SOMETIMES very ordinary people become enmeshed in the interstices of history, often with sad or even tragic consequences. Often, but not always. The case of Rosa Parks is definitely in the “not always” category, and is especially apposite in the year in which we mark the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King.
Rosa Parks was a seamstress who worked in a department store in Montgomery, Alabama, at the time when segregation laws were in force in the USA.
In December 1955, Rosa left work to get the bus to a youth-group meeting across town. The bus stop was crowded, so she headed for a nearby drugstore, thinking she would be able to get a seat if she waited a bit.
When she finally boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus, she managed to find a seat in the first row of the “coloured” section at the back. But after a few stops, the driver ordered her to get up so that a white passenger could sit down. Ms Parks refused, and the police were called to take her to jail.
She was released on $100 bail. By midnight, a city-wide bus boycott was in place directed by a young Baptist minister named Martin Luther King. The boycott lasted 381 days, until the Supreme Court ruled that segregation on buses was illegal. Its success ignited the modern civil rights movement which, after Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC on 28 August 1963, led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a piece of legislation designed to outlaw all aspects of racial discrimination.
Rosa Parks was the unwitting catalyst of change with her dis-play of defiance on a Montgomery bus on 1 December
1955. Here in Ireland, a woman died the other day whose own quiet display of defiance and personal fortitude caused her much pain, but was also a harbinger of change.
Eileen Flynn is one of a triumvirate of ordinary women - the other two being Ann Lovett and Joanna Hayes - who became enmeshed in the interstices of the history of modern Irish society at a time when the very tectonics of that society were beginning to shift.
Their stories, unlike that of Rosa Parks, did not have happy endings. Indeed, in the case of Ann Lovett it ended in tragedy. The 15-year-old from Granard, Co Longford, was found semi-conscious and fatally weak from exposure and bleeding on 31 January 1984.
The lifeless body of her sixand-a-half pound newborn baby boy lay nearby.
Ann was found in a grotto dedicated to Our Lady, with a statue of the Blessed Virgin looking down on her suffering. The manner of her death shocked the country and started a national debate on attitudes to and psychological pressures on young mothers.
Eileen Flynn was Wexford teacher who, in August 1982, was sacked from her job as an English and history teacher at the Holy Faith Convent in New Ross, Co Wexford. At the time she was dismissed, Ms Flynn was unmarried with a baby son and living with the baby’s father, a separated man, Richie Roche. Her only real sin, it has been said, was that she refused to be ashamed of herself.
To this day, it’s hard to get a fix on the Kerry Babies case of the 1980s, central to which was the diminutive figure of Joanne Hayes. Again, it involved an unmarried woman, a pregnancy and a dead baby. These are stories from the dark underbelly of Irish life, deeply disturbing stories.
