For a century and a half, policymakers and preachers have tried to break Ireland’s matriarchal spine. First came colonial statutes that stripped women of ancient Brehon era property rights; then, after Independence, a clerical regime insisted a woman’s duty began and ended inside four walls and that maxim even made its way into the Constitution. Both forces notched victories on paper. Yet the lived chain of female authority, mother to daughter, sister to sister never snapped. I know, because that chain carried me out of Bessborough Mother-and-Baby Home and set me, my child, and several generations of my family back on our feet.
I was the youngest of ten on a small, rocky farm west of Galway city. It was the 1970s, but the scene might have belonged to 1870: a low thatched cottage with no plumbing, a tangle of makeshift electrical leads, and a father who preferred a horse and trap to any tractor never mind a motor-car. My mother rose early every morning. She lit the Rayburn, boiled water, emptied the chamber pots, milked the cows, mixed brown bread, and fed the hens, calves, pigs, ducks, and goats any manner of animal she had taken into the mixed haggard. She had a natural way with animals, and I secretly thought she preferred being outdoors to inside the dark thatch, cleaning and cooking and who could blame her?
On Saturdays she packed eggs and vegetables into biscuit tins and baskets, turkeys at Christmas, then hauled the lot a mile to the bus stop. Galway’s market was our cash economy, and her elder daughters acted as sales crew while I tagged along, hindrance more than help, always rewarded with an upside-down bun and a glass of Coke from Lydon’s.
Back then I longed for square, shop-bought sliced pan; now food writers would gladly pay ten euro for a single heel of my mother’s “artisanal” brown bread, and I would trade everything I own just to watch her hands knead the dough again and taste her currant loaf once more, I miss her.
Lessons
Those Saturdays taught two lessons most history books ignore. First, female labour, not male acreage kept small farms solvent. Second, a matriarchy doesn’t need a Land Registry entry; it needs women who refuse to let the roof cave in.
That defiance predates any statute. Under Ireland’s Brehon codes (7th–12th centuries ), women could own property, succeed to clan leadership, and petition for divorce on grounds ranging from impotence to jealousy. Fosterage, usually overseen by senior women sent children to other households to tighten clan bonds. Anglo-Norman chronicler Giraldus Cambrensis scorned Irish wives as “immodestly powerful,” and London then spent five centuries trying to remedy the “problem.” Echoing that tradition, my mother would send the younger children to her sisters each summer when hayfields and bogs demanded every able hand at home.
The 20th century brought home rule but deeper control. Article 41.2 of the 1937 Constitution enshrined woman’s place “within the home,” sanctifying confinement as national virtue. A cash-strapped State, counselled by a moralising clergy, outsourced “problem” pregnancies to religious orders. From 1922 to 1998 some 56,000 women and girls entered institutions like Bessborough. The goal was simple: sever each “fallen” girl from the kin network that had always absorbed life’s surprises.
The 1970s and ’80s finally delivered electricity, mains water, and, at last, “the new house” one of those single-storey bungalows tourists dismiss as a blot on the Connemara landscape. Critics longed for postcard thatch and “comely maidens” churning butter; my mother longed for a washing machine that wouldn’t freeze solid in January. For her, sockets and plumbing were feminist infrastructure. My father mourned the vanished reed roof, but she measured progress in hours wrested back from drudgery.
Work was our family religion. Everyone, children and Mam alike took shifts to pad out the farm’s meagre income, the local restaurant offering the steadiest wage. I’d watch Mam pedal off to scour pots beside the aunt I was named for; their laughter, curling through cigarette smoke in a tiny staff room out the back, was infectious. When I graduated to waitressing following sisters already on the floor and brothers behind the bar or over the stove, I discovered independence in the heady pulse of early-’90s Galway, with Salthill thumping at its heart. I loved every beat of it.
Then, in 1992, everything juddered to a halt.
