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all the men coming to the meeting do not have a problem because somebody else is looking after their kids. I don't see why at political meetings there shouldn't be somewhere for the kids.
If we are going to have a creche in factories, we badly need a creche for political meetings. A very minor point, but that would enable a lot more women to come to meetings. More and more women would be free.
Do you think the IRSP will in any way be involved in taking up the question of the-role of women and women's liberation in a more positive fashion than this has been done in the past?
The women in the organisation intend to ensure that it does, mostly because those of us who are involved in the founding of the organisation and at at national executive level are in fact all married women with children and it is, as far as we are concerned, a pracWe have very frequent meetings and we must travel to Belfast, Dublin, Wicklow, Tipperary wherever. to have to take our kids with us and our male counterparts will have to get used to it. It's not the done thing for Irish political meetings.
Some of those involved in the women's movement in Britain accuse the Irish women of relegating the role of women's liberation I don't think we do. We will demand our rights as women and the rights for our sex within the class struggle. But with the level of the crisis here I am not interested in liberating middle-class women. I have a fight on my hands, fighting middle-class men. I'm very sorry for my sisters, but why should | liberate them to go and fight against the working class.
Let them sit at home. Liberate working class women but let the middle class liberate their own women.
Obviously the whole weight of the Catholic Church over here and of Catholic ideology on questions like abortion and contraception will make it a harder and more difficult struggle on these kinds of questions than in Britain?
Yes, much more so, and that is true for both Catholic and Protestant sections of the community.
Socially, they tend to be conservative. As the situation changes economically and socially individual women and families will see the need their own personal need for a change in their attitudes.
You see very much in Ireland at the minute, women's attitude on the question of contraception, for example, has changed in a most peculiar fashion in that if you ask them they will still trot out the Church's position, but then if you ask them honestly do they take the pill they will say yes.
How widespread is that?
I'd say that it is very widespread in the north and the south, because there is a personal, rational need to regulate their families or to have no further children. An economic necessity determines that they take the pill and the hangover of the moral issue means that they are simply justifying it to themselves. You know, they say it's still wrong for everybody eise, but I'm different, and that attitude will change.
Would you say in Ireland that male chauvinism and sexism are even more rampant in Ireland than in Britain?
I don't know, and wouldn't like to say. It differs in a lot of areas. If you take an area like Derry, particularly in the Bogside where so many men are unemployed and the women go to work, it's a peculiar situation because the dominant partner in that set up is a woman, and the person who makes all the regulations.
and rules and imposes them is the woman.
bines the two roles in that she goes to work and does the housework and washes the dishes. They say the situation is in fact different in Belfast.
class struggle?
Nonetheless she also coman.
A catholic community action group making meals in a minority area of Belfast during the reactionary Ulster Workers' Council strike last May.
I don't think you can generalise On a liberal basis, 1 can understand that Irish men are reputed to be worse to their women and better to their family than English men but that may be because we expect less of them or something. On a principled basis 1 couldn't say whether Irish men are better or worse. There is a real problem and personally I think it's a problem of misguided brothers as op posed to the American position where it's almost a position of the enemy of the oppressive class.
You are suggesting that there are a whole number of reasons which makes makes the task of liberating women in Ireland more difficult?
Yes, I think that for many different reasons the nature of the struggle has to be different, and I don't see it as worse but fundamentally better that the struggle for women's liberation stems from the class struggle in Ireland. —very much more so than it does in Britain or in America. And is much more closely related to the class strug gle than it has been in Britain.
Why should it be more related to the Probably agai in relation to the nattional struggle and the history of the national struggle. That's just the way it has been. The development of the women's movement in Ireland has right from the beginning been very much class-orieso than in Britain or in America. I think that oné of the reasons for that is the gulf between the working class woman and the middle class professional wom-
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nted, and working class women have dealt with working class women's issues more