It was the autumn after a summer of funerals for the IRA hunger-strikers, and Belfast was desolate. Along with exhaustion there was an ominous sense that rage was renewing itself. I had worked as a volunteer counsellor in the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, the first in Ireland, which opened in In the Republic, the Catholic hierarchy denounced feminism as an attack on the family.
In the North, we had rows about whether you could be a feminist without being a republican, a republican and not a feminist. We had rows about whether there were unionist feminists, or feminist unionists. What about feminists who defined themselves just as feminists?
What about separatism? Our collectives were constantly splitting and splintering though we remembered to forget our differences on the dancefloor at the women-only socials we organised. We led Reclaim the Night marches through the dark deserted streets of the city. Down the road there was an Italian restaurant where banana splits were served to women with a flourish but without a spoon, a phallic joke of sorts.
There were a few pubs, surrounded by reinforced wire cages with security cameras, to deter bombers and gunmen. We had two shabby rooms with fake leather sofas that looked as if cats had clawed them. Today, most rape crisis centres only employ professional counsellors who have done courses that take years to complete. What we offered was more like support and solidarity, though we did get some training, and we cultivated allies — doctors, journalists, lawyers, police, community workers, even, warily, paramilitaries — and learned as we went along.
Other women would tell their stories as comedies. One described how the man who had offered her a lift home had beaten her about the head with one of her stilettos, raped her and flung her out of the car. We had moved to two tiny rooms high up in a Victorian building on Royal Avenue in the centre of town.
