come
together and say: "The accommodation I am living in appalling and now
I’m noticing that everybody’s accommodation is appalling except the
people who live 5 miles down the road who are surrounded by lovely trees and
parkland and gardens and 6 bedrooms and 10 bathrooms and goodness only knows
whatnot. And we have to do something about it. And there is no appropriate
child care for our children. And our healthcare service, the hospital is miles
away," and so on.
So, it starts in that very personal, immediate experiential way, and it does
hugely affect community structures, local structures. But there is also a
reverberation and a knock-on effect from community to community to community
which, effectively, means that there is a change across a very broad spectrum.
It will, of course, be halted. There will be obstacles. There will be
resistance. And that’s that conflict, tug-of-war-thing that goes on all
the time. Nonetheless, I mean, when I analyze what has happened here over the
past 20 years, I see what women have been doing at local level: It really is
quite remarkable. Many of those women who are community leaders and community
activists are very strong, very powerful people, who choose, often to remain
activists within a local area but who do have an important national
reverberation or resonance. And who are effectively I suppose inspiring models.
I don’t like the term "role model" but who are an inspiration
to other women.
I think one of the most important things we can do is to always tell ourselves
the stories of these women - it’s the dissemination of community
activism. And the story of it is really important. Because it’s in local
communities, often you don’t know about it somewhere else. So telling
those stories, that’s so important; that’s so empowering. Sometimes
it’s quite difficult to analyze that because I’m thinking of
personal and particular examples. But I do know that through education, I can
see this happening. I know the struggle. I know the difficulty. I know the
difficulty from our end in the University — in trying to work with local
women’s groups (that’s not an effort; the effort is to get the
funding to get the resources, to get the recognition). But women who started
out doing perhaps a very basic course of some kind are now doing Master’s
of Women’s Studies. I think this is one of the great ironies, that
they’re doing "Master’s" in Women’s Studies. Those
women are hugely important and powerful in their communities and in some ways I
think those local initiatives have actually remained much more radical than
have the more national kinds of feminist politics. That’s why I really
like being fortunate and priveleged enough to be able to work with groups where
there is a very radical analysis and understanding of power relations.
It’s always what it boils down to. Those women are saying "You have
too much power. Move over."
MM: That leads me to a question about power. We had Mary
Robinson elected President in 1990 and now we have a second woman
President. We have these very strong women working at community level, lots of
very strong women activists throughout the country. Why aren’t there more
women in the government?
Why aren’t we getting to that level of power where you can actually enact
laws that will change things?
AS: It’s not absolutely clear, of course, that more women in power means
better laws for everybody. The jury’s out on that. But, I don’t
think that that’s the argument. I think that the argument is that women
should have equal representation in our democratic structures, wherever they
are. Whether women are going to be better than men or not is beside the point.
They should have equal representation: flat 50/50. None of this 40/60 nonsense.
And we need to take special measures to ensure that women do have that
representation. It involves several things. It involves first of all, the
recognition on the part men, who occupy 80% of the representational positions,
that they are not going to do that any longer. That some of them, at least 30%
of them, are going to have to disappear. Now which 30% are going to have to
disappear is a bit difficult because they don’t want to. So that’s
sort of problem number one, if you like. And it requires very firm governance;
it requires real leadership because it will be men telling other men. You never
tell yourself that you have to move over, not if you’re a man you
don’t anyway. It’s men telling men that, "Some of us are going
to become obsolete, redundant." I think that many of us would have thought
this a long time ago but it’s got to become official. So that’s a
huge challenge.
The other dimension of it, I think, is the kinds of structures that women are
in, living their lives. And of course there are massive differences across
generations, across different locations (urban, rural), across social class,
across ethnic distinctions, and so on and so forth. But nonetheless, women are
much more likely to be less economically independent than men are, more likely
to be entirely responsible for familial obligations of all kinds, and more
likely to be much more caring in terms of the work they do in their
neighborhoods and communities - to be much more involved there. We must never
underestimate the work that women do — women who don’t define
themselves as activists but who are actually keeping communities going and
keeping them together — which I think IS activism very much.
