Our Lives Out Loud: In Pursuit of Justice and Equality

By Ann Louise Gilligan, Dr. Katherine Zappone and Abp. Desmond Tutu

A fascinating story of love and campaigning for equality and social justice.
When Katherine Zappone and Ann Louise Gilligan met it was love. It has been love through twenty-seven years together. But that love had consequences which brought this couple to the High Court, and beyond.
They met at Boston College. Returning to Ireland, their relationship had to be kept secret. Jobs were at stake, and elevation to positions of authority could be jeopardised.
What would happen if one of them died? Only a married couple received the support of the state in such circumstances.
Ireland rejected their Canadian marriage and they had to make a huge decision: to go public and fight or to stay quiet and suffer the consequences? Here they offer their deeply personal story – out loud for all to read.
Foreword by Archbishop Desmond Tutu

• Language: English
• Publisher: The O'Brien Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9781847174352

Ann Louise Gilligan

ANN LOUISE GILLIGAN, PhD was appointed to the staff of St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra, in 1976, and has worked in the area of teacher education at undergraduate and post-graduate level for the past thirty years. She established and directed its Educational Disadvantage Centre, and has lectured and published on the philosophy of the imagination, philosophies of difference and educational equality. In 2001, she was appointed by the Irish Minister for Education to establish and chair the National Education Welfare Board. Ann Louise loves travel, wine, jazz and golf on a good day.  

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1

ANN LOUISE

My parents married at the beginning of the Second World War, and I was born at the end of it. Perhaps my optimism throughout life can be attributed in part to my arrival into a world that was excavating hope from the rubble of destruction. Although Ireland remained ‘neutral’ in this war while its neighbours defended their versions of freedom, a canopy of threat still hung like a cloud over the Republic during those six years. In fact, the cloud burst accidentally, at times raining down devastation. The German bombing on the North Strand in May 1941, I was told, was clearly audible from our home across the bay in Nutley Park, South Dublin. There were other bombings too, and I grew up regaled with stories about my parents crouching in the press under the stairs seeking protection during those terrifying episodes.

It is the glance backwards from adulthood that really allows one to assess and evaluate one’s childhood. What I experienced then, and what is confirmed by my memories now, is that I had a blissfully happy childhood. My parents simply adored each other. I never once heard an argument or cross word pass between them. My father, Arthur, was a businessman, a confirmed bachelor until, at thirty-three, he unexpectedly met my mother, Imelda, then barely twenty. Marrying my father forced my mother to leave her briefly held job in the Central Bank in Dublin – the marriage ban, which prohibited married women from working in the public service, was not removed until 1973.

I recall as a tiny child asking my mother which of the three of us children she loved the most, and without hesitation she responded, ‘I love your father most of all and after that I love each of you equally.’ When my mother died of cancer in her early sixties, with little warning, many of her close friends confided that she died of a broken heart. It was true. Try as she did, she never got over my father’s death, also of cancer, a few years earlier.

While strongly middle-class, our upbringing was marked by careful expenditure of resources and genuine simplicity. We consumed few goods and services. I have no memory as a child of eating out; however, eating in was delicious as my mother was a wonderful cook and frequently entertained at home. The laughter from their dinner parties and her bridge evenings would ring through the house.

Early on in my life I learned that perceptions of wealth and well-being are relative. At school in Loreto, Foxrock, I had friends who lived in that very affluent suburb of County Dublin. Their fathers were among the industrialists who were reaping the benefit of Ireland’s break from the cocoon of protectionism led by Sean Lemass. We often attended parties in homes on Westminster Road where butlers and cooks served us and the chauffeur waited on long, winding driveways. All this led me to conclude that our own comforts were few and sparse.

Class distinctions in the Ireland of my childhood were sharp but unspoken. Apart from my grandmother’s discourse at every Sunday lunch which always referred to people’s titles and connections, our privilege and others’ deprivation was never mentioned. Yet, this was a time of marked differences and harsh poverty. Historians remind us that during this post-war period Taoiseach Éamon De Valera defended the dearth of social services when compared to our northern neighbours on the fact that they paid double the taxes.

Politics were never discussed in our family or within the walls of Loreto, Foxrock, where my sister June and I were educated. My brother Arthur, who also started his schooling in this genteel environment, graduated after his First Communion to the rough and tumble of a Christian Brothers’ school. However, after a brief sojourn in this ambiance of Republican idealism, he electrified our Sunday lunch conversation on one occasion by asking my father where our grandfather had died. That the response ‘at home, in his bed’ was wholly unsatisfactory was evident from my brother’s crestfallen face. ‘Oh, dear,’ he stated, ‘I hoped that he died in a ditch fighting for Ireland.’

Shortly thereafter he was transferred to a private boarding school in Newbridge, County Kildare, run by the Dominicans. Any socialisation to patriotic hatred was anathema to my father whose manner was marked by a gracious, good-humoured gentleness. This said, one of the most formative stories of my childhood was told by him of his own experience as a boarder in the Jesuit school, Clongowes Wood. Shortly after his arrival there he became aware that a ritual of new boys being severely bullied by older pupils was practised. When the moment came for his initiation, he was prepared. He took a compass from his pocket and drove it through the leg of the leader of the gang. They fled and never touched him again. He quietly added a codicil to this story: ‘Never tolerate an injustice’, a phrase that has profoundly influenced my life.

The Catholic Church commanded absolute obedience from its members during this period, and I was among its servants. From my earliest years I had a deep sensibility for the spiritual dimensions of life. I loved solitude, and, reflecting back on my early childhood, I remember thinking a lot about questions related to life and death, and, indeed, pre-life and after-death issues.

My mother had a quiet piety. Her yearly visits to Lough Derg on a penitential pilgrimage involving quite a bit of hardship, our family outings to visit her beloved sister, Mother Dolorosa Gately, in a convent in far-flung Wexford, and her rosary and prayer books beside her bed all had a formative influence. My Dad, on the other side of the bed, muttered, as he smoked his pipe, that she did the praying for all of us. He read from his large pile of history books as she said her rosary. In fact, he offered a perfect antidote, balancing her devotion with scepticism, if not agnosticism, in relation to all dogmatic absolutes.

An abiding memory of my childhood is kneeling beside my mother at Monday evening devotions in the nearby church on Merrion Road. Her voice soared, incense wafted, candles burned in abundance, and I experienced Heaven. However, no links were ever made between the mystical experience of Marian devotions and the incarceration of unmarried women on the Donnybrook Road less than a mile away, in the Magdalen Laundry. The Sisters of Charity ran this institution on behalf of the same Church. I always experienced a cloud of depression as my mother left me at the huge, wrought-iron gates at the entrance to this grey residence and whispered that she needed to leave in a packet. While alms-giving was part of our family culture, there was no critique of the injustice of poverty nor any engagement to act for its transformation. Furthermore, there was no analysis as to why places such as the Magdalen Laundry existed. I continue now to feel anger and outrage that the lives of many young women, my age, were destroyed as they bore the sins of their fathers, literally and metaphorically, and were incarcerated in the gloom and damp of imposed guilt.

The underside of a child’s sensibility towards the spiritual in the period of my youth was the controlling influence and the dogmatic arrogance of the Catholic Church. ‘Outside the Church there is no salvation’ was a teaching from school that rang in my ears as I tried to fall asleep at night having laughed and played with my Protestant and Jewish friends who lived on our park. At this point, I had not awoken from my ‘dogmatic slumber’ and simply struggled with the contradiction and confusion that caused me genuine worry and distress.

My home and school shared common factors: they both were places of love, warmth and excitement. I can still feel the hug from Mother Imelda in the cloakroom as I arrived at school, an embrace of love that was extended to each child every morning. This rotund, jolly woman had a profound influence on my life. Although she died in her thirties of cancer while I was still in the junior school, it was her name I chose when I entered religious life some twelve years later. I remember how movingly she spoke of God’s love for us as we prepared for First Confession and Holy Communion; this was one of those rare moments when words allow one to experience the reality. While some claim we grow into innocence, that it is not something we are born with, I would disagree; those years were years of pure, untarnished innocence, which was the greatest privilege of all.

My desire to become a teacher was formed during those earliest years. Something in me wanted to ensure that all children could experience their birthright to such openness and know love and joy within an educational setting. Before she died, my mother reminded me that when I was a very small child I used to wander up and down our park gathering up children, large and small, and bring them back for lessons at our dining-room table, where I presided as the teacher!

Growing up, I came to realise that I lacked certain linguistic wirings – the dawning was gradual. Thankfully, this was never termed a ‘learning disability’ or diagnosed as dyslexia, which is what it was, and so never really blocked my educational journey. Orally, I had no difficulty – one repetition was enough. I remember sitting in Junior Infants saying to myself, If they repeat this one more time I will scream. But spelling was another matter. Week on week my mother and I would sit by the fire in the drawing room on a Thursday night as she ‘heard’ my spellings in preparation for the Friday test. Neither she nor I was ever too deflated when each Friday revealed that, no matter what I did, I couldn’t get them right. She’d always smile and say, ‘Well, all that matters is that you did your best.’

These Friday-morning ‘failures’ quickly evaporated into longing for Friday evening. My father, a publican, always worked late, and so, after our baths, the three of us snuggled into our parents’ bed, and my mother read to us. I don’t recall what she read, but the emotional warmth remains. Certainly this experience inculcated a love of books, and early on in my childhood I became an avid reader, starting with comics such The Beano, then the Noddy books, and quickly graduating to everything I could get my hands on. Then, as now, I was a slow reader, and I have never been able to read for long periods at a time; however, that has never taken away from the enjoyment and love of reading.

Not being able to spell and being incapable of reading aloud never became a major issue. The curriculum in our school was eclectic at best, varied at least, and, in general, ideal for someone with my challenges. The day started with either marching with Major Gollard or ballet lessons, with Miss Doran on piano. My sense of rhythm, love of dance and jazz all had their formation in those early years. By the time I was eleven years of age, Miss Cahill had trained us to be proficient public speakers. Our sessions were early examples of how the Toastmasters conduct their meetings: a pupil was called forward and given a topic to address spontaneously, others then had to speak against them. I found these sessions exhilarating, and they certainly prepared me for the position as leader of the school’s debating team in later years. Later still, when I won the All-Ireland Toastmasters’ competition, I stated my firm belief that training in oral confidence is imperative for children with dyslexia.

Music formed a large part of our education. We had a school orchestra, in which I played first violin, and a school choir, where we sang and were examined in a large choral repertoire, while at home I learned piano. When I was eight, my sister June and I played duets on Raidio Éireann. Art education also featured strongly, and Mother Peter prepared us each year to enter the Caltex Art Competition where we all won all sorts of prizes. This was an aspect of education that linked my home and school: my father was related to the Irish artist Fr Jack Hanlon, and early on it became evident that my brother Arthur was a gifted artist.

My greatest love in school was sport, a passion that has never faded. During my first year in secondary school I was given a place in goal on the first senior hockey team, a position I held for the following six years. It was utterly unusual that a twelve-year-old would play on a senior team, but I was fearless and adored the rush of adrenalin as girls twice my size charged at the goal. My sister, three years ahead of me, played on the same team, as right wing – unlike me, she could run like lightning. I was happy to flank the goal, and, as a large, heavy child, I would make the occasional dash when the opponent’s approach needed to be halted.

As I reflect on my schooling, I think that my engagement with school in general and love for the whole school environment was more important for my future happiness and well-being than academic achievements. Indeed, my attendance in class reflected what the great educationalist John Dewey spoke of as ‘double-mindedness’. I never gave more than half my mind to what was going on at the top of the room, some of which I found extremely boring; the rest of my mind was plotting the next adventure or creative prank. I was always a leader in class and recall my fifteen classmates, when faced with a written examination in religious education, pleading with me to think of something to save us. The nun entered the room, settled herself on the raised podium and produced the exam papers. On cue, I ‘fainted’. The exam was postponed.

Thankfully, I attended school in an era when there was no points rating for university places. All we needed was to matriculate in six subjects, including Latin and Maths. Indeed, a basic Leaving Certificate, so long as you passed Irish, could be your entrée into medicine or any other field. However, such opportunities were available only to the middle classes and those who could pay for secondary school and university.

There is much evidence that poorer children in Ireland at the time left school after primary, between twelve and fourteen years of age, having suffered their schooling in classrooms of up to, or over, forty-five children. It wasn’t until 1967 that the then Minister for Education, Donogh O’Malley, without permission from anyone (the Taoiseach, Jack Lynch, was out of the country) announced free education for all second-level students. This decision rocked the Government and changed the Irish nation. His decision was clearly influenced by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)/Irish Government report of 1965, Investment in Education, which forewarned that future economic growth would be hindered if an educated workforce were unavailable. I also like to believe that he was moved by an awareness of the injustice of a school system riddled with classism.

It was in my final two years of school that it became clear not simply that I wanted to teach but what I wanted to teach. Questions of meaning always fascinated me, so the day that a friend of mine asked the nun teaching us religion whether God really existed or not, I snapped out of my day-dream and listened intently for the answer. What happened next really shocked me. With a crushing glare, the nun told the girl to sit down and never ask such a question again. That moment was formative, helping me decide that what I wanted to do was teach religion and to encourage questioning of the given or received truths that shaped our lives.

As I entered my final year at school in the autumn of 1962, the twenty-first Council of the Catholic Church began. It was a time of huge optimism that a new age was dawning, led by a charismatic pope in the twilight of his life. Pope John XXIII’s notion of aggiornamento, ‘to-day-ing’, became a household word in Ireland. We had just got television, so we could see images of a sea of bishops, some 23,000 of them, descend on Rome. I do recall being informed, when I boldly asked, that twenty-four women, half of them nuns, would be allowed in as observers!

Two weeks later, the mood changed, and I recall lying awake waiting for the world to end. US President John F Kennedy had confirmed reports that Soviet missile sites were located ninety miles from America, and so we were in the midst of the Cuban missile crisis. Most of us believed this was the beginning of a third World War, the beginning of the end. The fear evaporated but left its mark in relation to the transience and uncertainty of human life.

Change happens in many ways, but, on a few occasions in my own life, I have experienced what I would describe as an intellectual conversion – by this I mean a fundamental shift in my way of understanding the world, caused not by direct experience but by reflecting on new ideas. During our final year at school in 1963, a priest from the Oblate Order was invited to teach us the Social Encyclicals, which, in my opinion, are ‘the best kept secret of the Catholic Church’. The earliest of these was written in 1891 when the Church was perceived by many intellectuals as essentially irrelevant. Each encyclical offered radical insights into Catholic responsibility to engage in social analysis and action, especially on behalf of the poor.

We started our study with Pope Leo XIII’s On the Condition of Labour (Rerum Novarum), and heard the pope rail against the inhuman conditions that many working people were subjected to in industrialised societies. He emphasised the dignity of the worker and the necessity of a just wage that took into account the needs of the individual. To my ears it all sounded remarkably similar to the radical views that had been expressed by the trade-union leader ‘Big Jim’ Larkin, especially when he addressed workers on O’Connell Street during the 1913 lock-out. The fact that the Church deemed that it had a responsibility to speak out about social issues was new, as was the connection between human rights and the economic order.

Forty years on, Pope Pius XI wrote The Reconstruction of the Social Order (Quadragesimo Anno, 1931). In it, he addressed a very different world where the First World War had shattered the liberal confidence of the earlier period. In his own words, he sought to ‘expose the root of the present social disorder’. We were introduced to a new term, namely, ‘social justice’, and we critically reflected on how this type of justice demanded recognition of the ‘common good’. I recall our discussions about the right to own private property and it being clarified that with this right came a duty. This idea stayed with me and was certainly influential in later years when Katherine and I decided to share our home with the people of Tallaght West, a situation that continues to this day.

We also had extensive discussions on the requirement on Catholics to share superfluous wealth. This was neither communism nor socialism, I had to remind myself, this was the teaching of the Church! There was an anomaly about sitting in a classroom with some of the wealthiest young people in Ireland reflecting on these ideas. Whatever the aim of this course, it utterly changed my life. I have often thought, then and now, that if the institutional Church practised what it taught it might have credibility and meaning in the lives of more people today, including my own.

Throughout our schooling, respect for authority was never questioned, and discipline was never an issue; however, minor misdemeanours assumed an inordinate gravitas. In my final term at school it was agreed that I would not be allowed to become a Child of Mary, the final badge of honour for a Catholic schoolgirl, because of my persistent talking in class. In my opinion, this was clearly ridiculous, and so I summoned the Mother Superior to the front parlour for a meeting to discuss the matter. To her credit, she listened, and so I graduated along with the other sixteen with this honour.

Shortly afterwards, my classmates and I took a group of inner-city children on a summer holiday to Sunshine House in Balbriggan, and seeing the injustice of poverty etched in their faces confirmed my commitment to take the next, rather unexpected, step. I entered religious life in Loreto, Rathfarnham, some months later. My personal guiding motto was: What return can I make to the Lord for all that He has given to me?

My parents greeted my decision with shock, if not dismay; my father was especially reserved about the wisdom of the idea. This was a period in Ireland when droves of young people were entering religious communities and few were leaving. In fact, leaving was much more difficult than entering. Like many young people at that time, I was full of enthusiasm and idealism. I was also innocent, if not ignorant, about my sexual identity. Never having any interest in boys could have been attributed to the fact that we all but lived at our all-girls’ school. Weekends were as occupied as weekdays, playing inter-school matches or preparing for and performing in school plays. One could say I was completely undeveloped sexually, and none of this would alter as I prepared to take a vow of chastity!

Entering religious life was like stepping into the nineteenth century. Founded in 1821, Loreto, Rathfarnham, had retained all the graciousness and discipline of Victorian living. Being a postulant in 1963 was like living a synthesis of the ‘upstairs/downstairs’ cultures of that earlier period. Our parents visited us in the glorious, if faded, grandeur of leather-wallpapered parlours with magnificent antique furniture, overlooking manicured lawns. While they sipped tea from fine, bone-china cups, we struggled to make conversation across the divide of different worlds. However, once downstairs in the novitiate, we cleaned, dusted, polished, shone silver and distributed laundry in an endless rotation of housework. The Sub-Mistress of Novices stood over us, ensuring perfection in the execution of each task. For someone who had never dusted or polished anything in my life, this was a shock to the system.

It was a period when the nuns were divided into ‘sisters’ and ‘mothers’. The sisters performed the mundane, menial tasks such as housekeeping and cooking, and the mothers did the professional work of teaching. The sisters sat apart in church, had their own community room, ate separately and slept in the basement quarters. The mothers had cells high above the church, looking down on the ‘blessed sacrament’. From the day I entered, this ‘apartheid’ system deeply disturbed me. One of my fondest memories and greatest achievements was gaining permission, while still in the novitiate, to put on a course in scripture for the sisters, which I taught them in their separate community room.

After an initial year as a postulant, during which I had the chance to teach in a local school which I loved, I made the transition to becoming a novice and entering what was called a spiritual year. This transition was traumatic as it involved having all my hair cut off and wearing a veil of heavily starched white linen. As an older novice cut off my long, thick hair, leaving me in a bald state, I remember thinking, rather irreverently: Well, that’s it – none of us will be leaping over the wall anytime soon! On a more serious note, I also silently questioned the gender injustice of this act, knowing for sure that the Jesuit novices across the road in Rathfarnham Castle were not being subjected to the same indignity. This was a time when Vatican II was writing its document on religious life, Perfectae Caritatis, and recommending ‘that religious dress should meet the style of contemporary fashion’. Donning the habit was a gesture that was both symbolic and real as it also severed all connection with the outside world. Much to my regret, I lost all contact with all my very close school friends. However, this was the culture: friendship was not encouraged, and ‘particular friendships’ were shunned. I was always perplexed as to why! I was allowed the odd letter, which would be opened, from my parents. My mother later spoke of her alarm when, in response to her correspondence that referred to The Beatles, I wrote back questioning why she was talking about insects!

