I am Lonely For them’ (Re)Imagining this island as a Feminist Society'

Looking via a feminist legal lens at the period leading up to 1922 inspires both prefigurative imaginings of what a future/past Ireland might comprise alongside despondency in what occurred. Irish suffragettes such as Eva Gore Booth or Elizabeth Bell, trade unionists like Winifred Carney legal scholars such as Sophie Bryant, barristers, Frances Kyle and Averill Devrell, politicians like Constance Markiewicz and Kathleen Clarke, members of the judiciary like Hannah Sheehy Skeffington and Maude Gone McBride were partaking in the creation of a new polities that they believed would treat them as equal active citizens. The 1916 Proclamation had told them that they would, and they had placed themselves as active constituent power holders. What happened instead were legal orders that facilitated the re-entrenchment and furtherance of a patriarchal societies. But while those women’s prefigurations have not (yet) happened, both their imaginings and their sense of loss can drive us forward. This paper engages with pre-figurative feminist legality, thinking ‘as if’ something else had/could occur and what that feminist legal Ireland/Northern Ireland could/will look like.

Prof Aoife O'Donoghue's work critically examines how legal structures enable or prevent states, institutions and individuals to (not) act and the ramifications of such actions. Encompassing all areas of public law, including international and domestic, Aoife uses feminist legal theory, law and literature, prefiguration and legal history alongside tyranny and utopias to consider and challenge accepted narratives about what the law is or could be. Her monographs on tyranny and global constitutionalism have been published with CUP. She has worked extensively on Brexit and Northern Ireland. She is the co-director of Doing Feminist Legal Work and the Northern/Ireland Feminist Judgments project and is working on a project on prefigurative constitutional futures for the island.