“It would be very hard to overstate the effect that the ICA had on
women’s lives and on the culture of our rural communities and small
towns over these 100 years,” Archbishop Diarmuid Martin said last
Saturday at an ecumenical prayer service to mark the centenary of the
Irish Countrywomen’s Association.
In his address, the Archbishop of Dublin paid a glowing tribute to
the role of Irish women in building up rural and urban communities
during hard times and more prosperous ones.
“By its very nature, the ICA culture of community was always
outgoing, supporting others, and establishing networks of care and
solidarity, thus placing it in a leading position in addressing the
status of women in a changing Irish society,” Dr Martin said.
The 15,000-strong Irish Countrywomen’s Association was founded in
Bree, Co Wexford in 1910.
The aim of the non-denominational and
non-political organisation was “to improve the standard of life in rural
Ireland through education and co-operative effort.”
In his homily at St Mary’s Pro Cathedral, Archbishop Martin said
early members of the organisation had seen how mobilising women into
supporting community groups was essential to fostering a vibrant
society.
“The ICA sprang up from small groups of far-seeing women who
recognised the needs of rural women but who also realised that the best
framework in which those needs would be fostered was community.”
He added that a culture of caring and sharing was about who we are
and who we want to be.
“It is about the way God created humankind as a
family, marked by interdependence and mutuality. There is in each of us
an innate and fundamental need to rise above myself as an individual,
in order to encounter the other, to share, to live in relationships with
others, to love.”
"Community is essential at any time,” Dr Martin said. "Community
organisations are not something which provide services when times are
hard and public funds limited. The work and witness of the ICA was just
as essential at the height of Ireland’s prosperity when the danger of
individualism and believing that I can go along on my own and put myself
first was a pervading temptation."
Referring to the positive role of local women in one of Dublin’s most
disadvantaged parishes, the Church of Our Lady of Lourdes in Sean
McDermott Street, in building up a “sense of community and solidarity”,
the Archbishop said, “The women of that parish were and are
extraordinary: strong, hardworking, caring but above all courageous.”
Recalling last Saturday’s 50th anniversary celebrations of the inner
city parish church, the Archbishop said the local community was one
which had known “very hard times.”
“It experienced generations of harsh poverty. Poor quality housing
was allowed to degenerate. It was as if the authorities did not care.
Over the years unemployment was high. The schools were poor and
overcrowded,” the Archbishop explained.
He added that in more recent
times substance abuse was “exploited unscrupulously” and the area was
“robbed of talented young lives and families were burdened with grief
and often, the loss of parents.”
Paying tribute to the presence of the Daughters of Charity in the
area, he said the women of the parish had ensured that the sense of
community and solidarity that had saved it in hard times, survived and
still flourishes today.
The Archbishop said the ICA had done for rural communities what the
women of Sean McDermott Street had done for that inner city community.
“Individuals were empowered to set in motion community-based industries
and initiatives in weaving, marketing, tourism, credit unions and many
other areas”, he noted.
“The work and witness of the ICA was just as essential at the height
of Ireland’s prosperity when the danger of individualism and believing
that I can go along on my own and put myself first was a pervading
temptation,” he said.
The culture of prosperity, power, celebrity and style tempted many to
underestimate what caring and sharing mean to the fabric of society,
the Archbishop continued.
“Yours was and is an organisation which gets
out and does things. It identified what were the primary social issues
that rural women had to face. It pioneered campaigns on water and
electricity,” the leader of the Church in Dublin said.
However, he underlined that the ICA was “always more than just a
campaigning organisation,” adding, “It accompanied its campaigning with
what we would today call ‘capacity building’, helping women to use every
aspect of social improvement well.”
Recalling the death a few weeks ago of a 106-year-old French nun who
had had “an extraordinary effect on my life,” the Archbishop explained
how the Sister had in the 1950s started a sewing class in Ballyfermot
with his mother and his aunt.
“I remember my mother and my aunt chatting one evening saying they
must do something more. They were talking about inviting the local GP
to come and to talk to the women about health and nutrition and child
rearing. What actually was evolving was much more than a sewing class,
but a place where women in a deprived area could come together
themselves to talk about themselves and the challenges they had to meet
and to improve not just their sewing skills but their skills as persons,
as women, as parents,” Archbishop Martin reflected.
He recalled how the French nun started to bring his mother books about life, spirituality and community.
“There was no stopping the energies that this nun had in wanting to
see that every woman she worked with would be enabled to deepen their
basic human capacities and come to a better understanding of
themselves,” he said.
“Then one day the nun arrived to say she was off
to New Zealand to start again somewhere else.”
Concluding, the Archbishop of Dublin said the ICA was marked by “an
innovative mix of caring, of empowering, of supporting and of
structuring in order to address society’s needs as they change and to
change the way we address them.”
He added, “Today we are entering into uncharted territory regarding
many aspects of the future of our Irish economy and society. In this
moment of uncertainty the ICA is a sort of icon of what society we
should be seeking.”