I entered Bessborough at eighteen, pregnant, petrified, propelled by family panic and clerical pressure. The building looked orderly, the nuns were outwardly civil, and we were fed with tea and toast of squared white bread. It ran like a conveyor belt, up to 15-20 women at every stage of pregnancy, each new face appearing as another vanished post- delivery. One bath per floor. No washing machines or dryers, only an outhouse with deep cement vats where women, even in their third trimester, bent over scrubbing clothes. The institution could easily have provided basic amenities; withholding them was the point: we were to know our lesser status.
Feeling contempt
Mealtimes drove it home. We queued single-file on the left for dinner while retired nuns filed out on the right, fed first and apart. Some hissed at us as they passed. I was still a teenager and tried to excuse them as merely old or confused, but the truth was plainer: it was contempt. Yet the purpose was unmistakable: separate mother from child and bury the evidence in sealed adoption files.
What defeated that plan was not State mercy but female kinship. My elder sister posted weekly envelopes, hand written letters, a fresh copy of the Galway Advertiser, a slice of normal life beyond the misery of the place. Those packets breached walls the State deemed impregnable. When staff pushed adoption papers at me, memories of my mother on market mornings and of teenage sisters mothering me rose stronger than any sermon. I refused to sign.
If colonisers and clerics had really broken the matriarchal line, my story would end there, child surrendered, future amputated. Instead, the line thickened. That same sister organised my baby’s first birthday joint with her own toddler, a year and a day older, proving cousinhood and kin outrank scandal. When my daughter was due to start primary school a few years later, my mother welcomed us back home, by then my daughter had officially become the most cherished of all the grandchildren. I completed further degrees in fine art and film while my child was raised by a committee of strong women.
We never called it a “feminist collective”; in my mother’s words, it was simply “getting on with it.” A committee of sisters and a grandmother shouldered the load, and without their support I’d never have had the freedom to pursue a film career or establish a home of my own. Female solidarity, women helping one another made it possible. I certainly couldn’t have done it alone, and I don’t believe any woman can “have it all,” whatever that phrase is supposed to mean.
Anthropologist Conrad Arensberg’s 1937 study The Irish Countryman found rural households “nominally patriarchal but operationally matrilateral” men held the deeds, women ran the show. Census 2022 suggests the pattern is re-emerging: female-headed households are up 15 per cent in 20 years, and multi-generational homes rise fastest in counties labelled conservative.
Politics is catching up. In 2018, the referendum repealing the Eighth Amendment passed by 66 per cent, powered by young women “the granddaughter vote.” Many canvassed their grandmothers first; the chain had survived. In 2023 Ireland marked its first public holiday for St Brigid, Christian cloak over a goddess of wells and midwifery. Official Ireland calls it “new”; families like mine know it never went away.
Triumphalism, however, would be nai?ve. Traveller women still face maternal-mortality rates triple the national average; asylum-seeking mothers in Direct Provision endure surveillance hauntingly like the mother-and-baby homes. The State has apologised for Bessborough, yet access to records remains agonisingly slow. A matriarchy cannot protect daughters who are denied their own archives.
So let the record stand, scrubbed of nostalgia and clerical varnish. Ireland’s true republic was long sustained by women absent from statute books: mothers baking bread before electricity, sisters honing sales pitches before “entrepreneur” was fashionable, Cumann na mBan couriers slipping military dispatches through British checkpoints during the War of Independence, sisters smuggling newspapers through institutional walls. Colonisation and Church diktats cut many links, yet the root system endured, ready to nourish any shoot that reaches daylight.
The historian Margaret MacCurtain said Irish women “became experts in survival.” Survival is only the floor. My generation raised on brown bread and rewound Disney cassettes now shoulders its own daughters’ futures. We owe them more than survival; we owe them the unbroken chain. So let us name what happened, matriarchal power forced underground yet saving lives, mine among them and guard it until it can step from kitchen shadows into full daylight, while Bessborough itself is spared the developer’s bulldozer by a compulsory purchase order, preserved as living proof that no State or Church can ever again declare women expendable.
Nora Flaherty is completing the Swim challenge for Pieta House this month. You can donate if you wish via idonate. https://www.idonate.ie/fundraiser/11667025
