Remembering Cathleen O'Neill, who beat down a path for other women

A large pram is parked beside the door at 58 Amiens Street. 

In a room on the left of the entrance, a baby boy wobbles on the ground, about to crawl. 

Downstairs, toddlers play and chat with workers at the crèche in Saol Project, an education and support hub primarily for women grappling with drug addiction – but also those experiencing poverty and homelessness. 

In the kitchen, patties sizzle in a pan. Most of the kids who come to Saol are children of its service users. 

That’s what Cathleen O’Neill, its co-founder, wanted, said Paula Kearney, a training programme team leader at Saol, recently, sitting in the building’s backyard near a barbeque grill.

O’Neill wanted Soal to look after their kids so that women had time and space to recover and thrive, she said.

Two decades ago, O’Neill would bustle up and down the stairs at the old building, shows Born Bolshy, a 2002 documentary about her life by the late director Louis Lentin, saved in RTÉ’s archives.

“If you can! Alright, Mary. Thanks a million, bye, bye, bye, bye,” says O’Neill, before hanging up the phone at a tiny office in Saol.

Then she says, “Okay, lads, I have to go. I have a crisis,” and glides down the stairs in a black leather jacket.

That’s around the time Kearney, then grappling with homelessness and drug addiction herself, became a participant of Saol project, she says. 

One December, O’Neill put her up in her own home for a whole month while she travelled, Kearney says. “I was in homeless accommodation at the time with my kids. She didn’t want me to spend Christmas in a hostel.”

O’Neill still strode up and down the carpeted stairs at Saol until she couldn’t anymore, about five years ago, said Kearney. 

About two weeks ago, she died in Beaumont Hospital. 

Last Wednesday, Saol staff, alongside O’Neill’s friends and family, gathered at the chapel in Dardistown Cemetery on Old Airport Road for her cremation service. 

The gathering spotlighted O’Neill’s crusade to outline a path for working-class and marginalised women to tell their own stories, demand a say, and spur change with confidence.

She challenged policies that exclude, and gatekeep higher education – and, with her death, leaves a formidable void in the Irish women’s rights movement.

“A force bigger than life itself,” said a eulogy by O’Neill’s friend Carmel Jennings, read by O’Neill’s daughter Siobhán at the service. 

“Working-class warrior,” said Rita Fagan, O’Neill’s buddy and project manager at St Michael’s Estate Family Resource Centre in Inchicore, by phone recently. 

Go not gently 

O’Neill was born on 13 January 1949. She grew up in Ballyfermot, where girls in working-class families would often take jobs in the sewing trade during the summer, she said in Born Bolshy.

“Because I was tall and skinny, believe it or not,” she said, chuckling. “I could pose as a 14-year-old, which was the legal age to start working.”

She landed a job at six months short of 13, soaping the “interfacings” on men’s overcoats, she said. 

“So, that when the interfacings were pressed, they went hard, and they gave the impression of a really really good quality coat,” said O’Neill in the film, from behind a sewing machine.

Her bones hadn’t fully formed yet, she said, and working with super heavy industrial bars of soap took a toll. 

In the footage, she is stout with short blonde hair. Her voice is soft but assertive. 

O’Neill’s dad liked kicking up a fuss and rebelling if needed, she said in Born Bolshy, an attitude that embarrassed her mum.

Once when her younger siblings were ill, a doctor’s receptionist had turned them away because they didn’t have a “blue card”, she said.

“And I kicked him. I said, ‘You won’t stop my mother. Those babies are sick. They will see the doctor.’”

They didn’t let them in. Her mum told her, “You’re always getting me into trouble,” said O’Neill.

But her dad was proud. “He’d gotten his pension that day, and he gave me half a crown,” said O’Neill, smiling.

Years later, when the HSE planned to transfer her son Sean – who lives with autism and brain injury – to a psych ward after he turned 18, O’Neill camped outside one of its offices until they agreed he could live in a residential facility.

“The only centre the Celtic Tiger economy could find for an active, vibrant six-foot-four young fella was a psychiatric bed in a psychiatric hospital,” said O’Neill in Born Bolshy.

Through the looking glass 

As a kid, she got a place at a good secondary school off the back of her primary cert results, said O’Neill in Born Bolshy.  

But the scholarship didn’t take into account the cost of books, uniforms, PE and the like. 

“And there was absolutely no recognition of that,” she said.

One morning, she didn’t have the money to buy typing paper for class, as usual. It was always humiliating –  “My heart was getting scalded for it” –  but that day, rage came in place of sorrow. 

“I said, ‘No. I haven’t gotten it, and I’m never going to have it. I’m out,’ and I just left. I felt really really good,” she said, smiling. 

When she settled in Kilbarrack, eventually a single mum to five kids, O’Neill turned to KLEAR, a local adult education centre, to catch up. 

Its workers spotted her at a shopping centre with her baby twins and told her about the courses. 

KLEAR ran a crèche for its students. That made it possible for her to attend, a vision she borrowed for the Saol Project later.  

“Kilbarrack Local Education for Adult Renewal is a terrible title. I used to pretend it was Kilbarrack Local Education for Adult Research,” said O’Neill in Born Bolshy, chuckling.

She later joined KLEAR, believing in the notion that knowledge is power and the greatest gift. “KLEAR taught me that local is political, and personal is political,” she said.