But, all of that work is hugely considerable and it doesn’t knit easily,
it doesn’t meld with public representational practices, which are highly
time consuming, and which are very masculinist in their value systems. Women
think, "Oh, God, how on earth could I possibly survive in that system
that’s really appalling? I’d be swallowed up in 2 seconds, even if
there were 50% of us. Why would I want to lose myself, to be drowned, to waste
my time among that shower of semi-corrupt shysters?" That’s actually
what a lot of women think politicians are, and we don’t often have the
power to vote otherwise - although there is that famous graffiti that you see
around Dublin at election time: "Don’t Vote, It Only Encourages
Them." Which I love. But nonetheless we still go out encouraging them. So
women have a very realistic appraisal and evaluation of public politics and
say, on the one hand, "Well actually I think I can probably do more where
I am." That would be particularly true of community leaders and activists.
"If I go in there, I’m going to get completely wasted by it."
And, on the other hand, saying: "I don’t like that value
system." So you have a kind of chicken and egg situation. Men won’t
move over. A lot of the time women feel that that is not the kind of world they
want to inhabit. And there is also the material level, then, of their not being
able to access that world, even if they want to do so because they don’t
have the economic independence but also the men are there occupying all the
seats.
So it is a big conundrum. It is not easy to see how this is to be resolved. It
is extremely important that our public representational systems become much
more diverse; that they become gender-equal; that they also have a much more
diverse ethnic mix; that they be more generationally open. We have very, very
few young people in politics, and we have very few older people in
politics. You never see anybody, really, over the age of 65 much in public
politics. Why not? These people have a lot of wisdom and experience. Maybe I
say this because I’m getting older and I think maybe when I’m 65
I’ll go up for election for something! But, I think we have this very
narrow definition and view and stereotype pretty well everywhere of what a
politician is: he is more or less in his 40s, and in our white-dominant
society, he’s definitely white, and he’s relatively well educated,
etc. And he has got a wife or partner at home who is ironing his shirts and
raising his children and keeping all the worries off his really important
agenda table where he’d dealing with the world, not very adequately as we
see because it’s a total mess.
So there are all sorts of reasons why we need women in the political system.
But am I the person to say to another woman: "You’re the one to go
in there, girl" ? You know, I couldn’t do it myself. We need more
women, but I don’t want to do it, so who’s going to put her hand up
and say, "I’ll go first" ? I actually have great admiration for
a lot of our women politicians. Not all of them, but there have been quite a
lot of them over the years who have actually got in there and really tried to
push the boat out. And it’s not easy. It really isn’t. They often
get critiqued by women and by feminists for not doing enough. You can’t
do very much if you’re only 12%. You really can’t. And speaking out
as a "feminist" is almost instant death in term of re-election or
ministerial power or anything like that.
But, just to come back briefly to the question of do more women make a
difference. They say that a critical mass of women is achieved when
you’ve got about 30%-40% of women represented in Parliament, for example,
and that does make an appreciable difference. I’m not absolutely sure. I don’t
think that women are somehow inherently or essentially "better" than
men. I’m very well aware that power is very difficult to resist, you
know. Power is a huge temptation. If you have some power, I think you would
have to be this 150% saint not to let it alter you in some way. I think it is
really, really hard to remain absolutely true to your principles. I think there
are people who can do it but I think it is really difficult. And I think any of
us who have even the little bit of power that we have (and in some ways I have
actually quite a lot because of the privileges of my birth), we’re very
reluctant to give it up. We like to tell ourselves that we use it for the good
of others but using it for the good of others doesn’t extend to saying,
"Well, I’m now going to back off so you can step into my
shoes." Actually, even telling someone to step into your shoes is really
arrogant, isn’t it? They have their own shoes.
So, I don’t think that it’s easy to solve problems of power. I
don’t think that it’s easy to dissolve the kinds of power systems
that we have. I don’t think a solution to that is theorizing power in
such a way that says, "Well, power is very dispersed, and therefore we
have to stop have to stop looking at these mega-systems of power." Excuse
me, power may be dispersed, but it’s also there in mega-systems. George
W. Bush is a mega-power system. The U.S.A. is a mega, huge power system. White,
heterosexist, imperialist patriarchy is a mega-world system. That’s not
dispersal; that’s very, very clear. I can point pretty exactly in this
country to the major levers of power. I’ll give you a list. That’s
not dispersal. Power is there. Tackling it is really hard; it takes a long
time. You don’t actually, contrary to the myth, need a huge number of people
to do that. You need people everywhere — locally, nationally, at home,
out in the workplace, on the scene — you need people everywhere who are
going to ask questions and are going to critique and going to contest. And
those people need to have clear minds and to have incredibly good health and
stamina. That’s for sure. To have the hide of a rhinoceros, never to mind
what anyone says to you about what you’re doing. Or if you don’t
have the hide of a rhinoceros, to have several shoulders that you can cry on on
a regular basis and lots of Kleenex and hankies. And you need to have a sense
of confidence in yourself which will come from a social status which you derive
through your social class location and/or through education and/or through some
kind of sense of your right to be here in this world.
