Nell McCafferty

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Nell McCafferty (born 1944) is an Irish journalist, playwright, civil rights campaigner, and feminist. In her journalistic work she has written for The Irish Press, The Irish Times, The Sunday Tribune and Hot Press and The Village Voice.

McCafferty was born in Derry to Hugh and Lily McCafferty, and spent her early years in the Bogside section of Derry — a neighbourhood on the outskirts of the city, which was home to the majority of its Catholic population. Although her family were not wealthy, she had a comfortable upbringing and entered Queen's University Belfast, where she took a degree in Arts.

After a brief spell as a substitute English teacher in Northern Ireland, McCafferty took up a post with The Irish Times. It was her career in journalism, commentating on Northern Irish life and Republican politics that brought her to public fame, and her outspoken attitudes on abortion, sexuality, feminism and contraception (in what was then a conservative nation) earned her a certain amount of notoriety. In over 30 years as a public commentator whose views on social change, the Irish identity and society are frequently sought, she is altogether one of Ireland's most familiar, most respected and most controversial journalists.

In 1990, McCafferty won a Jacob's Award for her reports on the 1990 World Cup for RTÉ Radio 1's The Pat Kenny Show. McCafferty lives in Ranelagh, an area of Dublin.

McCafferty published her autobiography, Nell, in 2004. In it, she explores her upbringing in a deeply sectarian and later war-riddled Derry, her relationship with her parents, her fears about being gay (she is an outspoken lesbian),^[1] the joy of finding a domestic haven with the love of her life, the Irish writer Nuala O'Faolain, and the pain of losing it.

The Irish Times wrote of McCafferty: