Margaretta D’Arcy – our dearest sister in struggle

We mourn the loss of our beloved sister in struggle, Margaretta D’Arcy, and we offer our deepest condolences to all her family, friends and movement colleagues.

Margaretta was a bold, fearless and determined campaigner against war and imperialism, and for women. Throughout her life, she used her many talents as an actor, playwright, writer, broadcaster and film-maker to fight injustice.

She was, as she said in Awkward Corners, “a third daughter…the one who was always breaking down the imposed ‘good order’”, belonging in what her late husband and partner in crime John Arden called “the camp of human decency”. In 1972 they even picketed their own play, The Island of the Mighty, at the Aldwych theatre in London in protest at the director’s pro-imperialist interpretation and the rights of authors as workers.

Margaretta and John also created The Non-Stop Connolly Show – a masterpiece that we hope will be staged again in their memory.

The name of her book, Tell Them Everything, about the time she spent in jail in Armagh in support of Republican women prisoners, best sums up her unwavering commitment to life, truth and justice.

She truly believed what James Connolly wrote: “None so fitted to break the chains as they who wear them, none so well equipped to decide what is a fetter.”

She fought for grassroots women’s voices and demands to be heard – from mothers and other carers, to asylum seekers, Indigenous farmers, women of colour, pensioners, prisoners, those with disabilities, survivors of institutional abuse, sex workers and more. We recall how brilliantly she spoke to the All African Women’s Group, a self-help group of asylum seekers who received her enthusiastically on one of her many visits to our Crossroads Women’s Centre in London.

We remembering meeting Margaretta at Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp which was protesting US cruise missiles at the RAF base there. She spent many weeks at Yellow Gate, the non-aligned anti-racist camp, with Sarah Hipperson to whom she dedicated her memoir, Loose Theatre. When we were witch-hunted by establishment forces in the peace movement which called for Awkward Corners to be censored, she and John stood unwaveringly with us – they knew all about being misrepresented and ridiculed.

Margaretta viewed the recognition and valuing of caring work as vital to ending women’s poverty. She reported on it on her Radio Pirate Woman broadcasts in Galway and spoke at our international conference Discovering Women – 1492-1992. She was part of our delegation to the UN’s women’s conference in Beijing, 1995, where we won the pathbreaking decision that governments must measure and value unwaged work – in the home, on the land and in the community – in national accounts.

In more recent times, we worked together to demand a care income for all who do the work of caring for people and the planet. During the 2024 referendum, we fought side by side to defend and strengthen state support for caring work in article 41.2 of the Irish constitution.

To mark the new millennium, Margaretta urged the National Women’s Council of Ireland to call a general strike of women for 8th March 2000. They would not so she asked the Wages for Housework Campaign for support – delighted, we made it global, women in over 60 countries took part and we became known as the Global Women’s Strike.

In her opposition to war, occupation and militarism she highlighted how women and children are the majority of victims – paying with our lives and our poverty for obscene military spending – and at the forefront of struggles for survival and liberation. 

As we all know, she fiercely opposed the use of Irish airports and airspace by the US military and, more recently, for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. We are proud to have participated in her first Shannon women’s peace camp more than two decades ago against the US military use of the airport for their wars and occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the many actions that followed there – her last protest at Shannon airport was only a couple of weeks before she went into hospital.

The poster of her on the Shannon runway in front of a huge plane exemplified her courage and determination. She was jailed in Limerick and Dublin for that direct action. We demonstrated outside demanding her unconditional release while our London colleagues, together with Payday Men’s Network and a number of Irish comrades, picketed the Irish High Commission. Margaretta thanked all who had supported her:

It is hard work when the State incarcerates women who are doing the work that the Irish State should be doing. Protecting our neutrality, bringing justice, affirming its devotion to the ideal of peace and friendly co-operation amongst nations founded on international justice and morality. In other words, your succinct slogan caring not killing.

Margaretta’s resolute support for a free Palestine drew on Ireland’s history against colonialism, empire and occupation and on her Jewish antizionism. During previous Israeli attacks on Gaza and over the last two years, she spoke out alongside Palestinian and other Middle Eastern women, determined to join every and any protest she could against the genocide. Together we highlighted the deliberate targeting of women and children in what the South Africans have called Israel’s “reproductive genocide”. In September, she returned her honorary doctorate to the University of Galway in condemnation at their continuing links with the Technion Institute of Technology in Israel which is directly involved in research, development and training for the Israeli Defence Forces. Others have followed her example.

Margaretta was a tireless defender of Ireland’s neutrality. Together with our sisters in Red Umbrella Éireann and Street Workers Collective Ireland, we’re proud to have helped organize her final camp – a 24-hour vigil outside Dáil Éireann, to defend Ireland’s neutrality and keep the Triple Lock. Up until a few weeks ago, she continued every day to hand out the neutrality/Triple Lock leaflets she had drafted with us.

We will make sure that her clarion call lives on as her uncompromising legacy of love, wit, creativity and struggle: “Resist, sisters, resist!”

Margaretta, our dearest sister, much loved, admired, missed and never to be forgotten, rest in power, agus suaimhneas sίoraí!

Maggie Ronayne and Kerry O’Brien

Global Women’s Strike Ireland

Selma James and Nina Lopez for the International Wages for Housework Campaign and Global Women’s Strike (India, Ireland, Peru, Thailand, US, England, Scotland and Wales)