Campaigning for change is never easy, but those who stick at it tend to get results. One person who has been going the distance is Cork-based Clare woman Siobhán O’Donoghue. Siobhán is a former nurse, community worker and tireless campaigner for social justice.
From starting to raise her voice at the age of 8 to now leading Uplift, a pioneering people-powered campaigning movement, Siobhán has never been one to shy away from the issues that need attention.
In an honest and revealing new interview on my Love and Courage podcast, she talks about her early life in the west of Ireland, and the experiences that have led her to become one of Ireland’s most important community change makers.
Now based in Schull, Siobhán was brought up in Kilmurry McMahon in Co. Clare. After several years as a nurse she joined Clare Youth Service, before getting involved with Limerick Travellers Development Group and the Community Workers’ Co-op in Galway. This led her to become one of the lead negotiators for the community platform during the social partnership talks in the late ’90s.
A former member of the National Economic and Social Council and a past Chairperson of the National Women’s Council of Ireland, Siobhán has no shortage of strings to her bow - but she remains humble in all she does, and her vivacious sense of fun is key to her approach to life.
Siobhán came to campaigning early in life when at the age of 8 she made a passionate stand for animal rights, securing a real - albeit temporary - victory.
“We owned a small farm, and there was a whole load of young, male bullocks who had to be castrated. And I basically managed to stop the whole process – because I was an animal lover, and I just wouldn’t let them do it. And I always remember going out in front of all these men, and saying: ‘No, no.’ And the thing was, my father listened to me.”
An early understanding of some of the hardships of life (where her family had no running water, and she was so badly tormented as the only girl in her class that she was forced out of school for months) was later sharpened by what she saw as a student nurse in 1980s Ireland.
”I remember one obstetrician who ended up in court several times. I took him on one day, as a student nurse – which you didn’t do. And I remember working with people who were victims of domestic violence.I was witnessing poverty, witnessing violence, witnessing mental health issues, young women getting pregnant and all kinds of hidden pregnancies, and addiction. And I was seeing all this as a nurse, and beginning to think: “There’s something more here.”
In 2002 she joined the Migrant Rights Centre of Ireland (MRCI), and for over 11 years helped it develop into one of Ireland’s most influential and dynamic civil society organisations.
“The Migrant Rights Centre Ireland supports migrant workers who live and work on the edge, and who don’t have any political capital, in the traditional sense – who can’t vote, for example. Often, English is their second language, and they work in what we call the “Three D jobs”: the Dirty, Dangerous, and Difficult jobs.
“They’re completely marginalised. But when you create the conditions for people to become empowered, and you create the conditions for collective action, change happens,” she says.
From humble beginnings, MRCI’s fearless approach would see it take on injustice in the Irish immigration system on countless occasions during its first years of life, and win multiple times, succeeding in forcing the government to criminalise forced labour and reverse a cut to the minimum wage that would have had a devastating impact on the most vulnerable people in society.
“We realised that we needed to get to the root of some of these problems, of a harsh, broken system that victimised people who didn’t want to be victims. So we began to collectivize, and try to create a practice.
“In those days, in the early noughties, nobody talked about campaigning. We used to be laughed at by policy-makers, civil servants, even some of our colleagues in colleagues in civil society, who just couldn’t get their heads around the idea that you actually have to change the system in order to get to the root of a problem. But we just never gave up”.
That fighting spirit, she says, was passed down by her mother, who extended a welcome to passing Travelling people when others often would not.
Another family inheritance, she says, was an understanding of some of the difficulties of the migrant experience. This experience was common to both her parents, who eloped to Manchester and later returned home to Clare with three children and almost no money.
“My mother talks about coming home with the three of us, and borrowing money to buy new clothes to come home. Because when you’re an immigrant, you’re not allowed to be a failure. If you leave, you have to succeed – you’re not allowed to fail.
“And it’s funny, because with the Migrant Rights Centre, I repeatedly saw that, over and over again, that experience of people struggling here – but when they manage to get home for a holiday, the story of their lives, the narrative of their lives, would be completely different to the reality in front of us here. And my mother would say that’s exactly what it was for them, as well.”
Siobhán’s range of experiences led her to join myself and others in 2004 to found Uplift, an online Irish campaigning movement which now boasts over 170,000 members, and has helped secure numerous social justice campaign victories in the past three years. Wins have included forcing a change of government policy on refugees in 2015, a recommencement of pancreatic transplant services in 2015, securing the right of unaccompanied minors to come to Ireland in 2016, improvements in rent certainty provisions, ensuring the new National Maternity Hospital is put in public ownership, and successful anti-eviction campaigns in Limerick and Wicklow.
“Before Uplift, I’d been part of winning campaigns, and I’d seen governments capitulate on hardline policy when people around us were saying: ‘You can’t do that.’ I just said: ‘Why not?’
“And Uplift gave people who were hurting, and wanted to act, something to do. They sensed that they were part of something, and they were being heard – politicians were feeling the heat.
“So we started in December 2014 with 300 people on an email list. And now, hundreds of thousands of people have been involved with Uplift, which is an independent movement for change. There’s a huge resurgence of community activity happening.
“When Trump won in the US we asked members how they felt, and we got hundreds of messages back. The dominant feeling was: we need to pull stronger together, we need to fight back. It was a message of resilience, of saying: it’s not over – but we’re stronger together.”
Siobhán takes huge hope from the membership of Uplift, and says her experiences with the members are what drive her on - and no doubt will continue to do so.
“I have emails and calls from members who talk about: ‘I think we should do this, now.’ And talk about ‘we.’ And they own it. And I always remember – and I wish I could play it to you – this 70-year-old woman ringing me on her birthday, during the summer, from somewhere in West Cork, leaving me a message to tell me how proud she was to be part of this community.
“And this was a woman – I rang her back – this was a woman who, on her 70th birthday, got her TTIP poster from us, by pure accident. And this woman is just not in any way part of the political process, in the traditional sense. She’s a woman who makes her living making brown bread every day, and is part of her own, local community – and she just loves being connected, and being part of the Uplift community, and picked up the phone to tell me that. And it actually made me cry.
“Because there’s people like that everywhere. And I think: ‘Wow.’ You know, when you can connect people like that – when you can make it possible for people to come together, and be connected, and feel that they’re visible, and feel powerful. Something good’s happening.”
You can listen to the interview with Siobhán O’Donoghue on the Love and Courage using itunes, the podcast App on your phone or through Soundcloud. More information at www.loveandcourage.org