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Description
May O'Brien was fifteen in 1947 when she started to work in Liberty Hall,
the dark and down-at-heel union headquarters that sat brooding beside the
River Liffey. The building had been shelled by the British army in 1916; as
she approached it from Butt Bridge on her first day, she felt that few
repairs had been done since.
She soon discovered that it was as gloomy a place inside as outside, and
that the most heinous crime was to neglect the coal fires that battled to
keep the chronic dampness at bay. But as this spirited young woman comes to
terms with the job and with her varied assortment of colleagues, the
atmosphere of her story lifts, instilling the book with a rare warmth,
humour and affection.
An entertaining account of one woman's experience, it is also a valuable
social document, revealing the realities of life for working-class women in
the 1940s. Women who had to doff the cap to the rent-man, the ESB man, the
doctor, the clergy, the Vincent de Paul man, "just about everybody who had a
glimmer of power". Women felt the power of the church as the imposing figure
of John Charles McQuaid, Archbishop of Dublin, loomed over their lives,
telling themthat they were sinners if they didn't have a child a year. Women
had miscarriage after misacrriage and their health was forfeit and nobody
gave a damn.
Life was a struggle for May and her family, and she was glad to be able to
contribute financially; she was glad, too, to find that she was appreciated
in work. After her first three months in the job, as the book ends, she
reflects that sheˆs learnt a lot from her union colleagues since she entered
Liberty Hall as an impressionable school leaver, and that "Maybe with the
help of those union people society could be made to change, be made to take
responsibility for those less well off, those who clung to life itself by
their very fingertips, always on the verge of falling into the pit." |
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Author
May O'Brien was born in 1932 and started work as a temporary clerk in the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union in 1947. In the 1960s she was only the second woman to be appointed as a full-time branch assistant.
In
1982 she was appointed Womanˆs Affaits Official, the first such appointment in the trade union movement; in that role she set out to ensure that women members had a voice in decision-making within the union, in Congress, in their workplaces and in their lifetime choices. In 1992 she retired but
from time to time she conducts assertiveness training course and is
constantly surprised that women today still need the boost that these
courses give.
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