“It was really a feeling of the need for fairness, not to have a situation of one lot of people rolling in money and running everything, and other people crawling along and trying to manage the best they could.”
Catherine McGuinness is explaining a lifetime dedication to public service in Ireland, whether as a politician, judge, or holder of many roles including chair of the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland.
She is comfortable with being described as a patriot. “Yes, of course I’m for Ireland. When your country asks you to do a job, the appropriate response is to have a go.”
And she enjoyed most of the jobs. “I can’t say that I was making enormous sacrifices. I put a lot of work into them, I felt it was worthwhile.”
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Born in November 1934, McGuinness grew up in the Protestant, staunchly unionist, Dunmurry area of east Belfast, where her father, Robert Ellis, a native of Spanish Point in west Clare, was a Church of Ireland clergyman. He met her mother, Sylvia Craig, from Tullamore, Co Offaly, when both were students at Trinity College Dublin.
McGuinness and her two younger brothers lived with their parents on the then main Dublin-Belfast road, where the Orange Order paraded past their home every 12th of July.
The parish was a working-class one, her parents’ church was not “of the rich and grand”, and she attended the local public elementary primary school. Their home was “full of books” and her parents’ influence made McGuinness aware there was “something outside what I was learning in primary school, outside the kind of social and political outlooks of everyone else”.
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Her mother, a clergyman’s daughter, knew being a clergyman’s wife “was a job in itself”, and was actively involved in parish work. “She would not have been deliberately thinking she was as good as a man, she knew perfectly well she was.”
Her parents voted for the Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) but were not politically overt. Their decision to send her to boarding school in Dublin was largely because they found the girls’ secondary schools in Belfast “so very unionist”.
McGuinness was aged 12 when she went to the clergy daughters’ school (CDS) attached to Alexandra secondary school and college, then located at Earlsfort Terrace in Dublin. The CDS was “deliberately designed to be reasonably cheap for the daughters of clergymen because they did not have much money”.
“In CDS, our view was, while we were poor, we were smarter,” she laughs.
She was particularly influenced by an “excellent” teacher, Nora Golden, who taught Irish and French and “was the person who interested me most in the Irish language”.
Having sat honours Irish in the Leaving Cert, McGuinness went to Trinity College Dublin in 1955 as a scholarship student to study Irish and French, where she met a young actor and broadcaster, Proinsias MacAonghusa. From the Connemara Gaeltacht and a “very different” background to her own, he was not a student, but was involved with Trinity’s cumann Gaelach.
Asked was it love at first sight, she smiles: “More or less.” They married before she graduated, she was 21, he was 22, and were together for 48 years until his death in 2003.
The couple lived in south Dublin and also spent time in their holiday home near Rosmuc in Connemara, where her father-in-law taught in the nearby school.
It would be more wearisome to go on forever, you have got to lie down some time
— Catherine McGuinness
Proinsias’s parents separated before he met Catherine, who formed a strong bond with his “wonderful” mother Maireád McGuinness. She had fought in the 1916 Rising, took the anti-Treaty side during the Civil War and served time in prison before going to the United States, where she trained as a nurse.
On her return to Ireland, Maireád worked as a nurse, married, had four children, and then left her marriage, says McGuinness. “She had the bravery to just up and leave when many people didn’t. I wouldn’t say she had given up being a Catholic, but she had a stand-off view of the Church as it was. She came to Dublin and managed to get herself a house from the Corporation and got her two daughters into school in Dublin.”
Maireád joined the “left-wing and radical” Irish Housewives Association, and McGuinness accompanied her to its meetings. “These were incredible women.”
McGuinness supported Maireád’s unsuccessful candidacy as an independent for Dublin northeast in the 1957 general election, running on an IHA-backed platform that included promoting “good housekeeping” in the nation’s affairs.
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Proinsias was involved over decades in the Irish Labour Party and, in 1961, McGuinness left her teaching job at Alexandra College to work as the party’s parliamentary officer, primarily as speechwriter for its leader Brendan Corish.
Her Labour Party involvement was grounded in a similar motivation to her parents’ support for the NILP, she says. They were very much in favour of the British Labour government elected after the second World War and the introduction of the National Health Service. All of this contributed to her views about “the need for fairness”.
McGuinness quit as parliamentary officer after her husband, who was vice-chairman of the party for a time, fell out with some senior members and was expelled in 1967.