The majority of the people in this world are not born with that, but it can be
acquired through education, which is why health and education are absolutely
key. They will enable people to be economically more independent and to be
politically more autonomous and to be better placed to develop a critique.
Everybody will not do that but, as I say, you only need 5% of the population.
You need 5% of the population that’s going to actively standing up there
saying, "This is wrong. People are being maltreated. People are being
treated like dirt. People are being disregarded." That’s all you
need. It’s not true to think that an entire population has to be
mobilized. It’s great when hundreds of thousands of people get out on the
streets. It’s equally fantastic when 5 women in a locality say,
"There’s something wrong here. We’re gonna change it." As
they have done in Ballymun in Dublin where they’re saying,
"We’re going to regenerate this whole area. We’re going to get
these buildings knocked down. We’re gonna set up a Women’s
Center." Or in St. Michael’s Estate where women have taken on the
whole issue of men’s violence against women.
The whole community is now working on that issue. And they’re knocking
down their dreadful high-rise. There is a part of an anarchist in me that
actually likes to see women out there knocking things down - because actually,
that’s how we’re going to build a better world. You can’t
build it on top of the high rises that are there; you have to knock down
what’s there. And that’s pretty painful because where do you be,
how do you live, while the things are being knocked down? With difficulty is
the answer. You sort of hope that it will be better for your children. Although
human beings are human beings so there will probably be a need for another
social movement in 20 years time.
MM: We’ve talked about Ailbhe the activist and Ailbhe the academic. What
about Ailbhe the writer?
AS: I think of myself as an educator, an academic, a researcher, a theorist,
and — it’s taken me a long time to be able to say this — I do
think of myself now a bit as a writer. It is so difficult for women to say,
"I’m a creative person." It’s taken me a long time to be
able to arrive at the point where I can say: "Yes, I do think my political
work is hugely important to me and my intellectual work as a researcher and a
theorist is really important to me, but that I am not at all satisfied with
living with those different parts of me all cut off." So I think, in a
way, some of the writing I do is about trying to make sense of that part of me
that is impassioned about — certainly changing the world but that’s
an arrogant thing… But it’s about living in the world and how we
can all live our lives. So, sometimes it will be writing poetry or more kind of
lyrical, autobiographical pieces. A lot of it is about telling stories about
things that are part of my life and trying to think about change and my life
and other people’s lives in so far as I can observe them or know them in
some way.
At the moment, I’m writing a piece which is called "Loss Connections
of Time and Place," which is about time, which is about loss obviously,
which is about how you live the time of your life with the losses that you experience
in the place that you’re in - and why it is that you’re in that
place. I’m writing it through poems and autobiographical moments and
through a kind of a diary which describes what’s happening to me in my
life as an activist or as an academic and how these things come together.
It’s about my very personal life, my erotic life even, much to the horror
of those who would have any erotic involvement with me - it’s never safe!
As activist you’re very "out there" in the world and
you’re very impelled by the here and now, the immediate moment. As an
academic, you’re always trying to stand back. You stand back and think,
intellectualize, work out what’s going on. So I’m well used to
living in a kind of contradiction. I think the writing I do is about overcoming
that gap. It’s about overcoming that kind of contradiction. And
it’s about trying to say something for myself which is about what living
can mean at a particular moment in time to a particular person with all of what
goes on with it.
I do think think of it as political. I do really. Because while it
doesn’t nurture a particular political ideology, it is very much about
seeking to express very freely something that I’m passionate about, which
is trying to achieve some kind of understanding of what this is all about
before I die. I don’t think I will, and I don’t think the world is
going to be transformed, and I don’t think people are going to be lots
happier because you do this little piece. I don’t think any of those
things any more. What I do think is that you have this fundamental
responsibility in your life which is to live your life as passionately and as
fully as you can. So why would you leave your creativity out? If you’ve
been given that opportunity, that has to be part of it. And the strange thing
is that it actually begins to help you to see something. I’m living in
great fear that one of these days, I may turn into the Buddha [laughing]…
a feminist one, of course.
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