It was serendipitous that, as I finished three years in the novitiate in Loreto, Mater Dei Institute opened, a college that, for the first time in Ireland, provided a formal training for religion teachers at secondary level. While most newly professed nuns waited passively for their assignment, I wrote to the Provincial and requested that I be sent to Mater Dei. To her credit, while informing me that my petition was inconsistent with my vow of obedience, she let me go. My teaching life began in earnest when I completed the course there.

However, I began to have a growing sense of disconnection between the world in which we lived out our religious commitment and the ‘outside’ world. Although I loved much about community life, especially the times of stillness, and I relished my teaching, I had the distinct impression that we were living a pre-modern existence, though this was supposed to be an ‘active religious order’, working within the framework of Vatican II ideas about the Church in the modern world. Furthermore, I had entered religious life with the expressed desire of going to Mauritius, where the Loreto sisters had a strong commitment to the Creole people. When I was informed that I was needed in Ireland, my love affair with convent life began to wane. In my opinion, I could be a good teacher and an effective administrator in any walk of life in Ireland, especially in middle-class schools. I didn’t need to be a nun to do that. I was also acutely aware of what I considered to be my lack of faith. To be an excellent religious, one needed, I felt, a faith deeper and less questioning than mine. I decided to leave the religious life.

Leaving the convent happened under a shroud of secrecy. While those in authority didn’t resist my decision and respected the echoes of my conscience that told me I must now go, they cautioned me to tell no one, to say no ‘goodbyes’. The sadness of this transition was cushioned by the kindness of my sister June, who collected me quietly, bringing the necessary change of clothes, and welcoming me into her home. I had no money but quickly gathered the train fare to Spain where I spent the next three months as an au pair to an extremely wealthy family in Seville. My father told me that the day I left was one of the best days of his life! Sadly, he died shortly after.

My fascination with community life persisted, however, and soon after leaving the religious community I set off for a kibbutz in Israel with two close friends. Having read the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber’s work Paths in Utopia, I wanted to experience this ideal of communal life, rooted in the theory of socialist democracy, and see whether it could be lived in practice. Our kibbutz, of some five hundred kibbutzim, followed the usual template. It was a classless, rural collective, striving to live out a social ideal. Here in Givat Hashlosha, a kibbutz of secular Judaism, land and language, not religion, seemed to bind the group. Adults had their own small living quarters, and children lived and were educated apart. This, we were told, contributed in part to the ideal of sexual equality, allowing women and men to work for the collective and to run for public office. After the work day, parents and children came together for what was popularly known as ‘the love hour’. Each afternoon, one could observe children gleefully bringing the fruits of their latest project to their parents’ home. The volunteers lived in small wooden shacks that were prone to visits from cockroaches and mice, especially at night.

The profits from the cotton industry, the orange groves and the chicken factory were reinvested in the settlement. There was a weekly meeting, and I recall endless wrangling over the use of the four cars the collective owned! Living in the kibbutz made us privy to a level of discontent such as one would never read in the literature describing this movement. During our time there, all families were rewarded with a television set out of the comprehensive budget. As volunteers, we certainly contributed to the profits, working long and arduous hours. I was assigned to the kitchens and peeled so many carrots over the months that my hands turned orange! My co-workers were immigrant Jewish Russian women who spoke Yiddish. We bonded without spoken language, and, when finally it came time to leave, we wept.

I felt I learned a lot about a different form of communal living. Although the kibbutz movement had a strong aspiration to change the order of human social living, and a strong feminist discourse about the need to equalise the status of women and to relativise the authority of men, in my experience women continued to bear the yoke of domestic work and resource the relational aspects of the kibbutz,