The couple then had two children, Caitríona, born in 1963, and Donal, born in 1965. Their third child, Diarmaid, was born in 1969, the same year that Proinsias ran unsuccessfully as an independent candidate in the Dún Laoghaire constituency.
McGuinness’s Labour Party work had involved analysing different Bills and Acts. That experience of the interaction between law and politics, plus encouragement from her barrister uncle, Max Ellis, and from Kader Asmal - a law professor in Trinity, chair of the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement and a close friend - led to her decision to pursue a law degree. “I loved it, it all fitted in with what I had been doing in the Labour Party.”
She entered the Law Library in 1977, aged 42, where she devilled [was apprenticed to] Paul Carney, since deceased, who went on to become a judge of the High Court and Court of Criminal Appeal. “He was quite a character and very, very good to work with – not the kind of person who kept an eye on you all the time. Sometimes I would say, ‘I‘ve never done that kind of case before’ and he would say ‘Go on, you’re perfectly well able to do it’.”
More women were joining the Law Library in those years and some men would “make remarks” about that, McGuinness recalls. One of the early entrants, Frances Elizabeth Moran, “was supposed to have stood up and said ‘Frances Elizabeth Moran, this is no place for you if this is the way people are going to behave’”. The challenges for women at the Bar included simply getting work. “Solicitors would be trying to get the best for their client and a lot would hesitate about putting a woman before their client or before judges.”
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Family law, then just developing, was one avenue of work for women. Many successful male barristers looked on it as “awful messy stuff”, and their approach was to “let the women do that, we’ll stick with men who fall off ladders or whatever”.
Family law “was always about property”, and some cases also involved cruelty or violence. “Even if it was not about property like houses, it was about money, wages – people need money, even wives need money.”
McGuinness was elected senator for Trinity College in 1979 and was re-elected until 1987. She actively opposed the 1983 anti-abortion amendment to the Constitution and supported the 1986 referendum to end the divorce ban.
Her appointment to the Council of State from 1988 to 1990 by then president Patrick Hillery underlined the widespread respect in which she was held. She was appointed a second time to the council by President Michael D Higgins in 2012, serving until 2019.
Her appointment as the first woman Circuit Court judge in 1994 was an important milestone. “When I was appointed, there were still some judges who really did not want to talk to you because they did not want women on the bench. They would not get away with it now.”
When asked to chair the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation, established in 1994, she was “really pleased because of coming from the North and being a Northern Protestant”.
“It was hugely interesting and I really did feel we did achieve something, even if it was only to make these people sit down in one room and talk to each other.”
On the prospect of a united Ireland: “I would love to see it before I die,” she says. The many changes in society North and South have, she believes, cast doubt on “the old things we were fighting about”.
In 1996, she was promoted to the High Court bench. Four years later, she became the second woman to be appointed to the Supreme Court, where she served until she retired in 2006, aged 72. “I really hated retiring.”
Retirement turned out to be a loose concept. She was president of the Law Reform Commission until 2010 and, as chair of the Yes for Children campaign from 2011, led civil society organisations lobbying to insert a child rights amendment into the Constitution, the culmination of her decades of advocacy for children.
Her 1993 Kilkenny Incest Investigation report, as chair of the inquiry into failings over 15 years by various State agencies for an incest victim, had brought the child abuse issue into the public domain for the first time and led to changes in childcare law.
While welcoming the advances, McGuinness cautions there “is always room for improvement”, and is glad to see judges increasingly speaking out about children’s rights.
At 90, it’s fair to say, she has seen a lot of change over the decades.
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Having more women involved in the law “changes the agenda in a way, the family law issue practically did not exist before we all got involved”. Women deal with “the basic issues”, she says, including the idea of the family and the rights of children to education and to be properly looked after. “All of those on-the-ground issues had not really featured much in the law at all except for very grand people.”
When McGuinness was in the Seanad, there were more women involved and she “felt more listened to than in the past”.
As chairwoman of the national forum on the end of life, McGuinness urged an end to the “taboo” around talk of death. She dislikes the widespread use of the expression “passed away”, rather than “died”. “It seems like crawling out of the room.”
She does not fear death. “When you have got as old as I am, you think, well you can’t go on forever. It would be more wearisome to go on forever, you have got to lie down some time.”
Her advice to others hoping to make a positive impact is to “be brave”.
“Don’t lose courage, be prepared to work, and don’t mind the people who are sort of pushing back. Be brave, don’t say ‘I can’t do this’ or ‘I can’t do that’. Maybe you can, or at least you can try. Fight for what you want, if it’s a good thing.”