It affirmed all kinds of anger she felt about life’s injustices, said O’Neill, and bared the notions that shaped them. 

“Why you couldn’t get your buggy on the train because the fucking train was designed by a man, and it was never designed with twin buggies in mind. And it never conceived you’d want to bring your twins into town.”

Sandra Gaffney didn’t particularly want to go back to school when she strode up to KLEAR one day, she said in Born Bolshy.

O’Neill met her at the gates. “This enormous woman met me, and her name was Cathleen O’Neill.

“I look at Cathleen as a Mrs Fix-It. Cathleen will always fix something.”

A photo shows a beaming O’Neill – who did a master’s in equality studies at University College Dublin (UCD) – proudly adjusting the collars on the graduation gowns of a crowd of women. 

Give me your tired

O’Neill set up Saol Project, with her pal and community activist Joan Byrne, with an awareness of why some working-class people become addicted to drugs.

“All I see is somebody who has suffered from decades of neglect, I see somebody who’s never had a chance,” she said. 

Anna Keogh, a Saol participant who started taking heroin at 12, said in Born Bolshy that the staff being all working-class people made her feel seen and safe. “You’re never shamed talking to them.”

She began using heroin, she said, because “everyone in the area was on heroin”.

She looks super young, with big blue eyes, short hair, and a raspy tired voice. When she eventually got off methadone too, with Saol’s aid, said Keogh, it became easier to navigate illness in her family. 

O’Neill had noticed, she said, why the government funds addiction support. Not because it cares about those who are addicted and wants to tackle why they seek escape through drugs, she said, but because it wants to save money.

“What little [money] had been provided is because the government [is] scared of the cost of HIV and the cost of Hepatitis C, and it’s scared of the cost of crime,” she said.

Byrne, Soal’s co-founder and former manager, said at her cremation service that some men in the community felt threatened by their activism and initiative in the north inner-city and called them names. 

“Apparently, we were known as the two fat lezzos of the North Strand,” she said. Everybody laughed. 

Speak for yourself 

Kathleen Lynch, sociologist at UCD, told O’Neill’s funeral how she once came to the university to criticise – and “rightly so” – what she saw as the hijacking of marginalised women’s stories by educated middle-class women. 

“She saw how in universities, and they still do in higher education, unfortunately, take people’s stories, and they put their names on them,” said Lynch.

O’Neill wanted to change that, she said.

“She inspired us in Equality Studies in UCD and she made the point, and I hope it’s never forgotten, that we were there to enable people to speak for themselves,” said Lynch at the podium beside O’Neill’s wooden coffin.

Kearney, the team leader at Saol, said that even today, middle-class researchers use the stories of marginalised people without offering an opportunity for their subjects to have a say in what solutions to problems look like and how they can be achieved. 

“If you look at big organisations now, they’re very much headed by white middle-class women or men,” she said. 

O’Neill’s 1992 research titled Telling It Like It Is documented the hardships of a working-class community in north east of Dublin, commissioned by the Combat Poverty Agency – which was dismantled by the government in 2008.

“This book tells the story of a small working-class neighbourhood fractured by poverty and unemployment as told by the women of the neighbourhood,” wrote O’Neill in the book’s introduction. 

Rage with me 

Cathleen O’Neill first discovered that reading was powerful at 12 when a passage in the book I, Claudius roused her curiosity. 

“I asked my sister, ‘You know, he’s calling God a madman in here, do you think that’s right?’ The more you do of that, the more educated you become.”

She thought the best thing about growing up in Ballyfermot was long strolls that took her to two city libraries. “One in Thomas Street and one in Emmet Road. I was a member of both.”

She loved James Joyce and read Ulysses with the participants of Saol Project. One scene in Born Bolshy shows her holding up a worn copy of Ulysses at the support hub on Amiens Street. 

The women cluster around her as she discusses the book. The day in the life of the protagonist embodies everything about what it means to be a Dubliner, she says. 

The camera swirls around, the motions blur the women’s faces.

When she told Lynch at UCD that she wanted to do her undergrad in English, O’Neill said, “She roared at me and said, ‘Why do all the good people do English?’”

She took the Dart to work, showed Born Bolshy, but as a teenager, enjoyed daydreaming on long walks.

She loved Black Bush Whiskey and Christy Moore. She had a good voice and sang often, sometimes in protests and picket lines. 

When the city wanted to celebrate KLEAR, the Lord Mayor’s Award could only go to a person and not a group. They nominated O’Neill, and she discovered these awards weren’t meant for people like her. 

“The Lord Mayor Award is designed with men in mind, and here I am all dressed up to receive my award. And the award is a tie pin with the Dublin coat of arms, which says, ‘Happy is the city whose citizens are obedient’.”

“A: I was never an obedient citizen. B: I was never going to use a tie pin,” said O’Neill.

She was angry, probably wasn’t born that way, she said, but it was a good thing to be raging. It kept her warm, she said. 

In Born Bolshy, her friend Alvis Crawford remembers the time O’Neill was at a burger joint and noticed some kids harassing a Black woman nearby. She got angry.

“She just went up and she picked up the dinners and threw them in the bin and said, ‘Don’t ever let me hear you talk about Black people like that and women like that’,” said Crawford. “And she walked off.”

Cathleen O’Neill died on 2 May, aged 76, after several years of illness and living with the aftermath of a series of strokes.